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Science chief backs cannabis view

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 03 November 2009 10:47:00 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition: The UK government's chief science adviser has told BBC News that he supports the former chief drugs adviser's scientific view on cannabis. Professor John Beddington, the UK's chief scientist, would not be drawn on whether the H

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London Pedestrians Cross at New Japanese-style

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 03 November 2009 10:43:33 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From TreeHugger: In a bid to make pedestrians' lives easier and safer, Oxford Circus, one of the busiest street crossings in London, has been redesigned. Today a copy of the Japanese "scramble crossing" design was unveiled, complete with Japanese drummers. When the traffic li

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http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/10647/London-Pedestrians-Cross-at-New-Japanes
e-style?from_rss=1

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EPA adds US Magnesium to Superfund Site List

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 03 November 2009 10:40:40 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Yahoo! News: Science News: he U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has added the U.S. Magnesium site near Utah's Great Salt Lake to the federal Superfund list. The EPA's announcement Monday makes the Tooele County site's cleanup a national priority. EPA officials say the

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Reminder for Texans

post from Pharyngula on 03 November 2009 10:40:32 AM. © Pharyngula

The Texas Freethought Convention will be taking place in San Antonio on 14 November. Y'all are going, right? A good turnout in Texas would be newsworthy, you know, and would shake up all those preconceptions about your state.

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Singularitology 101

post from Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought on 03 November 2009 10:30:23 AM. © Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought

If studying the past to inform the future can tell us anything about human technological progress, it's that we are very good at creating new technologies but not very good at creating specific new technologies. And even when we do manage to build exactly what we are trying to build, we almost always also build every variety of that new invention. But these generalities sound speciously ominous, so let's explore a few examples.

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What is reality

post from Physics Buzz on 03 November 2009 10:25:00 AM. © Physics Buzz

As a child, Anton Zeilinger used to pull the heads and limbs off his sister's dolls. "I liked taking things apart," he explained in an interview with the Institute of Physics (see video below). This childhood tendency grew up into scientific curiosity; Zeilinger is now a well-respected physicist, the head of a quantum optics group at the Institut fur Quantenoptik and Quanteninformation in Vienna.

We generally believe that Zeilinger can satisfy his scientific curiosity through experiments, either by doing his own or by learning of the results of others' work. When we ask nature a question, she will answer truthfully, as long as we ask the question honestly and know how to interpret her response. Our observations, then, can create a picture of reality, mapping the facts of the world "out there" in one-to-one correspondence with ideas in the mind "in here."

video details and more

In a talk at the recent Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Zeilinger raised a question that might seem, at first glance, naïve.

"What do we really describe in physics?" he asked. "Do we describe reality? Is it out there?"

Classical physicists would have said yes, resoundingly. Studying physics reveals nature's workings, providing an explicit map of reality's subtleties. Those subtleties would be there whether we figured out how to question and extract them.

But in the early part of this century, quantum mechanics put that happy belief on the chopping block. Quantum mechanics, for all its ability to describe the atomic and subatomic world, blurs the distinction between the observer and the observed. As a result, it calls into question the essence of scientific curiosity and inquiry.

According to quantum mechanics, an electron's position is a smattering of possibilities. It's likely to be found, perhaps, within a certain boundary, and less likely to be found outside it. When we ask the electron where it is, this smattering will collapse into a definite value.

But what about the electron before we observe it? What is the reality of the electron? Einstein believed that the electron must know where it is. And Heisenberg's uncertainty principle only makes this little gedankenexperiment more preposterous for classicists: once we know the electron's position, we can know nothing about its momentum.

Einstein believed that this was evidence that quantum mechanics was in some way incomplete. His formal argument is known as EPR, for his collaborators, Podolsky and Rosen. Joshua Roebke writes in an article in SEED on Zeilinger's work:

The EPR paper begins by asserting that there?s a real world outside theories? EPR argued that objects must have preexisting values for measurable quantities and that this implied that certain elements of reality could not be determined by quantum mechanics.

Quantum entanglement is one particular case that wreaks havoc on Einstein. In his talk at Quantum to Cosmos, Zeilinger explained the effect:

If you have a pair of dice that are quantum entangled—you can't buy them yet but I'm sure in a hundred years you can buy them as a Christmas present—a pair of quantum dice would be such that if you throw one die here and one die there they always show the same number. Now this can only be if they have a common cause, or if they are talking to each other somehow.

Zeilinger studies entanglement with photons; in lieu of the face of a die, the photon's polarization is the property in question. Separate two entangled photons by a galaxy, then have an observer measure the polarization of each. They will see the same polarization.

In 1997, Zeilinger demonstrated this effect in the lab; it was hailed as "teleportation," with information (the photon's polarization) being beamed instantly from one particle to another. In 2007, he demonstrated in spectacularly across two of the Canary Islands. It's as if one photon, the moment it was measured, sent an instantaneous, light-speed-limit-breaking signal to the other, telling it what polarization to have; accepting this non-locality would allow physicists like Einstein to hold onto realism, the idea that the photons must have a determined polarization before they are measured.

A physicist named Anthony Legget formulated this possibility into a testable theory, which he brought to colleagues who brought it to Zeilinger's lab. To Legget's chagrin (quantum entanglement upsets him nearly as much as it upsets Einstein), fastidious experiments proved that this wasn't the case (for further reading, see the full text of "Reality Tests"):

It took [Zeilinger and his colleagues] months to reach their tentative conclusion: If quantum mechanics described the data, then the lights? polarizations didn?t exist before being measured. Realism in quantum mechanics would be untenable.

"What this tells us also in a deeper way is that there are situations where what we observe in experiment is not some reality which was there before," Zeilinger explained in his talk at Quantum to Cosmos. "Our experiment creates reality in a sense. What is then reality, really? What are we describing now with physical theories?"

In his talk, Zeilinger suggests that physics sorely needs new ideas that can comprehend these facts. "I mean, quantum mechanics is a hundred years old. Relativity is a hudnred years old. A new breakthrough is due," he said.
For Zeilinger, that new idea that makes everything clear might be the unification of these two big theories, something physicists have been grappling with for several decades now. Or it might involve another sort of unification altogether.

"Maybe we have to unify the idea of reality and information, which is my own personal theory," he said.

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http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/2009/11/what-is-reality.html

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KR Tools Autoloader Screwdriver Changes Bits
Automatically

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 03 November 2009 10:24:38 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Coolest Gadgets: When you're trying to do odd jobs around the house, it's nice to have a few little tools around to make things a lot easier. These Autoloader screwdrivers allow for you to go from job to job without having to make a run to the toolbox for a different sized scr

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http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/10645/KR-Tools-Autoloader-Screwdriver-Changes
-Bits-Automatically?from_rss=1

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Graphene Additive for Drilling Fluids

From The Engineer: Rice University and Houston-based M-I SWACO, the world's largest producer of drilling fluids for the petrochemical industry, aim to develop a graphene additive that will improve the productivity of wells. Rice chemistry professor James Tour's lab will work wit

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Another marvelous image from Cassini's Nov 2
Enceladus flyby

This image goodie was produced from the raw images from Cassini's close encounter with Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus yesterday by Gordan Ugarkovic. At the time that this photo was taken, Enceladus was in Saturn's shadow (that is, it was in eclipse). Light bouncing around the Saturn system is scattered within the south polar plumes, so they glow faintly. Behind Enceladus is the F ring, which is bright because the Sun is nearly in front of ....

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http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002190/

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Ussher's calculation methods

post from Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought on 03 November 2009 10:20:10 AM. © Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought

Bishop James Ussher arrived at his creation year of 4004 BCE by going backwards, starting by first fixing the date of the earliest event in the Bible that could be corroborated with other historical sources.

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http://machineslikeus.com/news/usshers-calculation-methods

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