Two Favourite Phrases

Graphic interpretation of the test that resulted in the first
Higgs Boson detection at CERN LHC.

"I hate being right."

A day or two ago, CERN announced that further tests and analysis confirmed that their observation of a Higgs Boson several months previously was, in fact, the Higgs Boson, behaving in the way it was supposed to.

Secretly, scientists are always a little disappointed to be right - it's exciting enough to know that Higgs Bosons actually exist, since the math doesn't work without them existing, but it would have been much more exciting if it did something wierd in the process.

"Wierd" is one of the best possible reactions your brain can have to an observation, because it means that pursuing it will almost always mean learning something new about the world in which you live - knowledge being its own reward, of course.

Core structure of Penicillin

"Because I can."

The X-Ray was pretty good; so was penicillin. Neither were discovered with a practical objective in mind.

Science is a machine for discovery. There is rarely a practical reason, in this day and age, to ask "why". Some of our most important discoveries, from the tectonic to the prosaic, came by accident.

Penicillin is a favourite of mine - in spite of wide-spread allergies to the damn stuff, and the (predictably!) rising resistance of biotics to traditional antibiotics, Penicillin pretty much curbed the spread of a number of common diseases at the time. But it wasn't the only one. Radar technicians came up with the idea for the microwave oven - ivory soap was a result of over-mixing, post-its were a failed attempt at adhesive design by 3M. X-Rays, in particular, were recovered completely accidentally but are now one of the most commonly-used diagnostic tools in medicine. 

Fun with Exorbitantly Large Numbers

I came up with a concept in the shower this morning called the Turing Constant, which I defined as the number of "operations" done by a system in a single step. In a four core computer, this would be four. I chose to represent the Turing Constant with the Greek letter Xi, which is surprisingly hard to type, so I won't.

Then, I had an idea. From a purely mathematical perspective, it's possible to calculate the Turing Constant of any system - like the universe. I went a head and made a few assumptions: I assumed the mass of the universe to be constant to within a reasonable degree, thinking that the matter-energy conversion produces a net change of zero. Mass and energy are equivalent in physics, so this is not a huge problem. Once you know the mass of the universe, all you need to know is how many moles of stuff are in the universe.

That's right, moles. One mole is 6.02x10²⁶ of a thing. It's equivalent to the mean molecular weight of an object. Using fancy (and fuzzy) maths involving the expanse of the known universe, its suspected density, and the mean molecular weight of the universe's five most common elements, I came up with a very large number.

1.77 × 10⁸¹

As it happens, this represents more or less the number of atoms in the universe. It is a very, very large number, but certainly not the largest number ever derived. It's not even the largest number I know. It is, however, very, very big. It's 177 million, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion atoms. It's so large that it's enough to construct, well, a universe.

And that's how many permutations happen within the universe in a single step. But what do I mean by a step? Well, that's fairly elementary. A "step" in the universe should be the smallest meaningful period of time. An instant.

We have such a time. See, the universe has a finite resolution in terms of distance - the Planck Length. The time it takes a photon to traverse one Planck Length is the Planck Time, which is the smallest meaningful unit of time.

It's about 5.4 x 10^-44 seconds.

As it happens, the age of the universe is known! That means, we can figure out how many steps it's taken to get to the precise time: 7.90x10⁶⁰ steps.

How many individual things have happened in that time?

1.40 × 10¹⁴²

This is an incredibly large number. 

Musings on the Nature of Food (and Tea)

So I have, as it happens, a relatively nice little kitchen, considering the size and style of my home, and it's certainly something you could describe as being above pay grade. I guess some of you might have thought of that as a given, considering the amount of work I do, and my past experience as a chef, but like most other things, the nature of my kitchen is one of life's little consequences that has to do more with the way in which I hunt for a home than any prowess on my part in choosing this one.
When you have a kitchen that looks like this one, you like to use it, and I generally try to keep my fridge and cupboards stocked, since it staves off the Delivery Devil and my terrifyingly poor spending habits. I spend what some of my peers consider to be a small fortune on food every week (when I'm using my kitchen), but it's still far cheaper than the steady stream of delivery, take-out, and on-the-fly dining that pretty much ruined my September.

The reason why my grocery bills look high is that I tend to get fussy about the groceries I buy, particularly if I have the good fortune not to be hungry when I'm doing it. I find good cuts of the meat I want, buy fresh produce, and keep the herbs, spices, and staples well-stocked. Some of my friends are surprised to learn I make my own bread from scratch (I still have not figured out the right way to use this bread-maker. Admittedly, I also only do this on occasion) or that my only use for instant ramen is that it's the cheapest way to buy the noodles. I've managed to avoid the various forms of powdered boullion in over a year, and while I salt my food rather conspicuously, I still use less salt than most anything I've found packaged.

Not every jam is home made (but it can be) and not every stock or broth is made from scratch (though it's about a 50/50 wash at the moment). Sometimes my makinori zushi came from the store and not my kitchen, but that's rare.

See, my groceries cost a lot because I take food seriously. I scrutinize the labels carefully and take only the foods that fit my increasingly narrow parameters of what I'm really willing to put into my body. Does that mean I never eat hamburger helper, kraft dinner, or McDonalds? No - no more than not being a smoker means I don't have the odd cigar on special occasions, or the fact that I'm not a drunk doesn't mean I don't enjoy occasionally getting sloshed.

I want my food to be what it is - not what marketing committees think it should be to appeal to the widest possible audience. If I want say I want rosee sauce for my pasta, I really mean I want a white-wine veloute seasoned heavily with garlic, oregano, and anise and thickened with the pulp of fresh tomatoes and parmesean cheese. If I say I want a hamburger, I mean I want medium-fat ground beef bound by its own fat and seasoned with salt, pepper on worchester shire, on a bun (flour, water, salt, and yeast), usually dressed with mayonnaise (oil, eggs, salt, and vinegar), lettuce, tomatos, cheese (havarti, usually) and sometimes a little bacon (salt-cured pork, smoked) or sauteed mushrooms. No more than what I said.

While I recognize that most food additives are harmless (like maltodextrin) or at least considered harmless (like corn syrup), I do for the most part prefer to have the real thing. I like, for example, to bake with beat sugar, though I'm trying to find a Canadian source since we grow so damn much of the stuff. My three favourite Root Beers (on which I am quickly becoming something of an expert) are all made with sugar (two with cane, one with beetroot) and without HFCS. They have remarkably more dimension, and are remarkably more satisfying to one's thirst, than either major soft-drink-producer's offering. A cranberry juice whose main ingredient is actually pear is (a)more a virgin cocktail and (b)much less satisfyingly tart.

Now, where the tea comes in is that I still work for a major tea retailer, and I tend to drink a lot of our own product, both at home and at work. I have lots of interesting teas to choose from (98, in fact), and quite a lot of these teas are really very good. Teas and fruits are all grown according to some arcane EU standard I can barely remember the name of but which is much more comprehensive than, for example, the USDA Organic certification.

As it happens, I do have one USDA organic tea. It's grown in Rwanda, so it's out.

Lots of teas, even the flavored ones, are additive-free. More and more, though, the favoured teas are beginning to contain interesting ingredients, like maltodextrin, as a consequence of lowering our own buying standards. The additives are, by and large, ingredients in the production of ingredients we use to make our flavoured teas.

Now, I still drink these teas, since they're still better for me than the steady stream of soda I send flowing down my gullet - but that's like saying I still cut my wrists, because it's better than cutting my throat.

I won't publish a list of the teas with the ingredients I don't approve of, partly because it would be hypocritical to continue to drink them if I did (and I do like them), and partly because it's probably damaging to my career goals with that company. What it won't do is violate the terms of my employment, especially if I leave you with this final piece of advise, which goes for everywhere food is bought and sold.

Always check the ingredients listing.

The Pillars of Creation, Time Travel, and Hangover Physics

This weekend is special for any a number of reasons. For one thing, it's the first time in forever I get to see my lovely, and it's the first time in about as long that I've woken up on a Sunday morning with a hangover and major craving for a nice, buttery roll.

It's also special, because this is the weekend I'm going to blow your mind, courtesy of help from Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo, who pointed my attention in the direction of a very special, very powerful demonstration, in real-time, of how Relativity works, and the implications of that discrepancy.

Hubble Telescope Image

This image to the right is of a feature called an Elephant Trunk, a formation of gas within a nebula. In this case, these are the poetically-named Pillars of Creation, located within the Eagle Nebula, and about 7000 light-years away from Earth, and us. That means this photograph is actually a form of time-travel, a snapshot of a 7000-year past state, a state that we are learning no longer exists.

Light travels at an absolute and known constant speed through, which is the maximum speed for the universe. This speed is actually so well known that it is considered to be a fundamental physical constant and is normally expressed with the mathematical constant, c, in place of the actually number, which is on the order of ten-millions of metres per second. A key implication of that law is that information (in its precise physical sense) cannot be transmitted faster than light either.

A star, 6000 light-years from us, and about 1000 light years from the Pillars of Creation superstructure, was recently noticed to have "gone nova", exploding as a supernova, which is, for all intents and purposes, the largest of explosions in our universe. The explosion is expected to reach and destroy the Pillars' structure, something we'll see a thousand years or so from now. Which means, in 1000 years, the pillars of creation will have been destroyed.

Here's the thing, now: the light that shows them being destroyed will reach earth 1000 years from now. That light had to travel 7000 light-years to get here, which means, in actuality, that the pillars were destroyed 7000 years before... or 6000 years ago. We discovered the pillars with the Hubble Space Telescope, sometime between 1990 and now... so we discovered them about 5900 years or so after they were destroyed.

Though their majesty would be lost to real-time viewing in future generations, images of the Pillars of Creation will not be their only legacy. It is the current understanding of astronomical theory that the pressure of such blasts, moving through nebulae, helps to induce the dust and gasses to coalesce into stars and planets, beginning the cycle anew. For what might well be the first time in human history, we'll have an opportunity to watch, over hundreds and thousands of years, as that happens.

I love living in the future.

Actually, We Don't Know Anything.

If I were to ask you how many states of matter there are, I would expect one of two answers, without knowing a thing about your age, and making the assumption you're in a non-physical-sciences field. You might say three, or four. I historically always went for "four".

Well, it turns out I'm not remotely correct abut that. There are the four that we've always heard of: solids, liquids, gasses, and plasma. There are also superfluids and super-solids. Plasmas are a sort of "class" of states of matter, including typical plasmas and quark-gluon plasmas. Then there are the extreme low-temperature states such as Bose-Einstein Condensates, Quantum Hall states and the so-called strange matter.

I bring up this rather non-exhaustive list to make a point. We really don't know anything. Not a thing. And that's fascinating, if only because it means there's always something new to learn, even about something we always used to say was "basic" and "certain". How then can you say to be certain?

I ask questions because I don't know. Here's something else I don't know: What do you feel like hearing about over the next week? Well, the ~65% of you who aren't programs hitting the website to spread around your domain names, anyway. I imagine "hitbots" can't leave comments.

Following Up: Muon Propagation Restraints

So, and ahead of schedule, I've read the two papers I talked about in the previous post.

Photon Finish: Mechanical Analysis Suggests Opera Results Incorrect

I'd be lying if I didn't say I expected this, but another laboratory, lead by M. Antonello, has published a paper, not yet peer reviewed, which claims to refute the idea that the OPERA neutrinos are travelling at super-luminal velocities and suggests they are instead "merely" travelling at the speed of light. The study is based on an idea analogous to Cerenkov Radiation, where a superluminal particle should throw off lower-energy photons as it moves... an idea that has also not been peer-reviewed or demonstrated. The Cerenkov-Analogue was presented in a paper by Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glasgow.

The papers are provided above in Portable Document Format, once again courtesy of Arxiv. The language is very technical and I'm not done with reading any paper yet. I hope to have them finished by the end of the night so that I can comment more effectively.