Archive for the ‘Guest Blogger’ Category

Quantum Leap: The Standard Model, part 2

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 009.
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So the question is, “what is Elemental?” In 1661, Robert Boyle determined that something that can’t be broken-down by a chemical reaction is an element, a notion, according to Wiki, that held for almost 300 years and a definition I still recall from high school chemistry class. This was a major moment in the process of understanding what the underlying building blocks of life are. Now, for the first time, man had a tool and a way to codify his approach to answering the questions of what is fundamental.

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Quantum Leap: The Standard Model

Friday, February 19th, 2010

Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 008.

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With all of the unverified hypotheses regarding black holes, dark matter, and dark energy permeating the general discussions regarding particle physics, I thought it might be good to step back and take a look at what is actually known and tested in the world of quantum mechanics.  To do this, we need to take a look at The Standard Model.

When we seek to understand what is fundamental to life around us, it is a question of what exactly is the essence of our physical world.  If you break matter and energy down to the smallest component what is it that we are dealing with?

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Quantum Leap: Blackholes Don’t Exist

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 007.

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Despite the regular pronouncements in the popular press, there is a growing debate among physicists that, in fact, the mathematical models that at one time purported to clearly substantiate the existence of such, black holes are proving out to be false.

Black holes have provided “simple”  answers to, for example, the questions of angular momentum for galaxy formation.  Why is it that galaxies don’t fly apart, given the energy and resulting motions that are readily evident?  Well, the theory goes, if you have a sufficiently strong gravitational force at the center of a galaxy, that provides the stickiness needed to keep galactic material from devolving into chaos.

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Quantum Mechanics: Did Newton Have it All Wrong?

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. This is issue 006.

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You know, I am probably wrong in blaming Sir Isaac Newton for ideas like black holes, dark matter, and dark energy, but there is no doubt that the bulk of the scientific community have continued to attempt to use his approach based on Force, Mass, and Acceleration to model cosmology.  At least, at some point, after The Big Bang.

The $9 billion dollar science project, aka the Large Hadron Collider and the search for the elusive (and most likely) nonexistent Higgs Boson particle, represents the end point in this attempt.  Black holes and dark matter, the assumed core and make up of galaxies in an attempt to balance angular momentum, is akin to attempting, like the Little Dutch Boy, to plug as many holes as possible where observed reality fails to line up with the various hypotheses that exist in cosmology.  Dark energy is also a balancing variable in the equation because, if both black holes and dark matter have such a hold on the universe, why does it appear that all visible matter in space at the super scalar level appear to be growing more distant from one another?

The one thing that I have learned over the years building statistical models is that adding more variables in an attempt to improve ones forecasting accuracy isn’t necessarily the way to go, but this is the approach taken right now within the scientific community and their reliance on Sir Isaac.

Now this leads to the question of “If not Newtonian physics, what else is there?”  My and other minority scientists’ reply is Quantum Mechanics.  So what does that mean?

More to come…

<em>Watch for Issue #7 of Thomas’ “Quantum Leap”, here on A Sky Full of Stars, on February 05, 2010.</em>

You can access all previous issues of “Quantum Leap”, here.

Quantum Leap: The $9-billion particle

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Guest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics.  This is issue 005.

The significance of the $9 billion dollar particle …

In an earlier article, I talked about the Other Worldly difference between the near certainty, relatively speaking, of Newtonian physics and the chaotic, probability realm of quantum mechanics – how you can predict the path of a normal baseball being thrown against a wall bouncing back to you while a quantum baseball would just as likely go through the wall and come out the other side as it would return to you.

The fact that the Newtonian world we live in each day, looking so relatively stable, is actually resting on a world teeming with chaos and uncertainty – well, that makes this place we live in as much like Alice going down the rabbit hole as anything else.

Artist rendering of the Higgs Boson particle

It also leads us to the quest for the $9-billion particle, otherwise known as Higgs Boson.  The $9-billion cost is the budget used to create the Large Hadron Collider that will be used to attempt to find this little beastie.

Finding the Higgs Boson particle would, once and for all, unite the four forces that seemingly make up our world and usher in a New World Order with all sorts of possibilities for our understanding of the Universe, unifying the worlds of Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics.  The failure to find the particle wouldn’t make the Large Hadron Collider inert, but it would prove, once again, that speculation built on a hypothesis can easily lead the scientific community astray.

More to come on this one…

Watch for Issue #6 of Thomas’ “Quantum Leap”, here on A Sky Full of Stars, on January 15, 2010.

You can access all previous issues of “Quantum Leap”, here.

Quantum Leap: Quantum Mechanics Gets Depressed

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Tom_at_Elu_Event_2008_Cropped_for_Twitter_biggerGuest author, Thomas Kennedy, features a twice-monthly series, Quantum Leap, wherein he guides readers through the fascinating world of quantum mechanics.  This is issue 004.

From The Sunday Times, Oct 4, 2009:“BRITAIN could be forced to pull out of the world’s highest-profile physics project, Cern’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), because of financial failures by a government research council.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has already had to slash university grants, prompting warnings that physics departments may face closure.

Now managers are warning that Britain’s membership of Cern, based in Geneva, is also threatened, along with its involvement in global astronomy projects.”

When a society is immersed in an economic downturn so severe that it rivals the Great Depression of the 1930s, all matters of negative effects come into play.  Government funding of basic research will continue to be slashed over the next 10 years as the world’s economies find themselves having to re-balance what they want versus what they can afford.

It’s a new day, baby.

NOTE: The Large Hadron Collider is a grand quantum and astrophysics science experiment that is attempting to answer a number of questions, from what were the initial conditions when the universe was born, is there a unique particle, the Higgs Boson, that unites the world of particle and Newtonian physics, to what happened to antimatter after the Big Bang.  BBC News provides an excellent description of the LHC in their Guide to the Large Hadron Collider, here.

Watch for Issue #5 of Thomas’ “Quantum Leap”, here on A Sky Full of Stars, on January 1, 2010.

You can access all previous issues of “Quantum Leap”, here.