Three ‘til noon. You are at Pine Hill and have completed your walk. Carol is still on hers. There was a commentary on the editorial page you had not expected because the subject is on what it means if Einstein’s theory is overturned in terms of the speed of light not being the ultimate speed obtainable in the universe. To you this is the dark humor that ultimately of course belongs on the front page in the experiment proof is replicated. It is right up with the earth not being the center of the universe; which of course it still is relative to ‘the truth is us’. Now, light might be shocked to find it hasn’t won the race as far as speed goes. Woe is light. But for a few people no one need comprehend the difference.
“A neutrino is faster than me, how can that be?” asked Lieutenant Light.
“It is a new human discovery,” replied General Relativity.
“What does this mean to the modern scene?” asked Lieutenant Light.
"No need to spark a riot, sun, the Science is from a Private."
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The lines popped in your head while you were waiting for Carol to pick up picnic food for tomorrow’s trip to the banks of the Ohio. Today you had the garage door fixed so it is tighter to the house. Next year, when you paint, you will get a new garage door from PDQ the people who fixed it.
We had lunch earlier at Chipotle/Panera. Again, too much for me (I don’t know why the change); anyway, I have leftovers for supper. The PDQ people said they could be out today when we called this morning, so we took advantage of it. Beautiful day for a walk too, so it has not been entirely wasted. It was fun writing the lines – might not make a lot of sense to some, but I decided to put them on Facebook for a change of pace. And, for whatever reason, I am comfortable about yesterday’s decision – heart and mind appear settled. Who would have thought? Like light and neutrinos there is more to you than meets the eye, at least in my estimation. Thank you, I am ever appreciative. – rho
Mid-afternoon and you are sitting in the car in the shade at the scenic Little Miami State Park next to the river and near the bottom of 3-C state highway bridge (Cincinnati’s Montgomery Road and Westerville’s State Street – one in the same) a connection not often thought about.
You saw that a new Discover magazine arrived today and the cover focuses on Dark Matter, one of Doug Goss’ favorite physics’ subjects. And, earlier today you captured an article on BBC – Science. Here is the slightly condensed version.
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BBC – Science: 6 October 2011 Last updated at 16:29 ET
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Crab Pulsar's high-energy beam surprises astronomers
. . . Astronomers have spotted gamma ray emissions coming from the Crab Pulsar at far higher energies than expected. . . .
They found emissions at more than 100 gigaelectronvolts - 100 billion times more energetic than visible light.
The Crab Nebula that hosts the pulsar continues to amaze astronomers, despite being one of the most studied objects.
The remnant of a supernova that lit up the skies on Earth in 1054, it has been taken in modern times to be a constant source of light - so constant that telescopes were trained on it for calibrations.
But earlier this year, the Crab was spotted emitting gamma-ray flares that have confounded astronomers.
Within the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar - a tiny, rapidly spinning neutron star that sprays highly energetic electromagnetic rays out at its poles like a lighthouse beam, sweeping past the Earth 30 times a second.
The pulsar's enormous magnetic field is known to gather up particles and accelerate them - in a process much like particle accelerators here on Earth.
As those particles move in curved paths, they emit the gamma rays that we can measure.
Models reshaped
The new find complicates the story further, because that more steady beat of pulsar emissions seems to contain higher energies than was ever expected.
Current models of this process put an upper limit on just how energetic the photons will be.
But Nepomuk Otte of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics in California said that results from the Fermi space telescope suggested the Crab Pulsar might hold a surprise.
Fermi only measures gamma rays up to an energy of 20 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), but there were hints in the data that the pulsar might have more energetic particles that were not being caught.
"If you were more optimistic, and asked yourself 'is it also possible that with these data there should be more emission above 100 GeV', the answer was a clear yes... even though the models didn't expect that," Dr Otte told the Science podcast.
So Dr Otte and his colleagues turned to the Arizona, US-based Very Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (Veritas), which can measure far higher energies, and trained it on the pulsar.
They spotted gamma rays with energies of far more than 100 GeV, and there were further hints that there may be teraelectronvolt rays; that puts them nearly on a par with particle energies at the Large Hadron Collider.
"These are much, much higher energies than had been previously thought can come from a pulsar," Dr Otte said.
He said that there is something missing in our models of the "cosmic particle accelerators" that give rise to the gamma rays; they must arise from much further out in the magnetic fields of the pulsars.
"It's a very radical change to the picture of how we believe gamma-ray emission comes from pulsars," he said.
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What is an electronvolt?
Charged particles tend to speed up in an electric field, defined as an electric potential - or voltage - spread over a distance
One electronvolt (eV) is the energy gained by a single electron as it accelerates through a potential of one volt
It is a convenient unit of measure for particle accelerators, which speed particles up through much higher electric potentials
The Large Hadron Collider, for example, can accelerate particles up to an energy of several trillion electronvolts (TeV)
This is still only the energy in the motion of a flying mosquito
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The key to me is:
“Within the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar - a tiny, rapidly spinning neutron star that sprays highly energetic electromagnetic rays out at its poles like a lighthouse beam, sweeping past the Earth 30 times a second.
The pulsar's enormous magnetic field is known to gather up particles and accelerate them - in a process much like particle accelerators here on Earth.”
Particle accelerators are natural and the Crab Pulsar ‘touches’ the Earth with electromagnetic rays thirty times a second. This seems awesome until I read later:
“The Large Hadron Collider, for example, can accelerate particles up to an energy of several trillion electronvolts (TeV)
This is still only the energy in the motion of a flying mosquito.”
The juxtaposition of such large numbers with seemingly so little significance of energy blows me away. How much significance does it take to be significant in physics, in light? In the physics of thought? If we were bombarded by an insignificant unconscious thought thirty times a second, what would it mean? Is this what is going on in the DNA from the beginning to the end of our physical lives? Electromagnetic and chemical transmissions that tell us to have a backbone and to use it physically and metaphorically both at once?
Orndorff, you carry yourself away on a metaphorical flying carpet. There are no pulsars in living cells. You flutter your mind in the tealeaves, boy. Go home, read the real science in the magazine and come up with something a bit more concrete to think on and lift with that not so powerful backbone of yours. – Amorella.
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