Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

Large Hadron Collider goes LIVE today!

Caution: Science and Video Game Content Ahead

The world of Quantum/Particle Physics gets a new uber powerful "toy" today ... the 16 mile long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) goes online.  It's purpose? To smash protons together at energy level's never produced on Earth before and see what happens. The hope is it will create yet undiscovered particles that help explain the underlying rules that govern the universe and it's creation.  The fear is it will create some bad mojo and destroy the Earth if not worse :-)

If you ever played Doom or more specifically Half-Life you know how this story plays  out.  Physicists "accidentally" open a wormhole/portal to Hell/Xen.  And pretty much very bad things happen.

Let's pray there's no "resonance cascade" in real life or we'll all be looking for our H.E.V suits and a crowbar for starters ;-)

From The American Institute of Physics (yes, I subscribe to this)

The Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most expensive scientific instrument ever built in peacetime, begins operations on September 10 when a beam of high-speed protons begins shooting around the machine’s 16 mile (27 -kilometer) circular tunnel beneath Geneva, Switzerland. When the protons collide with each other inside the machine, one thing that scientists are certain won’t happen is the production of miniature black holes that gobble up nearby matter. A new study shows that the continuing existence of old stars in the sky is evidence that small black holes can’t swallow the Earth.

That is not to say that the new collider might not actually create mini-black holes as no one knows for sure what will emerge from the debris of the LHC collisions. Black holes are thought to represent the ultimate state of compressed matter, with gravity so powerful that any bit of matter, and even light, would be sucked inexorably inwards with no chance for escape if it gets too close to the black hole’s boundary. [more]

Actually I'm baiting you all a bit.  There's really nothing to worry about.  Many thousands of big brain people have studied and researched this and most believe there are no safety issues ... most ;-)

Here's a link to the LHC website (wow, can you tell this site was made by science type peeps?)

Wikipedia has some good LHC facts

The search for "the fingerprint of God" continues ... and I'm excited to see what the LHC "discovers" over time.

2007 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded for hard drive technology

Since all my formal training was in physics I still try to keep somewhat up to date on what's happening in the field ... however, it's amazing how much about physics I don't remember anymore ... sigh.  Anyways, last week the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two guys that discovered Giant Magnetoresistance way back in 1988.

Who cares?  You do if you use anything that has a small hard drive like a laptop or iPod :-)

Nanotechnology gives sensitive read-out heads for compact hard disks

This year's physics prize is awarded for the technology that is used to read data on hard disks. It is thanks to this technology that it has been possible to miniaturize hard disks so radically in recent years. Sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players, for instance.
   
In 1988 the Frenchman  Albert Fert  and the German  Peter Grünberg each independently discovered a totally new physical effect – Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR. Very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system. A system of this kind is the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current. Soon researchers and engineers began work to enable use of the effect in read-out heads. In 1997 the first read-out head based on the GMR effect was launched and this soon became the standard technology. Even the most recent read-out techniques of today are further developments of GMR.

A hard disk stores information, such as music, in the form of microscopically small areas magnetized in different directions. The information is retrieved by a read-out head that scans the disk and registers the magnetic changes. The smaller and more compact the hard disk, the smaller and weaker the individual magnetic areas. More sensitive read-out heads are therefore required if information has to be packed more densely on a hard disk. A read-out head based on the GMR effect can convert very small magnetic changes into differences in electrical resistance and there-fore into changes in the current emitted by the read-out head. The current is the signal from the read-out head and its different strengths represent ones and zeros.

The GMR effect was discovered thanks to new techniques developed during the 1970s to produce very thin layers of different materials. If GMR is to work, structures consisting of layers that are only a few atoms thick have to be produced. For this reason GMR can also be considered one of the first real applications of the promising field of nanotechnology.

Read more about this year's prize

E=mc^2

Such a simple equation ... 3 variables ... and you have recipe for how matter and energy are equivalent.  But is it accurate?  Does it hold up even decades later as our understanding of the quantum world deepens?  A new round of experiments by a host of institutes finds Einstein's famous equation to be accurate out to .00004% ... I'd say that's pretty good eh?

I love that equation as I think it really shows the fingerprint of God...simple, elegant, and to the point.

BEST DIRECT TEST OF E=mc^2. Albert Einstein's formulation of how matter and energy are equivalent is an important enunciation of the principle of conserved energy. As far as we know, it is at work at the moment an atom bomb explodes, when the fissioning of uranium is exploited for making commercial electricity, or when an electron and positron annihilate inside a PET scanner. A new experiment---conducted by scientists from MIT, Universite Laval, Florida State, Oxford, NIST, and Institut Laue-Langevin---keeps careful account of both matter mass and electromagnetic energy for a process in which ions of sulphur and silicon absorb neutrons, transforming them into new isotopes as they emit gamma rays. In this transaction Einstein's equation is shown experimentally to be true at a level of 0.00004%, a factor of 55 better than the previous best test. (Rainville et al., Nature, 22/29 December 2005.)

Why is sky blue ... and NOT violet?

If you paid attention in high school physics you already know part of the answer ... at least you would have if you had been one of my students ;-)  When sunlight hits the atmosphere the shorter wavelength light (blue) scatters the most and thus your eye receives mainly blue light.  That's generally good enough for most people.  As to why it's blue and not violet (shorter wavelenth than blue) the answer has been the eye picks up blue better than violet.  Why?  Umm, good question but now were talking biology.  Physicists have done some newer research and can now better quantify the why.

At the bottom is a short blurb on the research.

And here are a few fun physics tidbits about light and human eye...the rods and cones in the eye are just so fascinatingly complex.

* Red light doesn't disrupt night vision because night vision comes from your rods which aren't affected by red light or really much of any color at all.
* It takes approx 30mins to reach your optimal night vision. 
* Rods are responsible for your peripheral vision and are way more light sensitive than your cones thus you can see dim stars with your peripheral vision which may "disappear" when you look at them directly.
* Rods are also better at detecting motion and thus your peripheral vision is better at detecting motion.

WHY IS THE SKY BLUE, AND NOT VIOLET?  The hues that we see in the sky are not only determined by the laws of physics, but are also colored by the human visual system, shows a new paper in the American Journal of Physics.  On a clear day when the sun is well above the horizon, the analysis demonstrates, we perceive the complex spectrum of colors in the sky as a mixture of white light and pure blue.  When sunlight enters the earth's atmosphere, it scatters (ricochets) mainly from oxygen and nitrogen molecules that make up most of our air.  What scatters the most is the light with the shortest wavelengths, towards the blue end of the spectrum, so more of that light will reach our eyes than other colors.  But according to the 19th-century physics equations introduced by Lord Rayleigh, as well as actual measurements, our eyes get hit with peak amounts of energy in violet as well as blue.  So what is happening?
Combining physics with quantitative data on the responsiveness of the human visual system, Glenn Smith of Georgia Tech
(glenn.smith@ece.gatech.edu) points to the way in which our eye's three different types of cones detect color.  As Smith shows, the sky's complex multichromatic rainbow of colors tickles our eye's cones in the same way as does a specific mixture of pure blue and white light.  This is similar to how the human visual system will perceive the right mixture of pure red and pure green as being equivalent to pure yellow.  The cones that allow us to see color cannot identify the actual wavelengths that hit them, but if they are stimulated by the right combination of wavelengths, then it will appear the same to our eyes as a single pure color, or a mixture of a pure color and white light.  (Smith, American Journal of Physics, July 2005)

The Heavens Declare Your Majesty

Did you know I initially looked into majoring in Astronomy?  Gazing up at the heavens has always held such a great intrigue for me.  Of course after learning that there are almost no jobs for astronomers I decided physics would be a good alternative :-)

The Hubble Space Telescope had it's 15th anniversary recently and hubblesite just opened up a new online gallery where you can check out a plethora of amazing images that have been captured.  Many of them are so incredibly beautiful it's hard to believe such things exist.  You can't look at such images and not sense the beauty and majesty of God...I'm simply left in awe.

"Free" X-Ray

Remember ... my formal education is all in physics ... so I like to keep up with some of the leading edge stuff happening.  Just picked this one up off of the phyupdate newslist...

X-RAY THUNDERBOLT. Scientists have long suspected that lightning might generate x rays. However, until recently the observation of such x-rays has remained elusive, largely owing to the unpredictable nature of lightning. In the last few years a series of experiments by Joseph Dwyer and his colleagues at the Florida Institute of Technology and the University of Florida has shown that lightning indeed emits large bursts of x rays with energies up to about 250 keV (about twice that of a chest x ray). These x rays are mostly produced not by the bright return strokes, but by the leaders that precede the stroke, as they propagate from the cloud to the ground.  Full Story

So if you happen to have some x-ray film laying around and need free x-ray ... tape the film to your chest, grab something metal that's very long and pointed, and go stand on a golf course during a thunderstorm ... good times, good times.  Yes, you may die in the process, but we're talking a free x-ray here folks! ;-)