"The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching." Aristotle | Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this Wordpress website are the views and opinions of the content creator, Dr. Reggie Goodwin, and should not be construed as shared, or sourced from The Environmental Protection Agency, or any organizations with which they have cooperative, or business relationships.
The figure illustrates three events in Minkowski spacetime. Event 𝐵 is neither in the past nor in the future of 𝐴, 𝐴 ∼ 𝐵, and event 𝐶 is neither in the past nor in the future of 𝐵, 𝐵 ∼ 𝐶. Despite this, 𝐶 ≁ 𝐴. Indeed, 𝐶 is in the future of 𝐴: 𝐶 ≻ 𝐴. Credit: Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-71907-0
Topics: General Relativity, High Energy Physics, Theoretical Physics
A group of Brazilian researchers has presented an innovative proposal to resolve a decades-old debate among theoretical physicists: How many fundamental constants are needed to describe the observable universe? Here, the term “fundamental constants” refers to the basic standards needed to measure everything.
The study is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The group argues that the number of fundamental constants depends on the type of space-time in which the theories are formulated; and that in a relativistic space-time, this number can be reduced to a single constant, which is used to define the standard of time. The study is an original contribution to the controversy sparked in 2002 by a famous article by Michael Duff, Lev Okun, and Gabriele Veneziano published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.
The whole story had begun ten years earlier, in the summer of 1992, when the three scientists met on the terrace of the cafeteria at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. During an informal conversation, they discovered that they disagreed on the number of fundamental constants.
“In the summer of 2001, we returned to the subject and discovered that our opinions were still different. So we decided to explain our positions,” the three write in the abstract of their article.
In short, Okun stated that three basic units—meter (length), kilogram (mass), and second (time)—were necessary to measure all physical quantities. In other words, he reaffirmed the so-called MKS system (M, for meter; K, for kilogram; S, for second), which was later incorporated into the International System of Units (SI). Veneziano, for his part, argued that in certain contexts two units would suffice: one for time and one for length. Duff was equivocal, stating that the number of constants could vary depending on the theory in question.
Explaining the new article, Matsas says, “The goal is to find the most fundamental description of physics possible. The question raised by Okun, Duff, and Veneziano is by no means trivial. As physicists, we’re faced with the need to understand what’s the minimum number of standards we need to measure everything.”
I was on the workgroup out of Washington for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP) on this project. Perchloroethylene (Perc) is a common solvent for dry cleaning, selected for its low flash point, in comparison to kerosene and gasoline (yikes). OCSPP found it carcinogenic via inhalation and skin contact, instituting a 10-year phaseout of Perc, and trichloroethylene (T.C.E.):
I am the author of the companion Dry Cleaning National Emissions Standard for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) in my Research Triangle Park office, the Minerals and Manufacturing Group (MMG) to be published in the Federal Register and Regulations.gov, pending the Administrator’s signature (soon).
You now have enough government acronyms to last a lifetime.
*****
Now, we all tick-tock to December 20th at midnight, for hopefully not a government shutdown (an abysmal kabuki theater since Gingrich inaugurated this bloodsport in ‘94).
After reading Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr.’s book “Begin Again,” based on the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, I began seeking writings from James Baldwin, particularly to frame the times we’re in now, as what we’re experiencing started somewhere; it had an origin. I found this essay he wrote 40 years ago. To use Eddie’s term of affection, it was as if “Jimmy” was peering into our now.
What strikes me about this essay is that in April 1984, I probably missed it, as my focus and attention were on Ebony and Jet for the monthly centerfold. I was 21 years old, and four months from the first time I would be a “best man” in my A&T college friends Leon (deceased) and Vickie Nowlin’s wedding in Fayetteville, NC, on August 26, 1984, 12 days after my 22nd birthday. 15 years later, my father died on this date. Four years later on this date, Motorola laid me off in 2003, in the fourteenth round of what amounted to a slow torture for those who survived the economic downturn for that long.
What also strikes me about this essay is how timely it still is, forty years from its publication to this date in our calendar, this time of choosing between democracy, or dictatorship. We are here, in 2024, because some have embraced the delusion of “replacement” when brotherhood and sisterhood are more tolerable, reasonable, and survivable. Where we are, in 2024, started here, in 1984, when another president wanted to take us backward to an imagined, glorious, façade past that he often confused with his Hollywood persona, playing soldiers in WWII while not being one, chanting a mantra famous from the KKK and Nazi Germany to “make America (Germany) great again.”
Then, as now, we still don’t know fully what that means. It seems Jimmy did.
*****
On Being White and Other Lies
James Baldwin, in Essence Magazine, April 1984
The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable – and terrifying – because there is, in fact, no white community.
This may seem an enormous statement – and I’m willing to be challenged. I’m also willing to attempt to spell it out.
My frame of reference is, of course, America, or that portion of the North American continent that calls itself America. And this means I am speaking, essentially, of the European vision of the world, or more precisely, the European vision of the universe. It is a vision as remarkable for what it pretends to include as for what it remorselessly diminishes, demolishes, or leaves totally out of account.
There is, for example – at least, in principle – an Irish community: here, there, anywhere, or more precisely, Belfast, Dublin, and Boston.
There is a German community: both sides of Berlin, Bavaria, and Yorkville. There is an Italian community: Rome, Naples, the Bank of the Holy Ghost, and Mulberry Street. And there is a Jewish community, stretching from Jerusalem to California to New York. There are English communities. There are French communities. There are Swiss consortiums. There are Poles: in Warsaw (where they would like us to be friends) and in Chicago (where because they are white, we are enemies). There are, for that matter, Indian restaurants and Turkish baths. There is the underworld—the poor (to say nothing of those who intend to become rich) are always with us—but this does not describe a community. It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become “white.” No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.
It is probable that it is the Jewish community or more accurately, perhaps, its remnants—that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part, because they were not white; and incontestably in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes) American Jews have opted to become white, and this is how they operate. It was ironical to hear, for example, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin declare some time ago that “the Jewish people bow only to God” while knowing that the state of Israel is sustained by a blank check from Washington. Without further pursuing the implication of this mutual act of faith, one is nevertheless aware that the Black presence, here, can scarcely hope—at least, not yet—to halt the slaughter in South Africa.
And there is a reason for that.
America became white—the people who, as they claim, “settled” the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men—from Norway, for example, where they were Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans; raping Black women.
This moral erosion has made it quite impossible for those who think of themselves as white in this country to have any moral authority at all—privately, or publicly. The multitudinous bulk of them sit, stunned, before their TV sets, swallowing garbage that they know to be garbage, and—in a profound and unconscious effort to justify this torpor that disguises a profound and bitter panic pay a vast amount of attention to athletics: even though they know that the football player (the Son of the Republic, their sons!) is merely another aspect of the money-making scheme. They are either relieved or embittered by the presence of the Black boy on the team. I do not know if they remember how long and hard they fought to keep him off it. I know that they do not dare have any notion of the price Black people (mothers and fathers) paid and pay. They do not want to know the meaning, or face the shame, of what they compelled—out of what they took as the necessity of being white—Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson or Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali) to pay I know that they, themselves, would not have liked to pay it.
There has never been a labor movement in this country, the proof of the absence of a Black presence in the so-called father-to-son unions. There are, perhaps, some niggers in the window; but Blacks have no power in the labor unions.
Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political (!) representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. I will not name names I will leave that to you.
But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living in the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen: And how did they get that way?
By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men, and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves.
And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable populations, cheerful natives, and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may be and however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot’s wife—looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt.
However-! White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as Black is nothing new. We—who were not Black before we got here either, who were defined as Black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a very long time, and have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about ourselves, survived, and triumphed over it. If we had not survived and triumphed, there would not be a Black American alive.
And the fact that we are still here—even in suffering, darkness, danger, endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves is the key to the crisis in white leadership. The past informs us of various kinds of people—criminals, adventurers, and saints, to say nothing, of course, of popes—but it is the Black condition, and only that, which informs us concerning white people. It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.
The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, Sir John Glubb, Abe Books
In these inspiring essays, Sir John Glubb examines the human race over 4,000 years and finds the same patterns of rise and fall of national greatness on the same timescale.
I. Pioneers – In the video, these are the explorers. They used the technology of their time, usually sailing ships to traverse vast distances to new lands.
II. Conquests – Colonization in Western culture typically involves subjugation of the land, and the peoples on the land, sometimes to the point of depopulation, or extinction.
III. Commerce – Global trade in the Americas started with the first genocidal assaults, and kidnapping of Africans to subjugate the land because past the conquering stage, the colonizers remote control their commerce with the crack of whips and brutality.
IV. Affluence – With great wealth from commerce/slave trading and breeding, one can build castles, plantations with wraparound porches and mint julip tea.
V. Intellect – The video alludes to the building of Ivy League institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. Public colleges emulate the model. Everyone becomes crendentialed.
VI. Decadence – “Internal division, an influx of foreigners, materialism, and frivolity. A welfare state, weakening religion, and a defensive mindset.” Sounds eerily familiar.
Entropy (noun): a thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.
“the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases with time”
“The End of History and the Last Man,” by Francis Fukuyama “a 1992 book of political philosophy by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached “not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”Wikipedia
I had a short dialogue with two younger relatives:
Me: I canceled my Amazon Prime membership due to Jeff Bezos’s cowardice.
Relative: I honestly think this was more so because his Washington Post has been failing, and as a businessman, he’s using the non-endorsement as a tactic to get it back on track. I also don’t think news outlets should endorse presidential candidates, don’t we want reliable, unbiased news?
Me: They started the endorsement after Watergate. It was the daily reporting by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that held Nixon accountable. He went from a landslide victory to almost being removed from office via impeachment.
We had a news media when I was younger. What we had held the powerful accountable. When our media is owned by billionaires, it is more accurately defined as corporate media. When the powerful own our journalism, it’s hard, if not impossible to hold the powerful accountable. Google “oligarchy.”
Offline, I have been reading (a lot of) books, mostly on history. In “The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World,” by historian John Dickie. I excerpt Chapter 14 – Salamanca: Hyenas And Concubines:
“In Nationalist Spain, the army and right-wing vigilantes imposed a reign of terror. The intention was loudly proclaimed, to ‘cleanse’ the Fatherland of its political and cultural ‘pollutants.’ Anyone associated with the Republic and its institutions, with the political Left, and even with secular modernity, was liable to be arrested, tortured, and executed: trade unionists and politicians, workers and peasants, liberals and intellectuals, emancipated women and homosexuals. Tens of thousands died. Among them were many Freemasons.” (pages 323 – 324)
Hitler: I will get rid of the communist “vermin.”
Him: Repeated verbatim.
Hitler: I will take care of the “enemy within.”
Him: I will take care of the “threat from within.”
Hitler: Jews and migrants are poisoning Aryan blood.
Him: Migrants are poisoning the blood of our country.
Hitler: One people, one realm, one leader.
Him: One people, one family, one GLORIOUS nation.
In The Recount on Instagram, two African American Nevadans explained why they no longer support Democrats (and democracy) and “wish both parties would do better.” They also felt that the “him” I mentioned is “the only politician who hasn’t lied to them.” I assume that means politicians from both parties stretch the truth, and when caught, the news alerts blaring on our cell phones stoke the outrage to Olympian heights. The “him” I mentioned is a pathological liar, always lying, therefore, is “truthful” in his obfuscations.
The problem is that they probably don’t know their relatives, have never paid attention in school, and think that history began with the last thing they Googled on their phones.
They did not have the benefit (and honor) of being raised by a man drafted into the Second World War into the United States Navy, (to fight actual Nazis), only for the “GI Bill” to be bifurcated: white soldiers and sailors received academic and financial benefits like home loans that set them up for generations of prosperity. My father, with all the other black soldiers and sailors got trade school, that set us up for where we lived: the ghetto.
The Civil Rights era scenes are in YouTube videos played as they slept in their high school history classes, and Googled the answers to the take-home exam without meditation. It was never their big sister’s bloodied face patched by your nurse mother in the middle of the living room after marching for rights that in east Winston-Salem, NC, did not exist.
It is this proud ignorance of history and refusal to inquire about it from books written by experts, or by inquiring from the experts themselves. It is the modern, and young, notion that history didn’t exist before web pages and search engines. It is their overwhelming confidence that they can “get the gist” of any situation, no matter how dire, or life-threatening. If we lose our government in a coup, they’ll post something clever, or march and shout to shame the powerful into submission (the “him” wanted to shoot protestors in the leg during George Floyd and COVID). It makes a modern fascist/nationalist movement hard to believe is occurring in America because some of them have not received an alert on their cell phones from Instagram, or TikTok. And nothing exists if it hasn’t gone “viral.”
Well, this firmly puts a kink in the “Fermi Paradox.”
The Industrial Revolution started in Britain around 1760 – 1840, and there was a colloquial saying that “the sun did not set on the British Empire.” The former colony, America, cranked up its industrial revolution around 1790. Mary Shelley birthed the genre of science fiction in the dystopian Frankenstein in 1818, around the time of climate-induced change of European weather, and a noticeable drop in temperature. It was also a warning of the overconfidence of science, and the morality that should be considered when designing new technologies, and its impact on the environment, and humans that sadly, don’t think themselves a part of the environment. The divide between sci-fi is dystopian and Pollyannish: Star Trek mythology made that delicate balance between their fictional Eugenics Wars, World War III, the “Atomic Horror,” and a 21st Century dark age, the discovery of superluminal space travel, and First Contact with beneficent, pointy-eared aliens (Deus ex machina on steroid), leading to Utopia post xenophobia. We somehow abandoned countries and currency, and thus, previous hierarchal power and inequality modalities. Roddenberry’s dream was a secular version of Asgard, Heaven, Olympus, and Svarga: a notion of continuance for a species aware of its finite existence, buttressed by science and space lasers.
If aliens had a similar industrial revolution, they perhaps created currencies that allowed for trade and commerce, hierarchies to decide who would hoard resources, and which part of their societies were functionally peasantry. They would separate by tribes, complexions, and perhaps stripes if they’re aquatic, and fight territorial wars over resources. Those wars would throw a lot of carbon dioxide in their oxygenated atmospheres. Selfishness, hoarding disorder, and avarice would convince the aliens that the weather patterns were “a hoax,” they would pay the equivalent of lawyers to obfuscate the reality of their situations before it was too late on any of their planets to reverse the effects on their worlds. If they were colonizing the stars, it wouldn’t be for the altruistic notion of expanding their knowledge by “seeking out life, and new civilizations”: they would have exceeded the thermal budgets of their previous planets. Changing their galactic zip codes would only change the locations of their eventual outcomes.
Thermodynamics wins, and Lord Kelvin may have answered Enrico Fermi’s question. Far be it for me to adjudicate whether or not anyone has had a “close encounter of the third kind,” but I don’t see starships coming out of this scenario. Cogito ergo sum homo stultus.
It may take less than 1,000 years for an advanced alien civilization to destroy its own planet with climate change, even if it relies solely on renewable energy, a new model suggests.
When astrophysicists simulated the rise and fall of alien civilizations, they found that, if a civilization were to experience exponential technological growth and energy consumption, it would have less than 1,000 years before the alien planet got too hot to be habitable. This would be true even if the civilization used renewable energy sources, due to inevitable leakage in the form of heat, as predicted by the laws of thermodynamics. The new research was posted to the preprint database arXiv and is in the process of being peer-reviewed.
While the astrophysicists wanted to understand the implications for life beyond our planet, their study was initially inspired by human energy use, which has grown exponentially since the 1800s. In 2023, humans used about 180,000 terawatt hours (TWh), which is roughly the same amount of energy that hits Earth from the sun at any given moment. Much of this energy is produced by gas and coal, which is heating up the planet at an unsustainable rate. But even if all that energy were created by renewable sources like wind and solar power, humanity would keep growing, and thus keep needing more energy.“
This brought up the question, ‘Is this something that is sustainable over a long period of time?'” Manasvi Lingam, an astrophysicist at Florida Tech and a co-author of the study, told Live Science in an interview.
Lingam and his co-author Amedeo Balbi, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Tor Vergata University of Rome, were interested in applying the second law of thermodynamics to this problem. This law says that there is no perfect energy system, where all energy created is efficiently used; some energy must always escape the system. This escaped energy will cause a planet to heat up over time.
“You can think of it like a leaky bathtub,” Lingam said. If a bathtub that is holding only a little water has a leak, only a small amount can get out, he explained. But as the bathtub is filled more and more — as energy levels increase exponentially to meet demand — a small leak can suddenly turn into a flooded house.
Hummocks of moss cover Ardley Island off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Credit: Dan Charman
Topics: Antarctica, Civilization, Climate Change, Existentialism, Global Warming
A fast-warming region of Antarctica is getting greener with shocking speed. Satellite imagery of the region reveals that the area covered by plants increased by almost 14 times over 35 years — a trend that will spur rapid change of Antarctic ecosystems.
“It’s the beginning of dramatic transformation,” says Olly Bartlett, a remote-sensing specialist at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and an author of the study1, published today in Nature Geoscience, that reports these results.
From white to green
Bartlett and his colleagues analyzed images taken between 1986 and 2021 of the Antarctic Peninsula — a part of the continent that juts north towards the tip of South America. The pictures were taken by the Landsat satellites operated by NASA and the US Geological Survey in March, which is the end of the growing season for vegetation in the Antarctic.
To assess how much of the land was covered with vegetation, the researchers took advantage of the properties of growing plants: healthy plants absorb a lot of red light and reflect a lot of near-infrared light. Scientists can use satellite measurements of light at these wavelengths to determine whether a piece of land is covered by thriving plants.
The team found that the peninsula’s area swathed in plants grew from less than one square kilometer in 1986 to nearly 12 square kilometers in 2021 (see ‘An icy land goes green’). The rate of expansion was roughly 33% higher between 2016 and 2021 compared with the four-decade study period as a whole.
The title of this post is from a question Dr. Fatima Abdurrahman raised on her YouTube channel regarding Diversity in STEM and Prager (Not a Real) University: “Who is STEM for?”
This generated an apocryphal story using familiar characters from mythology. The following story is NOT real, but a framework to perhaps answer the question.
*****
There was once a man named Merlin, a clever fellow who was a serf who managed to scrape out a living by thievery and pirating. By happenstance, he landed in Alexandria, Egypt, home of the first extensive libraries, the first university, and the mysterious cult of Pythagoras (the Geometry guy). Feeling homesick for Europe, he made his way back to London with no clue that Arthur was planning on a crusade to “Christianize the savages,” colonizer-speak for seizing control of natural resources without a modicum of guilt. “The big guy made me do it” along with “manifest destiny” is built into the schtick.
As a serf, Merlin was about to be conscripted involuntarily into this “Holy War” against infidels in Jerusalem. First, Art had to remove the Lords of London who didn’t want any part of his cockamamie schemes of grandeur.
Merlin noticed that Art and the other barbarians launched javelins and catapults full of burning refuse against each other without much strategy or accuracy. Merl took Art to the side, explaining to him that he was a MAGA (“sorcerer”) and that he was initiated into the Euclidian Mysteries. Using his special geometric incantations (ahem: calculating launch angles), he could ensure that Art could bring the other Lords under heel, and probably take the Holy City in the name of God. Art bought it. Merl didn’t have to lead from the front, content to optimize his angle calculations (incantations to the math-challenged serfs), and two legends were born: Merlin the MAGA (magician), King Arthur, and Camelot.
*****
To use the made-up epithet in the made-up universe of Battlestar Galactica: Everything between the five asterisks is felgercarb.
In my fan fiction, I gave Merl an amateurishly written background story. I’m framing it around Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s “Three Laws,” appearing in his essay, “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination,” appearing in “Profiles of the Future” (1962). I’m partial to the year, since that’s when I appeared on the planet:
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Magic/MAGA. Math. Merl. Acting as his [own] hype man in medieval Europe, his Pythagorean vectors probably looked like magic to Art, or anybody else not initiates of Euclidian mysteries.
Taking a DiSC Model survey at work, my profile came out as follows:
DiSC:
The DiSC model: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness.
People with D personalities tend to be confident and place an emphasis on accomplishing bottom-line results.
People with i personalities tend to be more open and place an emphasis on relationships and influencing or persuading others.
People with S personalities tend to be dependable and place an emphasis on cooperation and sincerity.
People with C personalities tend to place an emphasis on quality, accuracy, expertise, and competency.
Everything DiSC also measures priorities (the words around the circle), providing more nuanced and memorable feedback in profiles.
Model
Your DC story.
Because you have a DC style, Reginald, you probably pride yourself on your ability to face challenges head-on. When you’ve set your mind on a goal, you’re not easily swayed by obstacles or disapproval from others. And, when the status quo doesn’t make sense to you, you’re not afraid to question it, even if it means occasionally stepping on other people’s toes.
Ahem: As a “DC,” I can be a bit much!
My PhD dissertation asked not “who is STEM for,” but why is anyone attracted to STEM in the first place? My research question got an answer: the modeling from others, to the tune of a fraternity brother Edward the 5th, and like the four Edwards before him, was in biology pre-med, and planning on attending medical school in his sophomore year!
I have often been called “a wizard” at whatever level of math I happen to be in, when in reality I am just as befuddled as the next person feverously taking notes in the class. Some things are obvious, while others take hours of work, and hope the janitorial staff doesn’t erase your efforts to clean the chalk, or dry erase boards.
STEM is for the larger society driven by the product that STEM generates: knowledge, applicable to the design of instruments, and weapons of war. Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist during the Second World War. (In Quantum Mechanics at A&T, I studied the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) As such, he worked for the Nazi Party in their nuclear weapons program, the motivation (I’m sure) for the Manhattan Project in the US. Had he succeeded, as alluded to in the alternate history novel by Philip K. Dick, “The Man in the High Castle,” the first nuclear weapon might have been called the Heisenberg Device. The Director of the Hayden Planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Avis Lang co-wrote a book, “Accessory to War,” alluding to the complicity of astrophysics in the military-industrial complex. From Merlin to Star Link managing signal traffic to drones, those with the bigger guns win, which has proven important in the colonial conquest of resources.
To conquer efficiently typically requires a lot of math. And those who pass the mysteries of differential and integral Calculus normally become modern Merlins for the state.
Using math to save the planet from climate catastrophe is rewarding, and altruistic, but it doesn’t conquer anything for God, or corporate profits.
Instead of better math, maybe we need better humans.
Topics: Applied Physics, Atmospheric Science, Chemistry, Climate Change, Global Warming
Note: It’s disheartening that geoengineering, made popular by science fiction novels and plots in Star Trek, is being considered because we’re too selfish to change our behavior.
More and more climate scientists are supporting experiments to cool Earth by altering the stratosphere or the ocean.
As recently as 10 years ago most scientists I interviewed and heard speak at conferences did not support geoengineering to counteract climate change. Whether the idea was to release large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to “block” the sun’s heating or to spread iron across the ocean to supercharge algae that breathe in carbon dioxide, researchers resisted on principle: don’t mess with natural systems because unintended consequences could ruin Earth. They also worried that trying the techniques even at a small scale could be a slippery slope to wider deployment and that countries would use the promise of geoengineering as an excuse to keep burning carbon-emitting fossil fuels.
But today, climate scientists more openly support experimenting with these and other proposed strategies, partly because entrepreneurs and organizations are going ahead with the methods anyway—often based on little data or field trials. Scientists want to run controlled experiments to see if the methods are productive, to test consequences, and perhaps to show objectively that the approaches can cause serious problems.
“We do need to try the techniques to figure them out,” says Rob Jackson, a professor at Stanford University, chair of the international research partnership Global Carbon Project, and author of a book on climate solutions called Into the Clear Blue Sky (Scribner, 2024). “But doing research does make them more likely to happen. That is the knotty part of all this.”
A researcher holds the scaffolding with tiny copper foils attached. These copper pieces will be struck with lasers, heating them to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit.
For the first time, researchers monitor the heat progression in laser-created plasma that occurs in only a few trillionths of a second.
A team of researchers supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation has developed a new method of tracking the ultra-fast heat progression in warm, dense matter plasmas — the type of matter created when metals are struck with high-powered lasers. Published in Nature Communications, the results of this study will help researchers better understand not only how plasma forms when metal is heated by high-powered lasers but also what’s happening within the cores of giant planets and even aid in the development of fast ignition laser fusion with energy-generating potential here on Earth.
The research team aimed a high-powered laser at very thin strips of copper, which heated to 200,000 degrees Fahrenheit and momentarily shifted to a warm, dense matter plasma state before exploding. At the same time, the researchers used ultrashort-duration X-ray pulses from an X-ray free-electron laser to capture images of the copper’s transformation down to a few picoseconds or trillionths of a second. By doing so, the researchers were able to observe the ultra-fast and microscopic transformation of matter.
“These findings shed new light on fundamental properties of plasmas in the warm dense matter state,” says Vyacheslav Lukin, NSF program director for Plasma Physics. “The new methods to probe the plasma developed by this international team of researchers may also inform future experiments at extremely high-powered lasers, such as the NSF ZEUS Laser Facility.”
A device containing a pneumatic logic circuit made from 21 microfluidic valves could be used as a new type of air-powered computer that does not require any electronic components. The device could help make a wide range of important air-powered systems safer and less expensive, according to its developers at the University of California at Riverside.
Electronic computers rely on transistors to control the flow of electricity. But in the new air-powered computer, the researchers use tiny valves instead of transistors to control the flow of air rather than electricity. “These air-powered computers are an example of microfluidics, a decades-old field that studies the flow of fluids (usually liquids but sometimes gases) through tiny networks of channels and valves,” explains team leader William Grover, a bioengineer at UC Riverside.
By combining multiple microfluidic valves, the researchers made air-powered versions of standard logic gates. For example, they combined two valves in a row to make a Boolean AND gate. This gate works because air will flow through the two valves only if both are open. Similarly, two valves connected in parallel make a Boolean OR gate. Here, air will flow if either one or the other of the valves is open.
Physics and Nano 