Fundaments of physics safe - thanks to dodgy cable

The physics world was alive this week with news that last year's celebrated superluminal neutrino results from the OPERA experiment may have been down to the most domestic of causes - dodgy wiring.

Last September the OPERA research group at the Gran Sasso underground lab in central Italy shocked the physics world by reporting they had recorded neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. Neutrinos released from the LHC particle accelerator near Geneva appeared to have travelled the 730km to the Italian lab at speeds exceeding the speed of light. It was a finding that would have turned all of modern physics on it's proverbial head, as it contradicts Einstein's special theory of relativity. The physics community responded with overwhelming skepticism, but as yet had not been able to find the error in their research.
Until this week.

CERN have now released a statement to confirm that a flaw in the OPERA experiment that could explain its puzzling neutrino discovery. It could be down to a faulty optical fibre. The collaboration is now investigating this, and another possible source of error, and it plans to carry out new experimental runs in May.

The statement reads:

"The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam. If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken. If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration. New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May."

Source: http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2011/PR19.11E.html

Holy yoctometers! A new scale-model of the universe

This simply extraordinary online project created by a ninth-grade pupil called Cary Huang is a scale model of the universe from it's smallest particle scales to it's largest cosmic scales.

As Physics Buzz reports:

"The model serves as both a virtual microscope and telescope, allowing viewers to see the relative sizes of the smallest quarks, the largest galaxy clusters, and everything in between. There are hundreds of objects to scroll through, and each one has its own quirky description."

The level of detail in the project is breathtaking. It's a remarkably instructive visualisation and a very beautiful tool. That it was made by a school student is quite astonishing.

Source: http://htwins.net/scale2/

Time Crystals

Are crystals possible in time, as well as in space?

Undoubtedly the most outlandish, and beautiful story in this week's science press was the pre-publication of two new papers by MIT's Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Frank Wilczek, which suggests that they are.

Wilczek postulates that if crystals exist in spatial dimensions, then they should exist in the dimension of time too. A time crystal is the temporal equivalent of an everyday crystal, in which atoms occupy positions that repeat periodically in space.

The new research stems from Wilczek's analysis of one of the most important tenets of modern physics - "symmetry breaking". Wilczek, and theoretical particle physicist, Al Shapere, conclude that time symmetry seems just as breakable as spatial symmetry at low energies. Their pithy abstract, published on arXiv earlier this week says:

"We consider the possibility that classical dynamical systems display motion in their lowest energy state, forming a time analogue of crystalline spatial order."

A further abstract postulating the existence of "quantum time crystals" states: "Difficulties around the idea of spontaneous breaking of time translation symmetry in a closed quantum mechanical system are identified, and then overcome in a simple model. The possibility of ordering in imaginary time is also discussed."

Science writers have been quick to interpret the significance of this work, with one helpful article by Alexandra Witze in Science News explaining how Wilczek dreamed up time crystals after teaching a class about classifying crystals in three dimensions. He wondered why that structure couldn’t extend to the fourth dimension - time.

She writes:
"To visualize a time crystal, think of Earth looping back to its same location in space every 365¼ days; the planet repeats itself periodically as it moves through time. But a true time crystal is made not of a planet but of an object in its lowest energy state, like an electron stripped of all possible energy. This object could endlessly loop in time, just as electrons in a superconductor could theoretically flow through space for all eternity."

Wilczek has described how the concept of time crystals reminds him of the excitement he felt when he helped describe a new class of fundamental particles, called anyons, in the 1982.

“I had very much the same kind of feeling as I’m having here,” he says, “that I had a found a new logical possibility for how matter might behave that opened up a new world with many possible directions.”

He went on to note: “I don’t know if this will be of lasting value at all,”

I couldn't help being reminded of Heinrich Hertz's quote when he produced radio waves in the laboratory for the first time: "It's of no use whatsoever...this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right" - Hertz (1887)

It remains to be seen if Wilczek and Shapere's outlandish theory proves to have the profound impact on physics that Hertz's work has had. It will be interesting to see what research follows this publication, and whether or not this idea can be experimentally tested. As physicist Ben Still noted in his talk on Wednesday 15 February, ""Until theorists can come up with ways we can test their theories, they are just dealing with works of fiction."

But when ideas like this emerge, one can't help celebrating the existence of theorists.

Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2537 & http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2539

& http://www.sciencenews.org

Chasing Ghosts - those elusive neutrinos

T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) Experiment, Japan. Image courtesy of http://t2k-experiment.org/

Particle Decelerator attended a fascinating talk on 15 February by Ben Still, a particle physicist working on the Tokai to Kamioka (T2K) neutrino experiment in Japan, alongside another 500 scientists and engineers.
Held in Lewes in Sussex, Still's talk, entitled "Chasing Ghosts and the Creation of the Universe" attempted to shine a light on the current state of play in neutrino research.

As the abstract noted:
Neutrinos are all around us in every nook and cranny. Trillions upon trillions inside and out of every planet, star, galaxy and the space in between. Billions pass through you every single second, night and day. But despite the phenomenal numbers it was not until 1953 that conclusive evidence of the existence of the neutrino, the most abundant thing in nature, was discovered. Since then scientists have devoted their lives to chasing these ghosts of nature. Despite its meagre size the tiny neutrino has had a profound effect upon our Universe and may hold the answer to one of the greatest questions of all time: the creation of the universe.

Still began by giving an introductory background to the history of this field of science, noting the key contributions by Wolfgang Pauli, Enrico Fermi, Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines.He then analysed the famous faster-than-light neutrino results, which the OPERA experiment yielded in 2011. He concluded by providing insight into why this field of study is beginning to yield results that may help us answer fundamental questions such as where all the matter in the universe came from. Preliminary results from T2K in 2011 are discussed in further detail here.

"We are going to work as hard as we can to confirm or refute it"
Ben Still on T2K's commitment to cross-check OPERA's neutrino result.

During his talk, Still confirmed that checking the OPERA results is a key priority for both T2K in Japan, and their sister experiment MINOS in the States. T2K was taken offline due to the logistical impact of the earthquake in Japan in 2011, and the subsequent Fukushima disaster, and is only just now coming back online. Upgrades of both MIINOS and T2K are underway, and it is expected that MINOS will start yielding research that may refute or confirm the OPERA result within a year, with things taking a bit longer at T2K - perhaps up to 2 - 3 years.

In many ways, the Q&A was the most fascinating part of the evening, with Still clearly identifying himself as an experimentalist first. He spoke articulately and passionately about the importance of evidence based science, declaring,"we should be lead by experiment, not theory."

"Until theorists can come up with ways we can test their theories, they are just dealing with works of fiction."

Whilst clearly respectful of the elegance of mathematics and theory, Still advocated an experiment-lead approach to science, stating that experiments such as the LHC were correcting a "bias toward theory that has defined physics since the 1970s".

He quipped, "mathematicians and theorists are going to love super-luminal neutrinos, because they enable them write grant applications that will allow them to indulge in the realm of fiction".

Deliberately provocative stuff, and a fantastically stimulating insight into the current lay of the land in neutrino research.

Intuition and Ingenuity - Art and Alan Turing

At Lighthouse in Brighton science and art collide in a show which explores the enduring influence of of computer science pioneer, Alan Turing.

Curated by British-based artists, Sue Gollifer, Nick Lambert and Anna Dumitriu, Intuition and Ingenuity is a group exhibition, staged as part of Brighton Science Festival, that illustates the impact of Alan Turing on contemporary art. The exhibition includes computer art pioneers Roman Verostko, William Latham, Ernest Edmonds, and Paul Brown, as well as contemporary media artists, boredomresearch (their work is pictured), Greg Garvey, Patrick Tresset, Anna Dumitriu and Alex May.

The exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing, and it’s part of a year of programmes which celebrate Turing's centenary.

Whilst he may be best known the person who cracked the German Enigma codes during World War II, thus significantly altering the course of the war, Turing also undoubtedly paved the way for the digital world that we live in today. He gave us algorithms and computation, created the foundations of computer science and artificial intelligence, and pioneered new thinking in the field of morphogenesis. So influential is his work, that it's almost impossible to imagine the modern world, now so thoroughly replete with computational technology, without him.It's great to see his legacy honoured by artists and curators.

Intuition and Ingenuity is showing at Lighthouse in Brighton 17 - 26 February, and will then tour to venues in London, Sheffield, Birngham and beyond.

Invisible Fields: an interview with José Luis de Vicent

Italian magazine, Domus, have published an interview with José Luis de Vicente, the co-curator of the art-science show, Invisible Fields.

Ethel Baraona Pohl introduces the interview by writing: "We inhabit intangible territories. The networks of invisible infrastructures which surround our world are extensive and growing day by day. In this context, Invisible Fields explores how the understanding of our world and our cosmos has been transformed by the study of radio waves."

In the interview, José Luis notes:
"I have an ongoing interest in my work in the infrastructures of information society, the historical, political and technological factors that have shaped them, and their impact on us as citizens. I feel it's hard to talk about technology as a agent of transformation without paying more attention to what goes in the infrastructural layer. This is quite common in architecture and urbanism, for obvious reasons, not so much in design or contemporary art. And one of the grand narratives about this theme is the progressive process of conquest and colonization of the radio spectrum throughout the 20th century, culminating in a way in the Digital Switchover in the first years of the 21st century. I've thought for a long time this is a story that has not been told cohesively, and evaluated from different disciplinary perspective. Invisible Fields is not that (that would be a titanic project, the work of a lifetime) but intends to be another piece in the construction of this greater story."

Read the full interview and review here: http://domusweb.it/en/interview/invisible-fields/

Invisible Fields is showing at Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona, from 14 October 2011 - 4 March 2012.

Spider-goats and the Rise of Synthetic Biology

Spider-goats, synthetic neurobiology and bio-hacking - Adam Rutherford's recent synthetic biology documentary for the BBC's flagship science programme, Horizon, is an important compendium of cutting edge ideas. Equal parts fascinating and disturbing, the documentary, provocatively entitled Playing God, was an overview of how synthetic biologists are breaking down nature into spare parts, and rebuilding it however they please.

Rutherford began by introducing viewers to "spider-goats" - goats which have been cross-bred with spiders, so that they excrete spider-silk in their milk.

Spider-silk is among the strongest materials which occurs in nature, but it's practical use to science has been limited by the relatively tiny amounts that scientists can extract from spiders. Spiders are notoriously impossible to farm, due to their cannibalistic nature. So scientists at Utah State University have come up with an ingenious method of producing spider-silk in industrial quantities.

As Rutherford explains in an article for The Observer, Randy Lewis, a professor of genetics at Utah, took the gene that encodes silk from an orb-weaver spider, and placed it among the DNA that prompts milk production in the goats. This genetic circuit was then inserted in an egg and implanted into a mother goat. Now, when the goats lactate, their milk contains spider-silk protein. The practical use for large quantities of spider-silk are numerous, but Lewis is interested in it's medical potential. He notes, "we already know that we can produce spider silk that's good enough to be used in ligament repair. [....] We've done some studies that show that you can put it in the body and you don't get inflammation and get ill."

The documentary further probed the medical implications for this type of work by introducing Ron Weiss's work at MIT. Weiss's team are creating living programmable machines that seek and destroy only the cells that cause disease. Using BioBricks, they have built a "cancer assassin cell". It distinguishes a cancer cell from a healthy cell using a set of five criteria. It then destroys the tumour cell if it satisfied those conditions. As Rutherford notes, "this sniper targeting is the opposite of the blunderbuss approach of chemotherapy, which can destroy both tumour and healthy cells with reckless abandon."

The documentary also probed how relatively simple it has become to experiment with synthetic biology, due to the popularisation of BioBricks and the emergence of biohacking and biology-hobbyists such as BioCurious. After visiting the BioCurious hobby space in the States, Rutherford comments: "there, high-school students were learning about biology by introducing fluorescent proteins from deep-sea jellyfish into bacteria to make them glow in the dark. In 2009, three scientists won Nobel prizes for this work. Already, it is literally child's play."

The documentary analyses industrial applications of synthetic biology, such as the development of synthetic biodiesel. Biotech companies Amyris have modified brewer's yeast so that instead of fermenting sugar to produce alcohol, diesel seeps out of every cell. The biodiesel is already in use.

Rutherford takes a balanced approach to the field, giving watchdog and campaign group, ETC, an opportunity to point of the risks of producing synethetic organisms on an industrial scale.. Their stance on synthetic biology can be found here.

This fascinating documentary and the companion article in The Observer, which documents the main narrative, is an excellent primer to an incredibly fast-moving field.

Sources:
BBC Horizon
The Observer

Guardian Podcast

Remnants of Cosmic Noise in New Zealand

Yesterday a friend of mine, Mike Hodgson, drew my attention to a plaque he discovered in Piha, near Auckland, in my native New Zealand. The plaque - pictured above - is commemorating a major event in radio astronomy history. In August 1948, two radio astronomers, John Bolton and kiwi, Gordon Stanley detected radio waves from outside the solar system for the first time.

This blog post from piha.co.nz documents the scientific discovery in detail.

"It is difficult to comprehend the emotional impact of an observation which took us from the partially explicable solar system and galactic radio emission phenomena, into the realms of phenomena with inexplicably high energy outputs," Stanley wrote in 1994, in a tribute to Bolton, who died in 1993. "Neither of us ever approached such an emotional high again in our work."

Further research showed that the radio signals emanated from the Crab Nebula, the remains of a star that went supernova over a thousand years ago, and a source of fascination for radio and optical astronomers alike. Some of the other radio sources they detected in the same year, during observations in Australia, turned out to be distant galaxies. Radio waves were generated by gas falling into giant black holes.

Following their pioneering discoveries, Bolton went on to become a major figure in Australian radio astronomy, helping found the famous Parkes radio telescope, becoming director of the Australian National Radio Astronomy Observatory and winning the the inaugural Jansky Prize in 1966 (so named after the father of radio astronomy, Karl Jansky).
Stanley became the first Director of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory in the States, run by Caltech.

As a New Zealander with a passionate interest in radio astronomy, I was mightily pleased to discover that 64 years ago, New Zealand was at the very epicentre of radio astronomical research. I'm not sure the same could be said now, but perhaps the radio astronomers of the future can take inspirational from the past.

Source: http://www.piha.co.nz/?p=324

Listening to the earth move

Christchurch-based sound engineer Ben Edwards recorded a magnitude 6 earthquake which struck earthquake-plagued Christchurch in New Zealand on 23.12.11.

As Edwards tells it, "whilst recording some drums in an old brick warehouse for the up and coming Eastern album we experienced a large aftershock. (5.8 in magnitude). We sat outside for a while and convinced ourselves it was ok to re enter the old building and continue our project... I was rolling as we were undertaking some line and level checking... this time we got it. 6.0 magnitude in a room full of kegs and bottles."

It's an incredible and sobering listen, and helps you understand what it must be like living in Christchurch - a city that's experienced nearly 10,000 earthqukes since the big one in September 2010.

Source: http://soundcloud.com/charlie-underwood/chch-earthquake-23-12-11-raw

The LHC finds its first new particle

After the excitement from last week's press conference from CERN, which revealed that whilst they are getting closer, scientists still haven't found the Higg's boson, I don't think anyone was expecting a boson discovery from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) after-all. But we've been given an early Christmas present: the LHC has found it's first particle - Chi_b(nP).

Chi_b(nP) was found by physicists working with the ATLAS detector, who published their findings on arXiv yesterday. It is the first clear evidence for a new particle since the LHC opened in 2009.

Chi_b(nP) is made of a beauty quark and it's antiquark bound together. They are bonded by the so-called strong nuclear force which also causes the atomic nucleus to stick together. Chi_b(nP) is a heavier version of a particle that was first observed around 25 years ago. Like the elusive Higgs, it is a boson, meaning it is a particle that carries force.

"It's interesting for what it tells us about the forces that hold the quark and the anti-quark together - the strong nuclear force. And that's the same force that holds, for instance, the atomic nucleus together with its protons and the neutrons."

Prof Roger Jones from the ATLAS Collaboration, quoted on BBC News.

Source: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.5154