Bob Lazar stated that the “Sport Model” Flying Disc amplified the “Strong Nuclear Force” of Element 115 (UnUnPentium or UUP) to generate the gravity field for “Space-Time Compression.” Bob also stated that the U.S. Government had 500 pounds of Element 115 in their possession. The raw Element 115 was given to the U.S. Goverment at S4 by the Reticulan EBEs in the form of discs. The scientists at S4 sent the Element 115 discs through Groom Lake to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, to be milled for use in the Anti-Matter Reactor. The Los Alamos personnel were told it was a new form of armor. They simply followed orders, milled it in accordance with the following steps, and sent it back to Groom Lake. It was during this process that some of the Element 115 turned up missing. As you’ll see below, the machining process to form the Element 115 wedge produces a tremendous amount of waste.
UFO Anti-Matter Reactor
In the following video, physicist Bob Lazar explains the mysterious Element 115 and the sophisticated anti-matter reactor used for powering the anti-gravity propulsion system used in the flying saucers located a top secret U.S. research facility known as S-4:
Bob Lazar stated that the Element 115 used as the fuel and gravity source in the “Sport Model” Flying Disc was stable. On February 2, 2004, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia (JINR), announced that they discovered two new super-heavy elements, Element 113 and Element 115. The Isotope of Element 115, produced by bombarding an Americium-243 (95Am243) nucleus with a Calcium-48 (20Ca48) nucleus, rapidly decayed to Element 113. then continued to decay until a meta-stable isotope was obtained.
Cutaway of the Sports Model UFO
The following hypothetical reaction displays the maximum theoretical atomic mass of an Element 115 Isotope that could be produced from combining an Americium-243 nucleus with a Calcium-48 nucleus. The following reaction assumes no neutrons were liberated during the process of the reaction:
The following reactions are the actual reactions that took place in the laboratory by bombarding Americium-243 with Calcium-48, which resulted in the two Isotopes of Element 115, indicated below, being identified.
The maximum theoretical atomic mass isotope of Element 115 that could be produced in the reaction, above,115UUP291, would only have 176 neutrons in its nucleus. This isotope of Element 115 is shy 8 neutrons from containing the magic number of 184 neutrons. The two actual isotopes of Element 115 produced by this reaction, 115UUP288 and 115UUP287 contain 173 neutrons, shy 11 neutrons from the magic number of 184, and 172 neutrons, shy 12 neutrons from the magic number of 184, respectively.
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This latest scientific breakthrough, however, provides significant credibility to Bob Lazar’s claims rather than discrediting his claims. Bob Lazar’s Element 115 discs used to make the wedge for the “Sport Model” Flying Disc Anti-Matter Reactor would have to have been the isotope of Element 115 containing the magic number of 184 neutrons, therefore, having an atomic mass of 299. The nuclear configuration of this isotope of Element 115 would be identical to the nuclear configuration of the only known stable isotope of Element 83, Bismuth, 83Bi209, containing the magic number of 126 neutrons, except that the Element 115 isotope would have one more energy level completely filled with protons and neutrons. 82 protons and 114 protons are magic numbers for protons because 82 protons completely fill 6 proton energy levels and 114 protons completely fill 7 proton energy levels. The 83rd proton for Bismuth is a lone proton in the 7th proton energy level and the 115th proton for Element 115 is the lone proton in the 8th proton energy level. 126 neutrons completely fill 7 neutron energy levels and 184 neutrons completely fill 8 neutron energy levels. Refer to the Nucleon Energy Level Table for Bismuth and Element 115, below, for the nuclear configurations of Bismuth and Element 115. This stable isotope of Bismuth, Element 83, has very unique gravitational characteristics. Refer to the Henry William Wallace Patent: U.S. Patent 3,626,605, “Method and Apparatus for Generating a Secondary Gravitational Force Field.”
NOTE: Producing the theoretically stable super-heavy elements is very difficult because the reactant nuclei of these nuclear reactions do not have enough neutrons to result in a product nucleus with enough neutrons to obtain theoretical stability.
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COMMENTARY: On February 4, 2004, two superheavy elements, elements 113 and 115, were recently synthesized through a collaborative effort between scientists from the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and researchers from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at the Flerov Laboratory for Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia. Two isotopes of element 115 survived 30-80 milliseconds before decaying into isotopes of element 113 that survived approximately ten times longer prior to decaying themselves. Following a series of alpha-decays, the element 115 atoms decayed into long-lived isotopes (multiple hours) of element 105 (Db). The great-great-great granddaughter Db isotopes were also chemically identified in subsequent experiments.
Courtesy of an article titled "Element 115" appearing in GravityWarpDrive
Particles collide at an exhibit at CERN, whose scientists hope to discover the Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that could explain how the universe is built.
Clues From Geneva's Collider Suggest Existence of Higgs Boson, Fabled Particle Key to Presence of Stars, Planets, People
Scientists are making tantalizing progress in the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson, a theoretical particle that could explain how the universe is built, though their data aren't robust enough yet to claim a conclusive discovery.
On Tuesday, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, near Geneva, Switzerland, said that data from two independent experiments had narrowed the range of the would-be particle's likely mass.
Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Click Image To Enlarge)
The Higgs boson is the only particle that the standard model of physics says should be there but hasn't been observed in an experiment. The model describes how matter is built and particles interact.
Scientists claimed progress in the search for the Higgs boson - colloquially known as the 'God particle' - which is considered the basic building block of the universe, Gautam Naik reports on digits. Photo: Getty Images.
Proof that the particle exists would help explain a big puzzle: why some objects in the universe—such as the quark, a constituent of protons—have mass, while other objects—such as photons, the constituent of light—possess only energy.
By extension, its discovery would help explain the presence of stars, planets and humans, and thus rank as one of the biggest coups for modern-day physics.
"The Higgs is the missing piece" in the current theory of matter, said Stefan Soldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester, England, who has been on a decade-long quest for the particle, though he wasn't involved in the recent LHC experiments. The latest data may be far from definitive, but "we're going in the direction that it is there," he added.
In 1964, three groups of physicists independently proposed the existence of the Higgs boson. It was named after one of the scientists, Peter Higgs, now an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Thousands of scientists have since tried to chase down the fabled subatomic particle.
Because nobody knows what the mass of a Higgs boson might be, the particle must be hunted indirectly, typically in giant machines that propel particles to near-light speed, then smash them together and generate an array of other subatomic particles.
The hope is that one such particle would be the Higgs itself, though it would almost instantly decay into different combinations of other particles. Finding it would then involve looking for statistically significant "excesses" of those particles.
The latest experiments at LHC, which is overseen by the European particle-physics laboratory CERN, found modest excesses of this sort in the data, a promising sign. One of the experiments, known as Atlas, suggests that Higgs could have a tiny mass, in the range of 116 to 130 gigaelectronvolts, or GeV. The other experiment pegged the particle's mass at 115 to 127 GeV.
On an individual basis, none of these excesses is any more statistically significant than tossing a die and ending up with two sixes in a row. However, physicists are encouraged, because multiple independent measurements indicate that the Higgs may be lurking in the region of 124 to 126 GeV.
CERN researcher Fabiola Gianotti of the Atlas experiment, suggesting a mass about 125 times that of a proton, said.
"Over the last few weeks, we have started to see an intriguing excess of events around 125 GeV. This excess may be due to a fluctuation, but it could also be something more interesting. We cannot conclude anything at this stage. We need more study and more data."
How might the Higgs boson confer mass to particles? Physicists have suggested that as the universe cooled after the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago, a force known as the Higgs field formed, along with the particle.
The video "The ATLAS Experiment - Mapping the Secrets of the Universe," was produced by ATLAS in two parts and describes the creation of the Universe beginning with the Big Bang, the Standard Model of Elementary Particles and forces making up matter, and the idea behind the creation of the ATLAS Experiment:
Part I:
Part II:
Under this scenario, the Higgs field permeates the universe, and any particles that interact with it are given a mass through the Higgs boson. The more they interact, the heavier they become. Particles that don't interact with the Higgs field are left with no mass at all.
CERN scientists say they plan to refine their analysis and won't be able to offer a definitive conclusion until sometime next year.
It's been an eventful year for the esoteric field of particle physics, especially at CERN. In September, for example, an experiment there reported ghostlike particles known as neutrinos apparently traveling a tiny bit faster than light, an apparent breach of the cosmic speed limit set down by Albert Einstein.
Yet, like many physicists, Dr. Soldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester isn't necessarily eager for the Higgs to be found.
He said.
"It would perhaps be even more exciting if it isn't where it's supposed to be. Then we'd have to come up with something else."
COMMENTARY: BREAKING NEWS: CERN physicists held a seminar on December 13, 2011 providing the latest update on the findings of research being done by the ATLAS Experiment to find the Higgs boson particle. The seminar was in two videos:
Part I:
Part II:
The ATLAS Experiment
The ATLAS Experiment is a particle physics experiment that is exploring the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape our universe. ATLAS has begun the search for new discoveries in the head-on collisions of protons of extraordinarily high energy. ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences. There are 3000 physicists (Including 1000 students) participating from 174 universities and laboratories in 38 countries. Visit http://atlas.ch
The ATLAS Detector
ATLAS is one of two general-purpose particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN.
The job of ATLAS is to record and visualise the explosions of particles that result from the collisions at LHC. The information obtained on a particle includes its speed, mass, and electric charge, and this information helps physicists to work out the identity of the particle.
ATLAS will investigate a wide range of physics, including the search for the Higgs boson, extra-dimensions, and particles that could make up dark matter. ATLAS will record sets of measurements on the particles created in collisions - their paths, energies, and their identities.
The following view shows ATLAS under construction beginning in 2003 through animations and time lapse images and video clips:
The following two-part video series (a must view) of The ATLAS Experiment explains the inner workings of the ATLAS Detector, how CERN physicists using the LHC collide protons together to create the sub-atomic particles of matter (See The Standard Model of Elementary Particles below) and how those sub-atomic particles are detected, tracked and measured:
Part I:
Part II:
This is accomplished in ATLAS through six different detecting subsystems (Innter Detector, Electromagnetic Calorimeters, Hadronic Clorimeters, Muon Detectors, and Particle Identification Detectors) that identify particles and measure their momentum and energy.
Another vital element of ATLAS is the huge magnet system that bends the paths of charged particles for momentum measurement.
The interactions in the ATLAS detectors will create an enormous dataflow. To digest these data, ATLAS needs a very advanced trigger and data acquisition system, and a large computing system.
ATLAS is about 45 meters long, more than 25 meters high, and weighs about 7,000 tons. It is about half as big as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and weighs the same as the Eiffel Tower or a hundred 747 jets (empty).
Various images of the ATLAS Detector (Click Images To Enlarge)
To view a comprehensive list of images of the ATLAS Detector through its various phases of construction click HERE.
To view the videos produced for the ATLAS Experiment YouTube channel click HERE.
If you would like a more thorough and technical description of the ATLAS Detector, Columbia University has published the following technical paper. You can download it by clicking HERE.
ATLAS Schedule
Late 2009 -- Startup of LHC and first event collisions at a total energy of 0.9 TeV and later at 2.36 TeV (above the previous world record).
March 2010 -- Event collisions at a total energy of 7 TeV. This led to about eight months of data taking before a few weeks of heavy ion collisions and the usual winter shutdown. Many papers with early results have come as a result of the 2010 run.
March 2011 -- Event collisions at a total energy of 7 TeV. Two years of much more intensive data taking. There will also be a few weeks of heavy ion collisions and a winter shutdown (Dec. 2011 - Feb. 2012).
2013 -- A long shutdown to prepare for an increase of the total energy towards 14 TeV.
Next 15-20 years -- Continued data taking with publication of results on an ongoing basis.
Make-Up of ATLAS Scientists
ATLAS is a virtual United Nations of 38 countries. In this troubled world, it is inspiring to see people from many lands working together in harmony. International collaboration has been essential to this success. These physicists come from more than 174 universities and laboratories and include 1000 students. ATLAS is one of the largest collaborative efforts ever attempted in the physical sciences.
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
The protons are accelerated in opposite directions in the Large Hadron Collider, an underground accelerator ring 27 kilometres in circumference at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Crashing together in the center of ATLAS, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy. LHC recreates the conditions at the birth of the Universe -- 30 million times a second. Relics of the early Universe not seen since the Universe cooled after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago will spring fleetingly to life again. The LHC is in effect a Big Bang Machine. (Portions of this text are paraphrased from an article written by Dennis Overbye in the New York Times on May 15, 2007, with permission.)
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator (17 miles in circumference) located at the CERN facility in Switzerland (Click Image To Enlarge)
The Standard Model of Elementary Particles
The Standard Model of Elementary Particles (simplified version) classifies sub-atomic particles into three familes:
Quarks, coming in six flavors (u, c, t, d, s and b) and three colors (red, green and blue)
Leptons, of the charged (electron-like: e, u and t) and uncharged (neutrino-like: Ve, Vu, Vt) variety.
Force-carrying particles: the photon (y), the eight gluons (g), and the very heavy weak bosons (responsible for radioactive decay: W± and the Z0).
All told, these particles and the way they interplay with one another fundamentally and successfully explains every phenomenon ever observed, with the sole exception of gravitation.
The Higgs boson (H) is the last particle predicted by the Standard Model that has yet to have been found. The Higgs is predicted to be the reason everything in the universe has mass. It is also supposed to break the Electro Weak symmetry: the fact that the EM boson is massless while the Weak bosons have mass.
The following Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions (expanded version) chart was prepared by the Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP) by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Livermore in 2000 and provides more detailed descriptions of each sub-atomic family and the individual particles within each family. This chart does not make reference to the Higgs boson particle which according to theoretical physicists is predicted to exist, but is yet to be discovered.
I hope you have enjoyed this blog post as much as I have enjoyed putting it together for you.
Corvallis, Oregon -- Some investors and entrepreneurs are braver than others. It's one thing to create the best iPhone app that mimics flatulence -- but to fund and join a large energy startup takes a certain level of testicular fortitude. Building a new automobile or solar factory or fuel cell is expensive and difficult and stands only a small chance of survival.
And if that startup happens to be developing a new take on light water reactors (that's nuclear reactors, son), well, that's a different animal altogether.
Although there are a few nuclear technology startups (Kurion, TerraPower, Hyperion, General Fusion, Tri-Alpha), the company with the clearest near-term chances of success seems to be Oregon's NuScale. This is not to diminish the work being done at the other firms. It's simply that NuScale's market-entrance strategy seems to better take into account the intricacies and glacial time-scale of Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approval.
Investor Maurice Gunderson of CMEA has labelled the small modular reactors (SMRs) designed by NuScale as one of the "game-changing" technologies in energy (along with utility-scale energy storage and fusion). CMEA is an investor in NuScale, along with Vulcan Capital and MKG, the Michael Kenwood Group.
We have reported on NuScale and SMRs numerous times, and we've covered the strong case that SMRs, small modular reactors, have made in their own favor.
Under the SMR concept, reactors can be built in factories and shipped to the site instead of being expensively and riskily built on-site. Rather than engineer and build reactors capable of producing over one gigawatt of electric power, SMRs can produce 10 megawatts to 350 megawatts of electricity (or heat). SMRs operate in similar fashion to conventional reactors or fossil fuel plants; nuclear fuel builds heat, which creates steam, which in turn is used to spin a turbine.
It is anticipated that SMRs will cost about the same to construct per kilowatt as large nuclear plants and will produce electricity at the same cost as a conventional nuclear plant (in the 6 to 8 cent/kWh range). SMRs are not new. The U.S. Army has built and operated small nuclear power plants in the past and the military uses small reactors to power naval vessels. But the incremental construction scheme of SMRs can change the financial and safety picture.
The sheer enormity of the undertaking and the level of commitment of this project were driven home at a NuScale-sponsored event I attended on the Oregon State University campus earlier this month. Remember that this is a startup project, not a multinational; most startups don't have to consider purchasing 8,490 tons of rebar or nuclear source term security issues.
More than 85 people from all layers of the nuclear ecosystem gathered to check in on NuScale's progress to date. One of the factors contributing to NuScale's progress and credibility is their access to a small-scale (electrically powered) nuclear integral test facility at OSU in which the technology can be run through its paces. One can essentially put a hole in pipe in a nuclear system and safely simulate failure behavior.
Dr. Jose Reyes, the CTO at NuScale, has experience at the NRC, and that knowledge is absolutely crucial in bringing this regulation-intense project to reality. Dr. Paul Lorenzini, the CEO at NuScale Power, is both a lawyer and a nuclear engineer, relevant skills for this prodigious effort.
One of the distinctions of the NuScale design is that it employs passive cooling, making the design safer and less complex with no pumps and no back-up pumps. The technology used by NuScale is proven, and in many cases, borrows from existing LWR designs. This is crucial as it allows the NRC to stay well within their comfort zone.
That's allowed NuScale to make real progress on the regulatory and political side, where, in the words of Reyes, the CTO, "We've seen huge changes in the acceptance of small reactors," and, in the words of the CEO, "in how much of a recognition of the role small reactors can play there is." On a related note, the Obama administration continued to support nuclear technology with a $2 billion conditional loan guarantee from the DOE last week to help finance AREVA’ s Eagle Rock Enrichment Facility near Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Reyes described the unit as a "stainless steel thermos, under water, underground." The firm has addressed safety issues throughout the design process: "Seismic isolators give remarkable seismic robustness," according to the CTO, and it is "walk-away safe" because of the water cooling design.
It is arguable that regulatory and political advances are as important as technical innovation in a project of this nature.
"You don't have to be a rocket scientist" to understand the value of SMRs, according to Lorenzini. He claims that the economics are validated along with the "incremental build-out option." Lorenzini stated, "The DNA in nuclear is economies of scale, but we asked 'how can we build a small plant to capture the economies of small?'" NuScale uses factory manufacturing, passive design and the ability to deliver the unit via barge, rail or truck.
NuScale has leveraged an existing supply chain with proven industry leaders like EPC firm Kiewit. The speaker from Kiewit said that they see "SMR construction looking more like conventional power plants."
"What has held it back is that nobody believed you could reach the price point," said Lorenzini.
On the subject of price, Jay Surina, the CFO of NuScale Power, estimated the cost at under $4000 per kilowatt at the 540 megawatt level -- a number that rivals or beats the price of existing "cathedral-style" nuclear plants.
According to the firm, a 540-megawatt power plant constructed from 12 of NuScale’s 45 megawatt reactors could produce power for 6 to 9 cents a kilowatt-hour on average over the plant’s lifetime, said Bruce Landrey, NuScale’s VP of business development.
NuScale hopes to submit design certification documents to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Q1 2012, and it will take about three years for the agency to complete its review. According to NuScale, approximately 95 percent of the regulatory basis for the NRC design review of a multi-module NuScale plant already exists. Using standard and proven computer codes, controls, components, control rod drives and enrichment levels, and fuel assembly design makes the approval process easier for the NRC and faster for all concerned. According to Lorenzini, there is a huge market for reactors in the 300-megawatt to 500-megawatt range.
About 20 percent of U.S. electricity comes from nuclear sources. Other nations like China, India and France will rely on nuclear for baseload power to an even greater degree going forward. We can't just wish it away.
Nuclear remains a financial and safety challenge and nuclear's detractors make good arguments -- everyone from Amory Lovins and his Rocky Mountain Institute to NIRS, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, are able to point out the cost overruns and safety concerns. More valid objections here. I could go on.
Perhaps NuScale and SMRs can help the industry address some of nuclear's historic financial and marketing impediments.
In a paper published online by the journal Nature Physics today, the ALPHA experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN1 reports that it has succeeded in trapping antimatter atoms for over 16 minutes: long enough to begin to study their properties in detail. ALPHA is part of a broad programme at CERN's antiproton decelerator (AD)2investigating the mysteries of one of nature's most elusive substances.
Click Image to Enlarge
Today, we live in a universe apparently made entirely of matter, yet at the big bang matter and antimatter would have existed in equal quantities. Nature seems to have a slight preference for matter, which allows our universe and everything in it to exist. One way of investigating nature's preference for matter is to compare hydrogen atoms with their antimatter counterparts, and that's what makes today's result important.
"We can keep the antihydrogen atoms trapped for 1000 seconds," explained ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University. "This is long enough to begin to study them -- even with the small number that we can catch so far."
In the paper published today, some 300 trapped antiatoms are reported to have been studied. The trapping of antiatoms will allow antihydrogen to be mapped precisely using laser or microwave spectroscopy so that it can be compared to the hydrogen atom, which is among the best-known systems in physics. Any difference should become apparent under careful scrutiny. Trapping antiatoms could also provide a complementary approach to measuring the influence of gravity on antimatter, which will soon be investigated with antihydrogen by the AEgIS experiment.
What is anti-matter?
Dr. Jeffrey Hangst from CERN describes how they trapped anti-matter.
Another important consequence of trapping antihydrogen for long periods is that the antiatoms have time to relax into their ground state, which will allow ALPHA to conduct the precision measurements necessary to investigate a symmetry known as CPT. Symmetries in physics describe how processes look under certain transformations. C, for example, involves swapping the electric charges of the particles involved in the process. P is like looking in the mirror, while T involves reversing the arrow of time.
Individually, each of these symmetries is broken -- processes do not always look the same. CPT, however, says that a particle moving forward through time in our universe should be indistinguishable from an antiparticle moving backwards through time in a mirror universe, and it is thought to be perfectly respected by nature. CPT symmetry requires that hydrogen and antihydrogen have identical spectra.
Says Hangst,
"Any hint of CPT symmetry breaking would require a serious rethink of our understanding of nature. But half of the universe has gone missing, so some kind of rethink is apparently on the agenda."
The next step for ALPHA is to start performing measurements on trapped antihydrogen, and this is due to get underway later this year. The first step is to illuminate the trapped anti-atoms with microwaves, to determine if they absorb exactly the same frequencies (or energies) as their matter cousins.
Explained Hangst,
"If you hit the trapped antihydrogen atoms with just the right microwave frequency, they will escape from the trap, and we can detect the annihilation -- even for just a single atom. This would provide the first ever look inside the structure of antihydrogen -- element number 1 on the anti-periodic table."
Notes:
1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. One candidate for accession: Romania. India, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.
A lot of my fans don't know what CERN really is. These YouTube videos should help explain this $10 billion project.
A 3-minute tour of CERN
Theoretical physics professor Michio Kaku talks about CERN's test run after CERN was shutdown for a year and one-half to fix mechanical problems.
An excellent documentary of CERN explaining what it hopes to accomplish (sorry about the poor quality). This is when they thought CERN was going to cost only $6 billion. HA, HA.
2. ALPHA is one of several AD experiments investigating antimatter at CERN. ATRAP has pioneered trapping techniques, and is also investigating antihydrogen. ASACUSA has made measurements of unprecedented precision of the antiproton's mass, so far not revealing any divergence from that of the proton. ASACUSA is also developing complementary techniques for studying antihydrogen. AEgIS studies how antiprotons fall under gravity, and ACE investigates the potential use of antiprotons for cancer therapy.
COMMENTARY: For physicists, antimatter is probably the most valuable substance ever; the slightest bit of it could provide extremely valuable information that can help clear out some of the most stressing issues in modern physics. However, the thing is these little gifts are pretty hard to wrap. However, the ALPHA project at CERN achieved this remarkable feat and took a huge leap towards understanding one of the questions about the Universe: what’s the actual difference between matter and antimatter.
The team had 38 successful attempts to capture single antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic field for about 170 miliseconds. Says Jeffrey Hangs, spokesman for ALPHA collaboration at CERN,
“We’re ecstatic. This is five years of hard work."
And they should be. Since it restarted working, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN had quite a few good moments, but this is the best one so far. Antimatter (or the lakc of it) still poses one of the biggest mysteries ever; according to the theories up to date, at the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were produced in equal amounts, but somehow all the antimatter dissappeared, so now researchers are forced to turn to more and more advanced and delicate methods in order to find it and study it.
As you can guess by its name, antimatter is just like matter, only in reverse. So the antiprotons are just like normal protons, but they are negatively charged, while electrons have a positive charge. The main objective of this stage of the ALPHA project was to compare the relative energy of hydrogen and antihydrogen in order to confirm that antimatter and matter have the same electromagnetic properties, which is a key feature of the standard model.
This is not the first time antimatter was captured, the first time it was in 2002, with the ATHENA project; however, it lasted just several miliseconds, which made it impossible to analyze. What happens is that when you combine matter with antimatter, they vanish with a big boom, releasing high energy photons (gamma rays). In the ATHENA project, antihydrogen combined with hydrogen from the walls of the contained and annihilated each other.
To prevent this from happening, the ALPHA team used a totally different technique, which was way more difficult: capturing the antimatter in a magnetic trap. To capture the 38 atoms, they had to repeat the experiment no less than 335 times.
Of course, achieving these atoms was very costly, but the effort was definitely worth it. However, physicists are looking into other methods that could prove to be more effective in times to come.
I have been poking fun at CERN ever since they built the multi-billion dollar monstrosity and it experienced one problem after another, after another. They cranked it up in 2007, but it didn't work. Finally in 2009 they were able to get the damn thing to finally work.
At the end of 2010, they have accomplished something significant--capturing anti-matter in a vacuum chamber--but what exactly have they started? Have we taken the Genie out of the bottle?
We are venturing into the unknown area where there are a lot of 'ifs'. What will happen when we start working with heavier elements? Let's hope nobody gets hurt and we don't open a time warp or create a black hole in the universe.
Courtesy of an article dated June 5, 2011 appearing in Science Daily and an article dated November 18, 2011 appearing in ZME Science
Does it seem like there are more law and MBA graduates than ever now? And how big is there decline in students pursuing education and engineering? As trends in in American culture, economy, and education change, so do students' choices in degree fields. The interactive infographic above explores which degrees and subjects have gained in popularity and which have declined over the course of ten years.
Click To Above Image To Launch Interactive Infographic
Bachelor's Degrees
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Master's Degrees
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Doctoral Degrees
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All Degrees
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Professional Degrees
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Engineering Degrees
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COMMENTARY:
Observations From The Above Charts
I think we should all be concerned that less students are entering the educational (down 5%) and engineering (up 17%) fields. We are now seeing a growing number of retiring teachers. The mass layoffs of teachers is really discouraging students from entering the field of education, and this is going to hurt our entire educational system. We will have shortages in the near future unless we can promote education as a career and increase teacher compensation. A higher percentage of engineering students are studing for their doctoral degrees as technology becomes more complex. Students entering the field of medicine and optometry increased by only 3% and 4% respectively, which means a shortage of medical doctors and optometrists in the years to come. Get used to seeing more Indian or Chinese doctors and optometrists treating patients in clinics and hospitals in the not too distant future. The fastest growing education fields are health (up 65%), digital and performing arts (up 52%) and business (up 48%). On a positive note, more students are entering college, but higher tuition and the student loan crisis is going to prove a challenge for many students at the lower socio-economic scale.
State of Science and Engineering in the U.S.
The state of science and engineering in the U.S. is strong, yet the nation's lead is shrinking, according to the latest report from the National Science Board. Based on a wide range of data - from R&D spending to higher-education trends in science and engineering fields - the group's Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 report suggests that U.S. dominance of world science and engineering has deteriorated significantly in recent years, due in large part to rapidly increasing capabilities in China and other Asian economies.
Everyone — from tech entrepreneurs and business analysts to news columnists and out-of-work engineers — is sounding the alarm: The United States is losing its innovative edge.
A new report suggests the claim isn't entirely inaccurate.
Last month, the National Science Board (NSB) released its Science and Engineering Indicators 2010, providing a comprehensive view of international science, engineering and technology. The report, produced every two years by the NSB — the governing body for the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NSF's Division of Science Resources Statistics — analyzes data ranging from research and development (R&D) spending to higher-education trends in science and engineering fields.
The latest edition indicates that while the state of U.S. science and engineering is strong, "U.S. dominance has eroded significantly" in recent years, due in large part to rapidly increasing capabilities among Asian nations, particularly China, Kei Koizumi, assistant director for federal R&D in President Obama's Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an announcement of the findings.
"The data begin to tell a worrisome story," Koizumi said.
The NSB's key findings, highlighted below, shed light on America's science and engineering position in the global economy.
R&D — Between 1996 and 2007, North America's share of world R&D activity dropped from 40 percent to 35 percent. Meanwhile, the European Union's (EU) share decreased from 31 percent to 28 percent. The Asia-Pacific region's share rose from 24 percent to 31 percent during the same period, "even with Japan's comparatively low growth." The share of the rest of the world increased from 5 percent to 6 percent. The annual growth of R&D expenditures in the U.S., at just over 5 percent, is low compared to America's Asian counterparts; in India, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and China, R&D budgets have increased up to four times that of the U.S. growth rate. American multinationals are shifting their overseas R&D from Europe to emerging Asian markets, whose share grew from 5 percent in 1995 to 14 percent in 2006.
NS&E Higher Education — Many Western countries are concerned about lagging student interest in studying natural sciences or engineering (NS&E), fields that convey technical skills and learning considered essential for knowledge-intensive economies. In the developing world, the number of first university NS&E degrees (broadly comparable to a U.S. baccalaureate) is rising, led by large increases in China, from about 239,000 in 1998 to 807,000 in 2006. NS&E degrees earned by Japanese and South Korean students combined in 2006 (about 235,000) approximated the number earned by U.S. students during that year, even though the U.S. population was considerably larger (300 million versus 175 million). The natural sciences include physical, biological, earth, atmospheric, ocean, agricultural and computer sciences as well as mathematics.
NS&E Doctorates Earned — China's domestically earned NS&E doctorates have shot up more than tenfold since the early 1990s, to about 21,000 in 2006, approaching the number awarded in the U.S. Most of the post-2002 increase in U.S. NS&E doctorates reflects degrees awarded to temporary and permanent visa holders, who in 2007 earned about 11,600 of 22,500 NS&E doctorates in the U.S. Foreign nationals have earned more than half of U.S. NS&E doctorates since 2006, 31 percent of whom are from East Asia, mostly from China. (Image credit: NSB, SEI 2010)
Engineering Doctorates and Visas — The engineering numbers are more concentrated. The share of U.S. engineering doctorates awarded to temporary and permanent visa holders rose from 51 percent in 1999 to 68 percent in 2007. Nearly three-quarters of these foreign Ph.D. recipients were from East Asia or India. While many of these individuals, especially those on temporary visas, will leave the U.S. after earning their doctorates, past trends suggest a large proportion will stay; 60 percent of temporary visa holders who had earned a U.S. science and engineering Ph.D. in 1997 were gainfully employed in the U.S in 2007, the highest 10-year stay rate ever observed.
Research Output — The number of research articles published in a set of international, peer-reviewed journals has grown from about 460,000 in 1988 to an estimated 760,000 in 2008. However, between 1995 and 2008, the U.S. and E.U.'s combined share of world scholarly articles dropped from 69 percent to 59 percent, while Asia's expanded from 14 percent to 23 percent. Over the past two decades, the number of engineering research articles in the U.S. has grown by less than 2 percent annually; likewise in Japan. Growth in the EU: about 4.4 percent. Meanwhile, China's output of engineering articles grew by close to 16 percent annually.
Patent Protection Filings — U.S. patents awarded to foreign inventors offer a broad indication of the distribution of inventive activity around the world. While inventors in the U.S. the EU and Japan produce almost all of these patents, and U.S. patenting by Chinese and Indian inventors remains modest, the number of patents earned by Asian inventors is on the rise, driven by activity in Taiwan and South Korea. From 1995 and 2008, the share of patents granted to U.S.-based inventions by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has shrunk from 55 percent to 49 percent. In 1997, 34 percent of high-value patents had U.S. inventors, yet this figure slipped to 30 percent by 2006.
In a 2007 special report, New Scientist explained that contemporary China "is a nation led by technocrats. The current generation of leaders is made up mostly of graduates from some of China's leading universities, typically trained in science and engineering."
"For those in the West," New Scientist said, "where lawyers dominate the political establishment, China provides an intriguing contrast."
(GENEVA) — A startling find at one of the world's foremost laboratories that a subatomic particle seemed to move faster than the speed of light has scientists around the world rethinking Albert Einstein and one of the foundations of physics.
Now they are planning to put the finding — and by extension Einstein — to further high-speed tests to see if a revolutionary shift in explaining the workings of the universe is needed — or if the European scientists made a mistake.
What is CERN you ask?
Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, who announced the discovery Thursday are still somewhat surprised themselves and planned to detail their findings on Friday.
If these results are confirmed, they won't change at all the way we live or the way the universe behaves. After all, these particles have presumably been speed demons for billions of years. But the finding will fundamentally change our understanding of how the world works, physicists said.
Only two labs elsewhere in the world can try to replicate the results. One is Fermilab outside Chicago and the other is a Japanese lab put on hold by the tsunami and earthquake. Fermilab officials met Thursday about verifying the European study and said their particle beam is already up and running. The only trouble is that the measuring systems aren't nearly as precise as the Europeans' and won't be upgraded for a while, said Fermilab scientist Rob Plunkett.
Plunkett, a spokesman for the Fermilab team's experiments said.
"This thing is so important many of the normal scientific rivalries fall by the wayside. Everybody is going to be looking at every piece of information."
Plunkett said he is keeping an open mind on whether Einstein's theories need an update, but he added:
"It's dangerous to lay odds against Einstein. Einstein has been tested repeatedly over and over again."
Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity — the one made famous by the equation E equals mc2. Light's 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) has long been considered the cosmic speed limit. And breaking it is a big deal, not something you shrug off like a traffic ticket.
Famed Columbia University physicist Brian Greene said.
"We'd be thrilled if it's right because we love something that shakes the foundation of what we believe. That's what we live for."
The claim is being greeted with skepticism inside and outside the European lab.
James Gillies a spokesman for CERN said.
"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real."
CERN provided the particle accelerator to send neutrinos on their breakneck 454-mile trip underground from Geneva to Italy. France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research collaborated with Italy's Ran Sass National Laboratory for the experiment, which has no connection to the Large Harden Collider located at CERN.
Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that
"They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail."
John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment said that confirmation from the physics community will be necessary. He said.
"Einstein's special relativitiy theory pretty much underlies everything in modern physics. It has worked perfectly up until now."
And part of that theory is that nothing is faster than the speed of light.
CERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant.
Given the enormous implications of the find, they spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment.
A team at Fermilab had similar faster-than-light results in 2007. But that experiment had such a large margin of error that it undercut its scientific significance.
If anything is going to throw a cosmic twist into Einstein's theories, it's not surprising that it's the strange particles known as neutrinos. These are odd slivers of an atom that have confounded physicists for about 80 years.
The neutrino has almost no mass, it comes in three different "flavors," may have its own antiparticle and even has been seen shifting from one flavor to another while shooting out from the sun, said physicist Phillip Schewe, communications director at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland.
Fermilab team spokeswoman Jenny Thomas, a physics professor at the University College of London, said there must be a "more mundane explanation" for the European findings. She said Fermilab's experience showed how hard it is to measure accurately the distance, time and angles required for such a claim.
Nevertheless, the Fermilab team, which shoots neutrinos from Chicago to Minnesota, will go back to work immediately to try to verify or knock down the new findings, Thomas said.
Drew Baden, chairman of the physics department at the University of Maryland, said it is far more likely that there are measurement errors or some kind of fluke. Tracking neutrinos is very difficult. Baden said.
"This is ridiculous what they're putting out."
Baden called it the equivalent of claiming that a flying carpet is invented only to find out later that there was an error in the experiment somewhere.
"Until this is verified by another group, it's flying carpets. It's cool, but..."
So if the neutrinos are pulling this fast one on Einstein, how can it happen?
Stephen Parke, who is head theoretician at the Fermilab said there could be a cosmic shortcut through another dimension — physics theory is full of unseen dimensions — that allows the neutrinos to beat the speed of light.
Indiana University theoretical physicist Alan Kostelecky, theorizes that there are situations when the background is different in the universe, not perfectly symmetrical as Einstein says. Those changes in background may change both the speed of light and the speed of neutrinos.
But that doesn't mean Einstein's theory is ready for the trash heap, he said.
Kostelecky said.
"I don't think you're going to ever kill Einstein's theory. You can't. It works."
Just there are times when an additional explanation is needed, he said.
If the European findings are correct, "this would change the idea of how the universe is put together," Columbia's Greene said. But he added:
"I would bet just about everything I hold dear that this won't hold up to scrutiny."
COMMENTARY: I'll put my money on Albert Einstein. The physicists of today don't hold a second candle to Albert. When CERN's "faster-than-light subatomic particle" findings are put up to scrutiny, Albert will be right. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light. Maybe the speed of light is the problem. They say its 186,000 miles per second, but what if it's just off a click. Then this could throw things off. Just saying.
Courtesy of an article dated September 23, 2011 appearing in Time Science
Like many physicists, Michio Kaku thinks our universe will end in a "big freeze." However, unlike many physicists, he thinks we might be able to avoid this fate by slipping into a parallel universe.
One of the most fascinating discoveries of our new century may be imminent if the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva produces nano-blackholes when it goes live again. According to the best current physics, such nano blackholes could not be produced with the energy levels the LHC can generate, but could only come into being if a parallel universe were providing extra gravitational input. Versions of multiverse theory suggest that there is at least one other universe very close to our own, perhaps only a millimeter away. This makes it possible that some of the effects, especially gravity, "leak through," which could be responsible for the production of dark energy and dark matter that make up 96% of the universe.
While it hasn’t been proven yet, many highly respected and credible scientists are now saying there’s reason to believe that parallel dimensions could very well be more than figments of our imaginations. Says Barrau, particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN),
"The multiverse is no longer a model, it is a consequence of our models. The idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention—it appears naturally within several scientific theories, and deserves to be taken seriously."
There are a variety of competing theories based on the idea of parallel universes, but the most basic idea is that if the universe is infinite, then everything that could possibly occur has happened, is happening, or will happen.
According to quantum mechanics, nothing at the subatomic scale can really be said to exist until it is observed. Until then, particles occupy uncertain "superposition" states, in which they can have simultaneous "up" and "down" spins, or appear to be in different places at the same time. The mere act of observing somehow appears to "nail down" a particular state of reality. Scientists don’t yet have a perfect explanation for how it occurs, but that hasn’t changed the fact that the phenomenon does occur.
Unobserved particles are described by "wave functions" representing a set of multiple "probable" states. When an observer makes a measurement, the particle then settles down into one of these multiple options, which is somewhat how the multiple universe theory can be explained.
Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT in Boston, Massachusetts concluded in a study of parallel universes published by Cambridge University,
"The existence of such a parallel universe does not even assume speculative modern physics, merely that space is infinite and rather uniformly filled with matter as indicated by recent astronomical observations."
Mathematician Hugh Everett published landmark paper in 1957 while still a graduate student at Princeton University. In this paper he showed how quantum theory predicts that a single classical reality will gradually split into separate, but simultaneously existing realms. Says Barrau,
"This is simply a way of trusting strictly the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics. The worlds are not spatially separated, but exist as kinds of 'parallel' universes."
Partly because the idea is so uncomfortably strange, it’s dismissed as sci-fi by many critics. But there are also many credible, respected proponents of the theory—a group that is continuously gaining new adherents as new research unveils new evidence. Some Oxford research—for the first time—recently found a mathematical answer that sweeps away one of the key objections to the controversial idea. Their research shows that Everett was indeed on the right track when he came up with his multiverse theory. The Oxford team, led by Dr David Deutsch, showed mathematically that the bush-like branching structure created by the universe splitting into parallel versions of itself can explain the probabilistic nature of quantum outcomes.
The work has another strange implication. The idea of parallel universes would apparently side-step one of the key complaints with time travel. Every since it was given serious credibility in 1949 by the great logician Kurt Godel, many eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect. An example would be the famous “grandfather paradox” where a time traveler goes back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.
But if parallel worlds do exist, there is a way around these troublesome paradoxes. Deutsch argues that time travel shifts happen between different branches of reality. The mathematical breakthrough bolsters his claim that quantum theory does not forbid time travel. He said,
"It does sidestep it. You go into another universe."
But he admits that there will be a lot of work to do before we can manipulate space-time in a way that makes “hops” possible. While it may sound fanciful, Deutsch says that scientific research is continually making the theory more believable.
"Many sci-fi authors suggested time travel paradoxes would be solved by parallel universes but in my work, that conclusion is deduced from quantum theory itself."
The borderline between physics and metaphysics is not defined by whether an entity can be observed, but whether it is testable, insists Tegmark.
He points to phenomena such as black holes, curved space, the slowing of time at high speeds, even a round Earth, which were all once rejected as scientific heresy before being proven through experimentation, even though some remain beyond the grasp of observation. It is likely, Tegmark concludes that multiverse models grounded in modern physics will eventually be empirically testable, predictive and disprovable
COMMENTARY: I love Dr. Michio Kaku because his scientific explanations about black holes, space and time, matter and anti-matter, worm holes, string theory, solar flares and now parallel universe's are so clear to me. However, it's a scary thought that the super-massive multi-billion dollar CERN atomic accelerator located in Switzerland is going to create nano black holes once it is cranked up again. That's one incredible idea if there ever was. Let's just hope that in doing so, the Earth doesn't get sucked into that little nano black hole, and we end up in some incomprehensible netherland, in a different part of the Universe many light-years away. Then we will all wonder, "What just happened?"
Any who, I have got to get a copy of Dr. Kaku's book published in 2006, "Parallel Worlds". It has to be a winner.
Courtesy of an article dated June 1, 2011 appearing in Before It's News
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