The “theory of everything” is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be “the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God”.

But theologians needn’t lose too much sleep just yet. Despite decades of effort, progress has been slow. Rather than one or two rival theories whose merits can be judged against the evidence, there is a profusion of candidates and precious few clues as to which (if any) might turn out to be correct.

Here’s a brief guide to some of the front runners.

The theories they summarize:

-String theory
-Loop quantum gravity
-CDT
-Quantum Einstein gravity
-Quantum graphity
-Internal relativity
-E8

New Scientist: Seven theories of everything

(via Wade)

Today, Alex Feigel at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, a government lab in Yavne Israel, suggests an entirely new way to modify the momentum of the quantum vacuum and how this can be exploited to generate propulsion.

Feigel’s approach combines two well-established ideas. The first is the Lorentz force experienced by a charged particle in electric and magnetic fields that are crossed. The second is the magnetoelectric effect–the phenomenon in which an external magnetic field induces a polarised internal electric field in certain materials and vice versa.

Technology Review: A Blueprint for a Quantum Propulsion Machine

(via HiggsBoson23)

John Stuart Reid proposes that sound is not actually a wave, as has been thought for centuries, but a “bubble” and that this is what creates the amazing patterns we see captured with cymatics.
In his article, The Physics of Sound, Reid says that sound has previously been thought to travel as a wave because of the graphical, wave-based representation we have used to capture sound visibly in the past…

“The graphical representation of sound ‘waves’ in the past is why the term ’sound waves’ is used, causing the false impression that sound travels as a wave.”

…but that cymatics allows us to realize that the true form of sound is actually spherical, or bubble-like, in nature.

Journal of Cymatics: Cymatics Scientist Says Sound is a Bubble, Not a Wave

(Thanks Wes!)

U.S. Navy researchers claimed to have experimentally confirmed cold fusion in a presentation at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting.

“We have compelling evidence that fusion reactions are occurring” at room temperature, said Pamela Mosier-Boss, a scientist with the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (San Diego). The results are “the first scientific report of highly energetic neutrons from low-energy nuclear reactions,” she added.

Cold fusion was first reported in 1989 by researchers Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, then with the University of Utah, prompting a global effort to develop the technology. Normal fusion reactions, where hydrogen is fused into helium, occur at millions of degrees inside the Sun. If room temperature fusion reactions could be realized commercially, as Fleishchmann and Pons claimed to have achieved inside an electrolytic cell, it promised to produce abundant nuclear energy from deuterium–heavy hydrogen–extracted from seawater.

Other scientists were unable to duplicate the 1989 results, thereby discrediting the work.

The theoretical underpinnings of cold fusion have yet to be adequately explained. The hypothesis is that when electrolysis is performed on deuteron, molecules are fused into helium, releasing a high-energy neutron. While excess heat has been detected by researchers, no group had yet been able to detect the missing neutrons.

Now, the Naval researchers claim that the problem was instrumentation, which was not up to the task of detecting such small numbers of neutrons. To sense such small quantities, Mosier-Boss used a special plastic detector called CR-39. Using co-deposition with nickel and gold wire electrodes, which were inserted into a mixture of palladium chloride and deutrium, the detector was able to capture and track the high-energy neutrons.

Full Story: EE Times

(via Justin)

One of the various projects of the Esalen Institute was the Physics Consciousness Research Group, founded to study time travel, ESP, consciousness after death, and other fringe subjects. Various people have made the claim that Physics Consciousness Research Group was the inspiration for the movie Ghostbusters. Jack Sarfatti, one of the founders of the Physics Consciousness Research Group, is a physicist and archetypal “mad scientist” – in fact, he claims to be the inspiration for both from Back to the Future and Egon Spangler from Ghostbusters.

Full Story: Hatch 23

Scientists have come a bit closer to achieving the “Star Trek” feat of teleportation.

No one is galaxy-hopping, or even beaming people around, but for the first time, information has been teleported between two separate atoms across a distance of a meter — about a yard.

This is a significant milestone in a field known as quantum information processing, said Christopher Monroe of the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland, who led the effort.

Teleportation is one of nature’s most mysterious forms of transport: Quantum information, such as the spin of a particle or the polarization of a photon, is transferred from one place to another, without traveling through any physical medium.

It has previously been achieved between photons (a unit, or quantum, of electromagnetic radiation, such as light) over very large distances, between photons and ensembles of atoms, and between two nearby atoms through the intermediary action of a third.

Full Story: Fox News

(Thanks Joe)

Stewart Brand, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Douglas Rushkoff, Garret Lisi and about a bazillion more weigh in on this year’s Edge question:

New tools equal new perceptions.

Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.

Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.

And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.

Nobel laureate James Watson, who discovered the DNA double helix, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter, recently were awarded Double Helix Awards from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for being the founding fathers of human genome sequencing. They are the first two human beings to have their complete genetic information decoded.

Watson noted during his acceptance speech that he doesn’t want government involved in decisions concerning how people choose to handle information about their personal genomes.

Venter is on the brink of creating the first artificial life form on Earth. He has already announced transplanting the information from one genome into another. In other words, your dog becomes your cat. He has privately alluded to important scientific progress in his lab, the result of which, if and when realized, will change everything.
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
“What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

Full Story: Edge

Very nice to start the year with advice from Taleb

While it has seemed an impossible goal for nearly 100 years, scientists now believe that they are on brink of cracking one of the biggest problems in physics by harnessing the power of nuclear fusion, the reaction that burns at the heart of the sun.

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

Its goal is to generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and pressures billions of times higher than those found anywhere else on earth, from a speck of fuel little bigger than a pinhead. If successful, the experiment will mark the first step towards building a practical nuclear fusion power station and a source of almost limitless energy.

Full Story: Telegraph

(Thanks Cap’n Marrrrk)

A new experiment may have found the first direct evidence of dark matter particles, a discovery that could begin to unravel one of the biggest mysteries in physics.

Theorists believe that dark matter, made up of of weakly-interacting massive particles, composes 23 percent of the universe, but no one has ever directly detected one of these WIMPs.

Now, physicists have announced they’ve spotted electrons with just about the amount of energy they would have expected to be made by a particular kind of WIMP entering the visible world.

John Wefel of Louisiana State University and colleagues report in Nature Wednesday that they could have detected “Kaluza-Klein” electron-positron pairs resulting from the annihilation of these WIMPS.

The KK particles are predicted by multiple-dimension theories of the universe and have long-been a leading candidate as the substance of dark matter. The new discovery then, if confirmed, would provide evidence that the fabric of space-time has many “compact” dimensions beyond the four that humans perceive.

Full Story: Wired

Late-night viewing of some “morphing UFO” footage has brought me back to a concept that’s always fascinated me: a Universe swarming with nano-scale ET intelligence.? This could mean anything from tiny spaceships, to Earth itself being a high-tech, alien-scripted “stage” where what we perceive as dead matter is anything but.

“The tiny probes I’m talking about will be so inconspicuous that it’s no surprise that we haven’t come across one. It’s not the sort of thing that you’re going to trip over in your back yard. So if that is the way technology develops, namely, smaller, faster, cheaper and if other civilizations have gone this route, then we could be surrounded by surveillance devices.”

That’s Paul Davies, thinking out loud along the same lines. (For more excellent brainfood from Davies, check out his recent 2007 Scientific American article, Are Aliens Among Us? — which is focused on microbial and nanoscale lifeforms, not shapeshifters posing as human.)

Although it remains mostly experimental and speculative, humans have worked out the mechnics of nanoscale engineering to a remarkable degree.? Decades ago, the concept of matter being able to change it’s fundamental properties instantly could only be attributed to magic and sorcery, but now it’s downright normal.? From the visionary Wil McCarthy’s classic article, Ultimate Alchemy:

“Electrons that are part of an atom will arrange themselves into orbitals, which constrain and define their positions around the positively charged nucleus. These orbitals, and the electrons that partially or completely fill them, are what determine the chemical properties of an atom – such as what other sorts of atoms it can react with, and how strongly.

This point bears repeating: The electrons trapped in a quantum dot will arrange themselves as though they were part of an atom, even though there’s no atomic nucleus for them to surround. Which atom they resemble depends on the number of excess electrons trapped inside. What’s more, the electrons in two adjacent quantum dots will interact just as they would in two real atoms placed at the equivalent distance, meaning the two dots can share electrons between them – they can form connections equivalent to chemical bonds. Not virtual or simulated bonds, but real ones.

Now we’ll take it a step further: Quantum dots needn’t be formed by etching blocks out of a quantum well. Instead, the electrons can be confined electrostatically by electrodes whose voltage can be varied on demand, like a miniature electric fence around a corral. In fact, this is the preferred method, since it permits the dots’ characteristics to be adjusted without any physical modification of the underlying material. We can pump electrons in and out simply by varying the voltage on the fence.

This type of nanostructure is called an artificial or designer atom, because it can be manipulated to resemble any atom on the periodic table. It’s not a science-fictional device, but a routine piece of experimental hardware used in laboratories throughout the world.“

Also check out the “free multimedia edition” of Wil McCarthy’s book-length (and excellent) expansion on this topic, Hacking Matter.

On Sept. 18, the news from CERN, the organization that runs the LHC, was that an electrical problem involved with a cooling system caused a helium leak that would keep the mammoth particle accelerator out of commission for a day or so. A couple of days later, the estimate had stretched into two months: The machine would need to be warmed back up, which will take three to four weeks, before a full investigation could be done.
Now the outlook is even more bleak for eager physicists, who have already waited decades for the giant collider to come to fruition, after only a week of tantilizingly successful beam operations.

Full Story: Wired

The world’s largest atom smasher’s first experiment went off today without a hitch, paving the way toward the recreation of post-big bang conditions.

The Large Hadron Collider fired a beam of protons inside a circular, 17-mile (27-kilometer) long tunnel underneath villages and cow pastures at the French-Swiss border.

Inside the control room, physicists and engineers cautiously shot the beam down part of the tunnel, stopping it before it went all the way around.

“Oh, we made it through!” one person cried as the beam made it through a further section of the tunnel.

One hour after starting up, on the first attempt to send the beam circling all the way around the tunnel, it completed the trip successfully-bringing raucous applause.

“First of all, I didn’t believe it,” said Verena Kain, a European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) engineer.

“I had to see it a second time, and I thought, Oh, wow, it actually worked!”

“Things can go wrong at any time, but luckily this morning everything went smoothly,” said Lyn Evans of CERN, who oversaw the building of the accelerator.

Full Story: National Geographic

The fact that I’m sitting here writing this and you’re sitting there reading it means that fears regarding the Large Hadron Colider (LHC) and the end of the world were a bit overblown. At 10:33 AM CET this morning, the first proton beam successfully completed a circuit of the entire LHC.

The LHC is the latest example of ‘Big Science,’ a multinational collaboration involving thousands of scientists from over 60 different nations. The largest particle accelerator ever built, scientists hope that data gathered from the LHC will nail down the existence of the elusive Higgs boson, a subatomic particle that is theorized to be responsible the existence of mass.

Full Story: Ars Technica

If you’re still worried, you can keep tabs on the LHC with the Large Hadron Collider webcams at CERN.

Or, if that’s too much trouble, just keep checking hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com

(Thanks to Bill Whitcomb for that last one)

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a 27 kilometer (17 mile) long particle accelerator straddling the border of Switzerland and France, is nearly set to begin its first particle beam tests. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is preparing for its first small tests in early August, leading to a planned full-track test in September – and the first planned particle collisions before the end of the year. The final step before starting is the chilling of the entire collider to -271.25 C (-456.25 F). Here is a collection of photographs from CERN, showing various stages of completion of the LHC and several of its larger experiments (some over seven stories tall), over the past several years. (27 photos total)

Full Story: Boston.com

(via Dark Roasted Blend)

he year is 1908, and it’s just after seven in the morning. A man is sitting on the front porch of a trading post at Vanavara in Siberia. Little does he know, in a few moments, he will be hurled from his chair and the heat will be so intense he will feel as though his shirt is on fire.

That’s how the Tunguska event felt 40 miles from ground zero.

Today, June 30, 2008, is the 100th anniversary of that ferocious impact near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in remote Siberia–and after 100 years, scientists are still talking about it.

“If you want to start a conversation with anyone in the asteroid business all you have to say is Tunguska,” says Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It is the only entry of a large meteoroid we have in the modern era with first-hand accounts.”

Full Story: NASA

(via Hit and Run)

See also: Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event and Tunguska event in fiction. The latter notes that the Tunguska Event was mentioned in Ghostbusters.

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.

Full Story: New Scientist

(via Kurzweil)

Our planet is not at risk from the world’s most powerful particle physics experiment, a report has concluded.

The document addresses fears that the Large Hadron Collider is so energetic, it could have unforeseen consequences.

Critics are worried that mini-black holes made at the soon-to-open facility on the French-Swiss border might threaten the Earth’s very existence.

But the report, issued the European Organization for Nuclear Research, says there is “no conceivable danger”.

Full Story: BBC

Cold fusion, the act of producing a nuclear reaction at room temperature, has long been relegated to science fiction after researchers were unable to recreate the experiment that first “discovered” the phenomenon. But a Japanese scientist was supposedly able to start a cold fusion reaction earlier this week, which-if the results are real-could revolutionise the way we gather energy.

Yoshiaki Arata, a highly respected physicist in Japan, demonstrated a low-energy nuclear reaction at Osaka University on Thursday. In front of a live audience, including reporters from six major newspapers and two tv studios, Arata and a co-professor Yue-Chang Zhang, produced excess heat and helium atoms from deuterium gas.

Full Story: Gizmodo

Although the bulk of his work involves deriving equations, Cowan’s findings mesh well with laboratory data generated on the cerebral cortex and electroencephalograms. His latest findings show that the same mathematical tools physicists use to describe the behavior of subatomic particles and the dynamics of liquids and solids can now be applied to understanding how the brain generates its various rhythms.

These include the delta waves generated during sleep, the alpha waves of the visual brain, and the gamma waves, discovered during the last decade, which seem related to information processing. “The resting state of brain activity seems to have a statistical structure that’s characteristic of a certain kind of phase transition,” Cowan said. “The brain likes to sit there because that’s the place where information processing is optimized.”

At this stage of his research, Cowan said it would be premature and speculative for him to try to relate how phase transitions in the brain might relate to neurological conditions or states of human consciousness. “That’s for the future,” he said.

Full Story: Science Daily.

(Thanks Jasper!)

See also:

Does the Earth’s magnetic field cause suicides?

“The builders of the world’s biggest particle collider are being sued in federal court over fears that the experiment might create globe-gobbling black holes or never-before-seen strains of matter that would destroy the planet.

Representatives at Fermilab in Illinois and at Europe’s CERN laboratory, two of the defendants in the case, say there’s no chance that the Large Hadron Collider would cause such cosmic catastrophes. Nevertheless, they’re bracing to defend themselves in the courtroom as well as the court of public opinion.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is due for startup later this year at CERN’s headquarters on the French-Swiss border. It’s expected to tackle some of the deepest questions in science: Is the foundation of modern physics right or wrong? What existed during the very first moment of the universe’s existence? Why do some particles have mass while others don’t? What is the nature of dark matter? Are there extra dimensions of space out there that we haven’t yet detected?

Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into “strangelets” that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?”

(via Cosmic Log- MSNBC)

(Related: Virtual tour of LHC via Popular Science Blog)

A new study is challenging the long-standing notion that the whole solar system formed from the same raw materials.

Until now most scientists had believed that the inner solar system bodies-Mercury, Venus, Earth, its moon, and Mars-had the same composition as primitive meteorites called chondrites.

But, problematically, Earth’s chemistry doesn’t quite match.

Now, French researcher Guillaume Caro, from Centre de Recherches P?trographiques et G?ochimiques in France, and his colleagues say that the makeup of Mars and the moon don’t correspond either.

It turns out the three bodies may be more similar to each other than the chondrite-rich asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter.

Full Story: National Geographic

“It sounds like a headline from the spoof newspaper The Onion, but for physicists, this is actually an achievement: Two teams have stored nothing in a puff of gas and then retrieved it a split second later. Storing a strange form of vacuum builds on previous efforts in which researchers stopped light in its tracks (ScienceNOW, 22 January 2001) and may mark a significant step toward new quantum information and telecommunication technologies.

To stop light, researchers first shine an intense and continuous beam of laser light into a gas of atoms. That “control beam” tickles the atoms to allow a pulse of laser light of another wavelength to enter the gas. To trap the pulse, researchers turn off the control beam, which causes the pulse to imprint itself on the atoms. To release it again, they turn on the control laser.

So storing a vacuum might sound ridiculously simple: Follow the same procedure but leave out the pulse, and you store nothing. However, Alexander Lvovsky of the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues and Mikio Kozuma of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and his group have stored a very peculiar type of nothingness called a “squeezed vacuum.”

(via Science Now)

More from TED, but considerably less grim:

Wired: Your entire career has been focused, in essence, on your rejection of string theory. What do you have against strings and extra dimensions?

Garrett Lisi: It’s more accurate to say my career (or, often, lack of one) has been focused on doing what I wanted. There are a lot of good things about string theory, and it’s great that some people want to work on it. But, to me, it seemed too disconnected from real particle physics and gravitation. It seemed unlikely that many of these string constructions could ever be experimentally tested, or connected up with the real world. So I set off to follow my own interests.

Full Story: Wired.

I got this email from my good friend Jason this morning regarding a series of literary fantasy novels I posted about a short time ago, The Prince of Nothing, by R. Scott Bakker:

You got read this on the Three Seas Forum, this cat Deadshade, is a phd physicist with a specialty in QM, his synopsis/interpretation is eloquent, elaborate, and utterly breathtaking. it essentially toches ground on alot of our dicussions on the subject/s, but his training and education enables him to elucidate in a way we were not!! check it out homes, if the link doesnt work just go to the forum and look for the topic “Inchoroi motivations & Quantum Mechanics”. I got so excited after reading it i had to print it off….

http://forum.three-seas.com/viewtopic.php?t=1287

For fans of the books, the post on the Three Seas forum will be of interest.

PS — SPOILER. While it doesn’t ruin the overall story, it’s a spoiler nonetheless.

“Dr HongSheng Zhao, of the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, has shown that the puzzling dark matter and its counterpart dark energy may be more closely linked than was previously thought. Only 4% of the universe is made of known material – the other 96% is traditionally labelled into two sectors, dark matter and dark energy. A British astrophysicist and Advanced Fellow of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, Dr Zhao points out, ‘Both dark matter and dark energy could be two faces of the same coin.

‘As astronomers gain understanding of the subtle effects of dark energy in galaxies in the future, we will solve the mystery of astronomical dark matter at the same time. Astronomers believe that both the universe and galaxies are held together by the gravitational attraction of a huge amount of unseen material, first noted by the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in 1933, and now commonly referred to as dark matter. Dr Zhao reports that, “Dark energy has already revealed its presence by masking as dark matter 60 years ago if we accept that dark matter and dark energy are linked phenomena that share a common origin.’

(via PhysOrg)

(Related: virtual tour of the Large Hadron Collider via Popular Science Blog)