Saturday, January 20, 2007

Where Protons Will Play


PERCEPTIONS & ILLUSIONS: A most confounding principle - the radius of curvature of all natural law, the quantity C, as the kinetic energy equivalent of the mass energy of matter. The "Hadron Collider, another sizable object is taking shape, also quite beautiful in its way, yet not at all dumb" .....may even be dumber then dumb. Reconsider the forward with which Einstein prefaced his mathematics: that none of the basic factors of nature have any reality or significance except when considered from a specified position or condition. The interpretation that mass approaches infinity as velocity approaches that of light, may simply be the measure of the kinetic energy differential between the observer and the point he is observing. The natural laws are Relative: that is, the value of one can be altered between any two reference points by altering the value or relationship of the other. This last fact should always be borne in mind when we hear some dogmatist solemnly declare that we are forever barred from reaching the stars by the hopelessly great degree of separation which exists between us. What may Hadron be missing? And when will humans get to play, evolve and survive?


NYT January 14, 2007
Where Protons Will Play
By JIM HOLT
On seeing the Alps for the first time, Dorothy Parker is reputed to have said, “They’re beautiful, but they’re dumb.” Near the foot of Mont Blanc, the greatest of the Alpine peaks, another sizable object is taking shape, also quite beautiful in its way, yet not at all dumb. In fact, its pristine geometries may be instrumental in revealing what have hitherto been some of nature’s deepest secrets.
It is called the Large Hadron Collider, or L.H.C. for short. Its shell is a more or less circular tunnel, some 17 miles in circumference and buried several stories underground, that straddles the Franco-Swiss border. Within this tunnel, a sort of racetrack for protons is being created. (Protons are, of course, usually found in the nucleus of an atom; they are members of the “hadron” family of subatomic particles.) The L.H.C. is scheduled to be up and running by the end of this year. When it is, flocks of protons will be made to zip around the tunnel in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. Then they will be forced to crash into each other, with (it is hoped) spectacular results for physics.
Physicists, you see, learn about the subatomic world by smashing things together and then looking at the debris. Imagine a midair collision between two watermelons; it would make quite a mess, but nothing very interesting would result. Suppose, though, you get two protons to collide head-on. If they are moving fast enough, the energy of their collision, converted into mass à la Einstein’s E=mc2, will produce a shower of new particles. (It would be as if colliding watermelons splattered into a shower of pineapples, blueberries, mangoes and more exotic fruits.) Some of these particles will already be familiar to physicists. Others, though never before observed, might well have been hypothesized by one of the speculative theories that physicists busy themselves devising, hence giving us reason to think that a theory in question is true. Still others might come as a complete surprise, eliciting an amazed cry of “Who ordered that?”
Although the Large Hadron Collider is a European project, a half-billion or so of the $8 billion price tag is being kicked in by the United States as an official “observer.” This might be seen as recompense for Congress’s decision to cut off funds for a supercollider in 1993, leaving only a partly excavated hole in the ground in Waxahachie, Tex. Among the community of 7,000 experimenters working at the L.H.C. — roughly half of the world’s particle physicists, coming from some 80 countries — the largest national contingent, numbering more than 700, will be American.
Physicists across the world are thrilled at the prospect of the Large Hadron Collider being turned on later this year, and not just because they look forward to skiing nearby in Chamonix. For the past generation, physics has been in something of a rut. There have been plenty of findings from smaller colliders, but the results have mostly been expected. To make further progress — to understand why the basic forces of nature have such wildly varying strengths, or why elementary particles have the seemingly arbitrary masses they do, or how all these forces and particles fit together in a single mathematical framework — data from higher realms of energy are needed. The L.H.C. should take physicists to those realms.
And what will they find there? At the very least, the violent proton collisions in the shadow of the Alps are expected to conjure into existence the all-important Higgs boson, a key to understanding not only the masses of the known elementary particles but also the early history of the universe. (Some pessimists fear that this is the only discovery the L.H.C. will result in. If so — pas mal.) Then there are more exotic possibilities: quantum black holes (sound dangerous, evaporate quickly); “dark matter” particles; Kaluza-Klein particles that flit off into higher dimensions; particles like the gluino, the squark, the slepton and the wino (pronounced WE-no) — which, though silly-sounding, could furnish badly needed evidence that there might be something to string theory. Beyond all that, there is the exciting chance that something utterly undreamed of will be found — a not-uncommon occurrence when physicists ascend to new levels of energy.
Energy and beauty are deeply linked in contemporary physics. At the highest energies, like those immediately after the Big Bang, perfect symmetry prevails, and all the forces of nature merge into one. As the universe cooled down, this symmetry was broken in various ways, so the world we see around us is, as the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg has put it, “only an imperfect reflection of a deeper and more beautiful reality.” By reaching back toward the primordial energy, the L.H.C. promises to move us a little closer to that reality. This promise is bodied forth in the rounded, symmetrical forms of the collider itself — next to which the Alps, for all their grandeur, look just a bit slovenly.
Jim Holt, a regular contributor, writes frequently about science.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Scientists Examine ‘Dark Energy’ of Antigravity



Silence since the late 1940's discovery of the 'sine wave' nature of the Radius of Curvature of All Natural Law within the expanded definition of E=MC2 StarSteps

November 16, 2006
Scientists Examine ‘Dark Energy’ of Antigravity
By DENNIS OVERBYE
A strange thing happened to the universe five billion years ago. As if God had turned on an antigravity machine, the expansion of the cosmos speeded up, and galaxies began moving away from one another at an ever faster pace.
Now a group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that billions of years before this mysterious antigravity overcame cosmic gravity and sent the galaxies scooting apart like muscle cars departing a tollbooth, it was already present in space, affecting the evolution of the cosmos.
“We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” said Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute about the antigravity force, known as dark energy. He is the leader of a team of “dark energy prospectors,” as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity. The group reported their observations at a news conference today and in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The new results, Dr. Riess and others said, provide new clues and place new limits on the nature of dark energy, a mystery that has thrown physics and cosmology into turmoil over the last decade.
“It gives us ability to look at changes in dark energy,” he said in an interview. “Previously, we knew nothing about that. That’s really exciting.”
The data suggest that in fact dark energy has changed little, if at all, over the course of cosmic history. Though hardly conclusive, that finding lends more support to what has become the conventional theory: that the source of cosmic antigravity is the cosmological constant, a sort of fudge factor that Einstein inserted it into his cosmological equations in 1917 to represent a cosmic repulsion embedded in space.
While Einstein later abandoned the cosmological constant, calling it a blunder, it would not go away. It is the one theorized form of dark energy that does not change with time.
Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology who was not part of the team, said: “Had they found the evolution was not constant, that would have been an incredibly earth-shaking discovery. They looked where no one had been able to look before.”
The paper by Dr. Riess and his colleagues represents a sort of progress report from the dark side, where astrophysicists have found themselves more and more as they try to understand what is happening to the universe. This encounter with the invisible began eight years ago, when two competing teams of astronomers were using exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovas as cosmic distance markers to determine the fate of the universe.
Ever since the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, the galaxies and the rest of the universe have been flying apart, like a handful of pebbles tossed in the air. Astronomers reasoned that gravity would be slowing the expansion and the teams were trying to find out by how much, and thus determine whether collapse one day into a “big crunch” or expand forever.
Instead, to their surprise, both teams, one led by Saul Perlmutter of the University of California at Berkeley, and the other by Brian Schmidt of the Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories in Australia, found that the universe was speeding up instead of slowing down. But the ground-based telescopes used by the two teams could track supernovas only to distances of seven billion light years, corresponding to half the age of the universe, and the effect could have been mimicked by dust or a slight change in the nature of the supernova explosions.
Since then, Dr. Riess, who was a member of Dr. Schmidt’s team, and his colleagues have used the Hubble Space Telescope to prospect for supernovas and dark energy farther out in space or back in time. The new results are based on observations of 23 supernovas that are more than eight billion years in the past, before dark energy came to dominate the cosmos. The spectra of these distant supernovas, moreover, Dr. Riess reported, appear to be identical to those closer and more recent examples, further validating their use as cosmological probes.
By combining these supernova results with data from other experiments like NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, Dr. Riess and his colleagues could begin to address the evolution of dark energy.
“That’s one of the $64,000 questions,” he said. “Is dark energy changing?”
So far, he said, the results are consistent with the cosmological constant, but other answers are also possible.The possibility that it is the cosmological constant is a mixed blessing. Physicists admit they do not understand it. “Dark energy makes us nervous,” Dr. Carroll said.
Einstein invented his constant to explain why the universe does not collapse. After he abandoned the idea, it was resuscitated by quantum mechanics, , which showed that empty space should be bubbling with staggering amounts of repulsive energy. The possibility that it really exists in the tiny amounts measured by the astronomers has flummoxed physicists and string theorists.
Because it is a property of empty space, the overall force of Einstein’s constant grows in proportion as the universe expands, until it overwhelms everything. Other theories of dark energy, like strange force fields called quintessence, or modifications to Einstein’s theory of gravity, can change in more complicated ways, rising and falling or even reversing their effects.
Astronomers characterize these different versions of dark energy by their so-called “equation of state,” the ratio of its pressure to its density, denoted by the letter w. For the cosmological constant, w is minus one.
Dr. Reiss and his group used their data to make the first crude measurement of this quantity as it stood nine billion years ago. The answer, he said, was minus one — the magic number — plus or minus about 50 percent. By comparison for more recent times, when there are many more supernovas observable and thus more data, the value is minus one with an uncertainty of about 10 percent.
“If at one point in history it’s not minus one, then we have killed the very best explanation,” Dr. Riess said.
Getting to the precision needed to kill or confirm Einstein’s constant, however, will be very difficult, he acknowledged. One of the biggest sources of uncertainty is the fact that the Type 1a explosions are not completely uniform, introducing scatter into the observations.
The Hubble is the only telescope that can pursue supernova explosions deeply enough to chart the early days of dark energy. The recent announcement that NASA will send astronauts to maintain and refurbish the telescope once again, enabling it to keep performing well into the next decade, is a lift for Dr. Riess’s project. A new camera could extend their observations to 11 billion or 12 billion years back in time.
But his team has competition. NASA and the Department of Energy are considering proposals for a dark energy satellite mission in the next decade and a variety large astronomical projects, using ground-based telescopes to investigating dark energy from other angles are in the process of starting up.
“It’s a clue, it’s not the answer,” Dr. Riess said of the new results. “Understanding dark energy will take a lot of clues.”
He added: “If this was a crime and this was a bad detective novel, we would ask, ‘Was dark energy lingering around the scene of the crime?’ We might look for a pile of cigarette butts.
“We found the cigarette butts,” Dr. Reiss explained. “Dark energy was here, full of mischievous intent.”

Mysterious force's long presence+


"Great Unifications become the founding ideas on which whole new sciences are erected. Sometimes the consequences so threaten our worldview that surprise is quickly followed by disbelief." The Trouble With Physics
Today, no one's ego stands priority over Human Life, Survival and Evolution StarSteps




Mysterious force's long presence

Dark energy - the mysterious force that is speeding up the expansion of the Universe - has been a part of space for at least nine billion years.
That is the conclusion of astronomers who presented results from a three-year study using the Hubble Space Telescope.
The finding may rule out some competing theories that predict the strength of dark energy changes over time.
Dark energy makes up about 70% of the Universe; the rest is dark matter (25%) and normal matter (5%).

Understanding the nature of dark energy is arguably the biggest problem physics is facing today Mario Livio, Space Telescope Science Institute
"It appears this dark energy was already boosting the expansion of the Universe as much as nine billion years ago," said co-investigator Adam Riess from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, US.
"That's out of a Universe which we think is about 13.7 billion years old - most of the way back."
The findings are consistent with the idea of dark energy behaving like Albert Einstein's cosmological constant. The cosmological constant describes the idea that there is a density and pressure associated with "empty" space.
In this scenario, dark energy never changes; it has the same properties across the age of the Universe.
Repulsive force
Einstein first conceived of the notion of a repulsive force in space in his attempt to balance the Universe against the inward pull of its own gravity, which he thought would ultimately cause the Universe to implode.
His cosmological constant remained a curious hypothesis until 1998, when astronomers used observations of supernovae from ground-based telescopes and Hubble to show that the expansion of space was accelerating.
These findings suggested there really was a repulsive form of gravity in space, a force that was shortly dubbed "dark energy".
There have been many attempts to explain the nature of dark energy.
One of these is that it behaves like the cosmological constant. Another is that dark energy behaves like a field that changes over time. The third proposes changes to our theories of gravity to explain the mysterious force.
The latest data from Hubble contradict theories that dark energy might have behaved differently billions of years ago to how it behaves now, or might not even have been present. Some astronomers had thought that dark energy might mimic whatever was the dominant force in the Universe at the time, such as matter for example.
Previous Hubble observations of the most distant supernovae known revealed that the early Universe was dominated by matter whose gravity was slowing down the Universe's expansion rate.
The observations also confirmed that the expansion rate of the cosmos began speeding up about five to six billion years ago. That is when astronomers believe that dark energy's repulsive force took over from that of gravity.
'Tug of war'
"Imagine that you were having a tug of war and the other end of the rope disappears behind a curtain. Somebody else is tugging on the other end; we'll call that dark energy," said Dr Riess.
"In 1998, we saw that the thing behind the curtain was winning, it was pulling harder and the Universe was accelerating.
"In 2004, we showed that was not always the case. There was a time when you - ordinary matter - were winning. The Universe was decelerating. Now, we have shown that, even at that time, the thing on the other end of the rope was beginning to pull."
The discovery comes from observations of 23 exploding stars, or supernovae. Using Hubble to peer far across the Universe, the astronomers were able see back to a time when the cosmos was less than half its present size.
"These supernovae provide cosmic mile-markers that allow us to measure the growth rate of the Universe about nine billion years ago," said Adam Riess.
Mario Livio, of the Space Telescope Science Institute, added: "Understanding the nature of dark energy is arguably the biggest problem physics is facing today."
In October, the US space agency (Nasa) said that shuttle astronauts would be sent to service the Hubble Space Telescope, which will fail within two or three years without running repairs.
Story from BBC NEWS:

Dark matter comes out of the cold



What part of the 'sine wave' nature of the Radius of Curvature of All Natural Law, specified by the energy differential of the constant 'C', in E=MC2 is still not understood????? Missing Energy Link



Dark matter comes out of the cold
2/6/06 By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter

Astronomers have for the first time put some real numbers on the physical characteristics of dark matter.
This strange material that dominates the Universe but which is invisible to current telescope technology is one of the great enigmas of modern science.
That it exists is one of the few things on which researchers have been certain.
But now an Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, team has at last been able to place limits on how it is packed in space and measure its "temperature".
"It's the first clue of what this stuff might be," said Professor Gerry Gilmore. "For the first time ever, we're actually dealing with its physics," he told the BBC News website.
Science understands a great deal about what it terms baryonic matter - the "normal" matter which makes up the stars, planets and people - but it has struggled to comprehend the main material from which the cosmos is constructed.
'Magic volume'
Astronomers cannot detect dark matter directly because it emits no light or radiation.
Its presence, though, can be inferred from the way galaxies rotate: their stars move so fast they would fly apart if they were not being held together by the gravitational attraction of some unseen material.
Such observations have established that dark matter makes up more than 95% of all the mass in the Universe.

These are the first properties other than existence that we've been able determine Prof Gerry Gilmore Institue of Astronomy, Cambridge
Now, the Cambridge team has provided new information with its detailed study of 12 dwarf galaxies that skirt the edge of our own Milky Way.
Using the biggest telescopes in the world, including the Very Large Telescope facility in Chile, the group has made detailed 3D maps of the galaxies, using the movement of their stars to "trace" the impression of the dark matter among them and weigh it very precisely.
With the aid of 7,000 separate measurements, the researchers have been able to establish that the galaxies contain about 400 times the amount of dark matter as they do normal matter.
"The distribution of dark matter bears no relationship to anything you will have read in the literature up to now," explained Professor Gilmore.

If this 'temperature' for the dark matter is correct, then it has huge implications for direct searches for these mysterious particles Prof Bob Nichol Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, Portsmouth
"It comes in a 'magic volume' which happens to correspond to an amount which is 30 million times the mass of the Sun.
"It looks like you cannot ever pack it smaller than about 300 parsecs - 1,000 light-years; this stuff will not let you. That tells you a speed actually - about 9km/s - at which the dark matter particles are moving because they are moving too fast to be compressed into a smaller scale.
"These are the first properties other than existence that we've been able determine."
Knowledge advance
The speed is a big surprise. Current theory had predicted dark matter particles would be extremely cold, moving at a few millimetres per second; but these observations prove the particles must actually be quite warm (in cosmic terms) at 10,000 degrees.
The most likely candidate for dark matter material is the so-called weakly interacting massive particle, or Wimp.
Scientists believe these are relic particles produced in the Big Bang.
They are predicted by certain theoretical extensions to the accepted description of matter and forces, the Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions. But also their presence would go a long way to explaining the structure and geometry of the Universe we observe.
Professor Bob Nichol, from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, described the Cambridge work as "awesome".
"If this temperature for the dark matter is correct, then it has huge implications for direct searches for these mysterious particles (it seems [science] may be looking in the wrong place for them) and for how we thought the galaxies and clusters of galaxies evolve in the Universe.
"Having 'hotter' dark matter makes it harder to form the smallest galaxies, but does help to make the largest structures. This result will generate a lot of new research."
Big neighbours
Experimental crystal detectors placed down the bottom of deep mines are hoping to record the passage through normal matter of these hard to grasp dark matter particles.
Researchers would hope also that future experiments in particle accelerators will give them greater insight into the physics of dark matter.
The Cambridge efforts have produced an additional, independent result: the detailed study of the dwarf galaxies has allowed the scientists to weigh our own galaxy more precisely than ever before.
"It turns out the Milky Way is more massive than we thought," said Professor Gilmore.
"It now looks as though the Milky Way is the biggest galaxy in the local Universe, bigger even than Andromeda. It was thought until just a few months ago that it was the other way around."
The Cambridge University team expects to submit the first of its results to a leading astrophysics journal in the next few weeks.

Evolution and the New Energy Revolution

The radius of curvature of all natural law within the expanded definition of E=MC2




Evolution and the New Energy Revolution

Awakening to New Energy Alternatives
As America and the Northern Hemisphere nations vigorously compete for remaining oil reserves, there is a quiet revolution in progress that heralds a new geo-political landscape. Human civilization is dependent upon petroleum only because no concerted effort has been applied to the alternatives. The vested interests are, of course, reluctant to change a proven system (the fossil fuel economy) for fear of destabilizing their profitable business infrastructure. However, abundant evidence now shows that such a course will not only imperil the global ecology, but oil production will dramatically decline over the next century, negatively impacting our economic futures.
In laboratories around the planet, in scientific circles as diverse as the many cultures that populate our globe, an emerging class of unconventional energy technologies is being birthed. Some of these are the logical 'next step' innovations building upon the state-of-the-art. Others are truly quantum advances in the understanding of how energy is generated. The aggregate body of knowledge represented by these developments clearly holds the key to moving beyond our destructive addiction to oil.
What generally characterizes the new energy principles and systems is that they fall outside the realm of conventional theory. For this reason, the orthodox science establishment has specifically ignored the effects seen in these technologies. It is herein proposed that a private University be established to focus exclusively on the 'anomalies' that underpin new energy systems. The promise of such research is that a vast range of phenomena will be opened to exploitation.
Is it not preferable to envision a world that has dispensed with the fear of limited resources? It follows that should a sustainable energy economy be put in place, a more equitable future will be possible for all. The question of energy is viewed as central to resolving global conflict, including 'the war on terrorism'. Were the future to be instead dominated by the prevailing tension, we would see a steady decline in overall quality of life. Whereas, abundant energy would lower the cost of living, enhance the economy, and expand the potential of human endeavor.
While at this stage there is but a minority of players in the alternative energy sphere, relative to the oil-based business sector, nothing is more pressing than the support of these rising entrepreneurs. It has been projected that wind-energy alone could reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil by one-half within the span of two-decades. The political consequences of this shift would be immense. Not only would the present thrust to militarize the Middle Eastern theater be unnecessary, we would gradually prove the viability of new energy systems over and above that of conventional sources (oil, coal, nuclear).
What makes this argument so compelling is the existence of truly advanced energy generation techniques that give us a renewed glimpse into the nature of the Cosmos. Since the industrial revolution, the scientific worldview has been fundamentally biased towards an 'entropic' model, i.e. the idea that all energy in the Universe will one day 'run out'. There is not only no conclusive proof to support this assertion, there are numerous examples that contradict it. Unfortunately, a dogmatic conviction has been enshrined in the minds of most scientists that any cosmology other than this is false. In the case where an effect is shown to violate this 'law of physics' (the conservation of energy within a 'limited system'), it is classified as 'anomalous', awaiting the day it can be explained in consonance with the theory. In other words, science is now more interested to uphold its theoretical constructs than to admit new knowledge and embrace its benefits.
The bulk of humanity suffers while the elite academicsand industrialists prop up their ivory towers.
Just as in the time of Jesus, when the 'law' was considered to have greater significance than the Spirit, our age is one in which the doctrine of limitation has proven more enduring than a policy of liberation.
In order for this benign revolution to progress, the research and development of new energy technology must be pursued in parallel with socio-political reforms. Time is short, for we are approaching the point at which the insatiable appetite for oil will exceed our capacity to fulfill the demand. This juncture is known as "Peak Oil" and is said to be looming on the immediate horizon. Once a consensus is reached that no greater reserves of oil can be secured, the global economy will begin to contract. As the value of currency itself is firmly pegged to economic growth, this portends ominous changes in the ability of peoples and nations to achieve prosperity.
It is no surprise that a rise of militarism should precede the demise of the fossil fuel empire. It is the vain attempt of the 'old guard' to extend the life of a dying ideology. Rather than take proactive steps to reconstitute the existing business model, brute force is the preferred, more expedient choice. This approach will bring with it an uncertain future. For often, in the chaos that accompanies an era of conflict, many basic human values are compromised.
Both the best and the worst in our nature are available at this point in history. The idealistic vision of sustainable energy is matched against greed and recalcitrance. In truth, the two attitudes may need to be melded if the world is to survive as we know it.
At this moment, the path is undeniable for those progressively-oriented souls who understand our dilemma. The democratic society needs to become decidedly unanimous where energy is concerned. The balance of power must be shifted such that our untenable use of oil is kept in check with the introduction of new energy breakthroughs. Even in the case these technologies are in an embryonic state that wouldn't, under normal economic conditions, qualify them as viable investments, these extraordinary times demand we broaden our perspective. The damage being wrought in the absence of robust alternatives to oil more than warrants even the speculative support of new energy. Once we have corrected our course, an unparalleled renaissance is assured.
Andrew Mount June 2004

Lethal Mix: Corporate Rule, Science, Education, Evolution





Corporate Rule: Dumbing us down is not a healthy road to Evolution. The need for improved education is perhaps best described by: "John Gatto, 1991’s Teacher of the Year for the State of New York. Mr. Gatto believes that the present school system (which included himself) teaches confusion, indifference, class position/hierarchy, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, and provisional self-esteem. It is an educational curriculum seemingly “designed to quash innovation, instill subservience, and undermine all coherence through a numbing series of arbitrary rules, disjointed facts, and days fractured by shrill bells.” The results, according to Mr. Gatto, are that children are indifferent to the adult world, have almost no curiosity, have a poor sense of the future, are ahistorical, cruel to each other, uneasy with intimacy or candor, materialistic, dependent, passive, and timid. [3] The University of Halexandria will strive to be an essential element in correcting these deficiencies and incorporating the changing paradigms of our modern world." (note current events Freedom Times)

Daniel Sewell Ph.D. Nuclear Physics - Library of Alexandria -- 21 September 2003
Corporations tend to get a bad rap. The good news is that they don’t necessarily receive a lot of bad press. This is because they tend to control the media, and in some cases, are the Media. Clearly the Media companies are corporations, and/or are owned by corporations. Duh. Meanwhile, those individuals who work for corporations, even the Transnational Corporations, may think that it’s not as bad as it appears from the outside. But this may only be a case of a gross inability to see the forest for the trees. (Or simply the wholesale, wanton and irresponsible destruction of the same trees, which when piled up alongside the river bank, inhibit any alternative viewpoint.)
But even those who see corporations as potentially the good guys, sometimes see the dark side, and suspect that there may be some need for reform. One case in point is Robert Monks, a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School, who operates an investment fund with more than $250 million under management, and who has written books about wealth and power, including, The Emperor's Nightingale: Restoring the Integrity of the Corporation in the Age of Shareholder Activism (Addison Wesley, 1998).
Monks has been concerned about the adverse effects of corporate power on society. But by and large, he is still a corporate reformer, i.e. not a corporate abolitionist. He does believe that it is the owners of the corporation who should determine its destiny. In that mode, he -- as the controller of a lot of stock ownership -- is not above flexing his investment group’s stock muscles from time to time.
Monks did join forces with George Soros, in a campaign against Waste Management Inc., a company with a long history of corporate wrongdoing. Monks identified Waste Management as a company with low stock value, sloppy management and misleading accounting. He then organized shareholders on the Inter Net, and forced the resignation of two CEOs. Eventually, the Monks group convinced the third CEO that the level of rot within the company was so great that the only way out was a merger with a cleaner, smaller company. Eventually, Waste Management merged with the smaller USA Waste.
In his book, Monks describes what he calls the four corporate dangers: unlimited life, unlimited size, unlimited power and unlimited license. (Which, of course, is coincident with limited liability. And therein lies the problem!) Only shareholder activism, Monk argues, can bring about the four “solutions”, i.e.: long-term life, appropriate size, balanced power, and accountability to long-term owners. He believes other efforts at controlling corporate power -- such as corporate chartering, investigative reporting, regulation, independent boards -- are bound to fail. From his viewpoint, only an activated shareholder movement can bring corporations into line. And as a major stockholder, this provides him with a considerable base of power, i.e. there might be a slight conflict of interest there.
Even if Monks is right, even if well intentioned, the odds are that his efforts will be in vain.
When the U. S. Supreme Court in 1886 (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad) held that a private corporation was a natural person under the U. S. Constitution [the 14th Amendment to the Constitution for the United States of America], the way was opened for corporations to dominate the public and private life of society, define the economic, cultural and political agenda for humans and all other living things, and perhaps most importantly, allow corporations to assume The First Amendment rights, wherein they can say anything, and yet... still have limited liability.
An absolutely fundamental difference between living, sentient beings and corporations is that human beings have unlimited liability, and corporations have limited liability. Human beings can forfeit their freedom, their property, even their lives for everything from libel and slander to mistaken judgment to accidents to intentional acts. Corporations can not even be driven out of business for the most questionable acts -- except perhaps in rare cases of public outrage. The latter, however, is wholly unacceptable in that an uninformed or misinformed public opinion could have been molded by -- you guessed it -- another corporation or group of corporations, also known as the media.
For those who’ve seen the movie, Erin Brockervich, the question to ask is: “Did anyone at the corporate utility (employees, directors, consultants), once it had agreed to pay thru the nose for destroying the health and lives of hundreds of people, ever do a single day of jail time? Did the corporation then recoop its liability losses by simply raising the rates for its services? Now, THAT’s limited liability, the “corporate veil” at work!
Enter the United States Government, with the where-with-all to curb corporate tyrannies. Unfortunately, this hasn’t worked out too well for anyone but the corporations and their highly paid (bribed?) political operatives. Current campaign financing laws, combined with the “revolving door” between corporations and government, are the means by which corporations control absolutely the politics of nations. The degree to which corporations are out of control is best illustrated by the recent massive theft at the upper levels by CEOs -- aided and abetted by Independent Accounting Firms. As the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange departs after eight years, he takes a mere $168 million home with him! Gee, I hope he can find another job.
Corporate Politics is in all respects the prime mover in the destruction of Constitutional principles and the idealized American way of life. Whether it is Oprah providing aid and soft money (i.e. free, extensive publicity) to the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates -- while ignoring completely the qualified and legitimate third party candidates -- or the international banksters being responsible for the US Bankruptcy, and its after-math, corporations rule the world from the unethical base of the “bottom line”.
About the only saving grace in Corporate Rule is that different corporations have different agendas in many situations, and thus the competition of the greedy keeps some aspects at bay. At the same time, however, organizations which support non-profitable institutions, such as public schools and environmental causes, have a very reduced ability to compete with the 900 pound gorillas.
[Suggestions whereby the non-profit organizations should have access to the same power that Corporations possess, show a lack of foresight. Making still more 900 pound gorillas is not the way to solve the problem of 900 pound gorillas.]
Prisons, for example, once the purview of government (and non-profit), are increasingly being taken over by (for profit) corporations. The corporations are, in most cases, paid on the basis of the number of convicts or prisoners in their “care”. The result is that these prison corporations, in order to bolster the bottom line, i.e. have more prisoners, begin to bribe judges and courts so they will levy heavier sentences, and even send individuals to prison who don’t deserve it, or who are simply not even guilty -- all in the name of profit for the shareholders. [But of course, the stockholders see precious little, as the CEOs and top ranking executives skim off the top most of the ill-gotten gains in the form of compensation, Golden Parachutes, fringe benefits, stock options, etceteras.]
Corporations not only strongly influence domestic policies within the United States, but also affect American foreign policy, by the simple expedient of an unbridled support of Capitalism by the American Government (or governments, when State governments are included). This in turn leads to tremendous inequities in the way the Military Industrial Complex (which President Eisenhower warned us about so many years ago) treats the people of the world. What we have is a Corporate Pac Man Conglomerate gobbling up resources from countries all over the world, and in the end so infuriating (often rightly so) the people of those foreign lands, that terrorist organizations the world over have easy access to disgruntled and disillusioned individuals. And not just from third world countries, as the presence of American and European proxy-terrorists have made clear.
The American Government’s wholehearted support of Corporate Capitalism, combined with what amounts to general greed, stupidity, and power-at-any-cost, has led to a Crisis of American Government, where The Art of Cover Ups has risen to new heights of sophistication, and Americans and non-Americans alike no longer trust anything the US government says, does, or in which it becomes involved.
The final horror is a situation where the awesome power of the United States, its military and industrial base, and its collective citizenry, is not used to curb Corporate abuse, but instead to aid it in its nefarious agenda to accumulate ever greater power in the hands an elite. Instead, all indication are that governments throughout the world are slowly handing over the reins of power to what can only be called a Corporate State.
So... What are the victims of Corporate tyrannies to do?
As Carolyn Chute, author of the 1985 classic, The Beans of Egypt, Maine, and a staunch corporate abolitionist phrased it: “...if faceless financiers and their tool, the corporation, aren't completely out of our lobbies, out of all our campaigns, and out of our constitution soon, looks like We, the People are going to come in the middle of the night with a can of gasoline in every hand and one fat match."
This is not necessarily a recipe for a Revolution, or even Anarchy on a massive scale. But inasmuch as it might have a deleterious effect on the bottom line of the Corporations, they might consider taking Ms. Chute’s sentiments with a certain amount of concern. Just as labor unions forced their way into the mainstream, despite the government’s assistance to the corporations in attempting to destroy them during the first half of the Twentieth Century, there is a point where it’s no longer profitable to forge the Corporate State.
A curious, highly ironic article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 9-11-2001 (i.e. the morning edition written and published before the more notorious events of that date). The article was about the many protests against the World Trade Organization, and had a quote from a person of considerable authority who stated confidently that, “DC will not burn!” Admittedly, the Pentagon is across the river from “DC”, but I think the point is made that protests cannot be automatically dismissed out of hand.

Check Mate Sovereignty Justice, Order, and Law
Forward to:
Transnational Corporations Corporate Politics
CEOs The Rule of 20-50 Independent Accounting Firms
Corporate State Capitalism American Foreign Policy

The Library of ialexandriah

Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory



What part of the 'sine wave' nature of the Radius of Curvature of All Natural Law, specified by the energy differential of the constant 'C', in E=MC2 is still not understood????? Missing Energy Link
December 27, 2005
Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Einstein said there would be days like this.
This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."
No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.
These atoms were each spinning clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. Moreover, like miniature Rockettes they were all doing whatever it was they were doing together, in perfect synchrony. Should one of them realize, like the cartoon character who runs off a cliff and doesn't fall until he looks down, that it is in a metaphysically untenable situation and decide to spin only one way, the rest would instantly fall in line, whether they were across a test tube or across the galaxy.
The idea that measuring the properties of one particle could instantaneously change the properties of another one (or a whole bunch) far away is strange to say the least - almost as strange as the notion of particles spinning in two directions at once. The team that pulled off the beryllium feat, led by Dietrich Leibfried at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Boulder, Colo., hailed it as another step toward computers that would use quantum magic to perform calculations.
But it also served as another demonstration of how weird the world really is according to the rules, known as quantum mechanics.
The joke is on Albert Einstein, who, back in 1935, dreamed up this trick of synchronized atoms - "spooky action at a distance," as he called it - as an example of the absurdity of quantum mechanics.
"No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this," he, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen wrote in a paper in 1935.
Today that paper, written when Einstein was a relatively ancient 56 years old, is the most cited of Einstein's papers. But far from demolishing quantum theory, that paper wound up as the cornerstone for the new field of quantum information.
Nary a week goes by that does not bring news of another feat of quantum trickery once only dreamed of in thought experiments: particles (or at least all their properties) being teleported across the room in a microscopic version of Star Trek beaming; electrical "cat" currents that circle a loop in opposite directions at the same time; more and more particles farther and farther apart bound together in Einstein's spooky embrace now known as "entanglement." At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers are planning an experiment in which a small mirror will be in two places at once.
Niels Bohr, the Danish philosopher king of quantum theory, dismissed any attempts to lift the quantum veil as meaningless, saying that science was about the results of experiments, not ultimate reality. But now that quantum weirdness is not confined to thought experiments, physicists have begun arguing again about what this weirdness means, whether the theory needs changing, and whether in fact there is any problem.
This fall two Nobel laureates, Anthony Leggett of the University of Illinois and Norman Ramsay of Harvard argued in front of several hundred scientists at a conference in Berkeley about whether, in effect, physicists were justified in trying to change quantum theory, the most successful theory in the history of science. Dr. Leggett said yes; Dr. Ramsay said no.
It has been, as Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted, "a 75-year war." It is typical in reporting on this subject to bounce from one expert to another, each one shaking his or her head about how the other one just doesn't get it. "It's a kind of funny situation," N. David Mermin of Cornell, who has called Einstein's spooky action "the closest thing we have to magic," said, referring to the recent results. "These are extremely difficult experiments that confirm elementary features of quantum mechanics." It would be more spectacular news, he said, if they had come out wrong.
Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna said that he thought, "The world is not as real as we think.
"My personal opinion is that the world is even weirder than what quantum physics tells us," he added.
The discussion is bringing renewed attention to Einstein's role as a founder and critic of quantum theory, an "underground history," that has largely been overlooked amid the celebrations of relativity in the past Einstein year, according to David Z. Albert, a professor of philosophy and physics at Columbia. Regarding the 1935 paper, Dr. Albert said, "We know something about Einstein's genius we didn't know before."
The Silly Theory
From the day 100 years ago that he breathed life into quantum theory by deducing that light behaved like a particle as well as like a wave, Einstein never stopped warning that it was dangerous to the age-old dream of an orderly universe.
If light was a particle, how did it know which way to go when it was issued from an atom?
"The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it seems," Einstein once wrote to friend.
The full extent of its silliness came in the 1920's when quantum theory became quantum mechanics.
In this new view of the world, as encapsulated in a famous equation by the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger, objects are represented by waves that extend throughout space, containing all the possible outcomes of an observation - here, there, up or down, dead or alive. The amplitude of this wave is a measure of the probability that the object will actually be found to be in one state or another, a suggestion that led Einstein to grumble famously that God doesn't throw dice.
Worst of all from Einstein's point of view was the uncertainty principle, enunciated by Werner Heisenberg in 1927.
Certain types of knowledge, of a particle's position and velocity, for example, are incompatible: the more precisely you measure one property, the blurrier and more uncertain the other becomes.
In the 1935 paper, Einstein and his colleagues, usually referred to as E.P.R., argued that the uncertainty principle could not be the final word about nature. There must be a deeper theory that looked behind the quantum veil.
Imagine that a pair of electrons are shot out from the disintegration of some other particle, like fragments from an explosion. By law certain properties of these two fragments should be correlated. If one goes left, the other goes right; if one spins clockwise, the other spins counterclockwise.
That means, Einstein said, that by measuring the velocity of, say, the left hand electron, we would know the velocity of the right hand electron without ever touching it.
Conversely, by measuring the position of the left electron, we would know the position of the right hand one.
Since neither of these operations would have involved touching or disturbing the right hand electron in any way, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen argued that the right hand electron must have had those properties of both velocity and position all along. That left only two possibilities, they concluded. Either quantum mechanics was "incomplete," or measuring the left hand particle somehow disturbed the right hand one.
But the latter alternative violated common sense. Such an influence, or disturbance, would have to travel faster than the speed of light. "My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion," Einstein later wrote.
Bohr responded with a six-page essay in Physical Review that contained but one simple equation, Heisenberg's uncertainty relation. In essence, he said, it all depends on what you mean by "reality."
Enjoy the Magic
Most physicists agreed with Bohr, and they went off to use quantum mechanics to build atomic bombs and reinvent the world.
The consensus was that Einstein was a stubborn old man who "didn't get" quantum physics. All this began to change in 1964 when John S. Bell, a particle physicist at the European Center for Nuclear Research near Geneva, who had his own doubts about quantum theory, took up the 1935 E.P.R. argument. Somewhat to his dismay, Bell, who died in 1990, wound up proving that no deeper theory could reproduce the predictions of quantum mechanics. Bell went on to outline a simple set of experiments that could settle the argument and decide who was right, Einstein or Bohr.
When the experiments were finally performed in 1982, by Alain Aspect and his colleagues at the University of Orsay in France, they agreed with quantum mechanics and not reality as Einstein had always presumed it should be. Apparently a particle in one place could be affected by what you do somewhere else.
"That's really weird," Dr. Albert said, calling it "a profoundly deep violation of an intuition that we've been walking with since caveman days."
Physicists and philosophers are still fighting about what this means. Many of those who care to think about these issues (and many prefer not to), concluded that Einstein's presumption of locality - the idea that physically separated objects are really separate - is wrong.
Dr. Albert said, "The experiments show locality is false, end of story." But for others, it is the notion of realism, that things exist independent of being perceived, that must be scuttled. In fact, physicists don't even seem to agree on the definitions of things like "locality" and "realism."
"I would say we have to be careful saying what's real," Dr. Mermin said. "Properties cannot be said to be there until they are revealed by an actual experiment."
What everybody does seem to agree on is that the use of this effect is limited. You can't use it to send a message, for example.
Leonard Susskind, a Stanford theoretical physicist, who called these entanglement experiments "beautiful and surprising," said the term "spooky action at a distance," was misleading because it implied the instantaneous sending of signals. "No competent physicist thinks that entanglement allows this kind of nonlocality."
Indeed the effects of spooky action, or "entanglement," as Schrödinger called it, only show up in retrospect when the two participants in a Bell-type experiment compare notes. Beforehand, neither has seen any violation of business as usual; each sees the results of his measurements of, say, whether a spinning particle is pointing up or down, as random.
In short, as Brian Greene, the Columbia theorist wrote in "The Fabric of the Cosmos," Einstein's special relativity, which sets the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit, "survives by the skin of its teeth."
In an essay in 1985, Dr. Mermin said that "if there is spooky action at a distance, then, like other spooks, it is absolutely useless except for its effect, benign or otherwise, on our state of mind."
He added, "The E.P.R. experiment is as close to magic as any physical phenomenon I know of, and magic should be enjoyed." In a recent interview, he said he still stood by the latter part of that statement. But while spooky action remained useless for sending a direct message, it had turned out to have potential uses, he admitted, in cryptography and quantum computing.
Nine Ways of Killing a Cat
Another debate, closely related to the issues of entanglement and reality, concerns what happens at the magic moment when a particle is measured or observed.
Before a measurement is made, so the traditional story goes, the electron exists in a superposition of all possible answers, which can combine, adding and interfering with one another.
Then, upon measurement, the wave function "collapses" to one particular value. Schrödinger himself thought this was so absurd that he dreamed up a counterexample. What is true for electrons, he said, should be true as well for cats.
In his famous thought experiment, a cat is locked in a box where the decay of a radioactive particle will cause the release of poison that will kill it. If the particle has a 50-50 chance of decaying, then according to quantum mechanics the cat is both alive and dead before we look in the box, something the cat itself, not to mention cat lovers, might take issue with.
But cats are always dead or alive, as Dr. Leggett of Illinois said in his Berkeley talk. "The problem with quantum mechanics," he said in an interview, "is how it explains definite outcomes to experiments."
If quantum mechanics is only about information and a way of predicting the results of measurements, these questions don't matter, most quantum physicists say.
"But," Dr. Leggett said, "if you take the view that the formalism is reflecting something out there in real world, it matters immensely." As a result, theorists have come up with a menu of alternative interpretations and explanations. According to one popular notion, known as decoherence, quantum waves are very fragile and collapse from bumping into the environment. Another theory, by the late David Bohm, restores determinism by postulating a "pilot wave" that acts behind the scenes to guide particles.
In yet another theory, called "many worlds," the universe continually branches so that every possibility is realized: the Red Sox win and lose and it rains; Schrödinger's cat lives, dies, has kittens and scratches her master when he tries to put her into the box.
Recently, as Dr. Leggett pointed out, some physicists have tinkered with Schrödinger's equation, the source of much of the misery, itself.
A modification proposed by the Italian physicists Giancarlo Ghirardi and Tullio Weber, both of the University of Trieste, and Alberto Rimini of the University of Pavia, makes the wave function unstable so that it will collapse in a time depending on how big a system it represents.
In his standoff with Dr. Ramsay of Harvard last fall, Dr. Leggett suggested that his colleagues should consider the merits of the latter theory. "Why should we think of an electron as being in two states at once but not a cat, when the theory is ostensibly the same in both cases?" Dr. Leggett asked.
Dr. Ramsay said that Dr. Leggett had missed the point. How the wave function mutates is not what you calculate. "What you calculate is the prediction of a measurement," he said.
"If it's a cat, I can guarantee you will get that it's alive or dead," Dr. Ramsay said.
David Gross, a recent Nobel winner and director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, leapt into the free-for-all, saying that 80 years had not been enough time for the new concepts to sink in. "We're just too young. We should wait until 2200 when quantum mechanics is taught in kindergarten."
The Joy of Randomness
One of the most extreme points of view belongs to Dr. Zeilinger of Vienna, a bearded, avuncular physicist whose laboratory regularly hosts every sort of quantum weirdness.
In an essay recently in Nature, Dr. Zeilinger sought to find meaning in the very randomness that plagued Einstein.
"The discovery that individual events are irreducibly random is probably one of the most significant findings of the 20th century," Dr. Zeilinger wrote.
Dr. Zeilinger suggested that reality and information are, in a deep sense, indistinguishable, a concept that Dr. Wheeler, the Princeton physicist, called "it from bit."
In information, the basic unit is the bit, but one bit, he says, is not enough to specify both the spin and the trajectory of a particle. So one quality remains unknown, irreducibly random.
As a result of the finiteness of information, he explained, the universe is fundamentally unpredictable.
"I suggest that this randomness of the individual event is the strongest indication we have of a reality 'out there' existing independently of us," Dr. Zeilinger wrote in Nature.
He added, "Maybe Einstein would have liked this idea after all."

Universe 'too queer' to grasp



What part of the 'sine wave' nature of the Radius of Curvature of All Natural Law, specified by the energy differential of the constant 'C', in E=MC2 is still not understood????? Missing Energy Link


Universe 'too queer' to grasp
7/12/05 By Jo Twist BBC News science and technology reporter
Scientist Professor Richard Dawkins has opened a global conference of big thinkers warning that our Universe may be just "too queer" to understand.
Professor Dawkins, the renowned Selfish Gene author from Oxford University, said we were living in a "middle world" reality that we have created.
Experts in design, technology, and entertainment have gathered in Oxford to share their ideas about our futures.
TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is already a top US event.
It is the first time the event, TED Global, has been held in Europe.
Species software
Professor Dawkins' opening talk, in a session called Meme Power, explored the ways in which humans invent their own realities to make sense of the infinitely complex worlds they are in; worlds made more complex by ideas such as quantum physics which is beyond most human understanding.
"Are there things about the Universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, in principle, ungraspable in any mind, however superior?" he asked.

Events of 7/7 and 9/11 remind us that we do not live in three different worlds. We live in one world Ashraf Ghani, former Afghan finance minister
"Successive generations have come to terms with the increasing queerness of the Universe."
Each species, in fact, has a different "reality". They work with different "software" to make them feel comfortable, he suggested.
Because different species live in different models of the world, there was a discomforting variety of real worlds, he suggested.
"Middle world is like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see," he said.
"Middle world is the narrow range of reality that we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness that we judge to be very small or very large."
He mused that perhaps children should be given computer games to play with that familiarise them with quantum physics concepts.
"It would make an interesting experiment," he told the BBC News website.
ET worlds
Our brains had evolved to help us survive within the scale and orders of magnitude within which we exist, said Professor Dawkins.
We think that rocks and crystals are solid when in fact they were made up mostly of spaces in between atoms, he argued.
This, he said, was just the way our brains thought about things in order to help us navigate our "middle sized" world - the medium scale environment - a world in which we cannot see individual atoms.
This idea meant that life was probably "quite common" in the Universe, Professor Dawkins said.
He concluded with the thought that if he could re-engineer his brain in any way he would make himself a genius mathematician.
He would also want to time travel to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
More serious focus
Developing world economist and businesswoman Jacqueline Novogratz brought Professor Dawkins' thinking into focus, arguing that we need to fully engage with "developing worlds" to move away from "them and us" thinking.
"The world is talking about global poverty and Africa in ways I have never seen in my life," she said.
"At the same time I have a fear that the victories of G8 will see that as our moral absolution. But that is chapter one; celebrate it, close it and recognise we need a chapter two - a 'how to'.
"The only way to end poverty is to build viable systems on the ground that can deliver services to the poor in ways that are sustainable," she said.
Former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani added that globalisation was "on speed" and needed real private investment and opportunities to flourish.
"Events of 7/7 and 9/11 remind us that we do not live in three different worlds; we live in one world."
He criticised the West for being only concerned with design issues that affect them, and solving environmental problems for themselves.
"You are problem solvers but are not engaging in problems of corruption," he told TED Global delegates.
"You stay away from design for developments. Your designs are selfish; it is for your own immediate use.
"We need your imagination to be brought to bear on problems the way meme is supposed to. It is at the intersection of ideas that new ideas and breakthroughs occur."
More than 300 leading scientists, musicians, playwrights, as well as technology pioneers and future thinkers have gathered for the conference which runs from 12 to 15 July.
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4676751.stmPublished: 2005/07/12 16:44:51 GMT© BBC MMV

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Man Made Obstruction to Evolution & Survival


Caveman behavioral characteristics and Nuclear Tools do not mix, be it between individuals or nations. What possibly could be missing in the "Five Great Foundational Problems in Physics" that create an empty vacuum in the Wisdom, Understanding and Survival Sciences? The same missing elements that transfer over to the physical realm of Reality in the form of - global warming, resource wars, looming food and water shortage, worldwide poverty, and superhighway parking lots that lost their transportation definition (see Freedom Times). The faint evolutionary threads of 'peak performance' and 'self actualization' tendencies are not prone to rise spontaneously when the majority of people spend the majority of their time meeting 'survival needs'.
Nothing short of evolutionary new energy systems have the power to surmount the lethal issues mentioned beforehand and open the door to new and expanding horizons of prosperity, health, growth, and sustainability.
Another look at the "old west holdup"without guns syndrome in Science - specifically energy and the stale, petrified, unexpanded E=MC2 equation:
Open Letter from Brian O'Leary to Al Gore
December 2006 http://www.newenergymovement.org/olearygore.aspx
Dear Mr. Gore,
I am a former astronaut, Cornell professor, physics faculty member at Princeton University and visiting faculty member in technology assessment at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, Mo Udall's energy advisor and speechwriter during his 1975 Presidential campaign, author, AAAS Fellow, World Innovation Foundation Fellow, NASA group achievement award recipient, and founder of the New Energy Movement.
You have asked the public to address the important question: "How can we reverse global climate change?" I agree that taking on that task is critical for our collective survival. You have also stated that we must freeze and drastically reduce our carbon emissions. I totally agree.
The most promising answer to your question is surprisingly simple and can be summed up in two words: new energy. My experience finds that serious discussion of new energy is still politically incorrect in mainstream circles, which is appalling. Delays in implementing life-saving innovation will be at our collective risk and peril. The urgency for action in these times is unprecedented in human history. Quantum leaps in energy innovation, which some of us in the scientific community are aware of, can provide the needed solution, hopefully in time to avert global disaster.
Having held professorships in the physical sciences and energy policy at many universities with an impeccable publication record for 45 years, I join you in not taking these matters lightly. I make no claims that cannot be rigorously backed up and I have no vested interest in which specific energy options should be implemented. I receive no money for the grassroots work I am doing in assessing these technologies. I can assure you that with proper public support, we will soon have robust solutions without needing many building blocks or wedges. Incremental approaches, as you correctly point out, will not be adequate to solve the problem. But you may not be fully aware of what's on the horizon, since we have been so blinded by our collective shortsightedness.
By "new energy" I mean innovative technologies with the potential of providing a quantum leap in our ability to tap cheap, clean and decentralized energy for producing fuels and electricity. These may or may not be recognized by mainstream science. The technologies include:
ADVANCED HYDROGEN TECHNOLOGIES (1) catalytic water molecule manipulation and dissociation through cheap electrolysis, and (2) manipulation of hydrogen plasmas with catalysts to induce fractional quantum electronic states that yield large energy outputs;
COLD FUSION or low energy nuclear reactions (LENR) by electrochemical means, induced in water and heavy water solutions catalyzed by (1) palladium cathodes, (2) sonocavitation and (3) other processes that can produce large amounts of thermal, radiation-free nuclear energy;
VACUUM ENERGY or zero-point energy, tapping the enormous quantum potential of every point in space-time, through the use of (1) super-motors with super-magnets (cf. Faraday), (2) solid state devices, (3) Tesla coils, and (4) charge clusters; and
THERMAL ENERGY from the environment.
Any one of the above approaches to new energy promises a quantum leap, i.e., orders of magnitude increase, in our ability to tap and have abundant clean, cheap, decentralized energy for all of humanity. In addition, there are many important transitional technologies which can mitigate emissions in the very near future, as follows:
RECYLING AND SEQUESTRATION OF CO2 AND OTHER POLLUTANTS AT THE SOURCE through innovative chemistry; and
REMEDIATION OF RADIOACTIVE NUCLEAR WASTE with innovative technologies.
All of the above concepts have already been demonstrated in laboratories throughout the world (I have seen many such demonstrations) and have been published in the peer-reviewed literature, but implementing them has proven difficult because there is no significant support.
As you undoubtedly already know, the environmental literature nowadays well expresses the energy problem and other aspects of our national crisis, but has so far fallen short on solutions. Some of the best scientists in the world (John Holdren, Nathan Lewis, Richard Heinberg, James Lovelock and Ruggero Santilli, for example) have concluded that conventional renewables such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, tides, biofuels and hydrogen fuel cells are not nearly adequate to meet current, much less projected, energy demands. Each of these "building block" options runs into serious pitfalls environmentally and economically when we talk about supplanting our multi-trillion dollar hydrocarbon energy economy. Nuclear options also have their serious problems, as you undoubtedly know.
You hit on the situation in your recent NYU speech when you said, "I am certain that some of the most powerful solutions will lie beyond our current categories of building blocks or wedges". You said that America, and only America, has the "capacity for vision" but that "we have to urgently expand the limits of what is politically possible". Very well said, and part of any program to implement new energy will involve a very rapid but necessary political education and risk-taking that even the liberal and progressive community has ignored. I acknowledge, and I am sure you would agree, that the limits of what is politically possible need to stretch very far to accommodate the reality of new energy. But what is physically and economically possible is surprisingly close at hand.
You also said in your speech that our children "deserve better than the spectacle of censorship of the best scientific evidence about the truth of our situation and harassment of honest scientists who are trying to warn us about the looming catastrophe." There's also a second group of scientists involved in new energy research that has been suppressed even more and need to take their place in our quest for solutions.
New energy would shift the paradigm overnight. We will need public policies in place to:
Do the necessary R&D Apollo-style in secured laboratories, gathering teams of the best and brightest scientists and engineers in the field. Surprisingly, the cost of such an effort would only be on the order of $2 billion/year for 5-10 years, the annualized equivalent of one week of fighting in Iraq and three weeks of profits for ExxonMobil. We must leave no stone unturned in this quest because the range of technologies is already broad and far-reaching.
Provide public forums to debate and discuss how to implement the most viable new energy options to mitigate climate change and pollution; and provide education and demonstrations for the public. We need to plan conversion scenarios that can help industry and government make the necessary transition to a new energy economy. The defense and aerospace conversion policies I helped George McGovern, Fritz Mondale and Jesse Jackson draft during their campaigns were minor compared to what we must do here.
While being politically incorrect at the moment, the consideration of new energy needs to be at the forefront of future energy policy discussions. It is too late to deny this, and we certainly don't want the control of these technologies be in the wrong hands by default. In President Eisenhower's words, "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together." New energy needs to be controlled by We the
People and so a strong grassroots movement will be necessary.
I cannot stress too strongly that an aggressive program to develop new energy is what humanity will need to survive our perilous situation. It may be painful for us to address these issues and may seem a bit far-fetched at first, but I can assure you these technologies are very real and can be developed as public policy.
One final word: don't rely exclusively on those mainstream scientists, journalists and pundits who deny the reality of new energy. They are just as ignorant as those scientists who denied the practicality of aviation even after the Wright brothers were flying. But to expect the Wrights to immediately deliver a 737 would have been unrealistic.
In the conclusion of your speech, you said, "This is an opportunity for bipartisanship and transcendence, an opportunity to find our better selves and in rising to meet this challenge, create a better brighter future - a future worthy of the generations who come after us and who have a right to be able to depend on us." I couldn't agree more and we're on the same team.
The leadership of The New Energy Movement will be introducing draft legislation for an historic new energy bill to members of Congress in January 2007, titled "Energy Innovation Act of 2007". I and my colleagues look forward to providing you a personal briefing on the background and provisions of this key legislation in the very near future, and trust that you will embrace and support it.
Sincerely,Brian O'Leary,