2. Chlorosis!

   
   

   [caption id=”attachment_548” align=”alignleft” width=”225” caption=”Albino Redwood foliage”][][/caption]

   Oh sweet void. I spent some of my traveling time a few months ago hunting the elusive albino redwood trees in northern California. Those trees have a genetic mutation which prevents them from producing chlorophyll, and so they survive by parasitism, attaching themselves to the root system of a nearby tree to leech nutrients. Those trees are absolutely breathtaking.

   So this morning I go to water the sprouts for my garden, and I find that one of my Bok Choi sprouts lacks any chlorophyll! Eeks! So cute! So rare! Genetic mutations! So! Cute!

   I haven’t done any genetic testing yet, so this could be simply an extreme case of chlorosis instead of an actual mutation. Plants like this don’t normally live very long, but I’m going to try to keep this little guy alive and happy as long as possible to figure out what’s going on here.[]

   Other questions which have been raised include:

   ​1) Why am I attracted to genetic mutations?

   ​2) Would the most ethical action be a mercy killing?

   ​3) What is the nutritional value of a plant with severe chlorosis? Is it like eating pickles?

   ​4) How do I make more of these? Is it possible to clone things at home yet?

   ​5) What are the odds of this condition occuring?

   []

   []: http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Albino_redwood.jpg

   []: http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_2316.jpg

   []: http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/IMG_2310.jpg

   read more

3. Unparticle Physics

   
   

   I recently discovered a young branch of theoretical physics: unparticle physics.

   Brief and simple explanation of the theory of unparticles from the Wikipedia entry:

   All particles exist in states that may be characterized by a certain energy, momentum and mass. In most of the Standard Model of particle physics, particles of the same type cannot exist in another state with all these properties scaled up or down by a common factor – electrons, for example, always have the same mass regardless of their energy or momentum. But this is not always the case: massless particles, such as photons, can exist with their properties scaled equally. This immunity to scaling is called “scale invariance”.

   The idea of unparticles comes from conjecturing that there may be “stuff” that does not necessarily have zero mass but is still scale-invariant, with the same physics regardless of a change of length (or equivalently energy). This stuff is unlike particles, and described as unparticle.

   Such unparticle stuff has not been observed, which suggests that if it exists, it must couple with normal matter weakly at observable energies.

   [caption id=”attachment_531” align=”alignleft” width=”335” caption=”Power Spectrum for Hawking Radiation of Unparticles”][][/caption]

   I’ve been reading up on this theory and wanted to post some academic papers so that others may do the same. However, I am having one difficulty: I have no knowledge of Banks-Zaks fields, and Unparticle Physics is almost entirely based upon them. My university doesn’t have a subscription to the journal for that year, and I can’t get the paper without paying \$31.50. Now, I don’t mean to whine or sound like a cheapskate, but I eat mostly rice and boiled cabbage, so \$31.50 could feed me for like two weeks. Plus, who ever heard of theoretical physicists demanding monetary compensation for their ideas, and not uploading their articles to arXiv? Crazy IP nazis. The paper I need is

   “Perturbative-variational calculations of ground-state energies of lattice gauge theories”

   by T. Banks and A Zaks, and it was published in 1982 in Nuclear Physics B. If anyone has this paper, could you please send it my way?

   Here’s all the other papers I have collected thus far: (click for .pdfs)

   Unparticle Physics

   Another Odd Thing About Unparticle Physics

   Unparticle Self-Interactions

   Uncosmology

   Cosmology with Unparticles

   Unparticle Dark Energy

   Hawking Radiation of Unparticles

   []: http://www.patternsinthevoid.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Hawking-radiation-of-unparticles.png

   read more

4. Famous Physicists on Mysticism #3: “Science and the Beautiful” by Werner Heisenberg

   
   

   []I would like to express again, for those who missed the first two installments of this series, that the views expressed within the essays are those of the physicists who wrote them, not me. It’s called “Famous Physicists on Mysticism,” not “isis agora lovecruft on Mysticism.”

   This essay is one of my favourite, and it is partly the inspiration for the title of this blog, although full credit has to go to Ryne Warner, whom I lived with as a roommate for several years. He’s an experimental composer, and one of his projects is called Ohioan. The first song off their album which was released last year is also the title of this blog. If you’re into Thee Silver Mt. Zion or any of the other numerous sounds that came out the Montreal scene in the first half of the last decade, you’ll like Ohioan. I used to sneak into their practice sessions just to stare at the fiddle player. His movements were a physical counter-point to the melodies. I cried a little bit one of those times, it was too pretty. I really hope he doesn’t read this…Just to show off Ryne’s talent: I highly recommend listening to Some Will Live. So. Damn. Beautiful.

   Science and the Beautiful

   by Werner Heisenberg

   Perhaps it will be best if, without any initial attempt at a philosophical analysis of the concept of “beauty,” we simply ask where we can meet the beautiful in the sphere of exact science. Here I may perhaps be allowed to begin with a personal experience. When, as a small boy, I was attending the lowest classes of the Max-Gynasium here in Munich, I became interested in numbers. It gave me pleasure to get to know their properties, to find out, for example, whether they were prime numbers or not, and to test whether they could perhaps be represented as sums of squares, or eventually to prove that there must be infinitely many primes. Now since my father thought my knowledge of Latin to be much more important than my numerical interests, he brought home to me one day from the National Library a treatise written in Latin by the mathematician Leopold Kronecker, in which the properties of whole numbers were set in relation to the geometrical problem of dividing a circle into a number of equal parts. How my father happened to light on this particular investigations from the middle of the last century I do not know. But the study of Kronecker’s work made a deep impression on me. I sensed a quite immediate beauty in the fact that, from the problem of partitioning a circle, whose simplest cases were, of course, familiar to us in school, it was possible to learn something about the totally different sort of questions involved in elementary number theory. Far in the distance, no doubt, there already floated the question whether whole numbers and geometrical forms exist, i.e., whether they are …

   read more

5. Famous Physicists on Mysticism #2: “The Debate Between Plato and Democritus” by Werner Heisenberg

   
   

   

   It was here in this part of the world, on the coast of the Aegean Sea, that the philosophers Leucippus and Democritus pondered about the structure of matter, and down there in the marketplace, where twilight is now falling, that Socrates disputed about the basic difficulties in our modes of expression and Plato taught that the Idea, the form, was the truly fundamental pattern behind the phenomena. The problems first formulated in this country two and a half thousand years ago have occupied the human mind almost unceasingly ever since and have been discussed again and again in the course of history whenever new developments have altered the light in which the old lines of thought appeared.

   If I endeavor today to take up some of the old problems concerning the structure of matter and the concept of natural law, it is because the development of atomic physics in out own day has radically altered our whole outlook on nature and the structure of matter. It is perhaps not an improper exaggeration to maintain that some of the old problems have quite recently found a clear and final solution. So it is permissible today to speak about this new and perhaps conclusive answer to questions that were formulated here thousands of years ago.

   There is, however, yet another reason for renewing consideration of these problems. The philosophy of materialism, developed in antiquity by Leucippus and Democritus, has been the subject of many discussions since the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and, in the form of dialectical materialism, has been one of the moving forces in the political changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If philosophical ideas about the structure of matter have been able to play such a role in human life, if in European society they have operated almost like an explosive and may yet perhaps do so in other parts of the world, it is even more important to know what our present scientific knowledge has to say about this philosophy. To put it in rather general and precise terms, we may hope that a philosophical analysis of recent scientific developments will contribute to a replacement of conflicting dogmatic opinions about the basic problems we have broached, by a sober readjustment to a new situation, which, in itself, can even now be regarded as a revolution in human life on this earth. But even aside from this influence of science upon our time, it may be of interest to compare the philosophical discussions in ancient Greece with the findings of experimental science and modern atomic physics. If I may already anticipate at this point the outcome of such a comparison; it seems that, in spite of the tremendous success that the concept of the atom has achieved in modern science, Plato was very much nearer to the truth about the structure of matter than Leucippus or Democritus. But it will doubtless be necessary to begin by repeating some of the most important arguments adduced …

   read more

6. Famous Physicists On Mysticism #1: “Scientific and Religious Truths” by Werner Heisenberg

   
   

   This is going to be an ongoing reprint series of mystical writings by famous physicists. The view expressed herein are presented merely for consideration and are not necessarily those of the blogger.

   [caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”280” caption=”Werner Heisenberg”][/caption]

   Scientific and Religious Truths

   By Werner Heisenberg

   In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point. In what follows, then, we shall first of all deal with the unassailability and value of scientific truth, and then with the much wider field of religion; finally—and this will be the hardest part to formulate—we shall speak of the relationship of the two truths.

   Of the beginnings of modern science, the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, it is usually said that the truth of religious revelation, laid down in the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers and dominant in the thought of the Middle Ages, was at that time supplemented by the reality of sensory experience, which could be checked by anyone in possession of his normal five senses and which—if enough care was taken—could, therefore, not in the end be doubted. But even this first approach to a description of the new way of thought is only half correct; it neglects decisive features without which its power cannot be understood. It is certainly no accident that the beginnings of modern science were associated with a turning away from Aristotle and a reversion to Plato. Even in antiquity, Aristotle, as an empiricist, had raised the objection—I cite more or less his own words—that the Pythagoreans (among whom Plato must be included) did not seek for explanations and theories to suit the facts, but distorted the facts to fit certain theories and favored opinions, and set themselves up, one might say, as co-arrangers of the universe. In fact, the new science led away from immediate experience in the manner criticized by Aristotle. Let us consider the understanding of the planetary motions. Immediate experience teaches that the earth is at rest and that the sun goes around it. In the more precise terms of our own day, we might even say that the word “rest” is defined by the statement that the earth is at rest, and that we call every body at rest that no longer moves relative to the earth. If …

   read more

⇇ « Page 2 / 2