The Universe

[LightEye]

dear friends,

i'm sure andrew collins is liking this...

http://skytonight.com/news/home/cosmic_rays_origins.html

andrews articles concerning the cygnus mystery;

http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/glastonbury_swan_cygnus_2012.htm

http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/thecygnusmystery_evolution.htm

http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/swan_upping_2006.htm


seeking the origins of cosmic rays
april 3, 2007by greg bryant and alan macrobert

where do cosmic rays come from? although they were first identified on a balloon flight in 1912, their sources have been hard to find. cosmic-ray particles are mostly protons, some helium nuclei, and a smattering of heavier nuclei. their flight paths are twisted and tangled by interstellar magnetic fields, so the directions from which we see them arriving tell nothing about where they began. only the very highest-energy cosmic-ray particles have enough momentum to fly across the galaxy in a nearly straight line, and these are extremely rare.

recently a slight, unexplained excess of cosmic rays — only 0.1% above the sky average — was identified coming from the direction of cygnus, according to a japanese-chinese team reporting last year science. cygnus is the direction forward along our local spiral arm of the milky way, suggesting that the arm has a magnetic field trapping cosmic rays within it to some slight degree. if the finding is confirmed (the cygnus high-energy excess might consist of gamma-ray photons instead), it may help astronomers deduce a cosmic-ray origin.

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070412_symmetrical_nebula.html

be well, be love.

david

near-perfect symmetry revealed in red cosmic square
by ker than
staff writer
posted: 12 april 2007
02:00 pm et


if symmetry is a sign of splendor, then the newly discovered red square nebula is one of the most beautiful objects in the universe.

seen in the infrared, the nebula resembles a giant, glowing red box in the sky, with a bright white inner core. a dying star called mwc 922 is located at the system’s center and spewing its innards from opposite poles into space. (a nebula is an interstellar cloud of gas, dust and plasma where stars can both emerge and die.)

“this spectacular event is the death of a star,” said study team member james lloyd of cornell university.

after mwc 922 ejects most of its material into space, it will contract into a dense stellar corpse known as a white dwarf, shrouded by clouds of its own remains.

the red square nebula discovery is detailed in the april 13 issue of the journal science.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://rrrgroup.blogspot.com/2007/04/cosmic-intelligence-and-black-holes.html

be well, be love.

david

cosmic intelligence and black holes

the paper by vladimir a. lefebvre, school of social sciences, university of california, irvine and yuri n. efremov. sternberg astronomical institute. moscow state university, moscow, titled above, takes the idea of teilhard de chardin and others, about the “living” -- even divine – universe, and puts a scientific patina on it, providing a new operative template for seti in the process.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

this article mentions among other things the red star nebula...

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=41wjs24r

be well, be love.

david

the astrophysical crisis at red square

"the history of science shows that the progress of science has constantly been hampered by the tyrannical influence of certain conceptions that finally come to be considered as dogma. for this reason, it is proper to submit periodically to a very searching examination, principles that we have come to assume without discussion."
—louis de broglie, revolution in physics, 1953.

in 1970, hannes alfvén, the 'father of plasma physics,' warned that cosmology was headed into crisis. he was referring to the treatment of plasma—which makes up about 99.9% of the visible universe—as a magnetizable gas. alfvén was responsible for the theory, known as 'magnetohydrodynamics' or mhd. but he publicly repudiated its use for space plasma in his 1970 nobel prize acceptance speech:

"the cosmical plasma physics of today is far less advanced than the thermonuclear research physics. it is to some extent the playground of theoreticians who have never seen a plasma in a laboratory. many of them still believe in formulae which we know from laboratory experiments to be wrong. the astrophysical correspondence to the thermonuclear crisis has not yet come."
—h. alfvén, plasma physics, space research and the origin of the solar system, nobel lecture, december 11, 1970

but astrophysicists didn't want to know. mhd made their theoretical work easy compared with the intricate behavior of plasma discovered in attempts to harness fusion power-the so-called 'power source of the sun.' their ignorance of the real behavior of plasma was certain to lead to divergence between theory and reality, just as it did for fusion power.

in fact each specialist group fuelled the mistakes of the other. it is a common situation in institutionalized science today. the astrophysicists misled the nuclear physicists into thinking the sun is powered internally, which led nuclear physicists to try unsuccessfully to mimic the sun's thermonuclear 'engine.' the nuclear physicists have nevertheless misled the astrophysicists into thinking that a stable thermonuclear reaction is possible inside the sun even though it results in a weird body that transfers internal heat unlike any other-by radiation instead of conduction and convection. and the sun is a cosmic body that is assumed to have much the same composition at its center as at the top of its atmosphere! clearly, it has been a theoretical 'deadly embrace.'

alfvén was considered a brilliant maverick. he railed against the consensus of big bang cosmology and insisted that we live in an electric universe. he argued that it was not enough to treat magnetism in space without considering the electric circuits in space necessary to generate and sustain magnetic fields. yet no book on astronomy mentions electricity or circuits. future historians of science will find this beyond rational understanding, like the belief in a flat earth. astronomy labors in the space age under the yoke of gaslight era science. our model of stars is little better than the ancient one of a 'campfire' in the sky. only the fuel is different.

thirty-seven years after alfvén's speech, the astrophysical crisis is becoming more obvious. adaptive optics and space telescopes give us much clearer views of stars, nebulae and galaxies, which theorists are floundering to explain. some express mild concern that their models aren't working. but there is no recognition that there is a deep crisis. denial, minimization and obfuscation can be expected before a paradigm shift begins. two reports in the april 13 issue of science highlight the situation.

the first report, "surveys of exploding stars show one size does not fit all," says "type ia supernovae are regular enough that astronomers can use them to measure the universe. but some of the "standard candles" are breaking the theoretical mold. when astronomers wish upon a star, they wish they knew more about how stars explode. in particular, experts on the stellar explosions known as supernovae wonder whether textbook accounts tell the true story."

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/apr/the-birth-of-dark-energy

be well, be love.

david

the birth of dark energy
a dark force that is pulling the cosmos apart
by alex stone

even weirder than dark matter—the invisible stuff constituting most of the mass of the universe—is dark energy, a mysterious force pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate. weirder still is a recent discovery that dark energy has been around for most of the history of the cosmos. “nine billion years ago, dark energy was already wielding its repulsive influence on the universe,” explains johns hopkins university astrophysicist adam riess. but the repulsion didn’t win out against the force of gravity until 5 billion years ago, when cosmic expansion kicked into high gear and began accelerating.

[sulphur369]

hey forum,

i'm glad that the admin posted about the article from holoscience.com. if there is one aspect of cosmology that i have seen lacking from divinecosmos it is the the electric aspect (there are connections but no direct references directly to the electric cosmos theory at all) which is crucial imo for really getting into the true nuts and bolts of how our galaxies and solarsystems with their suns are operating and interconnecting. i think it dangerous (and even ungrounded) to discuss "hyperdimensional physics" without a concrete connection to electric cosmos theory which has tons of evidence to back it up. in fact, the nebula david wrote about is not a cube at all but a fortuitously angled shot at a phenomena that has a polar configuration, as most electric phenomena in the cosmos have.

having said this i want to also say that i enjoy the many amazing connections that david has legitimately made in his work. but electric cosmology should be more included in work, i think.

[sulphur369]

hello,

once again i would direct the forum readers to electric cosmology theory for grounded evidence in explaining the likelyhood of the fact that things like blackholes, quasars and pulsars as they are understood, "neutron stars", dark matter and energy are quite likely completely delusional. blackholes, in particular, are essentially mathematical figments of the imagination, invented to make up for the fact that modern astrophysics insisted, against all evidence i might add, that gravity is running the universe. if you believe that the infinitely weak force of gravity is running things like galaxies then the mathematics demand an infinitely strong pull of mass in the centre of it to balance the equation out. in fact, when you look at the supposed black holes in the centre of galaxies they are spewing out a huge amount of matter! dark energy and matter has to be invoked to satisfy a cosmology that is totally blind to the force of electricity (which is a 1000 billion, billion, billion, billion times stronger than gravity!!!!) in the universe. it is required simply because of the delusional belief of gravity being the only real force running things out there. as i mentioned in a another thread, invoking "hyperdimensional physics" without the electric cosmos theory in the middle will lead to intellectual disconnect, imho...

[ThinkingWolf]

hello,

...direct the forum readers to electric cosmology theory for grounded evidence...

might i suggest:

http://www.electric-universe.info/

http://www.thunderbolts.info/home.htm

[sulphur369]

yes thinking wolf

thank you for pointing out the links, i didn't because a google search will immediately bring up those sites

[LightEye]

dear friends,

here's the paper;

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0646

here's an abstract;

http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe_frames.html

be well, be love.

david

the new paper: the mathematical universe
author: max tegmark

abstract: i explore physics implications of the external reality hypothesis (erh) that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. i argue that with a sufficiently broad definition of mathematics, it implies the mathematical universe hypothesis (muh) that our physical world is an abstract mathematical structure. i discuss various implications of the erh and muh, ranging from standard physics topics like symmetries, irreducible representations, units, free parameters and initial conditions to broader issues like consciousness, parallel universes and gödel incompleteness. i hypothesize that only computable and decidable (in gödel's sense) structures exist, which alleviates the cosmological measure problem and help explain why our physical laws appear so simple. i also comment on the intimate relation between mathematical structures, computations, simulations and physical systems.

[eyez4096]

i'm still reading this paper and, being a budding mathematician, i find this paper fascinating. thank you so much for the find!

-charles

[donald@newdirectionscs.com]

sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, just look at the incredible engery output from this planet. this photo is great from national geographic, this shows the huge amount of electrical force eminating from just one planet in the distant part of the solar system. donald

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070330-jupiter-picture.html


march 30, 2007—no, jupiter hasn't acquired a new toupee and goatee to impress venus.

those dashing purple puffs are x-ray images of the gas giant's high-voltage auroras—"northern lights on steroids," said planetary scientist randy gladstone of this image released yesterday by nasa.

the colorized picture is something of a collage. several x-ray images taken by nasa's chandra x-ray observatory have been combined and superimposed on the latest hubble space telescope image of jupiter.

"jupiter has auroras bigger than our entire planet," said gladstone, of the independent, nonprofit southwest research institute in texas, in a statement.

gladstone hopes these latest observations will help him crack some jovian mysteries. for starter, what causes these "hyper-auroras"?

the solar system's biggest planet and its magnetic field rotate extremely quickly—every ten hours—generating ten million volts around its poles. toss in charged particles from the volcanic moon io and you've got a crackling, nonstop sky show.

but how do the volcanic particles get from a relatively small moon to jupiter's planetary poles? that, gladstone says, remains one of the planet's unsolved puzzles.

(watch a brief animation of io's particles interacting with jupiter's magnetic field to create auroras.)

—ted chamberlain

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/matter_will_dominate_radiation_until_the_end_of_ti me_999.html

be well, be love.

david

matter will dominate radiation until the end of time

if you've ever wondered about the ultimate fate of the universe, lawrence krauss and robert scherrer have some good news - sort of.

in a paper published online on april 25 in the journal physical review d, the two physicists show that matter as we know it will remain as the universe expands at an ever-increasing clip. that is, the current status quo between matter and its alter ego, radiation, will continue as the newly discovered force of dark energy pushes the universe apart.

"diamonds may actually be forever," quips krauss, professor of physics and astronomy at case western reserve university (cwru) who is spending the year at vanderbilt. "one of the only positive things that has arisen from the dark-energy dominated universe is that matter gets to beat radiation forever."

this viewpoint runs contrary to conventional wisdom among cosmologists. today, there is more matter than radiation in the universe. but there were periods during the early universe that were dominated by radiation due to particle decays.

the generally accepted view of the distant future has been that ordinary matter particles - protons and neutrons in particular - will gradually decay into radiation over trillions upon trillions of years, leaving a universe in which radiation once again dominates over matter; a universe lacking the material structures that are necessary for life.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn11745-could-black-holes-be-portals-to-other-universes.html

be well, be love.

david

could black holes be portals to other universes?
exclusive
20:42 27 april 2007
newscientist.com news service
david shiga

the objects scientists think are black holes could instead be wormholes leading to other universes, a new study says. if so, it would help resolve a quantum conundrum known as the black hole information paradox, but critics say it would also raise new problems, such as how the wormholes would form in the first place.

a black hole is an object with such a powerful gravitational field that nothing, not even light, can escape it if it strays within a boundary known as the event horizon. einstein's theory of general relativity says black holes should form whenever matter is squeezed into a small enough space.

though black holes are not seen directly, astronomers have identified many objects that appear to be black holes based on observations of how matter swirls around them.

but physicists thibault damour of the institut des hautes etudes scientifiques in bures-sur-yvette, france, and sergey solodukhin of international university bremen in germany now say that these objects could be structures called wormholes instead.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

lots of good articles at the site. check them out...

http://preposterousuniverse.com/preposterous.html

be well, be love.

david

the preposterous universe

scientists tend to believe that the elementary structures underlying the world we observe are ultimately simple and beautiful, even (or especially) the structures we have not yet discovered. still, this basic elegance does not always manifest itself directly -- the universe we see is something of a mess.

this pie chart is a rather prosaic representation of a truly impressive accomplishment: an inventory of the relative amounts of the different substances comprising our universe. yellow is ordinary matter -- atoms, molecules, dust, stars, planets, both visible and invisible -- or what cosmologists call "baryons" (since most of the mass of ordinary matter comes from the protons and neutrons inside atomic nuclei, and protons and neutrons are classified by particle physicists as baryons). baryons make up about five percent of the known universe (actually closer to four percent, but let's not be picky). we know this from a variety of independent measurements, including the results of nucleosynthesis in the big bang, measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, and (less precisely) by direct detection. everything we have ever seen is only one-twentieth of everything there actually is.

this leaves 95% of the universe as stuff which is completely invisible. as depicted, it comes in two components: 25% "dark matter" (in red) and 70% "dark energy" (in blue). the difference between the two is in how they behave: dark matter acts like ordinary particles, in that it collects into dense regions (like galaxies or clusters of galaxies), whereas dark energy is smoothly distributed throughout space and slowly-varying in time. the best candidate for dark energy is the cosmological constant, or "vacuum energy": the idea that there is a nonzero amount of energy density inherent in the fabric of spacetime itself.

dark matter and dark energy are not theoretical constructs which were invented by cosmologists because they seemed interesting; observational data have forced us into positing their existence. even though they are invisible, both dark matter and dark energy give rise to a gravitational field; we can feel their effects. dark matter contributes to the total gravitational field of galaxies and clusters, which we measure by observing the velocities of nearby particles, or the deflection of light passing by. dark energy is smoothly distributed, but affects the geometry of spacetime itself: it makes distant galaxies appear to accelerate away from us, and it "flattens" the geometry of space, two effects which have been directly observed. these dark components are exactly the opposite of the "ether" that was popular a century ago: everyone expected ether to exist but nobody could find evidence of it, whereas nobody expected dark matter or dark energy, but we found them despite ourselves.

[Ricdaw]

folks:

the article is about this:

"astronomers have witnessed the most spectacular and powerful supernova ever, when a giant star was blown to smithereens in a cosmic flash.

using a variety of earth and space telescopes, they calculate that the cataclysm shined about five times brighter than any of the hundreds of supernovae ever seen before."

but it is the picture that fascinates me. look at the symmetry of this explosion:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2007/05/08/wsuper260.jpg

the rest of the article is here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/08/wsuper108.xml

rick :)

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/070510_galactic-collision.htm

be well, be love.

david

the galaxy next door—our destined home?

may 10, 2007
special to world science

as*tro*no*mers have run new sim*u*la*tions to see what could hap*pen when an ex*pected col*lision takes place be*tween our gal*axy and an*other big one—pos*si*bly with*in our de*scen*dants’ life*times.

the sur*pris*ing re*sults: lit*tle of the ce*les*tial fire*works that were wide*ly ex*pected to oc*cur as great gas clouds crunch to*geth*er to form new stars. in*stead, a more out*land*ish pos*si*bil*i*ty arose.

the com*put*er sim*u*la*tions in*di*cated there is a one in 37 chance we’ll end up liv*ing in that oth*er gal*ax*y—majestic an*drom*e*da, said the re*search*ers, t. j. cox and abra*ham loeb of the har*vard-smith*son*ian cen*ter for as*t*ro*phys*ics in cam*b*ridge, mass.

“fu*ture as*tro*no*mers in the so*lar sys*tem might see the milky way,” our pre*s*ent gal*axy, “as an ex*ter*nal gal*axy in the night sky,” cox and loeb wrote in a pa*per on their find*ings. in oth*er words, the milky way would be no more the fa*mil*iar sil*very strip across the heav*ens, but a dis*tant smudge of light.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.quantummotion.org/papers/tdu.pdf

be well, be love.

david

we live in a time division universe

the deepest implication of random discontinuous motion lies in that it entangles the world into an inseparable whole in a form of time division.

our universe is time-divided by god in a completely random way. everything, from atoms to stars, lives in the time division universe. it looks as if the whole world is composed of many sub-worlds, each one of which occupies one tiny part of the continuous time flow, and the occupying way is discontinuous and random in essence.

no doubt the new picture will lead to a profound shift in our world view. it implies that our universe is not a mere aggregate of independent existences, but an entangled inseparable whole in the time division form.

we live in a time division universe in reality.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://physorg.com/news98468776.html

be well, be love.

david

a two-time universe? physicist explores how second dimension of time could unify physics laws
by tom siegfried

for a long time, itzhak bars has been studying time. more than a decade ago, the usc college physicist began pondering the role time plays in the basic laws of physics — the equations describing matter, gravity and the other forces of nature.

those laws are exquisitely accurate. einstein mastered gravity with his theory of general relativity, and the equations of quantum theory capture every nuance of matter and other forces, from the attractive power of magnets to the subatomic glue that holds an atom’s nucleus together.

but the laws can’t be complete. einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum theory don’t fit together. some piece is missing in the picture puzzle of physical reality.

bars thinks one of the missing pieces is a hidden dimension of time.

bizarre is not a powerful enough word to describe this idea, but it is a powerful idea nevertheless. with two times, bars believes, many of the mysteries of today’s laws of physics may disappear.

of course, it’s not as simple as that. an extra dimension of time is not enough. you also need an additional dimension of space.

it sounds like a new episode of “the twilight zone,” but it’s a familiar idea to most physicists. in fact, extra dimensions of space have become a popular way of making gravity and quantum theory more compatible.

extra space dimensions aren’t easy to imagine — in everyday life, nobody ever notices more than three. any move you make can be described as the sum of movements in three directions — up-down, back and forth, or sideways. similarly, any location can be described by three numbers (on earth, latitude, longitude and altitude), corresponding to space’s three dimensions.

[u2candothis]

hi all,
found this interesting.
best regards,
len

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6657271.stm


hubble spots ring of dark matter

the ring of dark matter appears in this composite map

enlarge image
astronomers have found one of the best pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter, a mysterious quantity that pervades our universe.

they have identified what appears to be a ghostly ring in the sky which is made up of this enigmatic substance.

using the hubble space telescope, the scientists have established that the ring formed long ago after a colossal smash-up between two galaxy clusters.

details of the research are to appear in the astrophysical journal.

as the name suggests, dark matter does not reflect or emit detectable light, yet it accounts for most of the mass in the universe.

astronomers have long suspected the existence of this invisible "stuff" as the source of additional gravity that holds together galaxy clusters.

the clusters would fly apart if they were reliant only on the gravity from their visible stars.

dark material

no one knows what dark matter is made of, but it is thought to be a type of elementary particle found throughout the cosmos.

researchers from johns hopkins university and the space telescope science institute - both in baltimore, us - spotted the ring unexpectedly while they were mapping the distribution of dark matter within the galaxy cluster cl 0024+17.

this cluster lies 5 billion light-years from earth; its ring of dark matter measures 2.6 million light-years across.

because astronomers cannot see dark matter, they must infer its existence by studying how its gravity bends the light of more distant, background galaxies.

this powerful trick, called gravitational lensing, allows astronomers to map the distorted light to deduce the cluster's mass and how dark matter is distributed in the cluster.

at first, team members thought the ring was an illusion - or artefact - in the data. but repeated attempts to make the ring disappear met with failure. finally, the astronomers became convinced that it must be a real feature.

ripples in a pond

in august 2006, us astronomers identified the gravitational signature of dark matter in another merging galaxy cluster. but the ring structure in cl 0024+17 is exceptional.

"although the invisible matter has been found before in other galaxy clusters, it has never been detected to be so largely separated from the hot gas and the galaxies that make up galaxy clusters," said co-author myungkook james jee of johns hopkins university.

"by seeing a dark-matter structure that is not traced by galaxies and hot gas, we can study how it behaves differently from normal matter."

computer simulations of galaxy cluster collisions show that when two clusters smash together, the dark matter falls to the centre of the merged cluster and sloshes back out.

as the dark matter seeps outward, it begins to slow down under the pull of gravity and gathers together like a traffic pile-up.

luckily, astronomers had a head on view of this collision because it occurred along the earth's line of sight.

"it's like looking at the pebbles on the bottom of a pond with ripples on the surface. the pebbles' shapes appear to change as the ripples pass over them," dr jee explained.

"so, too, the background galaxies behind the ring show coherent changes in their shapes due to the presence of the dense ring."

team member holland ford, also of johns hopkins, said: "by studying this collision, we are seeing how dark matter responds to gravity.

he added: "nature is doing an experiment for us that we can't do in a lab, and it agrees with our theoretical models."

[soup]

assuming a uniform dark background, it seems possible that a collision caused some sort of spherical expanding wave that accounts for the distribution of light and dark banding. that scatter from particulates causes the lighter portion of the sky which is traveling outward and leaves a spherical area behind it of lower particle density having lower scatter, appearing darker.

another possibility is a uniform light background with a uniform round cloud of absorbing material inbetween us and the clusters, this cloud isn't able to attenuate the bright light of the cluster center. here the background temperature of 3k comes to mind - i would expect dark matter to reveal a temperature depression but don't find any mention of it. is the apparent temperature of a black hole less than 3k, or is the intermediate medium enough to boost its appearance to 3k?

in this case another assumption seems that the space between us and the deep sky objects we observe is empty but it may not be, it may be filled with particles of about 3k temperature which skews our understandings somewhat.
in my case, my understanding seems highly skewed regardless.

[soup]

if a person has two watches that tell a different time, then is it possible to understand time to a higher degree than if the person had simply one watch?

if a person has three watches this might be an advantage over two, because if two of the three watches agree to a greater degree than the third, this might suggest that the third watch has malfunctioned.

if a person has many watches and averages their indication of time, there may be some sort of gaussian curve found which yields a lower uncertainty in the mean value than the accuracy of one watch alone offers.

so by metaphor, interpreting reality from perspectives of multiple dimensions may offer advantage over a simple perspective of rudimentary dimension.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/

be well, be love.

david

this web page is designed to give everyone an idea of what our universe actually looks like. there are nine main maps on this web page, each one approximately ten times the scale of the previous one. the first map shows the nearest stars and then the other maps slowly expand out until we have reached the scale of the entire visible universe.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/turok07/turok07_index.html

be well, be love.

david

"in recent years, the search for the fundamental laws of nature has forced us to think about the big bang much more deeply. according to our best theories — string theory and m theory — all of the details of the laws of physics are actually determined by the structure of the universe; specifically, by the arrangement of tiny, curled-up extra dimensions of space. this is a very beautiful picture: particle physics itself is now just another aspect of cosmology. but if you want to understand why the extra dimensions are arranged as they are, you have to understand the big bang because that's where everything came from."

the cyclic universe [5.17.07]
a talk with neil turok

neil turok holds the chair of mathematical physics in the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at cambridge university. he is coauthor, with paul steinhardt, of endless universe: beyond the big bang.

neil turok's edge bio page


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
the cyclic universe

[neil turok:] for the last ten years i have mainly been working on the question of how the universe began — or didn't begin. what happened at the big bang? to me this seems like one of the most fundamental questions in science, because everything we know of emerged from the big bang. whether it's particles or planets or stars or, ultimately, even life itself.

in recent years, the search for the fundamental laws of nature has forced us to think about the big bang much more deeply. according to our best theories — string theory and m theory — all of the details of the laws of physics are actually determined by the structure of the universe; specifically, by the arrangement of tiny, curled-up extra dimensions of space. this is a very beautiful picture: particle physics itself is now just another aspect of cosmology. but if you want to understand why the extra dimensions are arranged as they are, you have to understand the big bang because that's where everything came from.

somehow, until quite recently, fundamental physics had gotten along without really tackling that problem. even back in the 1920's, einstein, friedmann and lemaitre — the founders of modern cosmology — realized there was a singularity at the big bang. that somehow, when you trace the universe back, everything went wrong about 14 billion years ago. by go wrong, i mean all the laws of physics break down: they give infinities and meaningless results. einstein himself didn't interpret this as the beginning of time; he just said, well, my theory fails. most theories fail in some regime, and then you need a better theory. isaac newton's theory fails when particles go very fast; it fails to describe that. you need relativity. likewise, einstein said, we need a better theory of gravity than mine.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

doh! i posted this at joseph's posting. lets hope larry can erase it. ;-)

here's some earlier work from fintan dunne's site where neil is mentioned;

http://www.treeincarnation.com/inside-out-universe.htm

be well, be love.

david

note that this material is from september, 2002.
it lays out the core ideas which have really come
together in the latest articles. see: part 1 and part 2

the mirror mind of the cyclic universe
it's the structure of creation.

the latest big bang theory proposes a cyclic universe --driven by colliding membranes. the new model supports analysis that a human-like mirror mind created our universe. the wall in science is coming down.

17th september 2002
by fintan dunne,
author: treeincarnation.com

big bang researchers have developed a landmark theory, with just-glimpsed implications which dethrone established scientific views of the world. princeton's jeremiah ostriker has called the theory "..the first new big idea in cosmology in over two decades."

were louis pasteur alive he would be overjoyed. the new theory intersects with his conviction that the left-handed twist of amino acids in living tissues held the key to the mysteries of creation. he was right.

in 1851 pasteur wrote: "i am on the verge of mysteries and the veil which covers them is getting thinner and thinner." but it has taken another 150 years to fully dissolve that veil. let's examine the new theory, then see how this links back to pasteur.

the most recent breakthrough has come from princeton university's paul j. steinhardt and cambridge university's neil turok. the two leading cosmologists have confirmed the applicability of string theory to a cyclic universe. according to this view, universes are created and then disperse into space, one after another, with each cycle lasting trillions of years.

a variation of this concept known as m theory, proposes that the universe consists of two parallel sheets, or membranes, in a higher dimension. the two so-called 'branes' are separated by another dimension only nanometers wide. when the membranes slap together, they trigger the big bang and begin rapidly expanding like stretched latex.

on the membrane which holds the known universe, this bang generates the particles and forces which form our milky way. the other membrane contains "dark energy."

over trillions of years the membranes continue to expand, growing darker, colder and more diffuse. when the 'branes' eventually become flat and featureless they collapse and come together for another cosmic bang.

[soup]

that seems perplexing in some way. i would imagine this is what it appears like assuming light travels in a straight line, but does it? for example the light that goes by the local stars could be gravitationally bent and so what is behind the star gets distorted and/or occluded. the same goes for the opposite side of the galaxy - it seems difficult for me to comprehend what is on the other side of the galactic center from us, let alone what exists at the galactic center, mysterious as it is. the galaxy subtends such large angles. it seems easier for be to visualize we have better understanding of what the universe appears to be outside the plane of our galaxy where the density of stars is lower and we can better see without interference of neighboring stars. this line of wandering brings me to question the plane of the solar system, in relation to the plane of the galaxy - it just doesn't seem unreasonable to me that the universe may also have a dominant plane andwe just can't see it well.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070528/full/070528-7.html

be well, be love.

david

space telescope spies dark matter

triangulation technique spots object at the edge of our galaxy.
geoff brumfiel

astronomers have used telescopes on earth and in space to nail the precise position of a mysterious, dark object at the outer edge of our galaxy. the work could be an important step in understanding so-called dark matter — mysterious material that makes up about a quarter of our universe.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/05/science/space/05essa.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

bewell, be love.

david

the universe, expanding beyond all understanding
by dennis overbye

when albert einstein was starting out on his cosmological quest 100 years ago, the universe was apparently a pretty simple and static place. common wisdom had it that all creation consisted of an island of stars and nebulae known as the milky way surrounded by infinite darkness.

we like to think we’re smarter than that now. we know space is sprinkled from now to forever with galaxies rushing away from one another under the impetus of the big bang.

bask in your knowledge while you can. our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the big bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers i have ever read.

if things keep going the way they are, lawrence krauss of case western reserve university and robert j. scherrer of vanderbilt university calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together gravitationally into what is known as the local group, which is not expanding and in fact will probably merge into one starry ball.

[Robert Riedel]

let us ponder the following, from those hubble folks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcbv-cxvwfw

having grown up in cleveland, i've come to reguard cwru as, well, less than a credible source of anything significant, due to their being taken over by a bunch of academic loosers.

bob

[donald@newdirectionscs.com]

i was rambling around trying to find information about gamma ray bursts in a time line fashion to see if they were increasing and stumbed uon this. it is a set of phos of a star collapsing, but look at last picture, is this not a beautiful picture of a torus field. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/gammaburst_challenge.html

by the way does anyone know of a site that tracks gamma ray bursts so that you can make sense out of the information and see if it is intesifying?
thanks donald:) by the way david wow, just read your post today about next tuesday, hope this really shakes things up and brings others into awareness. peace be unto us all.


gamma-ray burst challenges theory

03.08.07


in a series of landmark observations gathered over a period of four months, nasa's swift satellite has challenged some of astronomers' fundamental ideas about gamma-ray bursts (grbs), which are among the most extreme events in our universe. grbs are the explosive deaths of very massive stars, some of which eject jets that can release in a matter of seconds the same amount of energy that the sun will radiate over its 10-billion-year lifetime.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12089-do-black-holes-really-exist.html

be well, be love.

david

do black holes really exist?
22:16 18 june 2007
stephen battersby

black holes might not exist – or at least not as scientists have imagined, cloaked by an impenetrable "event horizon". a controversial new calculation could abolish the horizon, and so solve a troubling paradox in physics.

the event horizon is supposed to mark a boundary beyond which nothing can escape a black hole's gravity. according to the general theory of relativity, even light is trapped inside the horizon, and no information about what fell into the hole can ever escape. information seems to have fallen out of the universe.

that contradicts the equations of quantum mechanics, which always preserve information. how to resolve this conflict?

one possibility researchers have proposed in the past is that the information does leak back out again slowly. it may be encoded in a hypothetical flow of particles called hawking radiation, which is thought to result from the black holes' event horizons messing with the quantum froth that is ever-present in space.

but other researchers argue the information may never have been cut off in the first place. tanmay vachaspati and his colleagues at case western reserve university in cleveland, ohio, us, have tried to calculate what happens as a black hole is forming. using an unusual mathematical approach called the functional schrodinger equation, they follow a sphere of stuff as it collapses inwards, and predict what a distant observer would see.

they find that the gravity of the collapsing mass starts to disrupt the quantum vacuum, generating what they call "pre-hawking" radiation. losing that radiation reduces the total mass-energy of the object – so that it never gets dense enough to form an event horizon and a true black hole. "there are no such things", vachaspati told new scientist. "there are only stars going toward being a black hole but not getting there."

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~gekko/redsquare.html

be well, be love.

david

the red square

this image (left) announces a new arrival in the pantheon of exotically beautiful celestial objects. we have christened this startlingly symmetrical nebula "the red square" for its color and form, and also in recognition of its close cousin - the celebrated red rectangle nebula.

the new discovery was made with advanced imaging technologies known as adaptive optics while studying a hot star called mwc 922 located about 5000 light-years from earth in the constellation serpens (the serpent mythologically associated with medicine). the image to the left, which combines data from the mt palomar hale telescope and the keck-2 telescope , was taken in near-infrared light (1.6 microns) and shows a region 30.8 arcseconds on a side around mwc 922. as the outer periphery of the nebula is very faint compared to the core, the image has been processed and sharpened to display the full panoply of detail and structure.

the startling degree of symmetry and level of intricate linear form make the red square nebula around mwc 922 the most symmetrical object of comparable complexity ever imaged. the overall architecture displays a twin opposed conical cavities (known as a bipolar nebula), along the axis of which can be seen a remarkable sequence of sharply defined linear rungs or bars. this series of rungs and conical surfaces lie nested, one within the next, down to the heart of the system, where the hyperbolic bicone surfaces are crossed by a dark lane running across the principle axis.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070702_mm_big_bang.html

also this article;

quantum gravity shrouds time before the big bang
http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/11/6/20/1

be well, be love.

david

glimpse of time before big bang possible
by charles q. choi
special to livescience
posted: 01 july 2007
01:15 pm et

it may be possible to glimpse before the supposed beginning of time into the universe prior to the big bang, researchers now say.

unfortunately, any such picture will always be fuzzy at best due to a kind of "cosmic forgetfulness."

the big bang is often thought as the start of everything, including time, making any questions about what happened during it or beforehand nonsensical. recently scientists have instead suggested the big bang might have just been the explosive beginning of the current era of the universe, hinting at a mysterious past.

to see how far into history one might gaze, theoretical physicist martin bojowald at pennsylvania state university ran calculations based on loop quantum gravity, one of a number of competing theories seeking to explain how the underlying structure of the universe works.

past research suggested the big bang was preceded by infinite energies and space-time warping where existing scientific theories break down, making it impossible to peer beforehand. the new findings suggest that although the levels of energy and space-time warping before the big bang were both incredibly high, they were finite.

scientists could spot clues in the present day of what the cosmos looked like previously. if evidence of the past persisted after the big bang, its influence could be spotted in astronomical observations and computational models, bojowald explained.

however, bojowald also figures some knowledge of the past was irrevocably lost. for instance, the sheer size of the present universe would suppress precise knowledge of how the universe changed in size before the big bang, he said.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/060514_bouncefrm.htm

be well, be love.

david

another universe may have preceded ours, study finds
may 14, 2006
courtesy penn state university
and world science staff

three physicists say they have done calculations suggesting that before the birth of our universe, which is expanding, there was an earlier universe that was shrinking.

the results stem from a theory that claims the fabric of space and time is made up of minuscule, indivisible bits, much as matter is.

scientists believe our cosmos began in a sort of explosion called the big bang, when everything that exists—which just previously had been packed into one infinitely dense point—burst outward.

the universe is still expanding, according to this view, because it was born expanding.

according to some proposals, the big bang is a repeating cycle. universes might expand, then shrink back to a point, then expand again. thus the “bang” would be really more like a bounce.

the idea is appealing in some ways, but scientists have found it far from easy to test. einstein’s general theory of relativity, a key basis for the big bang theory, is silent on what happened before that event.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

the universe doesn't "destroy" anything - it's called "change" ;-)

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070629-the-universe-will-destroy-the-evidence-of-its-origin.html

be well, be love.

david

the universe will destroy the evidence of its origin
by john timmer | published: june 29, 2007 - 12:49pm ct

back around the early 1900s, the universe was a fairly simple place. it was static, had always been there, and largely consisted of our own galaxy and a few neighboring bits of matter. over the course of the 20th century, that view collapsed. many sources of light were revealed not be stars, but rather galaxies like (and, in many cases, unlike) our own. distant galaxies were found to be rocketing away from us, propelled by the unfolding of the universe itself, which has accelerated since the big bang. modern cosmology has revealed a universe teeming with dark matter and unseen energy, entering a new stage of inflation.

according to a paper that will appear in october (arxiv link), we're lucky to be able to reach this understanding—literally. the authors of the paper run the clock forward 100 billion years and reveal that it's going back to the future, a conclusion clear in the paper's title: the return of a static universe and the end of cosmology.

[soup]

it looks like there's likewise spokes about neighboring stars,
as if the spider holding the secondary mirror of the telescope
was inducing a diffraction pattern upon the telescope image
related to the coherency of the light used to form the image.

[soup]

the conventional big bang model suggests a space/time monad event which is often depicted with highly non-linear time scales built upon cause and effect. it may be that this thought construct has utility beyond the application of cosmic origin which may be happening right now in some way.

consider a multi-local regenerating fabric as appearance, with imperceptible dimensions at play in the mechanism. here, every now moment seems both ending and new beginning within a variety of cycles of energetic exchange, as if cosmic history becomes illusion compared to present moment realities.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/07/a_cyclic_universe.php

be well, be love.

david

a cyclic universe
by paul steinhardt

how did the universe begin? did it have a beginning at all? these questions may have been the subject of speculation and debate for millennia, but they have not been widely discussed for the past forty years. ever since the discovery of the cosmic background radiation in 1965, the overwhelmingly predominant view has been that our universe began about 14 billion years ago in a cosmic fireball known as the "big bang" and that it has been expanding, cooling, and evolving ever since. recently, though, a small but growing number of theorists have begun to challenge this conventional belief and to pursue a radical new history of the universe. according to this new idea, there was a big bang, but this was not the beginning of space and time. in fact, in the version proposed by neil turok and myself, the big bang has occurred myriad times in our universe's past, repeating at regular intervals during which galaxies, stars, planets, and life form anew. the result is a "cyclic universe" in which cycles extend far into the past and into the future—and perhaps forever.

[soup]

it seems strange, this mention of the lifespan of the longest lived stars. it seems to suggest that stars are alive in the context of being active - though even with a cooled white dwarf grown faint, it still contains potential for action by way of its gravity. my impression is that some of the dark matter of the universe comes in the form of cooled white dwarfs or black holes with another form being masses progressing upon a path toward becoming stars visible as upon the main sequence - as if in 100 billion years there will be many new stars in the sky taking place of the older ones.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

note this statement...

"that there is no beginning, and no end."

hmmm...wonder where i've heard that before... ;-)

http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2007/05/20070531_b_main.asp

be well, be love.

david

forget the big bang theory
aired: thursday, may 31, 2007 11-12pm et
by host tom ashbrook:

we all know the story, delivered in grade school textbooks across the country, of how the universe began. the big bang. fourteen billion years ago. space and time and everything, exploding into being in a flash, and still exploding as celestial bodies race apart across the cosmos.

well, maybe so. but the big bang theory has taken its lumps in recent years.

now, renegade physicists are making a new case. that it didn't all start in an instant. that there is no beginning, and no end. and those are fighting words in the halls of science.

[Chris Hamilton]

new scientific articles about the universe

[donald@newdirectionscs.com]

here is another good article on holographic universe, donald

http://www.hemuz.org/evolution/holographic-universe-does-objective-reality-exist-2.html

[note from moderator:this is an excerpt quoted from the holographic universe by michael talbot]

in 1982, a remarkable event took place. at the university of paris,
a research team led by physicist alain aspect performed what may
turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th
century. you did not hear about it on the evening news. in fact,
unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you
probably have never even heard aspect's name, though there are some
who believe his discovery may change the face of science...


aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances
subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously
communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating
them. it doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles
apart.

somehow, each particle always seems to know what the other is doing.
the problem with this feat is that it violates einstein's long-held
tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of
light. since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount
to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some
physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away
aspect's findings. but it has inspired others to offer even more
radical explanations.

university of london physicist david bohm, for example, believes
aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that
despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a
gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

to understand why bohm makes this startling assertion, one must
first understand a little about holograms. a hologram is a three-
dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

to make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in
the light of a laser beam. then a second laser beam is bounced off
the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference
pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured
on film.

when the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of
light and dark lines. but as soon as the developed film is
illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the
original object appears.

the three-dimensionalit y of such images is not the only remarkable
characteristic of holograms. if a hologram of a rose is cut in half
and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to
contain the entire image of the rose.

indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film
will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the
original image. unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram
contains all the information possessed by the whole.

the "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an
entirely new way of understanding organization and order. for most
of its history, western science has labored under the bias that the
best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an
atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

a hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend
themselves to this approach. if we try to take apart something
constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it
is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/30680

be well, be love.

david

testing the elements of the big bang

measurements of the amount of lithium in the universe combined with precision data from the cosmic microwave background are challenging our understanding both of stellar astrophysics and possibly even big bang nucleosynthesis itself, as kenneth nollett explains

the nitrogen and oxygen that we breathe, the carbon that makes biochemistry possible, and the calcium in our bones have one striking thing in common: they were all synthesized inside stars. indeed, the same is true of virtually all the chemical elements that we encounter in everyday life, from the rarest gases to the heaviest metals. one big exception is hydrogen: almost all hydrogen nuclei are protons that emerged from the big bang almost 14 billion years ago. another is light nuclei such as deuterium and lithium, which were produced in a process called big bang nucleosynthesis that occurred when the universe was only a few minutes old. the fact that these elements have been around since the beginning of time is surely one of the most fascinating facts in astrophysics.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

nice to see that guiliana is posting again...

http://www.giulianaconforto.it/english/articles/organic_revolution.htm

be well, be love.

david


organic revolution

utopia is not a place, but a transparent state of the organic, nuclear matter that composes our human body.
utopia is based on the consciousness that we, humans, are "cells" of the one organic universe.
utopia is sincerity, joy, well being and, mainly, ability to love and feel emotions.

organic astronomy is quite different from the modern, conventional one that just looks at the illusory electromagnetic light. as a paradox, orthodox astronomers calculate that only 5% of the entire mass interacts with electromagnetic light. therefore they know that they miss all the rest, that is 95% of the whole.

organic astronomy involves the whole, heavens and earth, and also includes us, the observers. this means that it must conjugate various ways of knowing, and mainly look at both sides of the force. these are the electromagnetic light, we can see, and the weak nuclear sound or rather music we can listen to, if, and only if, we sincerely want to. inner listening is not easy for our sleeping brain, but we can. many of us do it, at present.

listening to the sound, the silent music that conducts infinite universes, we have realized that human history is not the one we learn at school. a new quantum history has emerged. this is what i wrote in my book organic universe. we just need to realize that many kinds of matter and light do exist. these compose many worlds and many human bodies too. our conscious essence is manifested in our eternal light body, that giordano bruno called the body of fire. quantum history shows that we can transit from one to another world. here's just a short summary.

"...dragons, who came from draco constellation, could have been earth's original overlords. sumerians and assyrians called them anunnaki that just means "those who came from above". information about them comes from the stone tablets discovered in the lands of ancient sumeria and mesopotamia (now iraq).... annunaki, or dragons, are a piece of the human history puzzle... coming on earth’s surface they needed workers, who could mine gold, and genetically created them...

“travelling” to ancient babylonian times, we could “see” what the tower of babel actually was; it was not just a building, but a place where genetic experiments were performed... the babel of languages was actually the one of genetic codes that has affected all the people on earth’s surface... however this doesn’t mean that the human race, as we know it, is just a reptile/mammal hybrid species annunaki, created several thousand of years ago, in babylonia. that event is just another piece of the puzzle...

... many coincidences indicate the existence of a precise, highly detailed intelligent plan.... our visible human bodies are inside an emotional cosmic computer... our true identities can be outside, though. why do we seem confined to 5%? the answer, my friend, is incredible. human genesis was just a conception, the beginning of a cosmic pregnancy that is now coming to an end.. a new genesis awaits us, humans, and implies the collapse of the em illusion.

the path to be delivered is within; it is consciousness of our own true identity...

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/08/seeing_the_unseeable_1.php

be well, be love.

david

seeing the unseeable
by maggie wittlin • posted august 20, 2007 05:00 pm

within the confines of the ordinary, vision is the most reliable tool we have. but some of the most extraordinary parts of nature, those that lie at the frontiers of science, can't be seen at all. dark matter, for example, the invisible, mysterious material that makes up 22 percent of the stuff in the universe, is one of the great scientific unknowns, a substance nearly six times as abundant as ordinary matter but made up of fundamental particles we haven't yet identified. and dark matter doesn't emit light, it doesn't reflect light, and it doesn't absorb light. it's not dark, as the name suggests—dark matter is completely, inherently unseeable.

while we are unable to see dark matter itself, we are able to create maps of it, pinpointing its location by observing the effects of its mass on light from distant galaxies. einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that a massive object will curve the fabric of space, and light will follow this deformed path. so we can look at how light from galaxies has been bent and infer the quantity and location of the matter that did the bending. an international team of astronomers recently used this method to create the first three-dimensional map of the large-scale structure of dark matter, and they released this blue and black image earlier this year.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,294359,00.html

be well, be love.

david

astronomers puzzled by massive blank spot in universe
friday, august 24, 2007

washington — astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. that's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there. the cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. it is 1 billion light years across of nothing. that's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a university of minnesota team announced thursday.

astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody's home. in fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years away. but what the minnesota team discovered, using two different types of astronomical observations, is a void that's far bigger than scientists ever imagined.

"this is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms of a typical void," said minnesota astronomy professor lawrence rudnick, author of the paper that will be published in astrophysical journal. "it's not clear that we have the right word yet ... this is too much of a surprise."

[LightEye]

dear friends,

here's more on that strange find.

http://physorg.com/news107109720.html

be well, be love.

david

astronomers find gaping hole in the universe
university of minnesota astronomers have found an enormous hole in the universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies and gas, as well as the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.” while earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the universe, this new discovery dwarfs them all.

“not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size,” said lawrence rudnick of the university of minnesota astronomy professor. rudnick, along with grad student shea brown and associate professor liliya williams, also of the university of minnesota, reported their findings in a paper accepted for publication in the astrophysical journal.

astronomers have known for years that, on large scales, the universe has voids largely empty of matter. however, most of these voids are much smaller than the one found by rudnick and his colleagues. in addition, the number of discovered voids decreases as the size increases.

[soup]

...astronomers find gaping hole in the universe...

the words used to describe this seem difficult to interpret. possibly they refer to an angular field of view as seen by the earth which is cooler than expected. why that particular field of view appears cooler may possibly be explained by the absence of "warm" material emitting into that field of view. maybe the suggestion of a "hole" seems like a super massive black hole that is so strong that no radiant emittance gets out - and so it appears cool. or else the area of space within that field of view is so transparent and void of matter that we see straight to the edge of the universe and it seems cooler than expected. i struggle to understand, wish they would have shared the data.

[pyramidnj]

hey guys...looks like there's an empty canvas for us to create our own world as we amuse ourselves at being "creators" .... wow! love, jo anne

http://news.aol.com/story/_a/astronomers-find-a-hole-in-the-universe/n20070824074709990001

astronomers find a hole in the universe
by seth borenstein,ap
posted: 2007-08-24 07:47:03
washington (ap) - astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. that's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there. the cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. it is 1 billion light years across of nothing. that's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a university of minnesota team announced thursday.

[Lorigga]

here's another article about the recently discovered empty hole:

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsone/idusn2329057520070823

funny enough, astronomers were investigating this region because it's very cold.

guess where it's located?

"the void is in a region of sky in the constellation eridanus, southwest of orion."

lols...ehhhh....


-lorenzo

"washington (reuters) - a giant hole in the universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter, astronomers said on thursday.

the team at the university of minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they have no idea why it is there."

[soup]

i wonder how they estimate the void is 100 billion light years across, or in other words, how do they know how far away it is? i would think that the closer it is to the observation telescope, the smaller it would be and the farther away it is the larger it would be. it may be that the angle that it subtends in the sky might be more meaningful.

i would imagine that the galactic center would be a nearby hotspot, but it seems visibly occluded, it appears visibly cooler than actuality. so i wonder if this could be due to a cold occlusion of some sort that prevents us from seeing the background behind it which would normally transmit through that area. if it is an object, what may cause it to be so cold?

[Lorigga]

"rudnick was examining a sky survey from the national radio astronomy observatory, which essentially takes radio pictures of a broad expanse of the universe. but one area of the universe had radio pictures indicating there was up to 45 percent less matter in that region, rudnick said.

the rest of the matter in the radio pictures can be explained as stars and other cosmic structures between here and the void, which is about 5 to 10 billion light years away.

rudnick then checked observations of cosmic microwave background radiation and found a cold spot. the only explanation, rudnick said, is it's empty of matter. "

so essentially, they calculate the void by examining how much matter should be there and subtracted out how much matter they think is there. the amount of matter is probably calculated using various data analysis techniques which incorporate luminosities, radiation densities, any data we can get!

the temperature is thought to be cold because the "microwave background radiation" is less than it should be. to my understanding, microwave background radiation is thought to be the "residue of heat" left after the big bang. the idea being that after the big bang there was a severe amount of heat which has been dissipating since. i guess the value for cmb in this region is significantly less than other spots in the sky and therefore, according to scientists, must be colder.

[soup]

it amazes me how disoriented i seem to be, in the sense of what direction the solar system is traversing. for example, what is the trajectory that the solar system is currently on, where will the solar system by in say 2012, and have they ever pointed those great telescopes in that direction?

[LightEye]

dear friends,

more from joseph...

http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2007/125/dunes-or-mega-life.htm

be well, be love.

david

mars dunes or mega life?
part-1
report #125
september 1, 2007
joseph p. skipper
j. p.skipper can be contacted at: jskipper@marsanomalyresearch.com

this multi-part reporting will attempt to deal with a subject that really cannot be dealt with adequately in a short reporting style like this. to do this adequately would require great volumes of text and far too many images to be practical and even then may still wind up being a bit too inconclusive. even so, i'm going to risk sticking my neck out and make a stab at this to at least alert viewers to the possibilities. so gear your expectations accordingly and don't expect too much. consider it merely pointing the way for others to one day follow through on. we'll start off here in part-1 by getting some brief reminder exposure to a mix of earth based sand dunes in the following five images.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

part i
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1l9kqjksphe

part ii
http://youtube.com/watch?v=om_qgorgw8q&mode=related&search=

part iii
http://youtube.com/watch?v=z7syuahur5m

part iv
http://youtube.com/watch?v=--2qs4lwqvs&mode=related&search=

part v
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-lmjs2w6ijc&mode=related&search=

part vi
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xye9zvcp5kg&mode=related&search=

part vii
http://youtube.com/watch?v=q06h8uwcvfq&mode=related&search=

part viii
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cnue_0qqxhm&mode=related&search=

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://ipac.jpl.nasa.gov/media_images/ssc2004-09a.jpg

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,

doh! ;-)

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1566

be well, be love.

david

is the universe a doughnut?
6 september 2007
by paul halpern
cosmos online

what does the simpsons have to say about cosmology? find out in this extract from what's science ever done for us? – an unauthorised and amusing look at science in the cult cartoon series.

someday spacecraft will be powerful enough perhaps to journey at extraordinary speeds, spanning the vast interstellar voids. our technology might develop until we become a vast, powerful intergalactic society, capable of resolving the deepest quandaries ever known. only then could we definitely answer what is perhaps the ultimate question: "is the universe shaped like a doughnut?"

this last question pertains to an idea attributed to homer and mentioned by guest star stephen hawking in an episode of the simpson's. in the episode, lisa simpson joins springfield's chapter of the brainy organisation mensa, which assumes mayoral duties and vows to remake springfield into a perfect society. the prospect of experiencing a blossoming utopia attracts the attention of the british cosmologist hawking, who – in his first animated appearance on the show – decides to visit and see it for himself.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

interesting videos/interview.

brane worlds
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/ngt1000/brane_8.swf

cyclic universe (you need to scroll down a bit)
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/cosmos/viz/movies/neil.html

listen to neil turok explain things;
http://download.guardian.co.uk/sys-audio/guardian/science/2007/09/03/scienceextra_neilturok.mp3

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,

and in a matter of a year ;-)

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070906_saturn_day.html

be well, be love.

david

length of saturn's day revised
by ker than
staff writer
posted: 06 september 2007
02:00 pm et

a day on saturn just got a few minutes shorter, if new calculations are correct.

using data collected by nasa's cassini, pioneer and voyager spacecraft, scientists have revised the ringed planet's rotation period to 10 hours, 32 minutes and 35 seconds-about 15 minutes shorter than an estimate made only last year.

those precious minutes could have big implications for how scientists think about saturn and other gas giants.

"while that may seem like a small uncertainty for the average person, it makes an enormous difference in terms of how we can understand the interior of saturn," said study team member gerald schubert of the university of california, los angeles.

if the new rotation rate, detailed in the sept. 7 issue of the journal science, is correct, then saturn's winds blow slower than previously thought and instead of whooshing in only a single direction, can blow both east and west. the finding could also shed light on how gas giant planets in general form.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

more from joseph...

http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2007/126/image-illusions.htm

be well, be love.

david

mars satellite image illusions
the art of misdirection & the unreal
report #126
september 15, 2007
joseph p. skipper
j. p. skipper can be contact at: jskipper@marsanomalyresearch.com

the above first image and the next three below are from the mro hirise #psp_003694_1800 science data image. as you can see, it is a wide-angle context view inclusive from one side of the strip to the other. the scene is beautifully clean and clear looking with a silky quality to it and that is so typical of the very high resolution current mro camera system images. the mro stats on this image indicate that this scene is located in terra sabaea south of janssen crater but that really isn't important to us here.

as you can also see, the darker streaks relative to the lighter color background are the scene's most eye catching feature. in the more current mro data these are described as "slope streaks" which is a rather neutral identifying moniker in relation to the previous characterizations of this evidence. in previous science data, these have been consistently officially described as dust slides down slopes. the theory is that the upper soil material slides downslope revealing darker geological material underneath. these characterizations of course reinforce the official position that mars in general is a super dry, dusty, dead world.

you should perhaps also know that some lay researchers in the field have identified these as water weeps but of course that, as you might well imagine, didn't get far in the traditional mainstream science communities who rarely deviate from evidence official designations once they are made. now in the over seven years i've been doing this, you might note that i haven't reported on this type of evidence. why? well i usually don't report on geological evidence because most of the time i leave that to the geologist unless i believe they are too far off base. however, that's not my reasoning here. i haven't reported on this simply because i don't buy into this evidence at all.

for example, in the above beautifully clear scene, note all the smoothed textures on everything giving it that silky look. this isn't the way geology looks and particularly not in satellite imaging with the very high fine resolution touted in the mro imaging. when it comes to rough geology, we should be seeing many times the geological detail we are seeing here. any professional worth his salt who has examined satellite images of earth's geology even in 10 and 20 year older satellite camera technology will have to admit that and it isn't because this is super dry dusty mars either where geology is covered by dust.

all one has to do is take a brief look at the spirit and opportunity rover imaging when the surfaces of the rovers are shown. after many months and even some years trekking around on the mars super dry "dusty" surface, the rover hardware surfaces including all of the onboard great many nooks and crannies and dirt catchers are pristine clean. either the rovers in these particular images are not on mars or, if one argues that they are, then mars just clearly isn't all that dusty, at least not to the degree as portrayed here in this mro image. you just can't have your cake and eat it to as the saying goes.

in my opinion, what we are looking at in this scene is a demonstration of the art of misdirection and illusions of the unreal. we are looking at everything being covered by map type smudge image tampering from one end and side of the strip to the other. it is applied thin enough in places so that the rougher natural terrain can print through a bit to the surface giving the scene the vague washed out look of geology. the streaks are added for effect as eye candy for the researcher's eye to lock onto rather than be faced with image after image devoid of any such detail and thereby slowly raising inconvenient questions.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://blog.wolfram.com/2007/09/my_hobby_hunting_for_our_unive.html

be well, be love.

david

my hobby: hunting for our universe

september 11, 2007
stephen wolfram

i don't have much time for hobbies these days, but occasionally i get to indulge a bit. a few days ago i did a videoconference talking about one of my favorite hobbies: hunting for the fundamental laws of physics.

physics was my first field (in fact, i became a card-carrying physicist when i was a teenager). and as it happens, the talk i just gave (for the european network on random geometry) was organized by one of my old physics collaborators.

physicists often like to think that they're dealing with the most fundamental kinds of questions in science. but actually, what i realized back in 1981 or so is that there's a whole layer underneath.

there's not just our own physical universe to think about, but the whole universe of possible universes.

if one's going to do theoretical science, one had better be dealing with some kind of definite rules. but the question is: what rules?

nowadays we have a great way to parametrize possible rules: as possible computer programs. and i've built a whole science out of studying the universe of possible programs--and have discovered that even very simple ones can generate all sorts of rich and complex behavior.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

once in a while newscientist posts a pay per view article free worth posting.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19225811.300-fold-testament-the-shape-of-the-universe.html

be well, be love.

david

fold testament: what shape is the universe?
stephen battersby

as big questions go, it's hard to get much bigger. does space go on forever? some cosmologists suspect not. rather than stretching off into infinity, space might be a much smaller, more manageable place. if we could cross the cosmos in a spaceship, then like sailors circumnavigating the globe, we might find ourselves back where we started.

unlike the earth, though, the universe does not have to be round. its true shape is still a mystery. is it flat like a sheet of paper? is it curved? is it tied in a knot, tangled by gravity at the very beginning of the big bang? does it even make sense to talk about the shape of something as complicated as the universe?

close to an answer

after years of detective work, cosmologists are at last beginning to get a little closer to some answers. in their quest to discover the shape of things, they have already explored to the edge of the observable universe - and they are even hoping to go beyond.

it is easy to visualise the shape of ordinary objects because you can look at them from the outside. you can pick up a cup, view it at different angles, feel its curves and surfaces, poke a finger through the handle. but we can't do this with the universe because we're stuck inside it - in fact, according to some definitions, it is all that exists. there are, however, still ways to feel its shape from the inside.

our best bet for studying the universe is in the form of ancient microwave radiation that survives from when the universe was 380,000 years old and the universe became less dense. the first complete map of this cosmic microwave background (cmb) was made by the cobe satellite in 1993. then in 2001, nasa launched the wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe (wmap) to produce much more sensitive and detailed maps of the cmb.

both cobe and wmap have revealed that the microwave sky is mottled with warmer and cooler splotches that reflect variations in the density of the youthful universe. the pattern fits modern cosmological models neatly, except for one problem: there are no fluctuations at the very largest scales. if you blur the microwave map into big enough pixels, around 60 degrees across or more, then it becomes an eerie blankness - there is no large-scale variation at all.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/09/21/sciuni121.xml

be well, be love.

david

parallel universe proof boosts time travel hopes
last updated: 3:01pm bst 21/09/2007

science fiction looks closer to becoming science fact, reports roger highfield

parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by oxford scientists that sweeps away one of the key objections to the mind boggling and controversial idea.

the work has wider implications since the idea of parallel universes sidesteps one of the key problems with time travel. every since it was given serious lab cred in 1949 by the great logician kurt godel, many eminent physicists have argued against time travel because it undermines ideas of cause and effect to create paradoxes: a time traveller could go back to kill his grandfather so that he is never born in the first place.

but the existence of parallel worlds offers a way around these troublesome paradoxes, according to david deutsch of oxford university, a highly respected proponent of quantum theory, the deeply mathematical, successful and baffling theory of the atomic world.

he argues that time travel shifts between different branches of reality, basing his claim on parallel universes, the so-called "many-worlds" formulation of quantum theory.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=107118

be well, be love.

david

bioplasma bodies
column: plasma metaphysics
posted on thursday, 27 september, 2007

jay alfred: "astronomers say they have discovered a giant magnetic field that is coiled like a snake around a rod-shaped gas cloud in the constellation orion." - ker than, space 'slinky' confirms theory with a twist. the helical shape of the magnetic field around the gas cloud in the constellation orion is believed to be caused by matter in the interstellar cloud moving in a straight line along the length of the filament. when this happens, it causes the magnetic field around the cloud to spiral around in a corkscrew pattern. the researchers were able to detect this spiral shape using the green bank telescope, a radio observatory in virginia. when helical magnetic fields form in plasma, charged particles move along the field lines generating helical currents.

kundalini is a sanskrit term meaning either "coiled up" or "coiling like a snake". it is derived from the term kundala, which means a "ring" or "coil". kundalini energy has often been depicted in ancient drawings as a serpent coiled around the back part of the root chakra in three and a half turns (comparable to a solenoid or a compressed helical current) around the sacrum. the phenomenon of "kundalini awakening" gives rise to the bio-energetic phenomena experienced by meditators. the intensified energy is supposed to originate from an apparent reservoir of subtle bio-energy at the base of the spine.

the central vertical currents in the subtle body (described as ida, pingala and sushumna in the yoga literature) are often depicted in the metaphysical (particularly the yoga) literature as a pair of mutually entangled helical currents with straight currents passing through them. they appear in a familiar structure which resembles the caduceus symbol found in medical literature.

mutually entangled (double spirals) currents are frequently seen in space and laboratory plasmas. this shows that there is a strong connection between plasma dynamics and the formation of the central kundalini and pranic currents in the (supersymmetric) bioplasma body as described by plasma metaphysics. helical structures can also be found in dusty (or complex) plasma.

[jax]

admin: i'm not sure where to place this in the science forums...move it if you wish to a more appropriate thread.

it's a very interesting article that i found as link in a weekly newsletter i get from whitley striber.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=pauniverse_sun14_parallel_universes&show_article=1&cat=0




parallel universes exist - study
sep 23 11:33 pm us/eastern

parallel universes really do exist, according to a mathematical discovery by oxford scientists described by one expert as "one of the most important developments in the history of science".

the parallel universe theory, first proposed in 1950 by the us physicist hugh everett, helps explain mysteries of quantum mechanics that have baffled scientists for decades, it is claimed.

a motorist who has a near miss, for instance, might feel relieved at his lucky escape. but in a parallel universe, another version of the same driver will have been killed. yet another universe will see the motorist recover after treatment in hospital. the number of alternative scenarios is endless.

it is a bizarre idea which has been dismissed as fanciful by many experts. but the new research from oxford shows that it offers a mathematical answer to quantum conundrums that cannot be dismissed lightly - and suggests that dr everett, who was a phd student at princeton university when he came up with the theory, was on the right track. (read more in article - url given above)


l&l, jax

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/071011_universes.htm

be well, be love.

david

other universes may be detectable, published study claims
oct. 11, 2007
special to world science

if there are oth*er un*iverses out there—as some sci*en*tists pro*pose—then one or more of them might be de*tect*a*ble, a new study sug*gests.

such a find*ing, “while cur*rently spec*u*la*tive even in prin*ci*ple, and probably far-off in prac*tice, would surely con*sti*tute an ep*och*al dis*cov*ery,” re*search*ers wrote in a pa*per de*tail*ing their stu*dy. the work ap*pears in the sep*tem*ber is*sue of the re*search jour*nal phys*i*cal re*view d.

cos*mol*o*gists gen*er*ally hold that even if oth*er un*iverses ex*ist, a con*tro*ver*sial idea it*self, they would*n’t be vis*i*ble, and that test*ing for their ex*istence would be hard at best.

a half-sky map of slight tem*per*a*ture vari*a*tions in the cos*mic mi*cro*wave back*ground ra*di*a*tion, thought to map struc*tures in the very ear*ly uni*verse. blue stands for colder ar*eas; red for hot*ter re*gions, where it's be*lieved mat*ter was dens*er. these dense re*gions are thought to have lat*er be*come ga*laxy-rich zones. the boxed ar*ea marks an un*u*su*al "cold spot" as*tro*no*mers rec*og*nize in the da*ta. an un*ex*plained gi*ant cos*mic void has also been found in the di*rec*tion of that spot. in a new stu*dy, the*o*ret*i*cal phys*i*cists ar*gue that some sort of ir*reg*u*lar*ity in the mi*cro*wave back*ground, and in mat*ter dis*tri*bu*tion, might in*di*cate where our uni*verse once knocked in*to an*oth*er one. but the re*search*ers take no po*si*tion on wheth*er this cold spot could be the anom*a*ly they're look*ing for. much more work is needed, they say.

but the new stu*dy, by three sci*en*tists at the un*ivers*ity of cal*i*for*nia, san*ta cruz, pro*poses that neigh*bor*ing un*iverses might leave a vis*i*ble mark on our own—if, per*chance, they have knocked in*to it. for such a scar to be de*tect*a*ble, they add, the col*li*sion might have had to take place when our un*iverse was very young. just how the bruise might look re*mains to be clar*i*fied, they say.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://media.www.californiaaggie.com/media/storage/paper981/news/2007/10/10/sciencetech/space.discovery.may.challenge.einsteins.theory-3022842.shtml

be well, be love.

david

space discovery may challenge einstein's theory
by: mateusz malinowski
issue date: 10/10/07 section: science & tech

in august, an international team of scientists made a discovery that could radically change our view of the universe.

the team, which includes professor daniel ferenc of uc davis, operates and analyzes results from the magic (massively atmospheric gamma-ray imaging cherenkov) telescope located in the canary islands.

the magic team discovered that high-energy photons emitted from a black hole more than 300 million years ago arrived four minutes later than the low energy photons. this discovery casts doubt on einstein's theory of relativity, which has been the basis of modern physics for many years.

[BlueSojourner]

i think it dangerous (and even ungrounded) to discuss "hyperdimensional physics" without a concrete connection to electric cosmos theory which has tons of evidence to back it up.

[...] invoking "hyperdimensional physics" without the electric cosmos theory in the middle will lead to intellectual disconnect [...]

i absolutely agree with your perspective! i have been aware of both the hyperdimensional physics material and the electric universe material for several years, and have always felt an intuitive, mutually supportive connection between the two theories.

the eu theorists readily admit that they don't know where the electricity that permeates this universe and creates "birkeland currents" originates. similarly, the hyperdimensional theorists refer to inter-dimensional "bleed-through" and such, but i do often find myself experiencing that intellectual disconnect you mentioned.

at any rate, it seems to me that entertaining both concepts could facilitate some fascinating discoveries for the serious researcher and, although i have no idea how it was received, i did suggest to a couple "thunderbolts" team members that they look into the hyperdimensional physics angle. heh, i know how much they like to complain about the fact that mainstream astronomers and astrophysicists know virtually nothing about electrical engineering and plasma physics and how they see no value in even communicating with experts in those fields!

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.contrarianthinker.com/red%20shift.htm

be well, be love.

david

a prosaic explanation for the observation of red shifts in distant galaxies
(also explains the anomalously high red shifts found in quasars)
(may also offer a clue as to the reason for observed quantisation of red shift)
by dr. graham laurenson

let me begin by drawing your attention to the following critique of current big bang theory (bbt)

"in 1929, a cal-tech astronomer named edwin hubble observed that objects which appeared to be much further away showed a more pronounced shift towards the red end of the spectrum. scientists building on hubble's discovery concluded that the farther an object was away from earth, the faster it was receding, and calculated the relationship between distance and velocity, called the "hubble constant" and concluded on the basis of this one observed fact and the assumption that there was no other explanation for that observed fact that the universe was expanding."

and

"perhaps the biggest contradiction with the big bang theory is the question of the singularity. the "primordial egg" had to be a super-massive black hole. therefore no amount of "bang", no matter how big, is going to thrust the universe out into, well, the universe.

cosmologists eager to promote the big bang theory have hit upon the "explanation" that the laws of physics, gravity., etc. simply did not apply in those first few moments of the universe. the present cosmology theory is that the universe enjoyed a period of "rulelessness" of about 3 seconds, after which the elements formed and the fundamental forces of the universe, gravity included, were functioning as we see them today.

ah, but there is a problem. the singularity formed by the primordial egg turns out to be rather large.

estimates of the total mass of the universe vary wildly, given that the ends of the universe have not yet been determined. one estimate is found at http://www.rostra.dk/louis/quant_11.html of 2.6*1060.

from the mass, you can calculate the diameter of the event horizon by finding the distance from a point mass that will have an escape velocity of c. use sqrt(2gm/r) where m is the mass of the hole (the entire universe in this case) and r is the radius (classical), and g is the gravitational constant. work it backward starting at c and you get c^2=2gm/r.

this works out to an event horizon light years across!

in short, at the moment in time when the big bang theorists claim the universe was functioning as it does today, complete with all fundamental forces, the entirety of the universe's mass was still well within the event horizon of its own gravity well. that the well was not the product of a true singularity is irrelevant, newton's equation provides an equivalent gravity field for a singularity or a super dense mass in a localized region.

therefore the big bang, as currently described, could not have produced the universe as we see it today. at three seconds, the time the theorists claim the universe started operating as we know it, it would have come under the influence of its own gravity and unable to reach an escape velocity exceeding that of light, collapsed back into itself."

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/10/15/scistars115.xml

be well,be love.

david

amateur stargazers map a 'lopsided' universe
by roger highfield, science editor
last updated: 12:01am bst 15/10/2007

a legion of amateur stargazers has posed a profound challenge to cosmological theories: our universe appears to be lopsided.

professional astronomers had asked the public for assistance in mapping the night sky, and were stunned when they received millions of hits on their website within a few days, enabling them to classify galaxies in the universe at rocket speed.

the response has been so great that within a couple of months the galaxy zoo project has completed a preliminary analysis of the heavens which would normally take years.

the survey has revealed that the collections of millions of stars, dust, gas and planets in galaxies prefer to rotate anticlockwise from the viewpoint of an observer on earth.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

here's the latest from joseph...

http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2007/128/who-to-trust.htm

be well, be love.

david

image tampering:who can you trust?
report #128
october 15, 2007
joseph p. skipper
j. p. skipper can be contacted at: jskipper@marsanomalyresearch. com

on september 23, 2007 the following post by schade was made in the website's guest book as repeated verbatim below in green text. this person of unknown identity makes an objective and legitimate question that needs a response.

"i gotta talk about both sides here. i know i'm not suppose to just believe everything nasa says n stuff, but why would i just believe everything i hear from you guys. i want to believe this all this is true, but it is just hard for me to. how do i know that you guys personally didnt tamper with the photos. i try to go to the website listed on the photos, or look them up myself, and with the resources i have at home, i can't find anything about it. maybe you guys just have better resources than me, i don't know. i'm just saying you are telling people not to believe everything they hear, and yet you are expecting them to believe what you are saying. if i could get proof that nasa or the govt was the only ones to touch these photos, then i would believe you and start telling people."

if one has a reasonably modern software browser like microsoft's internet explorer (ie) in conjunction with a reasonably modern home computer with for example the windows operating system and a decent size hard drive for storage space, one has the most basic tools necessary to download a number of science data images and view them, at least in basic. sometimes this is all that is needed for basic examination enough to verify the reported evidence. before this report is over, you will see how this can be effectively done and with some of the strongest and most important of all evidence. however, it is true that more frequently the science data is heavily obfuscated using many different obscuring tactics and below are just a very few examples.

for example, a scene may be simply over saturated with dark or light colors that obscures evidence requiring graphics software to lighten or darken the view. scenes may be flipped or inverted at official level to distort and obscure evidence and require graphics software to flip or invert them around to different orientations to find the correct one where scenes begin to make more sense.

one tactic that is almost always done is the distancing technique. the tampering work is done in an image at much closer resolutions than officially admitted to and then the whole scene is drawn back to a more distant view presented for public consumption making any evidence left out of the tampering distant and very tiny in scale. however this technique also requires that any otherwise harmless familiar scale geology also be the subject of tampering to prevent anything coming through to researcher's eyes that may tip them off as to the true size scale and that this distancing work has been done in the image.

so a lot of normal geology gets covered over for this reason as well. from the secrecy point of view, this has another solid long term benefit. it sculpts the landscape look and feel and over time and a lot of exposure trains the researcher's eyes to accept this general look as real. in subsequent missions over time, more and more of this is fed into perception training the researcher's eye and brain into what to expect to see in the data and at the same time what not to question. remember too that this is done via automated super computers and mapping object recognition software and so human time and effort are not much of a factor in this.

most of the time, what little anomalous evidence (often geometric structures) is left out of the tampering is so distant and small in scale that adequate recognition requires too much zooming in and that in turn creates too much pixelation tending to force scenes into artificial geometric patterns that is then by design confused with the evidence rendering it questionable. first it takes software capable of zooming in on such evidence and then experience in knowing when to stop short of the point where pixelation problems begins to adversely impact the evidence.

pixelation itself is also used as an obfuscation tactic in other ways than the distancing technique. for example, a scene is subjected to offset pixels where essentially one scene or pixel set is overlaid over another identical scene but ever so slightly off center. this very quickly degrades resolution as well as creating pixelation down at the most base pixel level. the net result is that the scene cannot then be zoomed in on and examined closer without quickly encountering too much pixel distortion.

you'll note that we haven't even yet discussed object or site specific tampering within an image strip. by far the most prevalent are color coordinated smudge and/or blur applications applied in the form of many semitransparent layers to blend in with the surroundings. a few are required for blending and many are required for hiding. the greater the camera resolution, the more tiny scale and effective the applications can be made at and the more effective the then following distancing technique can be in making it all for the most part invisible in the official resolution view.

now smudge is smooth or grainy but otherwise featureless and so too much of it draws attention to itself since geological terrain is never that smooth or that featureless. the old 1970s viking images of mars are examples of lesser camera resolution combined with blanketing smudge applications very obvious over wide areas of terrain covering just about everything in a scene. the much later clementine moon imaging brings developing higher camera resolution and more object specific mapping and object recognition smudge and blur applications in preparation for the future mars missions following clementine.

the applications did a generally decent job on the more normal size objectionable anomalous moon evidence. for example, the applications enabled by closer resolution would run around a geometric structure effectively hiding it from view but also leaving the top of the structure out to break up the blank smoothness of the application a little. the problem was that in a city setting where there were a lot of such structures it left out to many structure tops giving the smooth smudge applications with a strange speckled look.

likewise, the mapping and object recognition software did not do well at all on obscuring gigantic size structures. the applications mapped to such colossal size objects just fine completely and effectively hiding them from view. however, the applications clustered too tightly to them revealing their outlines via the tampering field itself. in the case of the great towers, not only did the too tightly conforming applications reveal themselves as tampering, they also revealed the basic outline of the object they were hiding standing out very sharply from the background. not good.

these were the tampering problems carried into the subsequent missions to mars. i suspect that the data coming back was quickly determined to be insufficiently obfuscated and so the earlier missions were quickly reported as failures so that the data would not have to be publicly released and the mars secrecy revealed. the later mgs moc data was a different story. many of the tampering problems had been fixed but not quite enough with literally a little too much truth still coming through. i suspect that was the reason that the initial public release of the first mgs moc data was resisted as an emergency tactical but it was too little too late as the public began to get upset and apply pressure resulting in release of the data.

this is the reason that i tend to concentrate on the mgs moc data because it has more mistakes as to the tampering in it that i can capitalize on allowing a higher percentage of truth to come through. the next and following odyssey mission data was actually more obfuscated than the mgs moc data. after that came the esa data but it is usually presented in artificially applied color and they are also not required to present all of the data either. the artificial color is a demonstration of the effectiveness of the object mapping and recognition software technology and generally the color applications are the tampering itself. in my opinion, the esa imaging is the developing tampering model for the future imaging beyond the mro data.

the current mro data is an exercise in very high camera resolution technology first started with the mer a (spirit) and mer b (opportunity) rover imaging and the public availability of supposedly very high file size imaging such as tiff. the applications can now be made at super tiny levels rendering them almost undetectable even with the available large tiff format files. next in future missions will come this mro super high camera resolution technology combined with the artificially applied still developing esa artificial color technology that will be passed off as the real thing but isn't. count on it.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanid=sa006&colid=1&articleid=8afc73bc-e7f2-99df-31fae14b26815014

be well, be love.

david

the great cosmic roller-coaster ride
could cosmic inflation be a sign that our universe is embedded in a far vaster realm
by cliff burgess and fernando quevedo

you might not think that cosmologists could feel claustrophobic in a universe that is 46 billion light-years in radius and filled with sextillions of stars. but one of the emerging themes of 21st-century cosmology is that the known universe, the sum of all we can see, may just be a tiny region in the full extent of space. various types of parallel universes that make up a grand “multiverse” often arise as side effects of cosmological theories. we have little hope of ever directly observing those other universes, though, because they are either too far away or somehow detached from our own universe.

some parallel universes, however, could be separate from but still able to interact with ours, in which case we could detect their direct effects. the possibility of these worlds came to cosmologists’ attention by way of string theory, the leading candidate for the foundational laws of nature. although the eponymous strings of string theory are extremely small, the principles governing their properties also predict new kinds of larger membranelike objects—“branes,” for short. in particular, our universe may be a three-dimensional brane in its own right, living inside a nine-dimensional space. the reshaping of higher-dimensional space and collisions between different universes may have led to some of the features that astronomers observe today.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?id=1332&category=science

here's the podcast;

http://www.earthfiles333.com/

be well, be love.

david

a quantum math description of parallel universes

© 2007 by linda moulton howe

"god does not play dice with the universe." - albert einstein, physicist
but with parallel universes, schroedinger's cat can be
both dead and alive at the same time.

october 18, 2007 davis, california - there could be another earth, a doppelganger planet, full of healthy bees in another parallel universe - just like the famous schroedinger's cat in the physics thought experiment about quantum mechanics - in which all states of existence are probable at the same time. that's why schroedinger's cat can be both dead and alive at the same time.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

you may have to copy and paste some of the links.

be well, be well.

david

part i
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwiyam5cako&mode=related&search=

part ii
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abv5gweaidc&mode=related&search=

part iii
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_vtxamrhhc&mode=related&search=

part iv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bqrjqhp_ne&mode=related&search=

part v
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf0npudpcfu&mode=related&search=parallel%20universes

[LightEye]

dear friends,

nasa - "where there's water there's life as we know it..." ;-)

http://www.disclose.tv/viewvideo/2063/life_on_mars/

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/071025_cosmic-defect.htm

be well, be love.

david

cosmic anomaly could point to ultimate realities
oct. 25, 2007
special to world science

an en*ig*mat*ic “cold spot” thought to have marked the in*fant un*iverse—and ac*cord*ing to one stu*dy, as*so*ci*at*ed with a giant void to*day—may re*sult from an ex*ot*ic, long-sought struc*ture called a cos*mic de*fect, a team of sci*en*tists say.

if so, this could be a mo*men*tous find*ing, be*cause such a de*fect is be*lieved to re*flect the way the var*i*ous types of forc*es in na*ture emerged from what once was a sin*gle, un*der*ly*ing force.

a cos*mic de*fect is like a cloudy spot in an ice cu*be. this arises be*cause wa*ter, so*lid*i*fy*ing, crys*tal*lizes dif*fer*ently in dif*fer*ent ar*eas. si*m*i*lar forma*t*ions, known as crys*tal de*fects, oc*cur in many sub*stances dur*ing so*lidifica*t*ion, due to im*pur*i*ties and oth*er causes. the pro*cess is al*so called “sym*me*try break*ing,” be*cause the sub*stance loses its orig*i*nal qual*ity of be*ing bas*ic*ally the same in eve*ry di*rec*tion.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

more interesting reading from dr. paul laviolette.

http://www.starburstfound.org/ydextinct/p1.html

be well, be love.

david

cause of the megafaunal extinction: supernova or galactic core outburst?
twenty-two problems with the firestone-west supernova comet theory

paul a. laviolette, ph.d.
the starburst foundation
starburstfound@aol.com
october 12, 2007

many of the ideas presented below are novel. those wishing to use any such ideas in future publications are kindly requested to cite the author as the source, mentioning either this website or his respective publication whichever is most appropriate. also those wishing to post any of this material should first contact the author for permission.

1. geochemical evidence indicating an et cause to the megafaunal extinction.

the cosmochemical evidence of the ydb group. at the may 2007 american geophysical union meeting in acapulco, a group of researchers, the so-called "younger dryas boundary (ydb) group," reported interesting findings pointing overwhelmingly to an extraterrestrial cause for the extinction of the pleistocene megafauna. particularly significant was the report of high concentrations of iridium (ir) and other extraterrestrial material indicators at the allerod/younger dryas boundary marking the terminal horizon in the extinction of the pleistocene megafauna which dates around 12,950 calendar years before year 2000 (b2k) on the basis of the cariaco basin gray scale climate profile chronology. since iridium is over 10,000 times more abundant in cosmic dust and chondritic meteorites than it is in terrestrial crustal material, it serves as an excellent et material indicator. other et markers included magnetic grains, microspherules, and fullerenes saturated with the rare isotope helium-3.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12853-black-holes-may-harbour-their-own-universes.html

be well, be love.

david

black holes may harbour their own universes
15:16 31 october 2007
newscientist.com news service
mason inman

when matter gets swallowed by a black hole, it could fall into another universe contained inside the black hole, or get trapped inside a wormhole-like connection to a second black hole, a new study suggests.

what's inside a black hole is one of the biggest mysteries in physics. the theory that predicted black holes in the first place – general relativity – says that all the matter inside them gets squashed into a central point of infinite density called a singularity. but then, "things break down mathematically", says christian böhmer of university college london, in the uk. "we would like to see the singularity removed."

many researchers believe that some kind of new, overarching theory that unites gravity and quantum effects will resolve the problem. string theory is the most popular of these alternatives.

but böhmer and colleague kevin vandersloot of the university of portsmouth in the uk use a rival approach called loop quantum gravity, which defines space-time as a network of abstract links that connect tiny chunks of space.

loop quantum gravity has been used before to tackle the singularity that would seem to have occurred at the origin of our universe. it suggests that instead of a big bang, an earlier universe could have collapsed and then exploded outward again in a "big bounce".

[LightEye]

dear friends,

make sure you check out the first link in the article;-)

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/534609/?sc=swhn

be well, be love.

david

it all began with an end – new theory on origin and future of the universe

the universe’s clock has neither a start nor finish, yet time is finite according to a new zealand theorist. the theory, which tackles the age-old mystery of the origin of the universe, along with several other problems and paradoxes in cosmology, calls for a new take on our concept of time.

"a good way to think about it is to picture a clock, with the big bang being at time %3d 0, the universe beginning to contract at 6 o'clock, and the big crunch being at 12 o'clock. just before 12, the clock resets and immediately resumes at 0. although the hands of the clock will continue to rotate indefinitely, it is the very same 12 hour interval that plays over, not a later one%3b there are no past or future cycles of the universe. it is one and the same."

newswise — the universe’s clock has neither a start nor finish, yet time is finite according to a new zealand theorist. the theory, which tackles the age-old mystery of the origin of the universe, along with several other problems and paradoxes in cosmology, calls for a new take on our concept of time – one that has more in common with the “cyclic” views of time held by ancient thinkers such as plato, aristotle and leonardo da vinci, than the christian calender and bible-influenced belief in “linear” time now so deeply imbedded in modern western thinking.

following its initial publication on the arxiv physics archive at cornell university earlier this year [url: http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0612053], the author of the theory, peter lynds, will present a second paper about it at the international conference on complex systems in boston on the 1st of november [url: http://necsi.org/events/iccs7/viewpaper.php?id=225]. another group will also be presenting a conference paper about the theory.

lynds’ theory involves the second law of thermodynamics, a bedrock of physics and the explanation behind why we only ever experience events evolving in one time direction in nature. this law is related to the fact that heat can never pass spontaneously from a colder to a hotter body. as a function of heat’s ability to disperse, hot flows to cold. because of this, natural processes that involve energy transfer tend to have one direction and to be irreversible. however, what would happen if, due to certain extreme physical conditions, heat was unable to flow to cold and was forced to flow to hotter?

[LightEye]

dear friends,

nice from maurice...

theory of the universe - maurice cotterell pt. 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oewzv5pdlwc

theory of the universe - maurice cotterell pt. 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3s0zbnhui8

theory of the universe - maurice cotterell pt. 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrshvssvgkq

theory of the universe - maurice cotterell pt. 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djqa3_zsehe

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071107/full/450147a.html

be well, be love.

david

peering into the heart of a black hole
a glimpse beyond the event horizon.
philip ball

no light escapes the event horizon, so the infinitely dense singularity remains hidden.

quantum mechanics might be capable of stripping bare a black hole to reveal the mysterious and unseeable 'singularity' that exists at its heart1, say george matsas and andré da silva of the são paulo state university in brazil.

it has long been suspected that these singularities — where the known laws of physics break down — are always decorously veiled behind the 'event horizon', a boundary beyond which light cannot escape from the fearsome gravitational pull of a black hole. theoretically, nothing within an event horizon can ever be perceived or investigated by an outside observer, because no light can escape. so the singularities remain insulated from the rest of the universe.

this amounts to what in 1969 physicist roger penrose called 'cosmic censorship', whereby the laws of physics conspire to save us from having to gaze on the unthinkable. according to einstein's general theory of relativity, in the middle of a black hole, its mass collapses in on itself to form an infinitely small, infinitely dense point, where space-time itself is punctured. even causality — the relation of a cause and its effect — breaks down, which seems to defy not only physics but logic. “penrose's motivation seemed to be to preserve the decorum of physics,” matsas says.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/the-man-who-imagined-wormholes-and-schooled-hawking

be well, be love.

david

the man who imagined wormholes and schooled hawking
kip thorne revolutionized physics, did the science for contact, and straddled the cold war divide.
by susan kruglinski

most people think of space as nothingness, the blank void between planets, stars, and galaxies. kip thorne, the feynman professor of theoretical physics at caltech, has spent his life demonstrating otherwise. space, from his perspective, is the oft-rumpled fabric of the universe. it bends, stretches, and squeezes as objects move through it and can even fold in on itself when faced with the extreme entities known as black holes. he calls this view the “warped side of the universe.”

strictly speaking, thorne does not focus on space at all. he thinks instead of space-time, the blending of three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time described by einstein’s general relativity. gravity distorts both aspects of space-time, and any dynamic event—the gentle spinning of a planet or the violent colliding of two black holes—sends out ripples of gravitational waves. measuring the direction and force of these waves could teach us much about their origin, possibly even allowing us to study the explosive beginning of the universe itself. to that end, thorne has spearheaded the construction of ligo [laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory], a $365 million gravitational-wave detector located at two sites: louisiana and washington state. ligo’s instruments are designed to detect passing gravitational waves by measuring minuscule expansions and contractions of space-time—warps as little as one-thousandth the diameter of a proton.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://genesis1.phys.cwru.edu/~krauss/essay_krauss.html

be well, be love.

david

does the universe have a purpose?

unlikely.

perhaps you hoped for a stronger statement, one way or the other. but as a scientist i don't believe i can make one. while nothing in biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, or cosmology has ever provided direct evidence of purpose in nature, science can never unambiguously prove that there is no such purpose. as carl sagan said, in another context: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

of course, nothing would stop science from uncovering positive evidence of divine guidance and purpose if it were attainable. for example, tomorrow night if we look up at the stars and they have been rearranged into a pattern that reads, "i am here," i think even the most hard-nosed scientific skeptic would suspect something was up.

but no such unambiguous signs have been uncovered among the millions and millions of pieces of data we have gleaned about the natural world over centuries of exploration. and this is precisely why a scientist can conclude that it is very unlikely that there is any divine purpose. if a creator had such a purpose, she could choose to demonstrate it a little more clearly to the inhabitants of her creation.

one is always free, as some people do, to interpret the laws of nature as signs of purpose, as for example pope pius did when belgian physicist-priest george lemaitre demonstrated that einstein's general theory of relativity implied the universe had a beginning. the pope interpreted this as scientific proof of genesis, but lemaitre asked him to stop saying this. the big bang, as it has become known, can be interpreted in terms of a divine beginning, but it can equally be interpreted as removing god from the equation entirely. the conclusion is in the mind of the beholder, and it is outside of the realm of scientific theory and prediction.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12911-new-evidence-for-extragalactic-lifeforming-matter.html

be well, be love.

david

new evidence for extragalactic life-forming matter
11:04 13 november 2007
newscientist.com news service
david shiga

tantalising traces of the building blocks of life have been spotted in nearby galaxies. however, working out the identity of these carbon-containing molecules, and when they became abundant, is proving tricky, say astronomers.

astrophysicists believe that organic molecules were present in the cloud of dust and gas from which our solar system formed, providing the raw materials for life on earth. astronomers can see these molecules throughout our galaxy, which is one reason why many believe conditions may also be ripe for life in other parts of the milky way, and perhaps further afield.

so the hunt is on to find these molecules in other galaxies. by looking at galaxies similar to our own, but at an earlier stage of their evolution, astronomers hope to work out how long these molecules have been abundant in the universe, and therefore how long the conditions suitable for life as we know it have prevailed.

the chemical signature of a class of organic compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons can be seen in the way they absorb light from distant stars. the molecules are thought to leave a complex pattern of dark bands in these spectra called diffuse interstellar bands (dibs).

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/cosmological_data_affected_by_an_unexpected_source _of_radiation_in_interstellar_space_999.html

be well, be love.

david

cosmological data affected by an unexpected source of radiation in interstellar space

dr. gerrit verschuur, a pioneer in the science of radio astronomy, has been studying the properties of the milky way using interstellar hi for almost 50 years. according to his recent work, it appears that many of the small-scale structures observed by wmap are correlated with hi.

by staff writers
memphis tn (spx) nov 13, 2007

the widely lauded discovery of small-scale structure in the cosmic microwave background may be seriously affected by a previously unidentified source of radio emission in our own milky way galaxy. this is the conclusion arrived at by dr. gerrit verschuur, adjunct professor of physics at the university of memphis. his work will be published in the december 10 issue of the astrophysical journal.

verschuur was studying data from the first ever all-sky survey of interstellar neutral hydrogen (hi) when he noticed intriguing similarities to the structure observed by the microwave anisotropy probe (wmap) spacecraft.

wmap was designed to detect faint variations in the cosmic microwave background, a pervasive signal left over from the big bang itself. this anisotropy may represent the first step in the structural evolution of the universe, a middle ground between the ultra-smooth cosmic microwave background and the clusters of galaxies that exist today.

the anisotropy detected with wmap confirms a discovery made a decade earlier by the cosmic background explorer (cobe) spacecraft. as a result, the cobe scientists won the 2006 nobel prize in physics.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

look to the stars - for there you will see your past...

and there you will see your future...

part i
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x08alwrar4e

part ii
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-xwaxe4xjg

part iii
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bdlk-xxd6i

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,

more on solar system changes...

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1699

be well, be love.

david

auroras brighten ganymede's poles
wednesday, 14 november 2007
by ker than
cosmos online

new york: a mechanism similar to the one behind earth's northern lights, or aurora borealis, might be brightening the polar caps of ganymede, jupiter's largest moon.

ganymede has a thick outer ice layer and a mantle of ice and rock. it is the largest satellite in the solar system, and though it has less mass, it has a greater diameter than the planet mercury.

the moon is unique in that it is the only one known to have a magnetic field. another aspect of ganymede that has long puzzled scientists is that its surface is brightest at high latitudes (greater than 40 degrees), near to the poles.

now, a new computer model detailed in the journal icarus suggests the two anomalies are linked.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

way cool... ;-)

be well, be love.

david

way cool... ;-)

sounds of enceladus
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/video-details.cfm?videoid=86

cassini's magnetometer instrument detected an atmosphere around enceladus during the feb. 17, 2005, flyby and again during a march 9, 2005, flyby. this audio file is based on the data collected from that instrument.
ion cyclotron waves are organized fluctuations in the magnetic field that provide information on what ions are present. cassini's magnetometer detected the presence of these waves in the vicinity of saturn's moon enceladus. this audio file shows the power of these waves near enceladus.

the cassini-huygens mission is a cooperative project of nasa, the european space agency and the italian space agency. the jet propulsion laboratory, a division of the california institute of technology in pasadena, manages the mission for nasa's science mission directorate, washington, d.c. the cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at jpl. the magnetometer team is based at imperial college in london, working with team members from the united states and germany.


radar echoes from titan's surface
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/video-details.cfm?videoid=81

this recording was produced by converting into audible sounds some of the radar echoes received by huygens during the last few kilometres of its descent onto titan. as the probe approaches the ground, both the pitch and intensity increase. scientists will use intensity of the echoes to speculate about the nature of the surface.

speeding through titan's haze
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/videos/video-details.cfm?videoid=80

this recording is a laboratory reconstruction of the sounds heard by huygens' microphones. several sound samples, taken at different times during the descent, are here combined together and give a realistic reproduction of what a traveller on board huygens would have heard during one minute of the descent through titan's atmosphere.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

strange indeed... ;-)

http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2007/130/mars-strange-1.dwt

be well, be love.

david

mars strange evidence-1
report 130
november 18, 2007
joseph p. skipper
j. p. skipper can be contacted at: jskipper@marsanomalyresearch.com

as this report's title suggests, we'll take a look here at some unusual and odd but interesting mars evidence that doesn't lend itself very well to quicker recognition or interpretation. feel free to consider it and decide what you think about it.

[dariusdjc]

that link you posted is not working for me. this one did :)

http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/evidence-reports/2007/130/mars-strange-1.htm

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/world/dark-energy-may-mean-the-end-of-the-universe/2007/11/22/1195321899715.html

be well, be love.

david

'dark energy' may mean the end of the universe
november 22, 2007 - 6:19am

paris, nov 21 afp - astronomers may have unwittingly hastened the end of the universe by simply looking at it, according to a theory reported in next saturday's new scientist.

the novel idea is being aired by two us physicists, who attack the notion that the universe, believed to have been created in the "big bang" some 13.7 billion years ago, will go on, well, forever.

in fact, the poor old cosmos is in a rather delicate state, they say.

until recently, a common idea was that the energy unleashed in the big bang happened when a "false vacuum" - a bubble of high energy with repulsive gravity - broke down into a safe, zero-energy "ordinary" vacuum.

but recent evidence has emerged that places a cosmic question-mark over this cosy thought.

for one thing, cosmologists have discovered that the universe is still expanding.

and, they believe, a strange, yet-to-be-detected form of energy called dark energy pervades the universe, which would explain why the sum of all the visible sources of energy fall way short of what should be out there.

dark energy, goes the thinking, is a result of the big bang and is accelerating the universe's expansion.

if so, the universe is not in a nice, stable zero-vacuum state but simply another "false vacuum" state that may abruptly decay again - and with cataclysmic consequences.

the energy shift from the decay would destroy everything in the universe, "wiping the slate clean," says lawrence krauss of case western reserve university in cleveland, ohio.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/cpg.html

be well, be love.

david

the cosmic power grid
"the extraordinary thing is that
scientists accept the big bang and in
the same breath deride the creationists."
-- wallace thornhill

an idealized universe

i remember once, back in 1980, catching a plane from orlando to new york, wearing just lightweight clothes appropriate to the laid-back and balmy life of central florida, where i had moved a year previously from massachusetts. it was early february. twenty minutes from landing, the pilot announced that the ground temperature at la guardia was thirty degrees, and it was snowing. i took a cab into manhattan, and the first place i directed the driver to was "a menswear store--any store!" two or three days were to go by before i could feel warm again. it's easy to forget that what we see when we look out at our own back yard isn't representative of the way things are everywhere.

modern astronomy has its roots in the work of such figures as kepler, newton, and laplace, whose laws described a mechanical universe consisting of electrically neutral bodies moving in a vacuum under the influence of gravity. and today's reigning cosmological theory concerning the origin and evolution of the universe as a whole is based upon einsteinian general relativity, which again is an essentially gravitational picture. yet over 99.9% of the matter that we observe in the universe exists not as solids, liquids, and gases of the kind that make up our immediate planetary environment, but in the form known as "plasma."

[tanam]

hello,
don't know if this one had been posted yet or not? it's very beautiful and elegant explanation.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4773590301316220374&q=%22thunderbolts+of+the+gods%22&total=17&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0


t^2

[music=geometry]

i saw this not to long ago and i too was surprised that one had yet posted something recent or ongoing about this topic. the electric universe is a wonderful idea which does fill in the gaps for the standard cosmological model.
imagine it... an electric galaxy fused with the energy of the universe... an electrical sun, alive and fused with the power of the galaxy. an electric planet, fused with the power of the sun! (as above and so it will be below) all the way down to the algea on a rock. we all thrive and depend on this energy in form or another. plants need sun, animals (if you eat them) need the plants and sun to grow, just as we do.

and if it is true, and energy is everything that ever was, is, and ever will be, we can see how this can parrallel "god". (everything that was, is and will be)

being electrical in nature it's rather amazing to see it all come together. i'm glad someone posted on this topic. it brings something tangible, something in numbers to our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. so in theory, when we say we are part of the higher self, or higher energy, we really are in mind body and spirit! :d

m=g

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/15488/1066/

be well, be love.

david

has first evidence of another universe been seen?
by william atkins
sunday, 25 november 2007
page 1 of 2

astronomers announced in august 2007 the discovery of a large hole at the edge of our universe. since then, theoretical physicist and cosmologist laura mersini-houghton and colleagues have claimed it is an “unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own.”

the article entitled “astronomers find enormous hole in the universe” discusses the august 2007 discovery of the hole. it is located at the national radio astronomy observatory website.

dr. laura mersini-houghton is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the university of north carolina (chapel hill).

the hole is estimated to be almost one billion light-years across, where one light-year is about 9.5 trillion kilometers (5.9 trillion miles) and is located within the constellation eridanus.

the mersini-houghton team states that the hole is another universe at the edge of our own universe. such an explanation, if true, would be the first experimental evidence of such an exo-universe, or a universe outside of our own universe.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

i've been doing an update of celestial warming in our sol system and came upon thi article which i hadn't seen before.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006gl028764.shtml

be well, be love.

david

suggestive correlations between the brightness of neptune, solar variability, and earth's temperature

h. b. hammel

space science institute, boulder, colorado, usa

g. w. lockwood

lowell observatory, flagstaff, arizona, usa

abstract

long-term photometric measurements of neptune show variations of brightness over half a century. seasonal change in neptune's atmosphere may partially explain a general rise in the long-term light curve, but cannot explain its detailed variations. this leads us to consider the possibility of solar-driven changes, i.e., changes incurred by innate solar variability perhaps coupled with changing seasonal insolation. although correlations between neptune's brightness and earth's temperature anomaly—and between neptune and two models of solar variability—are visually compelling, at this time they are not statistically significant due to the limited degrees of freedom of the various time series. nevertheless, the striking similarity of the temporal patterns of variation should not be ignored simply because of low formal statistical significance. if changing brightnesses and temperatures of two different planets are correlated, then some planetary climate changes may be due to variations in the solar system environment.

received 14 november 2006; accepted 15 march 2007; published 19 april 2007.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13043-milky-ways-two-stellar-halos-have-opposing-spins.html

be well, be love.

david

milky way's two stellar halos have opposing spins
18:03 12 december 2007
newscientist.com news service
zeeya merali

we call it home, but the milky way can still surprise us. it does not have just one halo of stars, as we thought, but two. the finding calls into question our theories for how our galaxy formed.

daniela carollo at the torino observatory in italy and her colleagues were measuring the metal content and motion of 20,000 stars in the milky way, observed by the sloan digital sky survey, when they made their discovery.

they found that the halo can be divided into two distinct regions, rotating in opposite directions, and containing stars of different chemical composition. "we really weren't expecting to see anything like this," says carollo.

the team found that the inner halo is flattened and extends out to about 4.6 x 1017 kilometres from the galactic centre, rotating at 20 kilometres per second, in the same sense that the sun travels round the galactic centre. the outer halo is spherical, stretching out to over 6.0 x 1017 kilometres and spinning in the opposite direction at about 70 kilometres per second.

it seems odd that no one noticed this in the past, but carollo points out that while astronomers had found a few stars that appeared to be moving in the "wrong direction", they did not have enough data to conclude that the halo was split into two parts.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/071212-saturn-halo.html

be well, be love.

david

saturn ringed by electric doughnut
by dave mosher
staff writer
posted: 12 december 2007
01:00 pm et

homer simpson, meet your match in space: astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lopsided "doughnut" of electrified plasma surrounding saturn.

the giant ring current, as the doughnut is called, was confirmed following analysis of recent cassini spacecraft data. but the new information adds a twist to the electric phenomenon, which extends more than 746,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) into space: it rotates.

don mitchell, an astrophysicist at johns hopkins university and co-author of a new study detailed in the dec. 13 issue of the journal nature, revealed his team's initial findings at a conference earlier this year, but said the new study now confirms them. he explained that most of saturn's ring current plasma comes from its ice-spewing moon enceladus.

"earth's ring current is made of upper atmosphere and solar wind particles, so it's mostly hydrogen," mitchell said. "but saturn's source is by and large enceladus, which shoots out a whole lot of oxygen in the form of water."

[pyramidnj]

hi all....there is certainly more to come from this "new" discovery....;)
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20071212/sc_space/hugenewfoundpartofmilkywayrotatesbackward

huge newfound part of milky way rotates backward

robert roy britt
senior science writer
space.com1 hour, 57 minutes ago

our milky way galaxy has two distinct parts in its outer reaches that rotate in opposite directions, astronomers announced today.

the galaxy has a bulbous core where stars are tightly packed and orbiting rather furiously around the central black hole. then there's the big flat disk with its spiral arms, also orbiting the galactic center somewhat in the manner of a hurricane's spiral bands. we live on one of those arms. around it all is a halo of stars that don't all behave in such an orderly fashion. that much researchers knew.

now they find the halo has two parts.

"by examining the motions and chemical makeup of the stars, we can see that the inner and outer halos are quite different beasts and they probably formed in different ways at different times," said daniela carollo, a researcher at italy's torino observatory and the australian national university.

the finding, detailed in the dec. 12 issue of the journal nature, is based on 20,000 stars observed as part of the sloan digital sky survey.

the main galactic disk, home to our sun, rotates counterclockwise as seen from above at an average speed of 500,000 mph. surrounding the disk is what's now called the inner halo. it orbits in the same direction at about 50,000 mph. the outer halo, a sparsely populated region, spins in the opposite direction at roughly 100,000 mph.

there are chemical differences between the two parts, too. stars in the inner halo have three times as many heavy atoms, including iron and calcium. these heavy elements were produced by massive stars that exploded fantastically and begat subsequent generations of stars.

"the halo is clearly divisible into two, broadly overlapping components," said study team member timothy c. beers of michigan state university. "the discovery gives us a much clearer picture of the formation of the first objects in our galaxy and in the entire universe."

the study adds to other evidence showing the galaxy was not built in a cosmic day. rather, it assembled over time, gobbling smaller galaxies in one of nature's greatest construction projects.

the inner halo probably formed first, from collisions between smaller galaxies that had been captured by the milky way's gravitation. the outer halo formed later, the thinking goes, as small galaxies (orbiting opposite our own) were lured in and torn apart.

"we still have a lot to understand," said masashi chiba of japan's tohoku university.
the strangest things in space video: our corner of the cosmos when galaxies collide original story: huge newfound part of milky way rotates backward

[music=geometry]

it's amazing. i posted up on the electric universe as well, with the same connections made as you did, but for some reason it didn't gain really any ground, and i was sure that it would. it appeared to have answered questions for general cosmology, brings in hdp, and even has the spark of the divine.

i mean, if energy is always around, and it just changes and transmutes for ever, much like the soul energy then why not even a mention? seems like a very valid reason to further studies.

maybe this is the wrong forum to post it on i guess.

i'm sure if some more "well known" members of this forum posted on it, than it would have gained more ground, but that in itself poses a much more ominous threat.

that many just follow much like the masses, and do not creat a paths for themselves. :confused:

[LightEye]

dear friends,

more from michio kaku and others...

horizons - parallel universes part 1 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kvseyozfte&feature=related

horizons - parallel universes part 2 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3e7-pqap1u&feature=related

horizons - parallel universes part 3 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdv0w0h5nio&feature=related

horizons - parallel universes part 4 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpgpyc2c4qy&feature=related

horizons - parallel universes part 5 of 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egidwarg57u&feature=related

horizons - parallel universes part 6 the final part
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vicf04qxhy8&feature=related

be well, be love.

david

concentration on the parallel universes associated with string theory and a look at m theory (membrane theory), which is a new look on the old big bang theory. with michio kaku and others.

[Verm]

for the first time astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole blasting its galactic neighbor with a deadly beam of energy.

the "death star galaxy," as nasa astronomers called it, could obliterate the atmospheres of planets but also trigger the birth of stars in its wake of its destructive beam. fortunately, the cosmic violence is a safe distance from our own neck of the cosmos.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22299201/

[LightEye]

dear friends,

that's of course if you believe in the concept of time as we know it... ;-) re-member thought that there is no end, no beginning...

there is only change...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=details&grid=&xml=/earth/2007/12/18/scitime118.xml

be well, be love.

david

time is running out - literally, says scientist
by tom chivers
last updated: 6:01am gmt 18/12/2007

it's the end of the world - but not as we know it.

death star "could be wiping out alien life"
telegraph.co.uk science homepage
a spanish scientist suggests that the universe's end will come not with a bang but standstill - that time is literally running out and will, one day, stop altogether.


hubble telescope photo of a supernova. scientists use these to study distant galaxies
professor jose senovilla, of the university of the basque country, bilbao, has put forward the theory as a rival to the idea of "dark energy" - the strange antigravitational force that is posited to explain a cosmic phenomenon that has baffled scientists.

it was noticed ten years ago that distant stars - the ones on the very fringes of the universe - seemed to be moving faster than those nearer to the centre, suggesting that they were accelerating as they shot through space. dark energy was suggested as a possible means of powering that acceleration.

the problem is that no-one has any idea what it is or where it comes from.

[weboy78]

http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=news&file=article&sid=654

summary (oct 30, 2003): never before have scientists been able to study phenomena in the immediate neighborhood of a black hole in such a detail. strong infrared flares from the center of our own milky way suggest a strongly rotating black hole, judging by the rapid on-off signals being broadcast. such remnants are the only means for such a massively dense object to be detectable, since its gravitational pull is so strong that even light cannot escape.

[weboy78]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/81238

asteroid may hit mars in next month

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=0r02qaoy2nly1qfiqmfsffoavcbq 0iv0?view=details&grid=&xml=/earth/2007/12/23/scicosmos123.xml

be well, be love.

david

'test tube universe' hints at unifying theory
by roger highfield, science editor
last updated: 12:01am gmt 26/12/2007

a "universe in a test tube" that could be used to assess theories of everything has been created by physicists.

the test tube, the size of a little finger, has been cooled to a fraction of a degree above the lowest possible temperature, absolute zero, which is just over 273 degrees below the freezing point of water.

inside the tube an isotope of helium (called helium three) forms a "superfluid", an ordered liquid where all the atoms are in the same state according to the theory that rules the subatomic domain, called quantum theory.

what is remarkable is that atoms in the liquid, at temperatures within a thousandth of a degree of absolute zero, form structures that, according to the team at lancaster university, are similar those seen in the cosmos.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

you just gotta like this guy...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pahmfmh7zvy

michio mentions thomas banchoff. here's a link to his work;

introducing dimensions and scaling and measurement
http://www.mathaware.org/mam/00/master/essays/b3d/index.html

be well, be love.

david

[alchemikey]

http://www.realitysandwich.com/unwinding_cosmos

at present there is a great deal of interest (and confusion) around a new field of science generally referred to as torsion physics. the einstein-cartan theory upon which it is based describes magnetism and gravity as two sides of the same coin – the curvature and twisting of spacetime. it may well give us the missing link needed to solve the world's energy and ecological crises while offering the ultimate "theory of everything."

most of us are aware of einstein's general relativity theory and how it describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime similar to the way a bowling ball stretches a trampoline. in torsion physics, this model adds a spin or twist to spacetime making it more like the surface tension of water going down a drain. as water swirls due to the change of density between the air and water in the drain, the water surface curves and curls towards the drain creating torque. torsion physics describes everything as spinning like this into regions of high density.

peace,
mikey

[moderator: since this is david wilcock's site this forum is in, let me please mention all his information on torsion fields that is available]

[LightEye]

dear friends,

well alchemikey you beat me to it. i was just reading this...

oh well...

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.physorg.com/news118241154.html

be well, be love.

david

stranger that fiction: parallel universes beguile science

is the universe -- correction: "our" universe -- no more than a speck of cosmic dust amid an infinite number of parallel worlds?

a staple of mind-bending science fiction, the possibility of multiple universes has long intrigued hard-nosed physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists too.


we may not be able -- as least not yet -- to prove they exist, many serious scientists say, but there are plenty of reasons to think that parallel dimensions are more than figments of eggheaded imagination.

the specter of shadow worlds has been thrown into relief by the december release of "the golden compass," a hollywood blockbuster adapted from the first volume of philip pullman's classic sci-fi trilogy, "his dark materials".

in the film, an orphaned girl living in an alternate universe goes on a quest, accompanied by an animal manifestation of her soul, to rescue kidnapped children and discover the secret of a contaminating dust said to be leaking from a parallel realm.

talking bears and magic dust aside, the basic premise of pullman's fantasy is not beyond the scientific pale.

"the idea of multiple universes is more than a fantastic invention -- it appears naturally within several scientific theories, and deserves to be taken seriously," said aurelien barrau, a french particle physicist at the european organization for nuclear research (cern), hardly a hotbed of flaky science.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://blog.hasslberger.com/2007/12/star_formation_reverse_whirlpo.html#more

be well, be love.

david

star formation: 'reverse whirlpool' or accretion vortex?

star formation is thought to be driven by gravity-induced accretion of material distributed in space. a recent article on space.com titled jets spiral in 'reverse whirlpool' from star illustrates this widely accepted but mistaken conception of the formation of heavenly bodies. space.com's jeanna bryner reports that

"astronomers have observed for the first time a jet of matter spiraling outward from an infant star, as if a lengthy strand of curly pasta. the enormous jet, which shoots out in two directions, is rocketing material away from the so-called protostar and into interstellar space at more than 'supersonic speeds'."

"stars are thought to form at the center of rotating disks of hydrogen gas and dust", continues the article, describing the theory according to which gravitation is the principal star-forming mechanism. however, there is a problem: "the gas can't fall inward toward the star until it sheds excess spin power called angular momentum". as far as official theory goes, the vortices astronomers observed in hh 211, are thought to dissipate some of the energy of rotation which, it is argued, counter-acts accretion by giving rise to centrifugal forces.

that is the official theory, but this explanation of star formation has several problems.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/01/scientist-says.html#more

be well, be love.

david

is time literally slowing down and disappearing from the universe?

remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? new evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. this radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.

scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. they assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force "dark energy".

however, to this day no one actually knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from. professor jose senovilla, and his colleagues at the university of the basque country in bilbao, spain, have proposed a mind-bending alternative. they propose that there is no such thing as dark energy at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. senovilla proposes that we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down. at an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. however, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

there wasn't a "beginning" just as there won't be an "end." there will only be "change..."

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/the-big-bang-wa.html

be well, be love.

david

the big bang wasn't the beginning
by brandon keim december 31, 2007 | 12:34:46

what if the big bang wasn't the beginning of the universe, but only one stage in an endlessly repeated cycle of universal expansion and contraction?

so suggests mathematical physicist and string theorist neil turok. he thinks there may be many universes, at once interpolated but separate, like a mixture of gases. these universes are attracted to each other; every few trillions of trillions of years, they collide, explode, expand and contract, then repeat the sequence all over again.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

imagine my surprise...

http://www.physorg.com/news118658078.html

be well, be love.

david

hot cyclones churn at both ends of saturn

despite more than a decade of winter darkness, saturn's north pole is home to an unexpected hot spot remarkably similar to one at the planet's sunny south pole. the source of its heat is a mystery. now, the first detailed views of the gas giant's high latitudes from the cassini spacecraft reveal a matched set of hot cyclonic vortices, one at each pole.

while scientists already knew about the hot spot at saturn's south pole from previous observations by the w. m. keck observatory in hawaii, the north pole vortex was a surprise. the researchers report their findings in the jan. 4 issue of science

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=mzualdiepy0kpqfiqmfsfggavcbq 0iv0?view=details&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/01/04/scicosmic104.xml

be well, be love.

david

cosmic web to be unravelled

forget about the world wide web. the cosmic web is much bigger, stranger and more interesting, says roger highfield

plans to explore and understand the cosmic web - one of the biggest and most mysterious features of the universe - have been unveiled by scientists.

the sky appears as a vast darkness with spots of lights and clouds of dust, but astronomers have discovered that the stars and galaxies we can see are embedded in streams of light stretching between inky voids, forming a wispy invisible structure called "the cosmic web."

this "framework" for the universe contains visible matter that we are all familiar with but 80 per cent of it consists of dark matter, the matter that astronomers only know to be there because of its gravitational tug on nearby objects.

the structure, and how it glues the cosmos together, poses one of the next big challenges for astronomy. scientists believe that a quantum leap in computing power and the development of powerful new telescopes will soon unravel the secrets of the web, which reaches right into our own cosmic back yard.

one puzzle, says farbrizo nicastro of the harvard-smithsonian centre for astrophysics and colleagues, is that predictions about the makeup of ordinary matter in the web are wrong.

the web is as big as the universe itself, measuring some 14 billion light years across, adds claude-andré faucher-giguère of harvard university, another of the groups discussing the web in the journal science.

although the details are being actively investigated, its birth is one of the best understood results of cosmology. the cosmic web grew out of tiny fluctuations imprinted in the early universe shortly after the big bang, which eventually condensed into the massive structures we see now.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.thinktechnologies.com/portfolio/demos/blackhole.swf

be well, be love.

david

[weboy78]

ua astronomers on team describing new evidence of ‘inconvenient’ galaxy

tuscaloosa, ala. – discovery of two new components within a puzzling spiral galaxy confirm it must have a pair of arms winding in the opposite direction from most galaxies, according to results being presented today to the american astronomical society meeting in austin, texas. presenting the results are drs. gene byrd and ron buta, from the university of alabama; tarsh freeman, bevill community college; and dr. sethanne howard, retired from the u.s. naval observatory.

“while the existence of a galaxy with a pair of ‘backward’ arms may seem like an inconvenient truth to many, our latest analysis indicates it is, nonetheless, a reality,” says byrd, professor of astronomy at the university of alabama.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.physorg.com/news119184975.html

be well, be love.

david

hubble sees double einstein ring

the nasa/esa hubble space telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. the double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string.

more than just a novelty, a very rare phenomenon found with the hubble space telescope can offer insight into dark matter, dark energy, the nature of distant galaxies, and even the curvature of the universe. a double einstein ring has been found by an international team of astronomers led by raphael gavazzi and tommaso treu of the university of california, santa barbara.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

"that implies that something, probably the temperature of jupiter's atmosphere is changing."

more concerning solar system changes ;-)...

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/01/14/jupiter-red-spot.html

be well, be love.

david

red spot offers window into jupiter
larry o'hanlon, discovery news

keeping an eye on the spot

jan. 14, 2008 -- the mysterious great red spot of jupiter may be providing an opportunity to see how the giant planet works, say researchers.

spacecraft observations of the way bands of high winds scream past the red spot show how the spot -- inaccurately described as a storm -- is actually far calmer than other parts of the jovian atmosphere.

"the red spot is very quiet at its center," said jupiter researcher philip marcus of the university of california at berkeley.

the winds at the center are just 9 or 10 miles per hour, whereas around the perimeter they exceed 200 miles per hour.

numerical modeling of the spot, as well as laboratory experiments trying to reproduce the dynamics of the great red spot indicate there's more going on than meets the eye.

"one of the interesting things we've discovered about this is that when you try to recreate this in the lab, it's highly, highly unstable," marcus told discovery news. "it just literally rips itself to shreds."

[LightEye]

dear friends,

there was no "big bang" at least not as some would have you "believe."

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/32439

be well, be love.

david

ekpyrotic cosmology resurfaces
branes collide

a six-year-old controversial theory that told of a time before the big bang is undergoing a resurgence, only to be lampooned again by its original critics.

the theory of ekpyrotic cosmology was first put forward as an alternative to the standard “inflation” model of the universe. inflation supposes that just after the big bang the universe underwent a brief period of rapid expansion. this amplfied tiny density perturbations, which evolved into the stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters we see today. although there is currently no way to prove that inflation ever occurred, the fact that it provides such a simple explanation for cosmic structure and the flatness of the universe has cemented it in cosmological doctrine since it was outlined in the early 1980s.

in ekpyrotic cosmology — which was proposed in 2001 by physicists paul steinhardt, justin khoury, neil turok and burt ovrut — there is no beginning of time. instead, our visible universe exists on one of two four-dimensional “branes” floating in a five-dimensional space. these two branes are locked in an endless oscillatory motion in which they creep together, “bounce” through each other, withdraw and then creep together again (see animation: branes collide). at each bounce, which is like a fresh big bang, ripples in the branes collide and liberate energy at different places to produce the initial density perturbations. and because energy conservation would favour a flat brane, the theory explains why our visible universe is flat too. “it’s like the antichrist to inflation,” says khoury.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=wgv2w3zuskd1jqfiqmfsffoavcbq 0iv0?view=details&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/01/23/scimatter123.xml

be well, be love.

david

is our cosmos teeming with alien 'unmatter'?
last updated: 6:01pm gmt 23/01/2008

scientists could have overlooked a new kind of "stuff," reports roger highfield

a radical new proposal to explain one of the enduring mysteries of the universe says we are bathed in an entirely new kind of matter, consisting of "unparticles."

cosmic snapshot of dark energy enigma
cosmology study may shed new light on dark matter
astronomers find evidence of 'dark matter'

the suggestion that the universe contains a novel kind of "stuff" offers a remarkable way to solve the puzzle of dark matter, which has perplexed cosmologists since it was discovered more than 70 years ago.

even though little is known about the nature of dark matter, evidence for its existence is overwhelming, from observations of the way its invisible gravitational tug influences the movement of galaxies, to clusters of galaxies, to shaping the universe as a whole.

a zoo of unusual particles has been proposed as dark matter candidates by physicists. today, in new scientist, harvard university physicist, prof howard georgi, discusses his suggestion that the cosmos may contain an entirely new type of matter made of what are called unparticles.

but even he has difficulty putting the arcane mathematics of unparticles, which can shift identity, travel faster than light and masquerade as fractions of particles, into words. "they are so unlike anything we are familiar with," he tells us.

although unparticles sound utterly unhinged, the idea is being taken seriously because of his reputation: prof georgi was among the first theorists to suggest that three of the four forces in nature might be united in a "grand unified theory".

he helped to develop supersymmetry, to rationalise the baroque workings of the universe, and was one of the architects of quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the force that acts inside atoms.

[litllady]

the leading edge of this cloud is already interacting with gas from our galaxy," said felix j. lockman, of the national radio astronomy observatory (nrao), leader of a team of astronomers who used the national science foundation's robert c. byrd green bank telescope (gbt) to study the object.

the cloud, called smith's cloud, after the astronomer who discovered it in 1963, contains enough hydrogen to make a million stars like the sun. eleven thousand light-years long and 2,500 light-years wide, it is only 8,000 light-years from our galaxy's disk. it is careening toward our galaxy at more than 150 miles per second, aimed to strike the milky way's disk at an angle of about 45 degrees.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080112153747.htm


just thought this might interest some of you-it did me

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.physorg.com/news121602545.html

be well, be love.

david

million-degree plasma may flow throughout the galaxy
by lisa zyga

on a large scale, the milky way is considered to be a vast cold region punctured with isolated hot clouds and star clusters. while much of this space is cold and empty, researchers have recently discovered the phenomenon of funneling hot plasma. flowing plasma may funnel from one region to another through empty space, connecting otherwise isolated clouds and clusters throughout the galaxy.

researcher manuel güdel at the paul scherrer institut in switzerland and colleagues from switzerland, france and the us have recently observed the plasma flow phenomenon for the first time in the orion nebula. based on images taken with an x-ray satellite called the xmm-newton, the researchers observed the existence of a million-degree plasma flowing from the nebula into the adjacent interstellar medium, and then into the neighboring superbubble eridanus.


“although there has been a theoretical model that predicted hot gas bubbles blown by just one massive star, such has not been detected until we found confirmation in the orion nebula,” güdel told physorg.com. “we didn't look for it - we actually found this diffuse emission by chance while looking at the many stellar x-ray point sources in the field. as previous researchers have not reported diffuse x-ray emission from such star-forming regions but were rather arguing against its presence, we were indeed surprised to find such prominent emission across large regions of the nebula.”

the orion nebula hosts several thousand young stars (less than a few million years old), and almost every one of these stars vigorously emits x-rays. the satellite’s cameras observed the x-ray stars, but it also picked up a separate, fainter emission in the extended parts of the nebula. upon investigating the spectrum of this emission, the scientists discovered that the energy indicated a million-degree plasma. a dense veil of neutral gas probably hid the hot plasma from previous observations, such as those by the chandra x-ray observatory, which didn’t detect a thing.

not only did the researchers discover a new phenomenon, but they think they know what causes the super-hot, large-scale plasma. as the scientists explain, the energy required to heat such a monstrous gas is “severe.” the young stars in the orion nebula don’t seem capable of hosting such a hot, energetic structure.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/the_poincare_dodecahedral_space_model_gains_suppor t_to_explain_the_shape_of_space_999.html

be well, be love.

david

the poincare dodecahedral space model gains support to explain the shape of space
paris, france (spx) feb 13, 2008

the last fifteen years have shown considerable growth in attempt to determine the global shape of the universe, i.e. not only the curvature of space but also its topology. the concordance cosmological model which now prevails describes the universe as a flat (zero-curvature) infinite space in eternal, accelerated expansion.

however, the data delivered between 2003 and 2006 by the nasa satellite wmap, which produced a full-sky, high resolution map of the cosmic microwave background radiation (cmb), yield a very poor fit to the concordance model at large angular scales. they rather tend to favor a finite, positively curved space, and provide hints about a multiply-connected topology.

the cmb is the relics of the radiation emitted soon after the big bang. it is observed on the so-called last scattering surface (lss), a sphere of radius about 50 billion light-years around us. the tiny temperature fluctuations observed on the lss may be decomposed into a sum of spherical harmonics, much like the sound produced by a music instrument may be decomposed into ordinary harmonics.

the relative amplitudes of each spherical harmonics determine the power spectrum, which is a signature of the geometry of space and of the physical conditions which prevailed at the time of cmb emission.

now, cosmic topology predicts that a space which is smaller than the lss cannot contain vibrational modes larger than the space itself. this should lead to a cutoff of power in statistics representing these fluctuations, above which power should drop to zero. the predicted cutoff in large scale power has precisely been observed by the 2003-2006 wmap all-sky survey.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://en.epochtimes.com/news/8-2-20/66264.html

be well, be love.

david

milky way larger than first thought
aap feb 20, 2008

sydney—australian astronomers have discovered that our galaxy is twice is thick as what we once thought.

the team, led by university of sydney astrophysicist professor bryan gaensler, have calculated that the milky way is 12,000, not 6,000, light years thick.

what makes the discovery even more amazing is that it doesn't involve looking through a telescope.

professor gaensler and colleagues dr greg madsen, dr shami chatterjee and phd student ann mao downloaded previously recorded data from the internet and re-analysed it.

"we were tossing around ideas about the size of the galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses," prof gaensler said.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/02/qa_turok

be well, be love.

david

physicist neil turok: big bang wasn't the beginning
by brandon keim 02.19.08 | 8:00 pm

the big bang was big, but it wasn't the beginning, cambridge university mathematical physicist neil turok says. he theorizes that the universe is engaged in an eternal cycle of expansion and contraction: there have been many big bangs, and there will be many more.

for decades, physicists have accepted the notion that the universe started with the big bang, an explosive event at the literal beginning of time. now, computational physicist neil turok is challenging that model -- and some scientists are taking him seriously.

according to turok, who teaches at cambridge university, the big bang represents just one stage in an infinitely repeated cycle of universal expansion and contraction. turok theorizes that neither time nor the universe has a beginning or end.

it's a strange idea, though turok would say it's no stranger than the standard explanation of the big bang: a singular point that defies our laws of physics, where all equations go to infinity and "all the properties we normally use to describe the universe and its contents just fail." that inconsistency led turok to see if the big bang could be explained within the framework of string theory, a controversial and so-far untested explanation of the universe as existing in at least 10 dimensions and being formed from one-dimensional building blocks called strings. within a school of string theory known as m-theory, turok said, "the seventh extra dimension of space is the gap between two parallel objects called branes. it's like the gap between two parallel mirrors. we thought, what happens if these two mirrors collide? maybe that was the big bang."

[Art]

great article! although i would disagree with his comments about science proving there is an "intelligence" ("god"), overall this article perfectly explained "the drive" for understanding; why we keep searching, learning...

wow...

art

[weboy78]

this theory inspired me:
it seem like the tubular theory of the brain , for explain the consciousness, no?
the tubules in the brain contract itself and our moment of consciousness depend on the number of contractions, if i'm correct..

[LightEye]

dear friends,

there are no coincidences, no accidents... ;-)

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080220/full/news.2008.610.html

i've found the answer...

i think...

10122 mentioned in the article...

1+1+2+2 = 6

now lets look at the mayan calendar in 2012.

the winter solstice happens when?

21122012 @ 11:11...

add the numbers up...

2+1+1+2+2+1+2+1+1+1+1=?

15 or ?

6

imagine my surprise... ;-)

6 from our friend nick;

http://lunarplanner.com/number.html

be well, be love.

david

cosmic coincidence spotted
an absurdly large number could hold the key to universal mysteries.

philip ball

this unimaginably large number keeps popping up in descriptions of the universe.
the secret of the universe is not 42, according to a new theory, but the unimaginably larger number 10122. scott funkhouser of the military college of south carolina (called the citadel) in charleston has shown how this number — which is bigger than the number of particles in the universe — keeps popping up when several of the physical constants and parameters of the universe are combined1. this ‘coincidence’, he says, is surely significant, hinting at some common principle at work behind the scenes.

the number first turned up when, more than a decade ago, physicists discovered that the expanding universe is accelerating. this implies that there is a force that opposes gravity on very large scales, which physicists call dark energy. it is quantified by a parameter called the cosmological constant.

one interpretation of dark energy is that it results from the energy of empty space, called vacuum energy. the laws of quantum physics imply that empty space is not empty at all, but filled with particles popping in and out of existence. this particle ‘fizz’ should push objects apart, just as dark energy seems to require. but the theoretical value of this energy is immense — so huge that it should blow atoms apart, rather than just causing the universe to accelerate.

physicists think that some unknown force nearly perfectly cancels out the vacuum energy, leaving only the amount seen as dark energy to push things apart. this cancellation is imperfect to an absurdly fine margin: the unknwon 'energy' differs from the vacuum energy by just one part in 10122. it seems incredible that any physical mechanism could be so finely poised as to reduce the vacuum energy to within a whisker of zero, but it seems to be so.

[Avocet]

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13362-giant-ropes-of-dark-matter-found-in-new-sky-survey.html

large hexagrams of dark matter, millions of light years across.

[One 66]

lighteye - "i've found the answer...

i think...

10122 mentioned in the article...

1+1+2+2 = 6

now lets look at the mayan calendar in 2012.

the winter solstice happens when?

21122012 @ 11:11...

add the numbers up...

2+1+1+2+2+1+2+1+1+1+1=?

15 or ?

6"

lighteye,

i found this answer back in june 26, 1999 when i "woke up" =)

6+6 = 12 (unity/union = 1 [one]) the 6's represent me and my twin flame who i was with when i "woke up".


one 66 :cool:

[brentcochran]

i saw this picture and i thought of the hypershpere photo from banchoff, (david usually uses this photo in his articles), a sphere within a sphere, within a sphere, and so on.

[Andromeda111]

anyone else think this thread should get sticky'd? there's so much great information being submitted here, it would be nice if it could stay near the top.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

"where there's water there's life as we know it" - nasa.

by the way...

amino acids that we know aren't alien life...

be well, be love

david

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=details&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/03/13/scistar113.xml

alien life signs on aa tauri
by roger highfield, science editor
last updated: 6:01pm gmt 13/03/2008

vast amounts of water and simple organic molecules that are precursors of the building blocks of life have been found in the dust and rubble swirling around a young star similar to our own sun.

the evidence was found by analysing the infra red light sent out by the disk of material that is forming planets around the star aa tauri, some 450 light years away, in a study by nasa's spitzer space telescope.

the discovery comes as a british team reports new evidence of how our own solar system was richer in life's raw materials than previously thought.
the "spectral fingerprints" seen by the space telescope in the cradle of planet formation suggest abundant water and simple organic molecules are present in the inner disk of dust and gas surrounding the very young star which is thought to be similar to our early sun, a common kind scattered throughout our galaxy.

the new observations reveal the chemical precursors of amino amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, up to three times the distance from the sun to our own earth. astronomers believe that this may offer a unique glimpse of the emergence of life in our own solar system, including the possible seeds of early life.

[Chris Hamilton]

on march 19th, telescopes detected the strongest gamma ray burst ever. it was recorded at 7.5 billion years ago, which is before the earth was formed. wow!

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/21mar_nakedeye.htm

[Greycat]

it took about 10 minutes of reading to be completley engrossed in the subject. thanks for putting the post up. i have lots of reading to do now...

i came across a book by [please e-mail for author and title]
in chapter one, he writes this: "we have put our faith in scientists and engineers, and it has clearly paid off – except in astronomy (and possibly archeology and geology)."

ha! i love what he adds in parenthesis.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/apr/25-3-theories-that-might-blow-up-the-big-bang

be well, be love.

david

3 theories that might blow up the big bang
time may not have a beginning—and it might not exist at all.
by adam frank

for paul steinhardt and neil turok, the big bang ended on a summer day in 1999 in cambridge, england. sitting together at a conference they had organized, called “a school on connecting fundamental physics and cosmology,” the two physicists suddenly hit on the same idea. maybe science was finally ready to tackle the mystery of what made the big bang go bang. and if so, then maybe science could also address one of the deepest questions of all: what came before the big bang?

steinhardt and turok—working closely with a few like-minded colleagues—have now developed these insights into a thorough alternative to the prevailing, genesis-like view of cosmology. according to the big bang theory, the whole universe emerged during a single moment some 13.7 billion years ago. in the competing theory, our universe generates and regenerates itself in an endless cycle of creation. the latest version of the cyclic model even matches key pieces of observational evidence supporting the older view.

this is the most detailed challenge yet to the 40-year-old orthodoxy of the big bang. some researchers go further and envision a type of infinite time that plays out not just in this universe but in a multiverse—a multitude of universes, each with its own laws of physics and its own life story. still others seek to revise the very idea of time, rendering the concept of a “beginning” meaningless.

all of these cosmology heretics agree on one thing: the big bang no longer defines the limit of how far the human mind can explore.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

it's the universal heartbeat... ;-)

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/home/18333354.html

be well, be love.

david

polaris's pulsations pick up

akira fujiipolaris is important not just because it's the north star. it also happens to be the brightest and nearest cepheid variable star, 430 light-years away. cepheids, a special class of pulsating giants, have provided astronomers with a crucial link in the cosmic distance scale for almost a century. but polaris isn't just any cepheid. it has been changing its period and especially the amplitude of its pulsations.

polaris varies in brightness only slightly, by just a few percent across its 3.97-day cycle. moreover, the pulsations steadily diminished for decades: from 0.12 magnitude per cycle a century ago — almost enough to see by eye — to a mere 0.02 magnitude per cycle in the mid-1990s. astronomers wondered if polaris was about to stop pulsing completely.

apparently not. four years ago edward f. guinan (villanova university) and several colleagues reported that polaris's fluctuations bottomed out in the mid-1990s and had started increasing again, to 0.038 magnitude per cycle in 2004. now an international team of nine astronomers finds the trend continuing. from 2003 to 2007, says the team, polaris's brightness pulsations increased by an additional one-third.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1967

be well, be love.

david

earth's poles long overdue for reversal
by claire thomas
cosmos online

sydney: a reversal of the earth's magnetic poles could happen sooner than we think, according to dutch scientists who report that the planet's magnetic field is becoming gradually less stable.

a reversal could effect everything from navigation and communications equipment to the composition of the atmosphere, say experts.

the report, published today in the u.k. journal nature geoscience, found that reversals have been far more common in the last 200 million years than they were deep in the planet's history.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

this is interesting considering the strength of the rd's cme. a picture of things to come?

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13936-puny-star-unleashes-deadly-flare.html

be well, be love.

david

puny star unleashes deadly flare
18:34 19 may 2008
newscientist.com news service
david shiga

a small red dwarf star has erupted with the brightest flare ever seen from a normal star other than the sun. if the star hosted planets, the flare could have killed any life that might have existed on the unlucky worlds.

the flare, which lasted 8 hours, was first detected by nasa's wind satellite on the morning of 25 april. the agency's swift satellite detected it less than two minutes later, and traced it to a red dwarf star called ev lacertae, which is just a third as massive as the sun and puts out just 1% or so of its light.

normally, ev lacertae, which lies 16 light years from earth, is far too dim to see without a telescope.

but the flare briefly outshone the star itself, making it temporarily bright enough to have been seen with the naked eye. the flare also temporarily made ev lacertae one of the brightest sources of x-rays in the sky.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-cosmic-origins-of-times-arrow

also this video;

frank close talks about nothing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uay9bgiuxr0

be well, be love.

david

does time run backward in other universes?
one of the most basic facts of life is that the future looks different from the past. but on a grand cosmological scale, they may look the same
by sean m. carroll

key concepts
the basic laws of physics work equally well forward or backward in time, yet we perceive time to move in one direction only—toward the future. why?
to account for it, we have to delve into the prehistory of the universe, to a time before the big bang. our universe may be part of a much larger multiverse, which as a whole is time-symmetric. time may run backward in other universes.
the universe does not look right. that may seem like a strange thing to say, given that cosmologists have very little standard for comparison. how do we know what the universe is supposed to look like? nevertheless, over the years we have developed a strong intuition for what counts as “natural”—and the universe we see does not qualify.

make no mistake: cosmologists have put together an incredibly successful picture of what the universe is made of and how it has evolved. some 14 billion years ago the cosmos was hotter and denser than the interior of a star, and since then it has been cooling off and thinning out as the fabric of space expands. this picture accounts for just about every observation we have made, but a number of unusual features, especially in the early universe, suggest that there is more to the story than we understand.

among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. the microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future, yet the early universe—hot, dense, homogeneous—is completely different from today’s—cool, dilute, lumpy. the universe started off orderly and has been getting increasingly disorderly ever since. the asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. and the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

the arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. it adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080523/full/news.2008.854.html

be well, be love.

david

doughnut-shaped universe bites back astronomers say universe is small and finite.
zeeya merali

mmm... universe. calculations show it really might be shaped like the snack favourite.the doughnut is making a comeback – at least as a possible shape for our universe.

the idea that the universe is finite and relatively small, rather than infinitely large, first became popular in 2003, when cosmologists noticed unexpected patterns in the cosmic microwave background (cmb) – the relic radiation left behind by the big bang.

the cmb is made up of hot and cold spots that represent ripples in the density of the infant universe, like waves in the sea. an infinite universe should contain waves of all sizes, but cosmologists were surprised to find that longer wavelengths were missing from measurements of the cmb made by nasa’s wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe.

one explanation for the missing waves was that the universe is finite (see 'universe could be football-shaped').

[meganarline]

i haven't really checked this out yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/whatis/whatiswwt.aspx



what is wwt?
the worldwide telescope (wwt) is a web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe.

choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. feel free at any time to pause the tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off. join harvard astronomer alyssa goodman on a journey showing how dust in the milky way galaxy condenses into stars and planets. take a tour with university of chicago cosmologist mike gladders two billion years into the past to see a gravitational lens bending the light from galaxies allowing you to see billions more years into the past


megan

[donald@newdirectionscs.com]

new article on electric galaxies, donald
http://www.thunderbolts.info/thunderblogs/thornhill.htm
05/20/08

"the conformist propensity of social institutions is not the only reason that erroneous theories persevere. however, once embedded within a culture, ideas exhibit an uncanny inertia, as if obeying newton’s law to keep on going forever until acted upon by an external force." —henry zemel.

"one fact that strikes everyone is the spiral shape of some nebulae; it is encountered much too often for us to believe that it is due to chance. it is easy to understand how incomplete any theory of cosmogony which ignores this fact must be. none of the theories accounts for it satisfactorily, and the explanation i myself once gave, in a kind of toy theory, is no better than the others. consequently, we come up against a big question mark. " — henri poincaré, at the conclusion of the preface to his book, hypothèses cosmogoniques.

"space is filled with a network of currents which transfer energy and momentum over large or very large distances. the currents often pinch to filamentary or surface currents. the latter are likely to give space, as also interstellar and intergalactic space, a cellular structure." —hannes alfvén.

in an electric universe x-ray and radio astronomies are very important; x-ray because it reveals discharge activity that produces x-rays; and radio because it traces the cosmic power transmission lines in deep space through the polarization of radio waves from electrons spiralling in a magnetic field — known as ‘synchrotron radiation.’



>> the very large array (vla) of radio antennae in its most compact configuration (" d-array"). the vla is 50 miles west of socorro, new mexico on u.s. highway 60. image courtesy of nrao/aui and kristal armendariz, photographer.

a recent report from the national radio astronomy observatory (nrao) highlights the usefulness of radio astronomy in discovering some of the electrical secrets of galaxies. however, it also demonstrates the "uncanny inertia" of "erroneous theories."

new vla images unlocking galactic mysteries

astronomers have produced a scientific gold mine of detailed, high-quality images of nearby galaxies that is yielding important new insights into many aspects of galaxies, including their complex structures, how they form stars, the motions of gas in the galaxies, the relationship of "normal" matter to unseen "dark matter", and many others. an international team of scientists used more than 500 hours of observations with the national science foundation's very large array (vla) radio telescope to produce detailed sets of images of 34 galaxies at distances from 6 to 50 million light-years from earth. their project, called the hi nearby galaxy survey, or things*, required two years to produce nearly one terabyte of data. hi ("h-one") is an astronomical term for atomic hydrogen gas.

"studying the radio waves emitted by atomic hydrogen gas in galaxies is an extremely powerful way to learn what's going on in nearby galaxies."

comment: the reference to "dark matter" in the outline of the things project should be of concern to all taxpayers. the invention of undetectable "dark" matter in a gravitational model of galaxies should be ringing alarm bells and flashing warning lights for anyone with commonsense. it is saying that there may be something we don’t know about gravity or that simple newtonian mechanics does not apply to galaxies. perhaps both are true. clearly, we need a better explanation than "an invisible tooth fairy did it." to be confident we understand galaxies we need a working model that can be demonstrated in the laboratory. is there such a model?

[LightEye]

dear friends,

it is dark because of the absence of light...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/science/03dark.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

be well, be love.

david

dark, perhaps forever
the new york times
the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate. click here for the full graphic.
by dennis overbye
published: june 3, 2008
baltimore — mario livio tossed his car keys in the air.

published: june 3, 2008
baltimore — mario livio tossed his car keys in the air.



they rose ever more slowly, paused, shining, at the top of their arc, and then in accordance with everything our galilean ape brains have ever learned to expect, crashed back down into his hand.

that was the whole problem, explained dr. livio, a theorist at the space telescope science institute here on the johns hopkins campus.

a decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. having been impelled apart by the force of the big bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. if they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling.

“that is how shocking this was,” dr. livio said.

it is still shocking. although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. it has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

“the discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said edward witten, a theorist at the institute for advanced study in princeton, n.j.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7440217.stm

be well, be love.

david

hints of 'time before big bang'
by chris lintott
co-presenter, bbc sky at night, st louis, us

cosmic microwave background could hold clues about the big bang

a team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early universe may contain the signature of a time before the big bang.

the discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (cmb), light emitted when the universe was just 400,000 years old.

their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

details of the work have been submitted to the journal physical review letters.

the cmb is relic radiation that fills the entire universe and is regarded as the most conclusive evidence for the big bang.

although this microwave background is mostly smooth, the cobe satellite in 1992 discovered small fluctuations that were believed to be the seeds from which the galaxy clusters we see in today's universe grew.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5qpy_xgprui

be well, be love.

david

astronomy astrophysics electricty in space cosmology cometary comets deep impact comet halley comet wild 2 comet borrelly comet shoemaket levy 9 plasma cosmology electric universe cosmos wallace thornhill anthony perratt david talbott meteorites asteroids

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.ezinearticles.com/?dark-matter---plasma-of-super-particles&id=1240357

be well, be love.

david

dark matter - plasma of super particles

what if the electron was as massive as the proton?

lighter electrons, under the standard model, are more mobile and are captured by a nucleus of protons easily. but what if electrons were as massive as protons? would we have atoms at room temperature? would the world look the same?

supersymmetric plasma

it is postulated by plasma metaphysics that supersymmetric bulk matter or dark matter, unlike bulk matter of standard model particles in our universe, is composed of heavy negatively and positively charged particles that are similar in mass. since the negatively charged articles are just as massive as the positively charged particles, recombination to atoms may not occur even at low energies and ionization potentials will be much lower. supersymmetric bulk matter would therefore be composed of matter that is analogous to "plasma". instead of a plasma consisting of light electrons and heavy protons, however, this plasma will consist of superparticles of similar mass.

the existence of positively and negatively charged particles of similar mass is not surprising. for example, the positively-charged positron, the anti-particle of the electron, has a similar mass to the negatively-charged electron. also, included within the standard model are two types of w particles - the w+ and w- bosons (i.e. "force-particles"). the particles have electric charges of +1 and -1, respectively, and have a similar mass of 80.4 gev/c2, which makes them almost 100 times as massive as the proton and heavier than entire atoms of iron. each particle is the antiparticle of the other.

therefore it is not inconceivable that there could be positively and negatively charged superparticles with similar mass. this implies that the matter composed of these particles would be non-atomic and more in the form of what we would describe as plasma. these superparticles will be analogous to the "charginos" predicted by supersymmetry theory.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

say sacred geometry...

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/jul/16-is-the-universe-actually-made-of-math

be well, be love.

david

is the universe actually made of math?
unconventional cosmologist max tegmark says mathematical formulas create reality.
by adam frank; photography by erika larsen

cosmologists are not your run-of-the-mill thinkers, and max tegmark is not your run-of-the-mill cosmologist. throughout his career, tegmark has made important contributions to problems such as measuring dark matter in the cosmos and understanding how light from the early universe informs models of the big bang. but unlike most other physicists, who stay within the confines of the latest theories and measurements, the swedish-born tegmark has a night job. in a series of papers that have caught the attention of physicists and philosophers around the world, he explores not what the laws of nature say but why there are any laws at all.

according to tegmark, “there is only mathematics; that is all that exists.” in his theory, the mathematical universe hypothesis, he updates quantum physics and cosmology with the concept of many parallel universes inhabiting multiple levels of space and time. by posing his hypothesis at the crossroads of philosophy and physics, tegmark is harking back to the ancient greeks with the oldest of the old questions: what is real?

tegmark has pursued this work despite some risk to his career. it took four tries before he could get an early version of the mathematical universe hypothesis published, and when the article finally appeared, an older colleague warned that his “crackpot ideas” could damage his reputation. but propelled by optimism and passion, he pushed on.

[Earthforce]

cosmologist max tegmark's theory of a mathematical universe is interesting to me since so many important dates in my life have coincided with the number 9 (base number 3). my date of birth, time of birth, ssn, hometown, marriage, number in family, professional license numbers, are just a few of many examples. further, i have an unexplained fear of the number 13 (triskaidekaphobia) which i cannot explain.

i would be interested to know how many others have the same experience.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn14200-galaxy-map-hints-at-fractal-universe.html?feedid=online-news_rss20

be well, be love.

david


galaxy map hints at fractal universe

is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? a new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is – though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so.

cosmologists trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe have precious few clues from which to work. one key clue is the distribution of matter throughout space, which has been sculpted for nearly 14 billion years by the competing forces of gravity and cosmic expansion. if there is a pattern in the sky, it encodes the secrets of the universe.

a lot is at stake, and the matter distribution has become a source of impassioned debate between those who say the distribution is smooth and homogeneous and those who say it is hierarchically structured and clumpy, like a fractal.

nearly all physicists agree that on relatively small scales the distribution is fractal-like: hundreds of billions of stars group together to form galaxies, galaxies clump together to form clusters, and clusters amass into superclusters.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=details&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/06/26/scihawking126.xml

be well, be love.

david

stephen hawking's explosive new theory
by roger highfield, science editor
last updated: 12:01am bst 26/06/2008

prof stephen hawking has come up with a new idea to explain why the big bang of creation led to the vast cosmos that we can see today.
the new theory believes original estimates of big bang expansion are wrong

astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures.

they have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighbouring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation.

but that left a deeper mystery: why did inflation occur in the first place?

now new scientist reports that an answer has been proposed by prof stephen hawking of cambridge university, working with prof thomas hertog of the astroparticle and cosmology laboratory in paris.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=x49g6gsf

be well, be love.

david

twinkle, twinkle electric star

astronomers don’t know what you are!

“sit down before facts like a child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” — t.h. huxley

an undergraduate textbook on the structure and evolution of stars makes a star seem a simple thing:

“a star can be defined as a body that satisfies two conditions: (a) it is bound by self-gravity; (b) it radiates energy supplied by an internal source.” buried in this definition are some critical assumptions that sir arthur eddington bequeathed to us long before the space age in his 1926 opus, the internal constitution of the stars. but how many students now read his original work with a critical eye?

eddington wrote, “the problem of the source of a star’s energy will be considered; by a process of exhaustion we are driven to conclude that the only possible source of a star’s energy is subatomic; yet it must be confessed that the hypothesis shows little disposition to accommodate itself to the detailed requirements of observation, and a critic might count up a large number of ‘fatal’ objections.”

[sergejsh]

astrobiology is the interdisciplinary study of life in the universe, combining aspects of astronomy, biology and geology. it is focused primarily on the study of the origin, distribution and evolution of life.

some major astrobiological research topics include:

- what is life?
- how did life arise on earth?
- what do astrophysical observations tell us about the present and future of life on earth?
- what kind of environments can life tolerate?
- how can we determine if life exists on other planets?
- how often can we expect to find complex life?
- what will life consist of on other planets?
- will it be dna/carbon based or based on something else?
- what will it look like?

though once considered outside the mainstream of scientific inquiry, astrobiology has become a formalized field of study. nasa now hosts an astrobiology institute (http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/nai/). additionally, a growing number of universities in the united states (e.g., university of arizona, penn state university, and university of washington), canada, britain, and ireland now offer graduate degree programs in astrobiology.

source: wikipedia - astrobiology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/exobiology)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

astrobiology is the study of life in the universe. it investigates the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life on earth and the search for life beyond earth.

astrobiology addresses three fundamental questions:

- how does life begin and evolve?
- is there life beyond earth and how we can detect it?
- what is the future of life on earth and in the universe?

source: nasa astrobiology roadmap (http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/roadmap/index.html)

.

[The_Last_Man_50008]

has the size of the universe been confirmed or is it still part of an ongoing debate?

[weboy78]

stars from black holes

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7574255.stm

astronomers have shed light on how stars can form around a massive black hole, defying conventional wisdom.

scientists have long wondered how stars develop in such extreme conditions.

molecular clouds - the normal birth places of stars - would be ripped apart by the immense gravity, a team explains in science magazine.

but the researchers say stars can form from elliptical discs - the relics of giant gas clouds torn apart by encounters with black holes.

they made the discovery after developing computer simulations of giant gas clouds being sucked into black holes like water spiralling down a plughole.

"these simulations show that young stars can form in the neighbourhood of supermassive black holes as long as there is a reasonable supply of massive clouds of gas from further out in the galaxy," said co-author ian bonnell from st andrews university, uk.

......

[litllady]

hey all!

interesting, a new object that is found to be rotating backwards around our sun.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn14669-distant-object-found-orbiting-sun-backwards-.html

peace,
virgo

[sergejsh]

news blog at sky and telescope by alan macrobert, september 11, 2008
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/28244844.html

"the project used the hubble space telescope to monitor very distant galaxy clusters for supernovae. on february 21, 2006, in the direction of a far-away cluster in bootes named cl 1432.5+3332.8 (redshift 1.112, light travel time 8.2 billion years), hubble began seeing something brighten. it continued brightening for about 100 days and peaked at 21st magnitude in two near-infrared colors. it then faded away over a similar timescale, until nothing was left in view down to 26th magnitude. the object brightened and faded by a factor of at least 120, maybe more.

the mystery object did not behave like any known kind of supernova. it is not even in any detectable galaxy. "the shape of the light curve is inconsistent with microlensing," say the researchers. they recorded three spectra of it — and its spectrum, they write, "in addition to being inconsistent with all known supernova types, is not matched to any spectrum in the sloan digital sky survey database" of vast numbers of objects. "we suggest that the transient may be one of a new class.""

see image on website.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

can you say say panspermia?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1058399/building-blocks-life-700-light-years-earth.html

be well, be love.

david

can you say say panspermia?



building blocks of life are found 700 light years from earth
by daily mail reporter
last updated at 6:16 pm on 19th september 2008

organic molecules that may have provided the foundations of life have been detected hundreds of light years from earth.

the molecules of naphthalene were found in a star-forming region of clouds of gas and dust in the constellation perseus, 700 light years away.

they are some of the most complex yet discovered in the regions of deep space between the stars.


by daily mail reporter
last updated at 6:16 pm on 19th september 2008

organic molecules that may have provided the foundations of life have been detected hundreds of light years from earth.

the molecules of naphthalene were found in a star-forming region of clouds of gas and dust in the constellation perseus, 700 light years away.

they are some of the most complex yet discovered in the regions of deep space between the stars.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/080923_wmap.htm

be well, be love.

david

something beyond visible universe detected?
sept. 23, 2008
courtesy nasa goddard space flight center
and world science staff

sci*en*tists have meas*ured an un*ex*pected mo*tion in dis*tant clus*ters of ga*lax*ies—pos*sibly caused, they say, by the gravita*t*ional pull of some*thing out*side the vis*i*ble uni*verse. “we nev*er ex*pected to find an*y*thing like this,” said lead re*search*er al*ex*an*der kash*lin*sky of nasa’s god*dard space flight cen*ter in green*belt, md.

the gal*axy clus*ter 1e 0657-56 (known as the bul*let clus*ter) lies 3.8 bil*lion light-years away. it's one of hun*dreds that ap*pear to be car*ried along by a mys*te*ri*ous cos*mic flow, astro*phys*i*cists say. (cred*it: na*sa/stsci/mag*ellan/d. clowe et al.)

we can see only those areas of the cos*mos close enough that their light could have reached us dur*ing our uni*verse’s ex*ist*ence. what lies past those lim*its, if an*y*thing, has been un*clear.

kash*linksy and col*leagues sug*gest what*ev*er is pulling on the mys*te*ri*ously mov*ing gal*axy clus*ters might lie out*side the vis*i*ble uni*verse.

the clus*ters, how*ev*er, lie much clos*er to us than to those vis*i*ble lim*its. there*fore, it’s not cer*tain that the mys*tery at*trac*tor is out*side that zone. how*ev*er, that’s “quite pos*si*ble,” the re*search*ers wrote, be*cause sup*pos*ing oth*er*wise forc*es the un*likely con*clu*sion that a fair chunk of the cos*mos, our area, is atyp*i*cal.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=big-bang-or-big-bounce

be well, be love.

david

big bang or big bounce?: new theory on the universe's birth

our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce—an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects
by martin bojowald


key concepts

* einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. but the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. to figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.
* according to one candidate for such a theory, loop quantum gravity, space is subdivided into “atoms” of volume and has a finite capacity to store matter and energy, thereby preventing true singularities from existing.
* if so, time may have extended before the bang. the prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. in short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

atoms are now such a commonplace idea that it is hard to remember how radical they used to seem. when scientists first hypothesized atoms centuries ago, they despaired of ever observing anything so small, and many questioned whether the concept of atoms could even be called scientific. gradually, however, evidence for atoms accumulated and reached a tipping point with albert einstein’s 1905 analysis of brownian motion, the random jittering of dust grains in a fluid. even then, it took another 20 years for physicists to develop a theory explaining atoms—namely, quantum mechanics—and another 30 for physicist erwin müller to make the first microscope images of them. today entire industries are based on the characteristic properties of atomic matter.

physicists’ understanding of the composition of space and time is following a similar path, but several steps behind. just as the behavior of materials indicates that they consist of atoms, the behavior of space and time suggests that they, too, have some fine-scale structure—either a mosaic of spacetime “atoms” or some other filigree work. material atoms are the smallest indivisible units of chemical compounds; similarly, the putative space atoms are the smallest indivisible units of distance. they are generally thought to be about 10–35 meter in size, far too tiny to be seen by today’s most powerful instruments, which probe distances as short as 10–18 meter. consequently, many scientists question whether the concept of atomic spacetime can even be called scientific. undeterred, other researchers are coming up with possible ways to detect such atoms indirectly.

the most promising involve observations of the cosmos. if we imagine rewinding the expansion of the universe back in time, the galaxies we see all seem to converge on a single infinitesimal point: the big bang singularity. at this point, our current theory of gravity—einstein’s general theory of relativity—predicts that the universe had an infinite density and temperature. this moment is sometimes sold as the beginning of the universe, the birth of matter, space and time. such an interpretation, however, goes too far, because the infinite values indicate that general relativity itself breaks down. to explain what really happened at the big bang, physicists must transcend relativity. we must develop a theory of quantum gravity, which would capture the fine structure of spacetime to which relativity is blind.

[7Sisters]

"gradually, however, evidence for atoms accumulated and reached a tipping point with albert einstein’s 1905 analysis of brownian motion, the random jittering of dust grains in a fluid."

pardon my way with words here, because i can only see this in my head at the moment and will not be able to get them out the way i am seeing this.

as with emotos' water crystals and intention, this would be how the shape of the water crystals form from this intention. can intention be tonal?

i have a few crystal bowls that are c and d. i have also read where if you would put sand on a dish and applied tonal vibrations that the sand would also form these beautiful shapes, and there were pictures of these shapes and they looked like the water crystals.

now when you look at the universe, instead of a big bang, could it have been an intentional toned vibration?

[btsumm]

now when you look at the universe, instead of a big bang, could it have been an intentional toned vibration?

my instincts agree with you here...

it appears to be a key component...

healing for all!
one 71

[7Sisters]

this is a video i found tonight on sound vibration and rice creating sacred geometry. i just about giggled when i saw it! http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=hi3sdweevcu&feature=related

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7687286.stm

be well, be love.

david

team records 'music' from stars
by pallab ghosh
science correspondent, bbc news

scientists have recorded the sound of three stars similar to our sun using france's corot space telescope.

a team writing in science journal says the sounds have enabled them to get information about processes deep within stars for the first time.

if you listen closely to the sounds of each star - by clicking on the media in this page - you'll hear a regular repeating pattern.

these indicate that the entire star is pulsating.


you'll also note that the sound of one star is very slightly different to the other. that's because the sound they make depends on their age, size and chemical composition.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

there are no coincidences, no accidents...

http://story.malaysiasun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/89d96798a39564bd/id/422823/cs/1

be well, be love.

david

why life on earth coincides with a vital shift in the makeup of the universe
malaysia sun
sunday 26th october, 2008
(ani)



canberra, oct 26 : scientists have come up with an answer to the puzzling question of why life on earth coincides with a momentous shift in the makeup of the universe.

according to a report by abc news, research into finding an answer to this mystery was done by ph.d. student chas egan and charley lineweaver from australian national university.

the conundrum has its roots in the way the universe changes as it expands, explained egan.

soon after the big bang, some 14 billion years ago, most of the energy in the universe was in the form of heat. later, as the universe cooled and expanded, matter, such as stars and planets, became dominant.

as the expansion continues, it is expected that "dark energy" - a mysterious force that causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate - will become most important.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/10/the_statistical_universe.php

be well, be love.

david

the statistical universe

we look up to an expanse of sky that is billions of light-years in size, but the universe may be far larger than what we are able to see.
by raphael bousso

we cannot see farther into the universe because the big bang happened only 14 billion years ago and light from distant regions has not had enough time to reach earth. yet subtle clues are beginning to reveal some of the properties of the regions of space hidden beyond our cosmic horizon. our world appears to be only a small part of a "multiverse," an expanse vastly larger than the visible universe, and for the most part completely different from it.

to account for what we do see, cosmologists invented a theory many years ago called "inflation," in which a brief, ultra-accelerated expansion of the early universe stretched space to a size far greater than what we observe. inflation explains why, despite the violence of the big bang, the universe appears to us uniform and smooth, and the theory has made predictions confirmed by measurements of subtle variations in the radiation left over from the big bang. but inflation does not really make the universe more uniform — just huge. if inflation is correct, then the billions of light-years that our telescopes probe are a mere dot on a far vaster canvas.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081105-dark-flow.html

be well, be love.

david

unknown "structures" tugging at universe, study says
john roach
for national geographic news
november 5, 2008

something may be out there. way out there.

on the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen "structures" are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says.

everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.

the presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader alexander kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at nasa's goddard space flight center in maryland.

the theory could rewrite the laws of physics. current models say the known, or visible, universe—which extends as far as light could have traveled since the big bang—is essentially the same as the rest of space-time (the three dimensions of space plus time).

[LightEye]

dear friends,

"my father's house has many rooms..." jesus the avatar

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/dec/10-sciences-alternative-to-an-intelligent-creator

be well, be love.

david

science's alternative to an intelligent creator: the multiverse theory

our universe is perfectly tailored for life. that may be the work of god or the result of our universe being one of many.
by tim folger
published online november 10, 2008

a sublime cosmic mystery unfolds on a mild summer afternoon in palo alto, california, where i’ve come to talk with the visionary physicist andrei linde. the day seems ordinary enough. cyclists maneuver through traffic, and orange poppies bloom on dry brown hills near linde’s office on the stanford university campus. but everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun, bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and—in this universe, anyway—life as we know it would not exist.

consider just two possible changes. atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. if those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. if gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. a beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. there are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties—so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.

“we have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible,” linde says.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

kinda gives you a perspective of things... ;-)

http://www.miqel.com/space_photos_maps/galactic_info/position-of-milky-way-in-virgo-supercluster.html

and here;

our position in the total observable universe
http://www.miqel.com/space_photos_maps/galactic_info/position-in-total-universe.html

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends;

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/19nov_cosmicrays.htm?list29945

be well, be love.

david

discovered: cosmic rays from a mysterious, nearby object
11.19.2008

nov. 19, 2008: an international team of researchers has discovered a puzzling surplus of high-energy electrons bombarding earth from space. the source of these cosmic rays is unknown, but it must be close to the solar system and it could be made of dark matter. their results are being reported in the nov. 20th issue of the journal nature.

"this is a big discovery," says co-author john wefel of louisiana state university. "it's the first time we've seen a discrete source of accelerated cosmic rays standing out from the general galactic background."

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/george_smoot_on_the_design_of_the_universe.html

be well, be love.

david

at serious play 2008, astrophysicist george smoot shows stunning new images from deep-space surveys, and prods us to ponder how the cosmos -- with its giant webs of dark matter and mysterious gaping voids -- got built this way.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/science/25dark.html?_r=1&8dpc

be well, be love.

david

a whisper, perhaps, from the universe’s dark side
by dennis overbye
published: november 24, 2008
is this the dark side speaking?


a concatenation of puzzling results from an alphabet soup of satellites and experiments has led a growing number of astronomers and physicists to suspect that they are getting signals from a shadow universe of dark matter that makes up a quarter of creation but has eluded direct detection until now.

maybe.

“nobody really knows what’s going on,” said gordon kane, a theorist at the university of michigan. physicists caution that there could still be a relatively simple astronomical explanation for the recent observations.

but the nature of this dark matter is one of the burning issues of science. identifying it would point the way to a deeper understanding of the laws of nature and the einsteinian dream of a unified theory of physics.

[alchemikey]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/11/081121-black-hole-heart.html

a colossal black hole nestled in the center of a distant galaxy controls its own growth and the growth of surrounding stars by pumping out energy at regular intervals, a new study says.

"it looks like a beating heart," said study team member mateusz ruszkowski, an astronomer at the university of michigan.

peace,
mikey

[EdwardJS]

looking at the forum subject re universe phenomenon, i post this.

once i used to believe in black hole existence. no more.

one you discover that modern physics is based upon rutherford's 1911 atomic nucleus model, and einstein's 1905 special relativity paper publish date, you realize that these "modern ideas" are respectively, 97 and 103 years old!

can a flat earth theory be far behind? that's where it's going at the present rate of delusion today. ever more paradox, surprises, adjectives such as baffling, strange, mysterious, and then conflict of theory to observational data. this screams out that today's theories and concepts are dead wrong.

we get from rutherford's nuclear atom model (positive charged proton nucleus with orbiting electrons) to black holes by a series of 30 to 40 assumptions, either directly stated, or implicitly. each of these assumptions depend on each other, much the same way that a 3-stage rocket depends upon all three to function (not fail) for a successful launch. give each stage of a rocket a 90% probability of success, and you have a total launch success probability of 73% (0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.729).

so give all 30 assumptions an equal 90% chance of being right. what do you come up for the truth of current physics theory? you get 4.24% chance of being correct theory (0.9 to the exponent of 30). and the more assumptions you pile on, the lower this correctness percentage goes.

so by probabilistic considerations alone, current physics is all wrong, and black holes cannot exist. now on the next phase.

the atomic nucleus. hmmm, all positively-charged protons together in a nucleus, should not be holding together, but repelling each other, flying apart because like charges repel, according to electrical theory. so in comes the ad hoc assumption of a "strong nuclear force". just to save the theory.

and that's not all. the electron is negatively-charged, and supposedly orbiting the nucleus of protons. three things are wrong here, if electrical theory is right. first, opposite charges attract. this means that a charged electron orbiting a positive nucleus must necessarily spiral down to the nucleus. physics has yet to answer this problem - even as this was a problem back in rutherford's day. where does the energy come from to keep the electron in orbit?

next problem: at subatomic distances that an electron and proton are from each other, these charges must neutralize each other and thus nothing. electrical charges don't even need this close a distance to annihilate.

third problem: a proton is 1,836 times the mass of an electron. if electric charge is proportionate to mass size, how is electrically neutral condition?

so we have physics theory at odds with electrical theory. both cannot be right. one is right, and the other is wrong. which is it?

this leads to the conclusion that the nuclear atom is wrong. perhaps the atom is electrically neutral to begin and charge plays no part.

another problem: black hole concept depends on the assumption that gravity acts inside the atom in addition to between them. acting between them has been proven. but action within an atom has never been proven. thus the foundation for how a black hole comes into existence is missing.

ed

[KassandraLoves]

.....

another problem: black hole concept depends on the assumption that gravity acts inside the atom in addition to between them. acting between them has been proven. but action within an atom has never been proven. thus the foundation for how a black hole comes into existence is missing.

ed

maybe we simply do not currently have technology that will detect/prove many things about the way physical matter and consciousness truly operate? thats why every theory has at least 1 small hole in it.

hopefully one day we can spend as much energy as we do on blowing things to bits, on actually figuring this stuff out, huh!

the problem is that the technology will only be found once we make some majpr leaps in knowledge. and the knowledge will only be found once we make some major leaps in technology. where do we start?

**phew** who said technology was easy? lol....

great post, btw...

[LightEye]

dear friends,

re-member this...

that avatar said...

"my fathers house has many rooms"

what do you think he meant?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2008/dec/08/religion-philosophy-cosmology-multiverse

be well, be love.

david

god or a multiverse?

does modern cosmology force us to choose between a creator and a system of parallel universes?

is there a god or a multiverse? does modern cosmology force us to choose? is it the case that the apparent fine-tuning of constants and forces to make the universe just right for life means there is either a need for a "tuner" or else a cosmos in which every possible variation of these constants and forces exists somewhere?

this choice has provoked anxious comment in the pages of this week's new scientist. it follows an article in discover magazine, in which science writer tim folger quoted cosmologist bernard carr: "if you don't want god, you'd better have a multiverse."

even strongly atheistic physicists seem to believe the choice is unavoidable. steven weinberg, the closest physics comes to a richard dawkins, told the eminent biologist: "if you discovered a really impressive fine-tuning ... i think you'd really be left with only two explanations: a benevolent designer or a multiverse."

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026861.500-did-our-cosmos-exist-before-the-big-bang.html

be well, be love.

david

did our cosmos exist before the big bang?
10 december 2008 by anil ananthaswamy

abhay ashtekar remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "i was taken aback," he says. he was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. but then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. what on earth was happening?

ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. and no wonder. the theory that the recycled universe was based on, called loop quantum cosmology (lqc), had managed to illuminate the very birth of the universe - something even einstein's general theory of relativity fails to do.

einstein's relativity fails to explain the very birth of the universe

lqc has been tantalising physicists since 2003 with the idea that our universe could conceivably have emerged from the collapse of a previous universe. now the theory is poised to make predictions we can actually test. if they are verified, the big bang will give way to a big bounce and we will finally know the quantum structure of space-time. instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/sep-dec08/stellarchoir/index.html

be well, be love.

david

a new kind of singing star

there are three new singing stars on the block, but you're unlikely to hear them on radio 1. the musical talents of hd49933, hd181420 and hd181906, three nearby stars which are hotter and larger than our sun, were discovered by a group of scientists, led by eric michel, using data from the corot space-based telescope. michel and his colleagues accurately measured accoustic vibrations in these stars that not only make for eerie listening, but also could reveal important information about how all stars evolve.

[astraya]

dear friends,

re-member this...

that avatar said...

"my fathers house has many rooms"

what do you think he meant?



hi david,

i think he meant that if any of us look within to our higher self (our father) that we will find a black hole filled with infinite love. i don't think that was covered in the article.

best,
stacy

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.blackraiser.com/mibzip/lifecomputer.pdf

be well, be love.

david

shock waves encode ‘lifecloud’ computer
by peter fotis kapnistos (copyright 2008)

when large comets hit the earth, boulders with organic debris splash back into space. for that reason, an expanding “biodisc” of dormant microbes preserved inside tiny rock fragments, 30 or more light years across, could encircle our solar system. a previous paper, “living proto-cells made in
space,” (2008), reviews the panspermia biodisc premises of cardiff university scientists
and notes how bacteria can physically store and transmit “bits of data” within a biologically self-organizing network. a gravitationally microlensed projection on a sheet of dormant microbes could reconstruct electromagnetic aspects of a wavefront. irradiating simple ice grains with ultraviolet radiation can emanate membranous-layered structures or proto-cell “amphiphiles” in space. living bacterial particle code computing is faster and more secure than conventional computing. a fertile biodisc surrounding our solar system could be a natural supercomputer and the active storage disc of life’s genetic database. 1

observations of the 1997 hale-bopp comet indicated that comet collisions into the earth brought water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide to produce our atmosphere. a few weeks after the passing of hale-bopp, nasa researchers chris mckay and bill borucki showed that an “impact” itself could have been a key event in the origin of life. they mimicked a collision of a comet and earth by aiming a laser blast at a vial of gas simulating the composition of the early atmosphere. they found that “powerful shock waves” from the microblast created temperature and pressure changes that altered the molecules of the atmosphere.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/home/36372969.html

be well, be love.

david

dark energy: yes it's real — and overwhelming

throw a baseball up toward the sky, and gravity will slow its travel from the moment it leaves your hand. for decades, astronomers assumed that the post-big bang universe worked the same way. even though galaxies are flying apart as space expands, their motion should be decelerating as the eons go by, due to the pull of their gravity on each other.

but a decade ago, cosmologists discovered something totally unexpected. the expansion of the universe has not been slowing down, but speeding up in the past few billion years. it's as if the baseball you threw upward, instead of slowing down, unexpectedly sprouted a rocket engine and took off toward the clouds.

something akin to anti-gravity — dubbed "dark energy" for lack of a better term — has apparently been inflating space. the evidence? extremely far-off galaxies are traveling away from us at the wrong speeds (as measured by their redshifts) for their distances (as measured by the brightnesses of supernovae within them).

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2442/new-clues-what-came-big-bang

be well, be love.

david

first clues to what came before the big bang
wednesday, 17 december 2008cosmos online

sydney: the big bang is thought to have obliterated all trace of what came before. but astrophysicists now believe that interpreting an imprint from the earliest stages of the universe may provide some clues.

"it's no longer completely crazy to ask what happened before the big bang," said marc kamionkowski, of the california university of technology in the usa.

kamionkowski led a team who have proposed a mathematical model explaining an anomaly in what is supposed to be a universe of uniformly distributed radiation and matter. the study is detailed in the journal physical review d.

[transiten]

hello all planet- and stargazers...

...at the moment my favourite planet venus is shining it's everincreasing light through my kitchenwindow. feels good that not all things in the universe are flying apart and that our own solarsystem at least provides some stability still:)

liliane transiten

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=143000

be well, be love.

david

shock waves encode ‘lifecloud’ computer
column: ufo disclosure
posted on saturday, 20 december, 2008

when large comets hit the earth, boulders with organic debris splash back into space. for that reason, an expanding “biodisc” of dormant microbes preserved inside tiny rock fragments, 30 or more light years across, could encircle our solar system. a previous paper, “living proto-cells made in space,” (2008), reviews the panspermia biodisc premises of cardiff university scientists and notes how bacteria can physically store and transmit “bits of data” within a biologically self-organizing network. a gravitationally microlensed projection on a sheet of dormant microbes could reconstruct electromagnetic aspects of a wavefront. irradiating simple ice grains with ultraviolet radiation can emanate membranous-layered structures or proto-cell “amphiphiles” in space. living bacterial particle code computing is faster and more secure than conventional computing. a fertile biodisc surrounding our solar system could be a natural supercomputer and the active storage disc of life’s genetic database.

observations of the 1997 hale-bopp comet indicated that comet collisions into the earth brought water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide to produce our atmosphere. a few weeks after the passing of hale-bopp, nasa researchers chris mckay and bill borucki showed that an “impact” itself could have been a key event in the origin of life. they mimicked a collision of a comet and earth by aiming a laser blast at a vial of gas simulating the composition of the early atmosphere. they found that “powerful shock waves” from the microblast created temperature and pressure changes that altered the molecules of the atmosphere.

“those new molecules, when mixed in with water, form amino acids,” borucki said. “they're the start, the first step toward life.”

[LightEye]

dear friends,

what about ahh uhhm a torus?

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/cookie_cutter_in_the_sky_999.html

all we are is light made solid.

david

cookie cutter in the sky

black holes can now be thought of as donut holes. the shape of material around black holes has been seen for the first time: an analysis of over 200 active galactic nuclei-cores of galaxies powered by disks of hot material feeding a super-massive black hole-shows that all have a consistent, ordered physical structure that seems to be independent of the black hole's size.
"this should be a very messy and complicated environment, but the stuff flowing onto different black holes looks the same, no matter how massive the black hole is," says barry mckernan, a research associate in astrophysics at the american museum of natural history and a professor at the borough of manhattan community college, city university of new york.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=b8zgwr0h

we are all light made solid.

david

nasa’s dim view of stars

the cone nebula shows a star at the top of a conical-shaped dusty plasma, festooned with lights. the image strikes an instinctive chord—the mythical celestial world mountain around which the stars revolve; the cosmic (christmas) tree with lights; fireworks displays against a night sky. why? because it reflects back to us our own prehistory when a strange drama was taking place in the sky. the earth was enveloped in a towering polar auroral plasma, flashing with light and with bright celestial bodies at its distant focus. how do we know? prehistoric mankind around the globe chiselled representations of what they saw into solid rock. the effort required was prodigious, the motivation extraordinary. modern astronomy seems unable to address the issue, offering instead a comfortable myth of cosmic stability.

twentieth century technologies have enabled astronomers to see the stars and planets ever more clearly, but their perceptions are clouded by centuries-old beliefs about celestial harmony; that the heat and light of stars is due to some kind of internal fire; that we understand gravity sufficiently to declare that it obeys a universal law and alone governs cosmic evolution. these perceptions have become dogma and dogma hinders progress. so it is not surprising that a growing number of critics see gravitational cosmology of the “big bang” as sterile and irrelevant to any real understanding of our place and history in the universe. the fact that it has nothing to say about life itself—the deepest mystery of the universe—is just one of countless signs that the present field of view is too limited.

[Djonne]

http://www.wimp.com/bigtheory/

interesting

michio kaku on cutting edge theories

[meganarline]

there are some great shots here. check it out.


science doesn’t take away from the beauty of nature. it enhances it, multiplies it.

there are so many incredible astronomical photographs released every year that picking ten as the most beautiful is a substantial task. but it becomes easier when you consider the science behind the image as well. does this image tell us more than that one? was the scientific result drawn from an image surprising, or did it firm up a previously considered hypothesis?


still, there’s something to be said for a simple, drop dead gorgeous picture.

so here i present my best 50 astronomy pictures for 2008


http://www.itvnews.tv/blog/blog/best-50-astronomy-pictures-of-year-2008.html

megan

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/bright-flash.html

we are all light made solid.

david

bright flash in heavens has no earthly explanation
by clara moskowitz

file this one under: things that go flash in the night.

while conducting a routine search for distant supernovae, astronomers observed a bright burst of light that they can’t account for. on feb. 21, 2006, the hubble space telescope first imaged the source of light, which continued to brighten over the next 100 days, peaked, and then finally faded to oblivion over another 100 days.

the time scale of brightening, as well as the particular characteristics of the colors of light seen, do not match any known astronomical phenomena.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090107-aas-loud-cosmic-noise.html

we are all light made solid.

david

mystery roar from faraway space detected
by andrea thompson
senior writer
posted: 07 january 2009
04:43 pm et

long beach, calif. -- space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. but one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.

the roar is from the distant cosmos. nobody knows what causes it.

of course, sound waves can't travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can't very efficiently. but radio waves can.

radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.

many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. even our home galaxy, the milky way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist karl jansky). other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.

but the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the american astronomical society, is far louder than astronomers expected.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

this is way cool...

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/casa2/animations.html

when you look at a photo of a galaxy or nebula, do you wonder what it would look like in 3-d? astrophotos show objects in just two dimensions on the plane of the sky, but everything out there has depth. on tuesday, astronomers presented new 3-d animations that blew my mind. the technique, developed from medical imaging technology, will open new doors to scientific discovery.

black hole

http://vimeo.com/2726147

we are all light made solid.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,


http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.900-dark-flow-proof-of-another-universe.html

be well, be love.

david

dark flow: proof of another universe?
23 january 2009 by amanda gefter

for most of us the universe is unimaginably vast. but not for cosmologists. they feel decidedly hemmed in. no matter how big they build their telescopes, they can only see so far before hitting a wall. approximately 45 billion light years away lies the cosmic horizon, the ultimate barrier because light beyond it not has not had time to reach us.

so here we are, stuck inside our patch of universe, wondering what lies beyond and resigned to that fact we may never know. the best we can hope for, through some combination of luck and vigilance, is to spot a crack in the structure of things, a possible window to that hidden place beyond the edge of the universe. now sasha kashlinsky believes he has stumbled upon such a window.

kashlinsky, a senior staff scientist at nasa's goddard space flight center in greenbelt, maryland, has been studying how rebellious clusters of galaxies move against the backdrop of expanding space. he and colleagues have clocked galaxy clusters racing at up to 1000 kilometres per second - far faster than our best understanding of cosmology allows. stranger still, every cluster seems to be rushing toward a small patch of sky between the constellations of centaurus and vela.

[Djonne]

http://www.wimp.com/hubblespace/

just fascinating and at the same time, inspiring surprising a bit
nice pictures too

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2598/perpendicular-rain-creates-complex-spinning-galaxies

be well, be love.

david

geometry creates complex spinning galaxies
tuesday, 3 march 2009
by heather catchpole

sydney: polar ring galaxies are strange galaxies in which an outer ring of gas and stars rotates over the poles, making them appear from a distance like spinning tops. but just how they grow has long puzzled astronomers.

now, u.s. and canadian astronomers say the oddly-shaped galaxies grow like normal galaxies, but suck in gas and dust spinning in a plane at an angle to the galactic disk. see a video of the formation of a polar ring galaxy, created by the astronomers, here.

[sieg]

i have problem to visualize matter universe and anti matter universe.

what is the connexion between them, how all this work?

if somebody can give me more light about this.

thank you

sieg

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126981.600-a-bizarre-universe-may-be-lurking-in-the-shadows.html?full=true

be well, be love.

david

a bizarre universe may be lurking in the shadows

* 04 march 2009 by anil ananthaswamy



it is 3.30am on 26 december 2007 in mcmurdo, antarctica. the crew at the long-duration balloon facility have stayed up all night in sub-zero temperatures, waiting for the winds to subside. finally, the gigantic balloon lifts off. filled with about a million cubic metres of helium, it soars high into the stratosphere carrying an experiment called atic.

for 19 days, atic circled the south pole, studying cosmic rays coming from space. then, nearly a year later, the atic team made a stunning announcement: they found that more high-energy electrons had left their mark on the experiment than expected. that might not sound like much, but the result is remarkable because it might be a telltale sign of dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to make up about 85 per cent of matter in the universe.

and it's not the only one. just months before, an italian-led collaboration reported that their satellite-based experiment, called pamela, had seen a similar excess of electrons, along with an excess of positrons. add to this earlier results from gamma-ray satellites and experiments searching for dark matter here on earth, and suddenly we have an abundance of new clues about dark matter. "it is a very exciting time to be doing dark-matter physics," says dan hooper, a physicist at the fermi national laboratory in batavia, illinois.

the bonanza of evidence suggests that dark matter might be far more complicated than we had ever imagined. for starters, the theoretician's favourite dark-matter candidate is falling out of favour, with the latest experiments making the case for new, exotic varieties of dark matter. if they are right, we could be living next to a "hidden sector", an unseen aspect of the cosmos that exists all around us and includes a new force of nature.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnrkn_t5l6s

be well, be love.

david

this is the fourth 10-minute segment of the three-hour video presentation in development, "symbols of an alien sky" - a reconstruction of the celestial dramas that inspired the myth-making epoch of human history.

this segment introduces the electric universe, and begins to explain how the two separate theories of david talbott and wal thornhill were merged into a compelling foundation for further study.

[transiten]

i cannot manage to get the adresses to the videos, they change all the time for the same one...

anyway, the video where it's stated that saturn was a the center /axis/pole is called "when saturn ruled the universe"....or was it world?? you'll find to the right of the video posted by lighteye if you first watch the 3:rd part of symbols of an alien sky.

these to concepts just don't fit together. and all the same it's the same guy who presents them...or i just don't understand english well enough...

anyway, the ancient greeks interpreted venus as a godess of war as morningstar and a godess of love as an eveningstar. the mayans planned their wars after the venuscycle and discovered that btw the venuspassages that occur with some hundred years apart and of one we are in the middle of at the present moment (the first occured june 8, 2004 andthe other will be on june 6 2012) they noticed great upheaval in society due to misuse of power among the elita and ruling classes.

so venus has had the double symbolism as the princess and dark witch while todya we only think of her as love and fruitfulness. but the supressed rage of femininity will have it's tribute it seems...

transiten

[weboy78]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10338-mysterious-source-of-cosmic-rays-detected.html

researchers led by michihiro amenomori of hirosaki university in japan plotted the direction of 37 billion cosmic rays and found a slight excess of 1 part in 1000 coming from a patch of sky roughly centred on the constellation cygnus.

this suggests there is a source of cosmic rays inside our own galaxy coming from that direction, says team member yi zhang of the institute of high energy physics in beijing, china.

the excess is in the same part of the sky that exhibits an unexplained excess of high-energy photons called gamma rays in observations by the milagro gamma ray detector in los alamos, new mexico, us, and other instruments.

both types of observation might be caused by one or more cosmic ray sources in the cygnus region, zhang says. "it would mean that those sources should not be too far from us, and this would provide us a good laboratory to study the cosmic ray acceleration," he told new scientist...


http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=2570
nasa's kepler mission to seek other earths
the mission will spend three-and-a-half years surveying more than 100,000 sun-like stars in the cygnus-lyra region of our milky way galaxy. it is expected to find hundreds of planets the size of earth and larger at various distances from their stars. if earth-size planets are common in the habitable zone, kepler could find dozens; if those planets are rare, kepler might find none.


some strange link ?

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090310/full/news.2009.143.html?s=news_rss

be well, be love.

david

cosmic strings could solve positron mystery

a network of 'cosmic strings' criss-crossing the universe could be responsible for a mysterious flux of antimatter particles which has been puzzling astronomers.

cosmic strings may have played a role in galaxy formation.nasatheoretical astrophysicists have long proposed the existence of cosmic strings, thinner than an atom yet stretching vast distances across the universe. they are thought to have formed in events known as 'phase transitions' – dramatic shifts in the structure of matter that took place as the universe cooled down shortly after the big bang. these strings would have strong gravitational fields, and could have helped to gather the matter that formed the first galaxies.

the idea fell from favour when detailed observations seemed to prove that strings alone could not account for galactic formation. instead, a theory called 'inflation' has been invoked to explain how the universe went through a period of exponential expansion early in its life, magnifying any tiny wrinkles in its structure into the seeds of the first galaxies.

[aqcheryl]

http://naurunappula.com/z/353424

anyone dizzy yet?

and you have to think, how many of those have active planets

[weboy78]

nasa's hubble space telescope has uncovered new evidence that galaxies are embedded in and protected by halos of dark matter, the invisible form of matter that accounts for most of the universe's mass.

dark matter is invisible and nobody even knows what it is, but it is evident by the fact that galaxies hold together at all. some unseen substance lurks in space — concentrated in galaxies — and generated gravity in amounts well beyond the visible matter.

peering into the tumultuous heart of the nearby perseus galaxy cluster (located 250 million light-years away), hubble discovered a large population of small galaxies that have remained intact while larger galaxies around them are being ripped apart by the gravitational pull of neighboring galaxies.

"we were surprised to find so many dwarf galaxies in the core of this cluster that were so smooth and round and had no evidence at all of any kind of disturbance," said astronomer christopher conselice of the university of nottingham in england, and leader of the hubble observations. "these dwarfs are very old galaxies that have been in the cluster a long time. so if something was going to disrupt them, it would have happened by now. they must be very, very dark matter-dominated galaxies."..
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090312-hubble-dark-matter.html

[meganarline]

wow, that is incredible. thanks for the link.

however it didn't make me feel small :d since we are all one, it is all me and you and everyone and therefore i felt extremely expanded and infinite.

megan

[The_Last_Man_50008]

it has been said by different scientists and researchers that all of the universes stars will burn out and that the universe will probably come to an end in 'heat death'....what are peoples views on this?

a lot of religious people use this argument for their 'end of days' idea saying that the universe is not eternal.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

interesting...

http://donbarone.selfip.net/i_am_god_part_ia.htm

be well, be love.

david

the final book of revelation the final chapter:
i am god and the universe and you are the proof that i exist

hi all ...

well it has been a long journey of discovery for me, and although it still goes on the mystery has in part been solved, for i have finally found "the master's plan". although i have solved that part of the puzzle, who this master builder is, why this master builder chose to create this universe we inhabit and when this creation took place for the moment escapes me. but rest assured that an intelligence of some description created it and this is the proof that i shall offer.

for a long, long time i have pondered on how would one ever prove that "god" existed? even more difficult, i often wondered, would be how would one prove it to me ! questions pondered on since "the dawn of man" and a title so aptly chosen by clive ross, a true pioneer in this field and one who probably already has all the answers i am only now just discovering. to begin i need to just add this. since childhood and my first experience with eclipses i always marveled at the amazing fact that the moon was situated is such an obit about the earth and placed in such a way that during a total eclipse of the sun it perfectly covered the sun and gives us this beautiful image:

i remember asking many times earlier on and in my childhood, when we still asked such questions and were not hardened to wonder and learning by the troubles and responsibilities of modern life, how this was possible and i vaguely remember being told it was "just a co-incidence" (possibly my first experience with that phrase) but the question really never left me and i always wondered how this could be. and then a couple of years ago i noted something else and developed a webpage on it but it fell on deaf ears but now has even more significance for me and this proof i am offering. as we all have seen, just moments before or actually at the instant before totality a beautiful ring is observed. is this the ring that "the creator" has offered us? well let's take a look at the image so it is fresh in our minds and wonder together and marvel at it's beauty, sparkling like the diamonds that the earth produces and meant, maybe symbolically to represent, the reflecting of 'the creator's light"

this journey really begins i think 59 years ago but that might be a bit tedious so i will start at where we are now and work backwards building onto the new with flashbacks of my older revelations. okay well where are we now? well we now have concluded and i think proven, at least to myself, that the solar system at the very least and probably the universe along with undoubtedly "man" has been created by intelligent design. there can be little doubt of this and unless there is someone out there who can come up with a mathematical formula that will solve all the data, this solution should stand the test of time, short though this time may be. further to this discovery either "ancient man" knew all of these things which i am about to explain to you or "the creator(s)" had an active part in either the building or the designing and leading of the ancient workforce. take your pick for there can be only these two possibilities.

[sieg]

hello everybody!

this is a question.
please help me to understand universe-matter and universe-antimatter.
how are they physical position in the space?
how is the interaction between them?
how the matter is created in one as in the other?

thank you.

sieg

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227033.200-is-dark-energy-getting-weaker.html

be well, be love.

david

is dark energy getting weaker?
10 april 2009 by rachel courtland

after billions of years of runaway expansion, is the universe starting to slow down? a new analysis of nearby supernovae suggests space might not be expanding as quickly as it once was, a tantalising hint that the source of dark energy may be more exotic than we thought.

for more than a decade, astrophysicists have grappled with evidence of a baffling force that seems to be pushing the universe apart at an ever-increasing rate. exactly what constitutes the dark energy responsible for this cosmic speed-up is unknown, says michael turner at the university of chicago. "the simplest question we can ask is 'does the dark energy change with time?'"

so far, the evidence has suggested that dark energy is constant, though its effect on the universe has become stronger as the universe has expanded and the gravitational force between objects weakens with distance.

now an analysis of supernovae suggests dark energy may actually be on the wane. in a paper on the physics preprint website, a team led by arman shafieloo at the university of oxford examined a newly released catalogue of supernova explosions, including a number of relatively recent blasts nearby (www.arxiv.org/abs/0903.5141). they found that the new data made the best fit with a universe in which dark energy is losing strength. "it seems acceleration is slowing down," says shafieloo.

the first evidence of dark energy emerged in 1998, when two teams of astronomers spotted distant supernova explosions that appeared dimmer than expected, and so further away. the find suggested the exploding stars were receding from earth faster than anticipated, and therefore so was the rest of the universe. "dark energy" was invoked to explain the apparent anomaly. since then more supernovae have been catalogued to help build up a picture of how the universe has expanded over time.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=does-dark-energy-exist

be well, be love.

david

does dark energy really exist? or does earth occupy a very unusual place in the universe?
by timothy clifton and pedro g. ferreira

key concepts
the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate, implying the existence of a strange new form of energy dark energy. the problem: no one is sure what dark energy is.
cosmologists may not actually need to invoke exotic forms of energy. if we live in an emptier-than-average region of space, then the cosmic expansion rate varies with position, which could be mistaken for a variation in time, or acceleration.
a giant void strikes most cosmologists as highly unlikely but so for that matter does dark energy. observations over the coming years will differentiate between the two possibilities.

in science, the grandest revolutions are often triggered by the smallest discrepancies. in the 16th century, based on what struck many of his contemporaries as the esoteric minutiae of celestial motions, copernicus suggested that earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe. in our own era, another revolution began to unfold 11 years ago with the discovery of the accelerating universe. a tiny deviation in the brightness of exploding stars led astronomers to conclude that they had no idea what 70 percent of the cosmos consists of. all they could tell was that space is filled with a substance unlike any other one that pushes along the expansion of the universe rather than holding it back. this substance became known as dark energy.

it is now over a decade later, and the existence of dark energy is still so puzzling that some cosmologists are revisiting the fundamental postulates that led them to deduce its existence in the first place. one of these is the product of that earlier revolution: the copernican principle, that earth is not in a central or otherwise special position in the universe. if we discard this basic principle, a surprisingly different picture of what could account for the observations emerges.

most of us are very familiar with the idea that our planet is nothing more than a tiny speck orbiting a typical star, somewhere near the edge of an otherwise unnoteworthy galaxy. in the midst of a universe populated by billions of galaxies that stretch out to our cosmic horizon, we are led to believe that there is nothing special or unique about our location. but what is the evidence for this cosmic humility? and how would we be able to tell if we were in a special place? astronomers typically gloss over these questions, assuming our own typicality sufficiently obvious to warrant no further discussion. to entertain the notion that we may, in fact, have a special location in the universe is, for many, unthinkable. nevertheless, that is exactly what some small groups of physicists around the world have recently been considering.

ironically, assuming ourselves to be insignificant has granted cosmologists great explanatory power. it has allowed us to extrapolate from what we see in our own cosmic neighborhood to the universe at large. huge efforts have been made in constructing state-of-the-art models of the universe based on the cosmological principle a generalization of the copernican principle that states that at any moment in time all points and directions in space look the same. combined with our modern understanding of space, time and matter, the cosmological principle implies that space is expanding, that the universe is getting cooler and that it is populated by relics from its hot beginning predictions that are all borne out by observations.

astronomers find, for example, that the light from distant galaxies is redder than that of nearby galaxies. this phenomenon, known as redshift, is neatly explained as a stretching of light waves by the expansion of space. also, microwave detectors reveal an almost perfectly smooth curtain of radiation emanating from very early times: the cosmic microwave background, a relic of the primordial fireball. it is fair to say that these successes are in part a result of our own humility the less we assume about our own significance, the more we can say about the universe.

darkness closes in
so why rock the boat? if the cosmological principle is so successful, why should we question it? the trouble is that recent astronomical observations have been producing some very strange results. over the past decade astronomers have found that for a given redshift, distant supernova explosions look dimmer than expected. redshift measures the amount that space has expanded. by measuring how much the light from distant supernovae has redshifted, cosmologists can then infer how much smaller the universe was at the time of the explosion as compared with its size today. the larger the redshift, the smaller the universe was when the supernova occurred and hence the more the universe has expanded between then and now.

[Mozart]

wow, man, check these beautiful photos out and be awed with the size / scale of our universe!


http://digg.com/d1ofqt


feel'n small, eh?

[BridgeBuilder]

i had a rather profound experience a couple of days ago, during which i basically was reaching out to grasp "the hand" of the divine, symbolically, yet with those very words in my mind.

within an hour, i sat down at my computer, and my sister had "randomly" sent me a message containing a link to the following cnn article:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/tech/space/04/14/space.hand/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

yes, this image of a "cosmic hand nebula" is very, very cool, isn't it? i found it interesting in the cnn story that scientists are trying to figure out how it was formed due to its complexity (be sure to watch the video accompanying the story where they interview a scientist studying the nebula). could it be that there is something unusual about this formation, something they can't explain just yet? hmmmm, it certainly makes you wonder, doesn't it?

all i can say is we have all the support we could possibly need right now. all we need to do is reach out and grasp the hand that is offered. and this "coincidental" experience very tangibly and profoundly demonstrated for me just how directly that support can arrive for us. i don't think i will ever forget the profound sense of support and love i have experienced from this "coincidence" on a personal level, it is bringing me to tears even in this moment, although i have a feeling that this is nothing in comparison to what's coming next for this planet...

in peace,
bridgebuilder

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.world-science.net/otherne...416_coffee.htm

be well, be love.

david

physicists see the cosmos in a coffee cup
april 16, 2009
courtesy duke university
and world science staff

a professor and a graduate student have found a “universal principle” that they say unites the interplay of light and shade on the surface of your coffee, with the way gravity distorts distant galaxies’ light.

they think scientists will be able to use violations of this principle to map unseen clumps of mysterious “dark matter” in the universe.

light rays naturally reflect off a curve like the inside surface of a coffee cup in a curving, ivy leaf pattern that comes to a point in the center and is brightest along its edge.

mathematicians and physicists call that shape a “cusp curve,” and they call the bright edge a “caustic,” based on an alternative dictionary definition meaning “burning bright,” explained arlie petters, a physicist and mathematician at duke university in durham, n.c. “it happens because a lot of light rays can pile up along curves.”

[BridgeBuilder]

i was once again marveling at the picture of the cosmic hand nebula. i can't seem to keep my eyes off of it, even independent of the coincidence that led to my discovering the picture.

am i the only one who sees echoes of the artwork for "wanderer awakening" in this picture? maybe the universe is giving david "a hand"...i wouldn't be at all surprised! :d

in peace,
bridgebuilder

[weboy78]

colossal new space oddity himiko baffles scientists
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090422/sc_afp/usspacejapan_20090422200246

washington (afp) – astronomers on wednesday announced the discovery of a massive and mysterious gas blob of the type that can be precursors to galaxies, which they dubbed himiko.

the data used in identifying the megablob came from a suite of telescopes. scientists said the object, which they named himiko for the legendary japanese queen, existed when our universe was only about 800 million years old.

our universe, borne of the big bang as the theory goes, is an estimated 13.7 billion years old.

himiko, a ball of gas, stretches for 55,000 light years, a record for that early era. the enormous length is comparable to the radius of our milky way's disk...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alonevoriqm

[weboy78]

missing planets suggest stars 'eat' their young
exoplanets that venture near their host stars are doomed to premature deaths – even before they get close enough to be ripped apart by the stars' gravity, two new studies suggest.

a star's gravity can put a nearby planet on a 'fast track' to spiralling into the star and may also cause the planet to lose much of its atmosphere, the studies say. the research may help explain why few exoplanets have been found right next to their host stars...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17044-missing-planets-suggest-stars-eat-their-young.html

[starborne]

am i the only one who sees echoes of the artwork for "wanderer awakening" in this picture? maybe the universe is giving david "a hand"...i wouldn't be at all surprised! :d

in peace,
bridgebuilder

no, you're not the only one who saw that. i actually posted the picture on the board here (http://www.divinecosmos.com/forums/showpost.php?p=47475&postcount=120) on 4/14. :)

i'm glad i'm not the only one to make the connection! :d

[LightEye]

dear friends,

this is somewhat "ground breaking" as nasa (never a straight answer) "suggests" that the big bang theory may be incorrect...

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_age.html

be well, be love.

david

how old is the universe?

until recently, astronomers estimated that the big bang occurred between 12 and 14 billion years ago. to put this in perspective, the solar system is thought to be 4.5 billion years old and humans have existed as a genus for only a few million years. astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: 1) by looking for the oldest stars; and 2) by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the big bang; just as crime detectives can trace the origin of a bullet from the holes in a wall.
older than the oldest stars?

astronomers can place a lower limit to the age of the universe by studying globular clusters. globular clusters are a dense collection of roughly a million stars. stellar densities near the center of the globular cluster are enormous. if we lived near the center of one, there would be several hundred thousand stars closer to us than proxima centauri, the star nearest to the sun.

the life cycle of a star depends upon its mass. high mass stars are much brighter than low mass stars, thus they rapidly burn through their supply of hydrogen fuel. a star like the sun has enough fuel in its core to burn at its current brightness for approximately 9 billion years. a star that is twice as massive as the sun will burn through its fuel supply in only 800 million years. a 10 solar mass star, a star that is 10 times more massive than the sun, burns nearly a thousand times brighter and has only a 20 million year fuel supply. conversely, a star that is half as massive as the sun burns slowly enough for its fuel to last more than 20 billion years.

all of the stars in a globular cluster formed at roughly the same time, thus they can serve as cosmic clocks. if a globular cluster is more than 20 million years old, then all of its hydrogen burning stars will be less massive than 10 solar masses. this implies that no individual hydrogen burning star will be more than 1000 times brighter than the sun. if a globular cluster is more than 2 billion years old, then there will be no hydrogen-burning star more massive than 2 solar masses.

the oldest globular clusters contain only stars less massive than 0.7 solar masses. these low mass stars are much dimmer than the sun. this observation suggests that the oldest globular clusters are between 11 and 18 billion years old. the uncertainty in this estimate is due to the difficulty in determining the exact distance to a globular cluster (hence, an uncertainty in the brightness (and mass) of the stars in the cluster). another source of uncertainty in this estimate lies in our ignorance of some of the finer details of stellar evolution. presumably, the universe itself is at least as old as the oldest globular clusters that reside in it.

[noel1111]

i had a rather profound experience a couple of days ago, during which i basically was reaching out to grasp "the hand" of the divine, symbolically, yet with those very words in my mind.

within an hour, i sat down at my computer, and my sister had "randomly" sent me a message containing a link to the following cnn article:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/tech/space/04/14/space.hand/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

yes, this image of a "cosmic hand nebula" is very, very cool, isn't it? i found it interesting in the cnn story that scientists are trying to figure out how it was formed due to its complexity (be sure to watch the video accompanying the story where they interview a scientist studying the nebula). could it be that there is something unusual about this formation, something they can't explain just yet? hmmmm, it certainly makes you wonder, doesn't it?

all i can say is we have all the support we could possibly need right now. all we need to do is reach out and grasp the hand that is offered. and this "coincidental" experience very tangibly and profoundly demonstrated for me just how directly that support can arrive for us. i don't think i will ever forget the profound sense of support and love i have experienced from this "coincidence" on a personal level, it is bringing me to tears even in this moment, although i have a feeling that this is nothing in comparison to what's coming next for this planet...

in peace,
bridgebuilder

i am speachless... what an awesome sight! i wish we knew really how large it all is.... great link! thanks for the story... :)

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/may/01-the-biocentric-universe-life-creates-time-space-cosmos

be well, be love.

david

the biocentric universe theory: life creates time, space, and the cosmos itself

stem-cell guru robert lanza presents a radical new view of the universe and everything in it.
by robert lanza and bob berman

adapted from biocentrism: how life and consciousness are the keys to understanding the true nature of the universe, by robert lanza with bob berman, published by benbella books in may 2009.

the farther we peer into space, the more we realize that the nature of the universe cannot be understood fully by inspecting spiral galaxies or watching distant supernovas. it lies deeper. it involves our very selves.

this insight snapped into focus one day while one of us (lanza) was walking through the woods. looking up, he saw a huge golden orb web spider tethered to the overhead boughs. there the creature sat on a single thread, reaching out across its web to detect the vibrations of a trapped insect struggling to escape. the spider surveyed its universe, but everything beyond that gossamer pinwheel was incomprehensible. the human observer seemed as far-off to the spider as telescopic objects seem to us. yet there was something kindred: we humans, too, lie at the heart of a great web of space and time whose threads are connected according to laws that dwell in our minds.

[weboy78]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227064.400-vanishing-matter-points-to-black-hole-in-milky-way.html

even assuming the team's arguments are ironclad, broderick admits there is still one viable alternative to a black hole. a wormhole connecting one region of the universe to another could collect matter and energy at the galaxy's centre and spit it out somewhere we would not be able to see it, he says.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227061.200-how-to-map-the-multiverse.html?full=true

be well, be love.

david

how to map the multiverse
04 may 2009 by anil ananthaswamy

brian greene spent a good part of the last decade extolling the virtues of string theory. he dreamed that one day it would provide physicists with a theory of everything that would describe our universe - ours and ours alone. his bestselling book the elegant universe eloquently captured the quest for this ultimate theory.

"but the fly in the ointment was that string theory allowed for, in principle, many universes," says greene, who is a theoretical physicist at columbia university in new york. in other words, string theory seems equally capable of describing universes very different from ours. greene hoped that something in the theory would eventually rule out most of the possibilities and single out one of these universes as the real one: ours.

so far, it hasn't - though not for any lack of trying. as a result, string theorists are beginning to accept that their ambitions for the theory may have been misguided. perhaps our universe is not the only one after all. maybe string theory has been right all along.

greene, certainly, has had a change of heart. "you walk along a number of pathways in physics far enough and you bang into the possibility that we are one universe of many," he says. "so what do you do? you smack yourself in the head and say, 'ah, maybe the universe is trying to tell me something.' i have personally undergone a sort of transformation, where i am very warm to this possibility of there being many universes, and that we are in the one where we can survive."

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://machineslikeus.com/news/day-universe-froze

be well, be love.

david

the day the universe froze
sat, 05/09/2009 - 02:43 - nln

imagine a time when the entire universe froze. according to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today.

the model, published online may 6 in the journal physical review d, was developed by research associate sourish dutta and professor of physics robert scherrer at vanderbilt university, working with professor of physics stephen hsu and graduate student david reeb at the university of oregon.

a cosmological phase transition – similar to freezing – is one of the distinctive aspects of this latest effort to account for dark energy – the mysterious negative force that cosmologists now think makes up more than 70 percent of all the energy and matter in the universe and is pushing the universe apart at an ever-faster rate.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/05/14/is-everything-made-of-mini-black-holes/

be well, be love.

david

is everything made of mini black holes?

written by nancy atkinson

credit: coyne and cheng
in 1971 physicist stephen hawking suggested that there might be “mini” black holes all around us that were created by the big bang. the violence of the rapid expansion following the beginning of the universe could have squeezed concentrations of matter to form miniscule black holes, so small they can’t even be seen in a regular microscope. but what if these mini black holes were everywhere, and in fact, what if they make up the fabric of the universe? a new paper from two researchers in california proposes this idea.

black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape, and are usually thought of as large areas of space, such as the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. no observational evidence of mini-black holes exists but, in principle, they could be present throughout the universe.

since black holes have gravity, they also have mass. but with mini black holes, the gravity would be weak. however, many physicists have assumed that even on the tiniest scale, the planck scale, gravity regains its strength.

experiments at the large hadron collider are aimed at detecting mini black holes, but suffer from not knowing exactly how a reduced-planck-mass black hole would behave, say donald coyne from uc santa cruz (now deceased) and d. c. cheng from the almaden research center near san jose.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227084.500-flat-universe-may-be-the-new-flat-earth.html

be well, be love.

david

flat universe may be the new flat earth
18 may 2009 by eugenie samuel reich

for centuries the ancients believed the earth was flat. evidence to the contrary was either ignored or effortlessly integrated into the dominant world view. today we dismiss flat-earthers as ignorant, yet we may be making an almost identical mistake – not about our planet, but about the entire universe.

when it comes to the universe, "flatness" refers to the fate of light beams travelling large distances parallel to each other. if the universe is "flat", the beams will always remain parallel. matter, energy and dark energy all produce curvature in space-time, however. if the universe's space-time is positively curved, like the surface of a sphere, parallel beams would come together. in a negatively curved, saddle-shaped universe, parallel beams would diverge.

thanks in part to the wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe (wmap) satellite, which revealed the density of matter and dark energy in the early universe, most astronomers are confident that the universe is flat. but that view is now being questioned by joseph silk at the university of oxford and colleagues, who say it's possible that the wmap observations have been misinterpreted.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/111

be well, be love.

david

the holographic universe

take one universe. turn it into a hologram. find its quantum wavefunction. understand the birth of the cosmos.
by anil ananthaswamy
fqxi awardees: alex maloney
may 22, 2009

mcgill university by 1988, when alex maloney was just twelve years old, holograms were well and truly "in." scientists had only recently worked out how to capture these three-dimensional photographs and emboss them onto two-dimensional metallic film and soon—to every kid’s delight—they were appearing on credit cards, magazine and book covers, and bank notes. maloney had little idea then that more than two decades on he would be ambitiously attempting to cast the entire universe as a hologram, in an effort to explain the mysteries of the cosmos in its infancy. but even at that young age he did know that he wanted to be a physicist.

"even when i didn’t have a name for it, i sort of had a good idea of what i wanted to do," says maloney, now at mcgill university, montreal. he credits his grandfather dewitt stetten, a prominent biochemist who would rather have been a mathematician or a physicist, for this insight. in his later years, stetten went blind and it fell upon young maloney to read to him. but this was no ordinary reading list. maloney had to read aloud books like men of mathematics and a four-volume set on the history of mathematics, straining his young mind to the explain the illustrations in the books. and then came stephen hawking’s a brief history of time. which prompts the question: did the twelve-year old maloney understand the book? "you know, i don’t think anyone understood a brief history of time," says maloney.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://blog.hasslberger.com/2009/06/holistic_physics_in_a_selforga.html#more

be well, be love.

david

holistic physics in a self-organizing universe

mathematical physics, which takes its cues from newton, seeks to analyze the universe and the matter it contains in terms of force and energy. we seek to discover ultimate reality by dissecting things into ever smaller parts, backtracking from the visible into the realm particles.

physics has come a long way in explaining how things work and our mathematical formalisms are extremely useful for technological development, but the larger picture still escapes us. the 'big bang' origin of the universe takes the concepts of force and energy to their highly illogical conclusion. no one can say how that unlikely concentration of energy that, according to physicists, gave rise to a primordial explosion from which both space and matter developed, could have come into being in the first place.

william day approaches the problem from a different angle. in his books, and now in a paper titled holistic physics in a self-organizing universe, he argues that we must look at hierarchies, at systems and patterns of organization. instead of trying to understand matter in terms of its parts, we must look at how things fit together. non-newtonian physics is a way of looking at the universe as a system, not just an accumulation of material parts that interact and that can be understood by putting them under a microscope.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/39306

be well, be love.

david

the unique universe

many cosmological theories not only see our universe as one of many but also claim that time does not exist. lee smolin argues against the timeless multiverse

three decades ago, talk of other universes was not seen by most physicists to be part of science. most research in theoretical physics and cosmology concerned observable features in our universe and most papers and seminars referred to experimental results. however, since then there has been a gradual shift, during which it first became acceptable to work on theories that described not only our universe, but other possible universes, universes with less or more dimensions, or universes with different kinds of particles and forces. in the last few years, we have moved further away from theories of our one universe, as these other worlds went from being logically possible to hypothetically actual. it is now common to hear about the multiverse — a quantum cosmology that takes for granted that the visible universe that we see around us is just one of a vast or infinite number of universes.

the multiverse assumption often comes hand in hand with a metaphysical assumption regarding the nature of time. it has been argued by many experts in quantum cosmology that time is not a fundamental concept, but an approximate and emergent one. if this is correct, then we experience time in a timeless universe for reasons similar to why we, who live in a quantum universe, experience one that obeys classical physics: we are composed of very large numbers of fundamental particles and emergent statistical regular*ities determine much of what we experience.

[lindabaker]

dear friends,

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/39306

be well, be love.

david

the unique universe

light eye says: "many cosmological theories not only see our universe as one of many but also claim that time does not exist. lee smolin argues against the timeless multiverse...the multiverse assumption often comes hand in hand with a metaphysical assumption regarding the nature of time. it has been argued by many experts in quantum cosmology that time is not a fundamental concept, but an approximate and emergent one. if this is correct, then we experience time in a timeless universe for reasons similar to why we, who live in a quantum universe, experience one that obeys classical physics: we are composed of very large numbers of fundamental particles and emergent statistical regularities determine much of what we experience.

from what i have learned, these fundamental particles are our bodies and our soul energy coming together at one point, our placeholder in consciousness. it is moveable and i call it our assemblage point, i believe. so we are a placement in a multiverse, depending on semantics.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

more nice reading from dr. bruce lipton...

http://www.brucelipton.com/article/embracing-the-immaterial-universe

be well, be love.

david

embracing the immaterial universe

for over four hundred years, western civilization has chosen science as its source of truths and wisdom about the mysteries of life. allegorically, we may picture the wisdom of the universe as resembling a large mountain. we scale the mountain as we acquire knowledge. our drive to reach the top of that mountain is fueled by the notion that with knowledge we may become “masters” of our universe. conjure the image of the all-knowing guru seated atop the mountain.

scientists are professional seekers, forging the path up the "mountain of knowledge." their search takes them into the uncharted unknowns of the universe. with each scientific discovery, humanity gains a better foothold in scaling the mountain. ascension is paved one scientific discovery at a time. along its path, science occasionally encounters a fork in the road. do they take the left turn or the right? when confronted with this dilemma, the direction chosen by science is determined by the consensus of scientists interpreting the acquired facts, as they are understood at the time.

occasionally, scientists embark in a direction that ultimately leads to an apparent dead end. when that happens, we are faced with two choices: continue to plod forward with the hope that science will eventually discover a way around the impediment, or return to the fork and reconsider the alternate path. unfortunately, the more science invests in a particular path, the more difficult it is for science to let go of beliefs that keep it on that path. as historian arnold toynbee suggested, the cultural—which includes the scientific—mainstream inevitably clings to fixed ideas and rigid patterns in the face of imposing challenges. and yet from among their ranks arise creative minorities that resolve the threatening challenges with more viable responses. creative minorities are active agents that transform old, outdated philosophical "truths" into new, life-sustaining cultural beliefs.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://plus.maths.org/issue51/features/maldacena/index.html

be well, be love.

david

the illusory universe
by marianne freiberger

with online socialising and alternative realities like second life it may seem as if reality has become a whole lot bigger over the last few years. in one branch of theoretical physics, though, things seem to be going the other way. over the last two decades string theorists have been developing the idea that the space and time we inhabit, including ourselves, might be nothing more than an illusion, a hologram conjured up by a reality which lacks a crucial feature of the world as we perceive it: the third dimension. just as the 3d image in a hologram emerges from patterns encoded on a flat piece of paper, so, the theorists speculate, our 3d space may emerge from a peculiar kind of physics that lives on a 2d surface. juan maldacena, professor at the institute for advanced study in princeton, has played a vital role in the development of this idea, which is known as the holographic principle. in the 1990s maldacena came up with the very first model of a universe which realises the holographic principle. plus caught up with him on his recent visit to cambridge.

[weboy78]

giant 'soap bubble' found floating in space
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327185.100-giant-soap-bubble-found-floating-in-space.html

it looks like a soap bubble or perhaps even a camera fault, but the image at right is a newly discovered planetary nebula.

planetary nebulae, which got their name after being misidentified by early astronomers, are formed when an ageing star weighing up to eight times the mass of the sun ejects its outer layers as clouds of luminous gas (see why stars go out in a blaze of glory). most are elliptical, double-lobed or cigar-shaped, evolving after stars eject gas from each pole (see a gallery of the nebulae)...

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://plus.maths.org/issue51/features/maldacena/index.html

be well, be love.

david

the illusory universe
by marianne freiberger

with online socialising and alternative realities like second life it may seem as if reality has become a whole lot bigger over the last few years. in one branch of theoretical physics, though, things seem to be going the other way. over the last two decades string theorists have been developing the idea that the space and time we inhabit, including ourselves, might be nothing more than an illusion, a hologram conjured up by a reality which lacks a crucial feature of the world as we perceive it: the third dimension. just as the 3d image in a hologram emerges from patterns encoded on a flat piece of paper, so, the theorists speculate, our 3d space may emerge from a peculiar kind of physics that lives on a 2d surface. juan maldacena, professor at the institute for advanced study in princeton, has played a vital role in the development of this idea, which is known as the holographic principle. in the 1990s maldacena came up with the very first model of a universe which realises the holographic principle. plus caught up with him on his recent visit to cambridge.
twentieth century mystery
a planet warping spacetime

massive bodies warp spacetime. image courtesy nasa.

the holographic principle grew out one of the biggest scientific problems of the twentieth century: the fact that the two fundamental theories of physics, general relativity and quantum mechanics, don't get along with each other.

in the early twentieth century einstein realised that space and time are inextricably linked, and he called the structure formed by both of them spacetime. his theory of general relativity states that spacetime is warped by massive objects and that gravity is a result of this warping. just as a pool ball placed on a trampoline will create a dip that a nearby marble will roll into, so does a massive body like a planet distort spacetime, causing nearby objects to be attracted to it. gravity, according to einstein, isn't something that propagates through space, but a result of the very fabric of spacetime geometry.

while general relativity describes the world of planets and galaxies, quantum mechanics looks at the sub-atomic scale, the realm of the fundamental particles that make up matter. at these small scales, there's little mass and gravity is negligible. quantum field theory, a quantum mechanical description of particle physics, holds that the fundamental forces work through messenger particles called gauge bosons: one fundamental particle exerts a force on another by sending over a few these gauge bosons.

in the course of the twentieth century, the messenger particles of three of the four fundamental forces, the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force, have all been observed in experiments. to make things consistent, einstein's theory of gravity should also be re-written in terms of similar messenger particles. physicists have dubbed gravity's hypothetical messenger particle the graviton, but so far no-one has found a trace of it. what's worse, attempts to describe the graviton in terms of the mathematics of quantum field theory lead to non-sensical answers. "a naive quantisation of gravity doesn't work and leads to mathematical inconsistencies," says maldacena. "we need something new."

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327191.600-dark-energy-may-disguise-shape-of-universe.html?full=true

be well, be love.

david

dark energy may disguise shape of universe

* 03 august 2009 by pedro ferreira


we live in a special time. for the past two decades, most of my colleagues and i have been working under the assumption that we can know everything about the universe. we know the amount of matter and energy it contains. we know its shape is flat. we can trace its history from the earliest moments after the big bang and we can even predict its fate. or at least we thought we could.

why were we so confident? exquisite measurements of the radiation left over from the big bang led us to believe that we could work out the curvature of the universe to within a few per cent. in doing so, we have determined how much energy the universe contains and that most of it is in an exotic form called dark energy, which is driving the expansion of space.

however, recent discoveries have left me wondering if these claims were premature. as we learn more about dark energy and its effect on the expansion of space and time, we find that dark energy and the shape, or geometry, of the universe are worryingly intertwined.

by changing our assumptions about dark energy we can radically modify our constraints on the shape of the universe. equally, without a much more precise measurement of the geometry, it is impossible to determine the nature and evolution of dark energy. our picture of the universe has, to some extent, been blown wide open again.

this state of affairs has serious implications for how we proceed in our exploration of the universe. a host of missions are being planned to pin down dark energy, but unless we measure the geometry much more accurately, the whole endeavour could be futile. in short, we will remain resolutely in the dark about dark energy.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2009/08/redshift_and_distance_in_the_e.php?utm_source=nytw idget

be well, be love.

david

redshift and distance in the expanding universe
posted on: august 5, 2009 4:23 pm, by ethan siegel

last week, we began talking about understanding the size of the universe, and we continued this week with some information on distances and motion in the universe. this brings us to my favorite application, which leads to the hubble expansion:

[LightEye]

dear friends,

"something" can never come from "nothing", but at least janna is willing to say
that there may be other "possibilities..." she's forgotten to mention the
"breathe of life" though...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv6aqbnhsro

be well, be love.

david

[LightEye]

dear friends,

more interesting concepts...

be well, be love.

david

http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/may-aug09/darkenergy/index.html

what is dark energy?

in our third online poll to find out what plus readers would most like to know about the universe, you told us that you'd like to learn about the secrets of dark matter and dark energy. we took the second part of the question — what is dark energy? — to john d. barrow, renowned cosmologist and professor of mathematical sciences at the university of cambridge. here is his answer. the first part of the question has been answered in plus by martin rees.

and don't forget to vote in the current poll to nominate the next question to be put to experts.

what is dark energy?

dark energy is a term that appeared a few years ago, to distinguish it from something called dark matter. we've known for a long time that there's a lot more material in the universe than we can see shining in the dark. we know this because we can see that stars in galaxies are moving around more quickly than they would if the only source of gravity pulling them was ordinary matter. typically, there needs to be around ten times more material in a galaxy than we can see on our photographic plates — the extra material has been called dark matter. identifying what dark matter is actually made of is an interesting problem, but it's not unexpected that the universe should contain dark material [see plus article what is dark matter? to find out more].

http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/may-aug09/darkstuff/index.html

what is dark matter?
martin rees

in our third online poll to find out what plus readers would most like to know about the universe, you told us that you'd like to learn about the secrets of dark matter and dark energy. we took the first part of the question — what is dark matter? — to martin rees, astronomer royal and professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the university of cambridge. here is his answer. the second part of the question has been answered in plus by john d. barrow.

and don't forget to vote in the current poll to nominate the next question to be put to experts.

what is dark matter?

the galaxies in our universe are not exclusively made up of the stuff we can see, but are held together by the gravitational pull of so-called dark matter. we shouldn't assume that everything is equally conspicuous and shouldn't therefore be surprised by this discovery.
the earth at night. movie courtesy nasa goddard space flight center.

the image of the earth at night from space at first glance reveals no discernable pattern, but a closer look discloses many identifiable features — light from major metropolises, oil wells alight in the middle east, and the warm glow from millions of wood-burning stoves in india. these beacons in turn outline the familiar pattern of the coastlines and continents. but most things on earth do not shine, and were this the only available snapshot of the earth, we would have a rather skewed and incomplete picture of the terrain. the majestic mountains of the andes, rockies, and himalayas for instance would be hidden from view.

it is like this when we look outward into the cosmos. since stars radiate most of their energy as visible light, optical telescopes remain the most powerful probes, however there are several other windows into the universe, like radio, or x-rays. in fact, prominent objects in the radio sky are quite distinct from those that dominate in optical images.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/117

be well, be love.

david

the non-expanding universe

time doesn’t exist. the universe isn’t really expanding. and if you want a theory of quantum gravity, look to the man who inspired einstein, says julian barbour.
by kate becker

for someone who believes time doesn’t exist, julian barbour sure has a head for dates. he remembers exactly when he started to have doubts about time: it was october 18, 1963, and he was reading the newspaper. he spotted an article about the physicist paul dirac and his quest for a theory of quantum gravity—a theory linking einstein’s ideas about gravity to the clashing doctrine of quantum mechanics.

today, barbour is on that same mission to unite gravity with quantum mechanics. in order to succeed, he believes that we not only need to re-examine our understanding of time, but also question the conventional wisdom that the universe is expanding.

happily for me, barbour doesn’t take advantage of his skepticism about time to shrug off appointments. after picking up the phone precisely on time for this interview, he asked for seven minutes exactly to finish the remaining third of his cup of coffee, and was ready and waiting for my call, coffee cup drained, 560 seconds later.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.ipod.org.uk/reality/reality_mathematical_universe.asp

be well, be love.

david

the mathematical universe

on this page we will consider the rather uncanny central role that mathematics appears to play in the structure of the universe. we will also consider the theory that certain mathematical structures have a form of "reality" all of their own.

it could be said that the role mathematicians is to discover truths which are already "out there". these truths are no inventions of clever men - it does not matter who invented the mathematical structure of complex numbers, for example. such structures have been there since the beginning of time - an eternal truth - waiting to be uncovered.

this view that certain mathematical concepts are eternal truths which apparently have an independent reality of their own was proposed in ancient times by the great greek philosopher plato (c. 360 bc). consequently, the mathematical structures with this apparent reality are called platonic.

and perhaps the most stunning example of a mathematical structure which has recently been discovered is the mandelbrot set.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/erasing_dark_energy/

be well, be love.

david

why do we need dark energy to explain the observable universe? two mathematicians propose an alternate solution that, while beautiful, may raise even more questions than it answers.

erasing dark energy
by veronique greenwood / september 24, 2009


illustration by mike pick

against all reason, the universe is accelerating its expansion. when two prominent research teams dropped this bombshell in 1998, cosmologists had to revise their models of the universe to include an enormous and deeply mysterious placeholder they called “dark energy.” for dark energy to explain the accelerating expansion, it had to constitute more than 70 percent of the universe. it joined another placeholder, “dark matter,” constituting 20 percent, in overshadowing the meager 4 percent that make up everything else—things like stars, planets, and people.

that a huge fraction of the universe could be composed of this enigmatic stuff was unnerving, to say the least. but what was most disturbing to cosmologists was that the discovery required adding a term to einstein’s equations of general relativity. these equations were derived from pure mathematics and had already beautifully predicted the expansion of the universe, discovered by edwin hubble in 1929. to many, even those who accepted its usefulness in explaining the data, dark energy was an inelegant addition. over the last decade, some researchers have been working to describe what dark energy might be, but others have gone back to see if the equations of general relativity can be tweaked to avoid having to use such a troublesome piece of math.

building from the einstein equations, mathematicians blake temple and joel smoller have now found a way to explain the observations that led researchers to propose dark energy. if their solution, published in the proceedings of the national academies of science, fits the data, it could provide a way out of the unpalatable notion of a dark-energy-dominated universe.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

"my fathers house has many rooms..."

http://www.physorg.com/news174921612.html

be well, be love.

david

physicists calculate number of parallel universes
october 16th, 2009 by lisa zyga universes

the strongest limit on the number of possible universes is the human ability to distinguish between different universes. credit: linde and vanchurin.

(physorg.com) -- over the past few decades, the idea that our universe could be one of many alternate universes within a giant multiverse has grown from a sci-fi fantasy into a legitimate theoretical possibility. several theories of physics and astronomy have hypothesized the existence of a multiverse made of many parallel universes. one obvious question that arises, then, is exactly how many of these parallel universes might there be.

in a new study, stanford physicists andrei linde and vitaly vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16. if that number sounds large, the scientists explain that it would have been even more humongous, except that we observers are limited in our ability to distinguish more universes; otherwise, there could be as many as 10^10^10^7 universes.

to work these numbers out, linde and vanchurin looked back to the time shortly after the big bang, which they view as a quantum process that generated lots of quantum fluctuations. then during the period of inflation, the universe grew rapidly and these quantum fluctuations were "frozen" into classical perturbations in distinct regions. today, each of these regions could be a different universe, having its own distinct laws of low energy physics.

[Zeke]

this image of the milky way is the work of physicist axel mellinger, who spent nearly two years combining over 3,000 images.

here is the link to his website:
http://home.arcor.de/axel.mellinger/

and a link to a small version of his image:
http://dvice.com/pics/a-color-all-sky-panorama-image-of-the-milky-way-by-axel-mellinger-2.jpg

peace and love to all!

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.searchmagazine.org/july-august%202009/full-multiverse.html

be well, be love.

david

the pluralistic universe
by nathan schneider

science has a handle on the age of the universe. now “multiverse” theorists are asking a vexing question: which one?

headshotsone universe is baffling enough. what little we know is that it’s composed of tiny blips of light in a cloud of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy, which are in turn describable only through the tunnel vision of quantum indeterminacy and chronic uncertainty. not to mention the matter of where everything came from and what it ultimately means. but even this may not be all. as scientists work to understand the cosmos we inhabit, some have come to suspect it might be only one among many.

a growing number of physicists now believe that we live not simply in the visible universe that started with a big bang, but in some kind of “multiverse” with a number of such universes. from universe to universe, any parameter might vary, from the force of gravity to what you had for lunch. today’s researchers have the benefit of orbital telescopes, supercomputer simulations, and as much mathematics they can wrap their minds around. but where other universes are concerned, looking beyond the pale of measurable time and space, the line between science and speculation—or even religion—can be difficult to draw. multiverse theories can seem radically opposed to both the experience of everyday life and our sense of place in the cosmos.

the discovery institute, the infamous promoter of intelligent design theory in biology, has begun looking to theoretical physics as another battleground in the struggle against materialism. evangelical philosopher and discovery institute fellow william lane craig has called the multiverse idea an act of “desperation” on the part of atheist scientists. christoph cardinal schönborn, the influential catholic archbishop of vienna, claimed in a 2005 new york times op-ed that people devised the idea of a multiverse specifically “to avoid the overwhelming evidence for purpose and design found in modern science.” and by “purpose and design,” of course, he means nothing other than evidence of divine handiwork.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3151/something-big-found-beyond-edge-universe

be well, be love.

david

weird data suggests something big beyond the edge of the universe
tuesday, 24 november 2009
by heather catchpole

sydney: astronomers have found the best evidence yet for the weird idea that our universe is one of many in the 'multiverse'. what's more, these parallel universes seem to be exerting a strange force on our own, causing galaxy clusters to stream across space towards the edge of the known universe.

the new evidence comes from studies of 'bumps and wiggles' in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation (cmb), the leftover afterglow of the big bang.

dark flow

u.s. cosmologist sasha kashlinsky of the goddard space flight centre in greenbelt, maryland, and co-workers measured slight changes in the cmb using nasa's wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe (wmap). slight deviations in the general expansion of the universe reveal the speed and direction of clusters of galaxies.

last year, kashlinksy's team found an unusual pattern in the movements of galaxy clusters. instead of expanding at a uniform rate, as predicted by einstein's general theory of relativity and theories of dark energy, clusters of galaxies stream in one particular direction and at greater than expected speeds. they called this weird phenomenon the 'dark flow'.

now, new research from the team has confirmed and extended this flow to three billion light-years from earth, about one-fifth of the way across the universe. the results have been submitted to the astrophysical journal.

[alchemikey]

"which come first, the supermassive black holes that frantically devour matter or the enormous galaxies where they reside? a brand new scenario has emerged from a recent set of outstanding observations of a black hole without a home: black holes may be “building” their own host galaxy."

http://spacefellowship.com/2009/11/30/black-hole-caught-zapping-galaxy-into-existence/

peace,
mikey

[Berry Chastain]

perhaps it depends on which end of a black hole the observer is stationed. i seem to remember ra saying somewhere in the loo material that in the eight density when all of creation is eventually subsumed that it is the black hole at the center/ end (timewise) of the universe into which all is joined and the new creation emerges from the opposite end. it has been a while since i read this but this sound more or less accurate to what was said. i shall have to research it to verify.

[Berry Chastain]

mikey,
i found the reference i was looking for from the loo material. it is in session #40.

"questioner: i thought that i would make a statement and let you correct it. i’m trying to make a simple model of the portion of the universe that we find ourselves in. starting with the logos, or sub-logos, our sun, we have white light emanating from this. this is made up of the frequencies ranging from the red to the violet. i am assuming that this white light, this then contains the experiences through all of the densities and as we go into the eighth density we go into a black hole which emerges on the other side as another logos or sun and starts another octave of experience. can you comment on this part of my statement?

ra: i am ra. we can comment upon this statement to an extent. the concept of the white light of the sub-logos being prismatically separated and later, at the final chapter, being absorbed again is basically correct. however, there are subtleties involved which are more than semantic.

the white light which emanates and forms the articulated sub-logos has its beginning in what may be metaphysically seen as darkness. the light comes into that darkness and transfigures it, causing the chaos to organize and become reflective or radiant. thus the dimensions come into being.

conversely, the blackness of the black hole, metaphysically speaking, is a concentration of white light being systematically absorbed once again into the one creator. finally, this absorption into the one creator continues until all the infinity of creations have attained sufficient spiritual mass in order that all form once again the great central sun, if you would so imagine it, of the intelligent infinity awaiting potentiation by free will. thus the transition of the octave is a process which may be seen to enter into timelessness of unimaginable nature. to attempt to measure it by your time measures would be useless.

therefore, the concept of moving through the black hole of the ultimate spiritual gravity well and coming immediately into the next octave misses the subconcept or corollary of the portion of this process which is timeless.

questioner: our astronomers have noticed that the light from spiral galaxies is approximately seven times less than that that it should be, from their calculations of what their mass should be. i was wondering if that was due to the increase of spiritual mass in the galaxy in what we call white dwarf stars? "

[ds37ds]

born in beauty: proplyds in the orion nebula

http://www.esa.int/esasc/sem0gm9k73g_index_0.html#subhead2

14 december 2009
a collection of 30 never-before-released images of embryonic planetary systems in the orion nebula are the highlight of the longest single hubble space telescope project ever dedicated to the topic of star and planet formation.

also known as proplyds, or protoplanetary discs, these modest blobs surrounding baby stars are shedding light on the mechanism behind planet formation. only the nasa/esa hubble space telescope, with its high resolution and sensitivity, can take such detailed pictures of circumstellar discs at optical wavelengths. looking like a graceful watercolour painting, the orion nebula is one of the most photogenic objects in space and one of the hubble space telescope's favourite targets. as newborn stars emerge from the nebula's mixture of gas and dust, protoplanetary discs, also known as proplyds, form around them: the centre of the spinning disc heats up and becomes a new star, but remnants around the outskirts of the disc attract other bits of dust and clump together. proplyds are thought to be young planetary systems in the making. in an ambitious survey of the familiar nebula using hubble's advanced camera for surveys (acs), researchers have discovered 42 protoplanetary discs.

visible to the naked eye, the orion nebula has been known since ancient times, but was first described in the early 17th century by the french astronomer nicolas-claude fabri de peiresc — who is given credit for discovering it. at 1500 light-years away, the nebula, also known as messier 42, is the closest star-forming region to earth with stars massive enough to heat up the surrounding gas, setting it ablaze with colour, and making the region stand out to stargazers.

within the awe-inspiring, gaseous folds of orion, researchers have identified two different types of discs around young and forming stars: those that lie close to the brightest star in the cluster (theta 1 orionis c) and those farther away from it. this bright star heats up the gas in nearby discs, causing them to shine brightly. discs that are farther away do not receive enough energetic radiation from the star to heat up the gas and so they can only be detected as dark silhouettes against the background of the bright nebula, as the dust that surrounds these discs absorbs background visible light. by studying these silhouetted discs, astronomers are better able to characterize the properties of the dust grains that are thought to bind together and possibly form planets like our own.

the brighter discs are indicated by a glowing cusp in the excited material and facing the bright star, but which we see at a random orientation within the nebula, so some appear edge on, and others face on, for instance. other interesting features enhance the look of these captivating objects, such as emerging jets of matter and shock waves. the dramatic shock waves are formed when the stellar wind from the nearby massive star collides with the gas in the nebula, sculpting boomerang shapes or arrows or even, in the case of 181-825, a space jellyfish!

it is relatively rare to see visible images of proplyds, but the high resolution and sensitivity of hubble and the orion nebula’s proximity to earth allow for precise views of these potential planetary systems.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

there is no beginning, no end...

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100103.html

be well, be love.

david

astronomy picture of the day

2010 january 3

a force from empty space: the casimir effect
credit & copyright: umar mohideen (u. california at riverside)

explanation: this tiny ball provides evidence that the universe will expand forever. measuring slightly over one tenth of a millimeter, the ball moves toward a smooth plate in response to energy fluctuations in the vacuum of empty space. the attraction is known as the casimir effect, named for its discoverer, who, 50 years ago, was trying to understand why fluids like mayonnaise move so slowly. today, evidence is accumulating that most of the energy density in the universe is in an unknown form dubbed dark energy. the form and genesis of dark energy is almost completely unknown, but postulated as related to vacuum fluctuations similar to the casimir effect but generated somehow by space itself. this vast and mysterious dark energy appears to gravitationally repel all matter and hence will likely cause the universe to expand forever. understanding vacuum fluctuations is on the forefront of research not only to better understand our universe but also for stopping micro-mechanical machine parts from sticking together.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/3263/full

be well, be love.

david

universe has less time left than thought

friday, 29 january 2010
by meghan bergamin
cosmos online

sydney: the amount of entropy, or disorder, in the observable universe is 30 times higher than previous estimates, report australian astronomers, suggesting the universe may not have as much time left as previously thought.

supermassive black holes, dark matter and stars are some of the contributors to the overall entropy of the universe, which is a measure of the irreversible processes occurring throughout.

previous estimations of the total entropy of the universe were limited by insufficient measurements of supermassive black holes, as well as uncertainty about the entropy of dark matter, according to a study to be published in the astrophysical journal.

[LightEye]

dear friends,

kind of puts things into perspective...

link to article;

http://forgetomori.com/2010/science/the-scale-of-the-universe-from-yocto-to-yotta/

link to site;

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/525347

be well, be love.

david

the scale of the universe: from yocto to yotta

from the smallest observable length, the planck length, measuring 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 meters; to the greatest length, the length of the whole universe estimated at 930.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 meters: there are many zeroes, many orders of magnitude that mey be difficult to grasp.

to make that a tiny bit easier, a user on newgrounds named fotoshop created an amazing interactive flash animation, through which you can travel between all the scales of the universe, from the tiniest end of the quantum foam in fractions of yoctometers, to quarks, atoms, molecules, viruses, cells, animals, mountains, planets, stars, nebulas, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, the local group, the observable universe and the universe itself, measring several yottameters.

that’s going from 10^-35 to 10^26, and you can travel by dragging the bottom bar with your mouse or using your keyboard, with the left and right arrow keys for greater precision.

as phil “bad astronomer” plait noted, “my favorite part is on the smallest end, when you have to go through several factors of ten with nothing happening to get to the planck scale, the smallest scale in the universe. it’s really quite a forbidding notion.”

is is merely a coincidence that most of the familiar objects that illustrate the animation are those around our own size, or those that we can view in the sky from earth? obviously not. physical theories suggest an incredible level of complexity at the quantum foam level, and much may be going on between the quantum foam and quarks, and then from quarks to hadrons, and so on. there’s also quite literally a whole universe to discover in stellar, gallactic scales, with intricacies we have barely grasped. we have almost 60 powers of ten of a very real world to explore scientifically. it’s almost beyond imagination that such complexities may fit inside the head of a person measuring a few dozen inches.

as carl sagan said, we barely began exploring the shore of the cosmic ocean. and it extends both away to the stars as well as inside the foam of the sea. “recently we’ve waded a little way out, and the water seems inviting”.