Science notes: Universe Through a Glass Darkly

Measured one way, the universe appears expanding at a certain rate; measured another way, the universe appears to be expanding at a different rate. And, as a new paper shows, those discrepancies have gotten larger in recent years, even as the measurements have gotten more precise.

“We think that if our understanding of cosmology is correct, then all of these different measurements should be giving us the same answer,” said Katie Mack, a theoretical cosmologist at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and co-author of the new paper.

The two most famous measurements work very differently from one another. The first relies on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): the microwave radiation leftover from the first moments after the Big Bang. Cosmologists have built theoretical models of the entire history of the universe on a CMB foundation — models they’re very confident in, and that would require an all-new physics to break. And taken together, Mack said, they produce a reasonably precise number for the Hubble constant, or H0, which governs how fast the universe is currently expanding.

The second measurement uses supernovas and flashing stars in nearby galaxies, known as Cepheids. By gauging how far those galaxies are from our own, and how fast they’re moving away from us, astronomers have gotten what they believe is a very precise measurement of the Hubble constant. And that method offers a different H0.

“If we’re getting different answers that means that there’s something that we don’t know,” Mack told Live Science. “So this is really about not just understanding the current expansion rate of the universe — which is something we’re interested in — but understanding how the universe has evolved, how the expansion has evolved, and what space-time has been doing all this time.”

Weikang Lin, also a cosmologist at NCSU and lead author of the paper, said that to develop a full picture of the problem, the team decided to round up all the different ways of “constraining” H0 in one place.Here’s what “constraining” means: Measurements in physics rarely turn up exact answers. (Think what this would be if lifted into the field of  forensic science, No murder may be pinned on the guilty.) Instead, they put limits on the range of possible answers. And by looking at these constraints together, you can learn a lot about something you’re studying. (In legal terms it would be a technical loophole). Looking through one telescope, for example, you might learn that a point of light in space is either red, yellow or orange. Another might tell you it’s brighter than most other lights in space but less bright than the sun. Another might tell you it’s moving across the sky as fast a planet. None of those constraints would tell you much on their own, but taken together they suggest  you are looking at Mars.

In an earlier post I had posited that Scientists are looking at universe from the wrong end of the telescope. Closer home things appear reliable and Laws of Newton or Kepler can be proved. Our predicament is that of the Flying Dutchman the more he sails the coast line further eludes him. He sees only what he believes in. Having failed to understand God as the Creator of Universe, sail he must never arriving at the one article that holds everything in order. What reason! What pother!

(Ack: How the Universe Stopped Making Sense/Life Science/Space/Rafi Letzter/Oct. 11,2019)

Benny

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Hubble (In)Constant-2

Pascal had in his Pensées observed thus ‘Nature has made all her truths independent of one another’ Nature is like the elephant of the Indian folk tale. Each of the five men of Benares, who focused on one aspect,- astrophysicists, biologists chemists and what have you, were all engaged in seeking truth but failed. Only their blindness stood in the way. God is Truth and without knowing Truth what the five collated were truths independent of one another. This is what Hubble Constant signifies.

Had Science worked from Truth down to its several parts truths of which would be set on a firm line of reasoning since Truth the frame of reference known; whatever results obtained must be compared with it; the process of eliminating the irrelevant and ever narrowing down to Truth could have settled the matter. So this method works from the whole to study the several parts without having to work in dark.

Whereas Science works just the opposite. Uncertainty principle consequently ought to warn chances of error are far greater in this case. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that there is inherent uncertainty in the act of measuring a variable of a particle. Commonly applied to the position and momentum of a particle, the principle states that the more precisely the position is known the more uncertain the momentum is and vice versa. Similarly the Pauli exclusion principle is the quantum mechanical principle which states that two or more identical fermions cannot occupy the same quantum state within a quantum system simultaneously. Do we not see exclusion principle in the manner history never repeats itself? There was an attempt to recreate caliphate in 2014. It failed thoroughly because what propped it up, many factors in the medieval times have moved on and combined with many others to make history of present times. Similar a Woodstock repeat to match the 1969 event  was an impossibility. Exclusion principle applies to charged fundamental particles and its effect on human events are equally palpable.

Science for that matter shall draw different results meaning the yardstick is flawed to begin with.

Man and Woman set a family but how an infant born out their union responds to his environment is uncertain. So holding individual number of man and woman as fixed gives an uncertain outcome considering the infant in his generation shall have to interact with altogether different imponderables. If cosmos throw up uncertainty principle in case of fundamental particles is it too farfetched to think similar correspondence will not show in the manner human societies evolve?  Numbers are man made; when hitched to human condition numbers do not tell the full story. Taking the above mentioned analogy further one man and one woman together represent something else. The sum is not two but a family; and give it hundred years it spreads into so many opinions and divided loyalties. Pascal had in his Pensées observed of man’s innate difficulty to conceive the largest circle and it would still come short of infinity. Suppose I chuck a ball at you and it elicits an automatic response that is outside your will. You duck involuntarily. Man can make hypotheses and observe,- from data he collected he tries to prove them. There is an inherent flaw in his brain that he misses changes already happening in between. so the cosmos he looks at, gives only what he is looking for. Had he the mind of God, he would not need Uncertainty principle or Exclusion principle. Science at best is man’s attempt to lift his brain (still evolving) to build a model of cosmos.Whereas God as Omnipotent and omnipresent has in his mind conceived the whole and every part in development in relation to other. Whereas man in time and space adding up what is observed. Hubble (In)Constant is the problem.

Science has its uncertainty principle and for a Christian accepting God as the creator of heaven and the earth has faith to base his life upon. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen./ Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear (He.11:1,3)”.

(My post ‘The Clean Slate principle of Feb,18, 2010 also relates to the topic)

Benny

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Science Notes: Farout

A newly discovered object is the most-distant body ever observed in the solar system — and the first object ever found orbiting at more than 100 times the distance from Earth to the sun.
The discovery team nicknamed the object “Farout,” and its provisional designation from the International Astronomical Union is 2018 VG18. “Because 2018 VG18 is so distant, it orbits very slowly, likely taking more than 1,000 years to take one trip around the Sun.” one AU is the distance between Earth and the sun, which is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).
When we choose a scale to pinpoint objects in space like the sun or stars we take AU. Suppose we want to measure the smallest unit, where the space-time is zero where do I go? From my previous post on loop quantum gravity I suspect my thought must be as strange as what happens at the event horizon of a black hole. Certain ideas I can recall I have been carrying around me and a few I could put to rest having drawn logical conclusions from them. God’s role in my life for example. Certain ideas have taken a leap at times and it comes back in the face of certain ife experience I know it made my reasoning on better grounds. An idea though discarded when it bounces back to point out my flaw in reasoning what shall I say? Collective memory must be a kind of interface on which thoughts must make impact. It is more likely for a seafaring nation because of their past lead other nations as well. Thus was with the Age of exploration and in anything else. Collective memory belong to the category of invisible persuaders. I remember the case of a boy who astounded many locals by being able to recall events he surely had no way of living through. Such previous birth experience must account for collective memory.
White holes, wormholes and black holes are mysteries of life on which Science wrestles on premises and trying to work its way into one whole.
Benny

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Science and man

We are familiar with the adage ‘Best laid plans of man and mice often go awry’ and science can tell how to sequence genome of man and mouse but cannot answer a simple thing as why their best laid plans go awry. Here we see knowledge laid up on two legs one of which unfortunately is so short so much so all their theories,- despite being formulated with greatest care come crashing down. I shall cite an example to the danger of leaving science to decide any outcome in the world.
When we consider the discipline of Science no name greater than Einstein can be found. He wrote a letter to the President of the USA that led to the Manhattan Project. (The Einstein–Szilárd letter was a letter written by Leó Szilárd and signed by Albert Einstein that was sent to the United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 2, 1939. Written by Szilárd in consultation with fellow Hungarian physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, the letter warned that Germany might develop atomic bombs and suggested that the United States should start its own nuclear program. It prompted action by Roosevelt, which eventually resulted in the Manhattan Project developing the first atomic bombs-Ack:wikipedia)
Need we consider a more unwise step than this? Granted that at the time the idea was logically sound (in order to bring the war to a speedier conclusion) but none had an inkling that would lead to. But consider the world in future being held to ransom by a mad man with his finger on the button? Think of the spent fuel rods and nuclear waste leaching into the soil and into food chain: higher incidence of cancer across the globe owe partly to it. Man’s haste for solving a problem on hand is like putting out a lit matchstick but if it should in the process, throw the entire woods in flames what shall we say? Man’s foresight does not match with what is observable by hindsight. We are still living in the plethora of problems still needing a solution. While plastic littered everywhere on land the marine life is showing strain of chocking on plastic debris finding their way into ocean gyre. By reasons allied to man’s indiscriminate land use climate is showing weird patterns and as a result the coral life is bleached or dying.
Logic and rational approach to any problem is sound but fraught with danger where the problem is merely a tip of the iceberg of imponderables. Scientists speak of a cosmological inflation (It is a theory of exponential expansion of space in the early universe. The inflationary epoch lasted from 10−36 seconds after the conjectured Big Bang singularity to sometime between 10−33 and 10−32 seconds after the singularity) So between Cause and effect when repeated along the line causes a no man’s land to form, where what you do to right a wrong loses its meaning. Think of Israeli-Palestine problem. Israel shoots to stop an intifada but stone throwing resistance escalates into molotov cocktails and rockets from across the border. There are no winners or losers but the whole region being sucked into an all drawn out war of annihilation. Science has no clue despite their claim of proven data and sequence of tests and revising experiments all over again and into whose hands they are playing?
Theoretical Physics by itself is as harmless as a drudge who passes his time digging up names in order to set up a family tree. Pure Science must serve man. But their pursuits are funded by those who can make fat profits. So Technology comes in to their help.
Technology is all about dollars and cents It shall be thus Science has blundered into fields no one has ever gone before. But for every kill the pride of lions casts shadow, and hyenas will know they can have their fill when the lions turn their attention to other things. Between Science and Technology it is no different than this symbiotic relationship. Science makes a breakthrough and it causes some other concern which needs to be reworked. Of the Hubble Constant I had discussed elsewhere the bug that stymies effort is in the human mind itself. Plastic was a wonder material touted once as man’s ingenuity and harbinger of progress.

Moral aspect of man is not some formula and its source is not proved in an aseptic lab but in intra-personal relationships: happiness of living in harmony is natural and morality is sum total arrived for which no mathematical equation exists. When man has done wrong (for war is a wrong perpetuated by might over right) any solution that sound logical and timely must negotiate with changed circumstances following the war. The problem with Manhattan project did not take into account North Korea to cite an example. Science knows nothing of moral clause in the Why of living. Science is an exact discipline, so says the man who may be a moral being who never tell a lie knowingly.
(To be concluded)

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Awesome Power of Little Things

Only recently President Assad admitted his predicament. He is winning a war that he cannot hold because of severe shortage. The Syrian leader must have realized what mass exodus of his people in order to avoid conflict could do to a vast country like his. He also said the army faced a shortage of soldiers. Naturally. This just shows no country can survive if there are no people to make it work. Assad may sit like Robinson Crusoe considering himself as a monarch of all that he surveys. But without a subject he must be a monarch who must foul all over the palace and clear up the mess himself. What pomp! What circumstance! Having said this we shall see nature itself shows the truth is not in the glory of any one or his clan or tribe. These are all sustained by the most meanest article one would not have given a second thought.

Look at the snowflake, it shall not form without a speck of grit or dirt to work its magic on. Similarly our clouds.

Firstly consider planktons. They are like you and me just nobodies managing their role in the marine foodchain, at the bottom Nevertheless most life in the sea ultimately depends on photosynthetic plankton. Also known as microalgae, these tiny or microscopic organisms live near the surface and take their energy from the sun and pass it on through the marine food chain.

Clouds are made up of many tiny droplets of water that have condensed from water vapour onto microscopic particles floating in the Earth’s atmosphere. These particles are known as cloud condensation nuclei. Plankton essentially help provide clouds with these nuclei to form around.

The number of these particles in a given volume helps to determine the number of droplets in a cloud, which can have a big influence on how much sunlight a cloud reflects back into space. The more droplets a given mass of cloud water is broken up into, the more sunlight is reflected, as the overall surface area of the cloud’s droplets increases. Since a significant portion of the planet’s reflectivity, or albeido, is due to clouds, this can have a major impact on the energy balance of the Earth.

But these plankton have a big role to play above the surface of the sea too. In new study published in the journal Science Advances it is found that plankton help to control clouds over remote seas far from land. These clouds in turn bounce the sun’s energy back into space, regulating the Earth’s climate and keeping temperatures cooler than they would otherwise be without them.( (The Conversation-How plankton help control clouds over the world’s most remote oceans/July 21,2015-Daniel Grosvenor)

When we see how many societies are rewriting natural and divine laws we know such societies make capitalism continue as before. When they fatten certain sections on the grounds these are on the assumption that the hands that create national wealth have also ingenuity and daringness. How real are they? Their risk taking is simiar to a free booter who is licensed by the ruling class to slash and burn rain forests or drill remote places and siphon off precious natural resources. The governments would not want to know the truth and pretend it is all for the nation’s economy. In nature there is no such big or little but each part is connected to something else. In such a complex sysem nations that let some perpetuate tyranny over the rest in their license to exploit what is for all shoud be considered as evil.

The concept of nations based on geographical borders is an illusion so is determining value of any in terms of size. People count.

benny

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