Large Hadron Collider Could Be World’s First Time Machine

If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider — the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year — could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time.

Illustration of singlet time travel theory. When a pair of protons collide in the Large Hadron Collider, the resultant explosion may create a special type of particle, called a Higgs singlet, that is capable of traveling forward and back in time. It would do so by leaving familiar three-dimensional space to travel in an extra dimension. (Credit: Jenni Ohnstad / Vanderbilt)

“Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.”

One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.

According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.

“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”

Unsticking the “brane”

The test of the researchers’ theory will be whether the physicists monitoring the collider begin seeing Higgs singlet particles and their decay products spontaneously appearing. If they do, Weiler and Ho believe that they will have been produced by particles that travel back in time to appear before the collisions that produced them.

Weiler and Ho’s theory is based on M-theory, a “theory of everything.” A small cadre of theoretical physicists have developed M-theory to the point that it can accommodate the properties of all the known subatomic particles and forces, including gravity, but it requires 10 or 11 dimensions instead of our familiar four. This has led to the suggestion that our universe may be like a four-dimensional membrane or “brane” floating in a multi-dimensional space-time called the “bulk.”

According to this view, the basic building blocks of our universe are permanently stuck to the brane and so cannot travel in other dimensions. There are some exceptions, however. Some argue that gravity, for example, is weaker than other fundamental forces because it diffuses into other dimensions. Another possible exception is the proposed Higgs singlet, which responds to gravity but not to any of the other basic forces.

Answers in neutrinos?

Weiler began looking at time travel six years ago to explain anomalies that had been observed in several experiments with neutrinos. Neutrinos are nicknamed ghost particles because they react so rarely with ordinary matter: Trillions of neutrinos hit our bodies every second, yet we don’t notice them because they zip through without affecting us.

Weiler and colleagues Heinrich Päs and Sandip Pakvasa at the University of Hawaii came up with an explanation of the anomalies based on the existence of a hypothetical particle called the sterile neutrino. In theory, sterile neutrinos are even less detectable than regular neutrinos because they interact only with gravitational force. As a result, sterile neutrinos are another particle that is not attached to the brane and so should be capable of traveling through extra dimensions.

Weiler, Päs and Pakvasa proposed that sterile neutrinos travel faster than light by taking shortcuts through extra dimensions. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, there are certain conditions where traveling faster than the speed of light is equivalent to traveling backward in time. This led the physicists into the speculative realm of time travel.

Ideas impact science fiction

In 2007, the researchers, along with Vanderbilt graduate fellow James Dent, posted a paper titled “Neutrino time travel” that generated a considerable amount of buzz.

Their ideas found their way into two science fiction novels.Final Theory by Mark Alpert, which was described in the New York Times as a “physics-based version of The Da Vinci Code,” is based on the researchers’ idea of neutrinos taking shortcuts in extra dimensions. Joe Haldeman’s novel The Accidental Time Machine is about a time-traveling MIT graduate student and includes an author’s note that describes the novel’s relationship to the type of time travel described by Dent, Päs, Pakvasa and Weiler.

Ho is a graduate fellow working with Weiler. Their theory is described in a paper posted March 7 on the research website arXiv.org.

Fire at Japan nuclear reactor heightens radiation threat

Japan raced to avert a catastrophe after fire broke out on Wednesday at a nuclear plant that has sent low levels of radiation wafting into Tokyo, prompting some people to flee the capital and triggering growing international alarm.

Civil defence relief workers stand together after an earthquake and tsunami swept through Otsuchi, in the Iwate prefecture, eastern Japan March 15, 2011. REUTERS/International Red Cross/Handout

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Public broadcaster NHK said flames were no longer visible at the building housing the No.4 reactor of the plant in Fukushima, 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, hours after the operator reported fire had broken out at the quake-crippled facility.

Experts say spent fuel rods in a cooling pool at the No. 4 reactor could be exposed by the fire and spew more radiation into the atmosphere. Operator Tokyo Electric Power said it was considering using a helicopter to dump boric acid, a fire retardant, on the facility.

Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said two workers were missing after blasts at the facility a day earlier blew a hole in the building housing the No. 4 reactor.

In the first hint of international frustration at the pace of updates from Japan, Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he wanted more timely and detailed information.

“We do not have all the details of the information so what we can do is limited,” Amano told a news conference in Vienna. “I am trying to further improve the communication.”

The U.S. Department of Energy said it had sent a team of 34 people to help Japan with the crisis.

Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Tuesday urged people within 30 km (18 miles) of the facility — a population of 140,000 — to remain indoors, as authorities grappled with the world’s most serious nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986.

Officials in Tokyo said radiation in the capital was 10 times normal at one point but not a threat to human health in the sprawling high-tech city of 13 million people.

The best advice experts could give them was to stay indoors, close the windows and avoid breathing bad air — steps very similar to those for handling a smog alert or avoiding influenza.

While these steps may sound inconsequential, experts said the danger in Tokyo, while worrisome, is slight — at least for now.

“Everything I’ve seen so far suggests there have been nominal amounts of material released. Therefore, the risks are generally low to the population,” Jerrold Bushberg, who directs programs in health physics at the University of California at Davis, said in a telephone interview.

Winds over the plant will blow from the north along the Pacific coast early on Wednesday and then from the northwest toward the ocean during the day, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

Fears of transpacific nuclear fallout sent consumers scrambling for radiation antidotes in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and Canada. Authorities warned people would expose themselves to other medical problems by needlessly taking potassium iodide in the hope of protection from cancer.

The nuclear crisis and concerns about the economic impact from last week’s earthquake and tsunami have hammered Japan’s stock market.

The Nikkei index was up over 6 pct in early trading on Wednesday after ending down 10.6 percent on Tuesday and 6.2 percent the day before. The fall wiped some $620 billion off the market.

SCRAMBLE TO STOP WATER EVAPORATING

Authorities have spent days desperately trying to prevent the water which is designed to cool the radioactive cores of the reactors from evaporating, which would lead to overheating and the release of dangerous radioactive material into the atmosphere.

“The possibility of further radioactive leakage is heightening,” a grim-faced Kan said in his address to the nation on Tuesday.

“We are making every effort to prevent the leak from spreading. I know that people are very worried but I would like to ask you to act calmly.”

Levels of 400 millisieverts per hour had been recorded near the No. 4 reactor, the government said. Exposure to over 100 millisieverts a year is a level which can lead to cancer, according to the World Nuclear Association.

The plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., pulled out 750 workers, leaving just 50, and a 30-km (19 mile) no-fly zone was imposed around the reactors. There have been no detailed updates on what levels the radiation reached inside the exclusion zone.

A Reuters reporter using a Geiger counter showed negligible levels of radiation in the capital late on Tuesday.

Despite pleas for calm, residents rushed to shops in Tokyo to stock up on supplies. Don Quixote, a multi-storey, 24-hour general store in Roppongi district, sold out of radios, flashlights, candles and sleeping bags.

In a sign of regional fears about the risk of radiation, China said it would evacuate its citizens from areas worst affected but it had detected no abnormal radiation levels at home. Air China said it had canceled some flights to Tokyo.

The U.S. Navy said some arriving warships would deploy on the west coast of Japan’s main Honshu island instead of heading to the east coast as planned because of “radiological and navigation hazards.”

Several embassies advised staff and citizens to leave affected areas in Japan. Tourists cut short vacations and multinational companies either urged staff to leave or said they were considering plans to move outside Tokyo.

German technology companies SAP and Infineon were among those moving staff to safety in the south.

SAP said it was evacuating its offices in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya and had offered its 1,100 employees and their family members transport to the south, where the company has rented a hotel for staff to work online.

“Everyone is going out of the country today,” said Gunta Brunner, a 25-year-old creative director from Argentina preparing to board a flight at Narita airport. “With the radiation, it’s like you cannot escape and you can’t see it.”

“WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?”

Japanese media have became more critical of Kan’s handling of the disaster and criticized the government and the nuclear plant operator for their failure to provide enough information on the incident.

Kan himself lambasted the operator for taking so long to inform his office about one of the blasts on Tuesday, Kyodo news agency reported.

Kyodo said Kan had ordered TEPCO not to pull employees out of the plant. “The TV reported an explosion. But nothing was said to the premier’s office for about an hour,” a Kyodo reporter quoted Kan telling power company executives.

“What the hell is going on?”

Nuclear radiation is an especially sensitive issue for Japanese following the country’s worst human catastrophe — the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

There have been a total of four explosions at the plant since it was damaged in last Friday’s massive quake and tsunami. The most recent were blasts at reactors Nos. 2 and 4.

Concern now centers on damage to a part of the No.4 reactor building where spent rods were being stored in pools of water outside the containment area, and also to part of the No.2 reactor that helps to cool and trap the majority of cesium, iodine and strontium in its water.

Before Tuesday’s explosion the temperature in Number 4 reactor’s cooling pool was 84 C, higher than normal due to a lack of electricity after the quake, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, chief spokesman of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

Since then the temperature had been rising and there was a possibility that it was boiling, he said.

It would take 7-10 days for the water to boil away, leaving the spent fuel rods exposed to the air, said Kazuya Aoki, a director for safety examination. As long as the spent fuel rods were covered with water there should be no leak of radioactive material from them, he said.

VILLAGES AND TOWNS WIPED OFF THE MAP

The full extent of the destruction from last Friday’s 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the tsunami that followed it was becoming clear as rescuers combed through the region north of Tokyo where officials say at least 10,000 people were killed.

Whole villages and towns have been wiped off the map by Friday’s wall of water, triggering an international humanitarian effort of epic proportions. A 6.4-magnitude aftershock — a significant earthquake in its own right on any other day — shook buildings in Tokyo late on Tuesday but caused no damage.

About 850,000 households in the north were still without electricity in near-freezing weather, Tohuku Electric Power Co. said, and the government said at least 1.5 million households lack running water. Tens of thousands of people were missing.

Hiromichi Shirakawa, chief economist for Japan at Credit Suisse, said in a note to clients that the economic loss will likely be around 14-15 trillion yen ($171-183 billion) just to the region hit by the quake and tsunami.

“The earthquake could have great implications on the global economic front,” said Andre Bakhos, director of market analytics at Lec Securities in New York. “If you shut down Japan, there could be a global recession.”

Courtesy:-Reuters

MESSENGER Spacecraft to Swing Into Orbit Around Mercury

As NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft approaches the planet Mercury, scientists are excited about solving some of the mysteries surrounding the solar system’s smallest and hottest planet. Findings from the mission are expected to broaden our understanding of rocky planets, more and more of which are being discovered in other solar systems.

The MESSENGER spacecraft will orbit Mercury in an effort to study the geologic history, the enigmatic magnetic field, the surface composition and other mysteries of the planet. The shield visible on the probe’s right side protects its sensitive instruments from the sun’s intense heat. (Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/CIW)

At 8:45 p.m. EDT on March 17, the MESSENGER spacecraft will execute a 15-minute maneuver that will place it into orbit around Mercury, making it the first craft ever to do so, and initiating a one-year science campaign to understand the innermost planet.

Mercury is an extreme among the rocky planets in our solar system: It is the smallest, the densest (after correcting for self-compression) and the one with the oldest surface and largest daily variations in surface temperature and the least explored.

Understanding this “end member” among the terrestrial planets is crucial to developing a better understanding of how the planets in our solar system formed and evolved.

MESSENGER stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging.

Along with their collaborators on the MESSENGER mission team, several University of Arizona researchers and technical experts are anxiously awaiting the orbit insertion maneuver, which marks the end of the space probe’s six-and-a-half year journey to the innermost planet of our solar system.

One of them is Ann Sprague, a research scientist at the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Sprague is looking forward to gathering data with the Mercury Atmosphere and Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, an instrument aboard the MESSENGER spacecraft capable of analyzing light reflected off the planet’s surface and scattered by atoms and ions — atoms with an electric charge — above the surface. Both types of light give scientists clues about the composition of the surface.

“By identifying spectral bands and modeling the results we hope to identify the mineral content of the surface materials and eventually figure out what kind of rocks are covering the surface and have come up from below the surface during volcanic events,” Sprague said.

When MESSENGER streaked into the early morning sky over Cape Canaveral on Aug. 3, 2004, very little was known about Mercury. No spacecraft had approached the planet since the Mariner 10 space probe performed three fly-by maneuvers over the course of 1974 and 1975, imaging the planet’s surface. However, Mariner 10 sent back photos of only one side of the planet, leaving the other shrouded in mystery.

One of the mysteries scientists are hoping to solve with the MESSENGER mission surrounds Mercury’s magnetic field. At a diameter only slightly larger than that of the moon (about 4,800 kilometers or 2,983 miles), Mercury should have solidified to the core. However, the presence of a magnetic field suggests the planet’s innards are partially molten.

For many decades, scientists such as Sprague and her fellow MESSENGER science team members Robert Strom and William Boynton at the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory were confined to studying Mercury by sifting through Mariner 10 data, making ground-based observations using visible and mid-infrared spectroscopy and by studying data obtained from Mars and meteorites.

“I am most excited to see what MESSENGER will discover about Mercury’s exosphere,” Sprague said, “because it will tell us a lot about the surface of the planet — what the volatiles, or gases, are in the cold locations and what elements are present in the minerals on the surface.”

Lacking an atmosphere, Mercury is surrounded by an exosphere: an invisible, thin region containing atoms and ions. It is generated by the solar wind’s charged particles showering down onto the surface. During the process, various chemical elements are kicked up from Mercury’s soil. The heavier ones, like sodium and potassium, remain fairly close to the surface until solar photons push them into space, emanating from the planet as a plume almost like that of a comet, except invisible to the naked eye.

“Lighter atoms like hydrogen quickly escape into space and soon are swimming in a sea of hydrogen that permeates our solar system,” Sprague explained. “So it’s a fine balance between what is heavy enough to be retained around the planet and what is so light that it escapes.”

She added: “One quite exciting possibility would be the presence of elemental mercury in the exosphere or on the surface. “We are waiting anxiously to see if we are going to find the spectrographic signal of mercury in Mercury’s exosphere.”

During its journey toward Mercury, MESSENGER passed the planet several times, filling in the imaging gaps left by Mariner 10.

Now, the entire planet with the exception of about five percent has been observed. MESSENGER will focus its cameras on getting the best possible images of the remaining portions, mostly in the polar regions.

“This is a bit unfortunate because at the North Pole, the spacecraft will be going very low and the view will be distorted,” Sprague said. “Over the southern pole, the craft will be several thousand kilometers away, causing the image resolution to be poor and distorted as well.”

The polar regions are of great importance, she said, because ground-based radar observations indicate there may be frozen water beneath thin layers of dust in regions where the sunlight never reaches, such as permanently shadowed crater bottoms.

“Alternatively, there may be other exotic volatiles or metals in those dark craters — like mercury, sulfur, sodium chloride or some other substance not thought of or expected. It is exciting and all eyes will be focused on the data that comes back from those polar scans.”

Robert Strom, professor emeritus in the UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said: “Once in orbit, MESSENGER will image the surface at 250 meters per pixel. At its closest approach, it will even get to a resolution of six meters per pixel. Of course, you can’t image a whole planet at this fine resolution. This will be reserved for targets of opportunity — features that MESSENGER images during its surveys and that catch our attention.”

Strom pointed out that the MESSENGER mission is unusual because its main payload is not the instruments, but the fuel needed to slow the spacecraft down.

“Because the journey from Earth to Mercury goes toward the sun, we need a lot of energy to counteract the sun’s gravitational pull,” he explained.

To save fuel, the engineers devised a carefully choreographed dance that MESSENGER performs around selected planets: Earth, the moon and Mercury.

“By having the probe dance around planets, it can take advantage of their gravitational fields to slow its speed,” Strom added. “Even once in orbit around Mercury, the spacecraft will need to burn fuel every few hours or so to prevent the sun’s gravitational field from pulling it out of orbit.”

Another great challenge MESSENGER has to cope with is the intense heat due to Mercury’s proximity to the sun. At the equator, surface temperatures become hot enough to melt lead. The heat reflected from the planet’s surface is so intense that the spacecraft’s instruments need to be shielded against the glare.

“The spacecraft is going to go very fast, traveling around the planet every 12 hours,” Sprague explained. “The orbit is highly elliptical to allow the spacecraft to cool down. We couldn’t do this with a circular orbit, like around Mars. Everything would just overheat. MESSENGER must swoop in, keeping its sunshade pointed toward the sun, and then it has to swing out far into space so it can cool down.”

Strom added: “The strategy is to have MESSENGER gather data during its close approach and then read the data out and send them back to Earth while the probe is at a safe distance from the scorching planet.”

Scheduled to remain in orbit for a year, MESSENGER will fly around Mercury 730 times. The mission may be extended for another year.

The in-flight preparations for the orbit insertion maneuver began on Feb. 8, when several heaters on the spacecraft were configured to condition the bi-propellant used during the maneuver.

“Similar to pre-heating the diesel engine of a truck or car prior to starting in cold weather to allow ignition and prevent damage to the engine, the MESSENGER team turns on and off different heaters on the spacecraft so that the pressures for each of the two propellants, hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, are at the optimum ratio for safe and efficient maneuver execution,” explained Eric Finnegan, MESSENGER systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

“Here at the UA, specialists including Karl Harshman, Dave Hamara, Mike Fitzgibbons, and Jerry Droege have important jobs to keep the data flowing, constantly checking for errors in electronic codes and correctly parsing the data for the scientists,” Sprague said.

She pointed out that the mission’s significance reaches beyond Mercury.

“Now that so many new planets are being discovered around stars in other solar systems, we need to know the effects of space weathering on rocky surfaces so we can accurately interpret telescopic and other remote sensing data we obtain from other rocky or dusty worlds.”

The MESSENGER mission is led by NASA, the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Johns Hopkins University and the Carnegie Institution.

Daily Thirukural: Kural #10

Today we are going to see 10th kural from “The Praise of God”

திருக்குறள்

Thirukkural / Holy Kural

Chapter 1.

அறத்துப்பால்

1.1 பாயிரவியல்

1.1.1 கடவுள் வாழ்த்து

1.1.1 The Praise of God

10 – பிறவிப் பெருங்கடல் நீந்துவர் நீந்தார்இறைவன் அடிசேரா தார்.விளக்கம்:
வாழ்க்கை எனும் பெருங்கடலை நீந்திக் கடக்க முனைவோர், தலையானவனாக இருப்பவனின் அடி தொடர்ந்து செல்லாவிடில் நீந்த முடியாமல் தவிக்க நேரிடும்.English:10-They swim the sea of births, the ‘Monarch’s’ foot who gain;
None others reach the shore of being’s mighty main.

Explanation: None can swim the great sea of births but those who are united to the feet of God.