The Unenlightened Thread - Demystifying the Apple

[chocolate]

Oh,... well,
I love the dancing dots.
Yes, definitely a bit dizzy. And after dinner.

[Wind]

Sorry, though sometimes it feels a bit funny to be dizzy.

[Skyhaven]

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TXPpQmgD85E

[chocolate]

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Do We Have the Big Bang Theory All Wrong?
From http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence...eory-all-wrong

A professor of astrophysics at the University of Bonn in Germany, Hans-Jörg Fahr has taken a stand against nearly the entire field of cosmology by claiming that the diffuse glow of background microwave radiation which bathes the sky is not, as is commonly believed, a distant echo of the Big Bang, the universe’s fiery moment of creation. The idea held by the cosmology community that tiny temperature fluctuations in this microwave background tell us about the clumpiness of the early universe, he says, is wrong. The rank and file cosmologist may as well be doing Rorschach tests.

Understandably, his ideas have met with skepticism among many. Glenn Starkman, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, puts it this way: “If you seek to replace a successful theory with an alternative, then [you] must demonstrate that your alternative explains a similarly full range of phenomena… In this task [Fahr and his colleagues] have not done due diligence.” But at the same time, Fahr’s ideas are rooted in physics that has already been proven in other systems, and they make falsifiable predictions. Pressed to defend his controversial position, the unorthodox theorist stands his ground. Whether he likes it or not, Fahr has become a cosmological iconoclast.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Fahr says he wholeheartedly supported the conventional Big Bang models of the universe while he pursued his own research into space physics. He’s made important contributions to the study of the solar wind (the stream of electrons and protons issuing from the sun) and the far solar system, where the solar wind slams into the gas and dust of interstellar space. He coined the term “heliopause” to describe this border region, which the Voyager spacecraft are now exploring today. When he turned 65 in 2005, Fahr’s colleagues organized a symposium in his honor that focused on unsolved problems in solar wind physics. A colleague of Fahr’s at the University of Bonn describes him as “one of the cleverest people around here.”

In parallel with his successes in the physics of the solar wind, Fahr also pursued a more unorthodox line of inquiry. In the 1990s he became aware of what were, in his opinion, curious gaps in the standard interpretation of the cosmic microwave background. The universe is a clumpy place, filled with vast voids interspersed with narrow, stringy filaments of galaxies and galaxy clusters. Yet the microwave background is staggeringly uniform in temperature, to one part in 1,000. Cosmologists usually assume that the microwave background’s homogeneity reflects the homogeneity of the universe as it was shortly after the Big Bang. To get from this smooth-as-cream beginning to today’s spotty universe full of voids and filaments, cosmologists add a clumping agent to their model: mysterious dark matter particles, whose existence remains unconfirmed.

No one has yet tried to observe the cosmic background radiation in the infrared, in part because it would be very difficult.

Fahr objects that this is just using one unknown to explain another unknown, and that there has to be a simpler solution. “If you take it seriously that you have a structured universe, then you need different models than used in [mainstream] cosmology,” says Fahr. “You need to pay attention to the fact that you have void and wall structures in the universe. And the expansion of the void structures is different from the expansion of the wall structures. And all of that makes the cosmos very much more complicated.”

With this in mind, Fahr set off to find a phenomenon that would naturally cause the universe to emanate a smooth microwave glow from all directions in space, like a glowing ember at a few degrees above absolute zero. He says he found one. “There was never a recombination event,” Fahr says of his model of the microwave background. “In my view [the microwave background] is just a kind of entropy feature of the cosmos as it is.”

In debating the interpretation of the cosmic microwave background, Fahr joins a long and distinguished line of heterodox astrophysicists, including the celebrated astronomers Halton Arp, Sir Fred Hoyle, and the Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén. These skeptics have ascribed the microwave background to assortments of glowing clouds of gas, dust, and charged particles throughout the galaxy and nearby universe. These clumps of molecular interlopers, they claim, translate starlight bouncing around the universe into a quiet and dim bath of microwave light, a little bit like how the Earth’s atmosphere scatters blue sunlight to produce the daytime sky.

The problem with these alternative models has been that the cosmic microwave background is not patchy, like gas, dust, and charged particles are. It’s hard to see how patchwork quilts of clouds and plasmas can add up to a smooth, omnidirectional microwave glow.

In a controversial 2009 paper in the journal Annalen der Physik, Fahr suggested an answer to this problem, drawing on his own deep expertise in the solar wind. Space probes voyaging throughout the solar system for the past five decades have detected unexpected hot and cold spots in the solar wind as it works its way past the planets and toward interstellar space. These result from a kind of turbulent interaction of photons with other photons—an interaction which is usually impossible, but is enabled by the mediation of charged particles inside the solar wind.

In 2009 Fahr says he began to realize that the vacuum of space itself has a kind of remote kinship to a plasma. After all, modern physics describes the vacuum as frothy with virtual electric charges blipping into existence only to annihilate and blip back out again. Typically, though not always, these virtual particles are electrons and their antimatter counterparts positrons. So Fahr wondered: If the vacuum is an electron-positron plasma, then why wouldn’t it also enable the same photon-photon interactions that occur inside the solar wind?

If this were happening, then empty space itself could be the source of the microwave background. The photons of starlight that have been streaming through the universe over millions and billions of years interact with each other over time, gradually achieving a kind of thermal equilibrium, and translating hot point-sources of starlight into a dull all-sky glow. “It’s a very slow process which is operating,” says Fahr. “However, assuming you have time enough, then the diffusion is bringing you from stellar emissions to background emissions.”

Fahr says the effect should be observable in the lab. If laser light of a single wavelength were bounced back and forth in a vacuum for a half-year or more, its color should begin to smear, with some photons slipping into slightly higher wavelengths and others into slightly lower ones. “It is like a simulation of free space—like photons passing through cosmic space,” Fahr says. “I am predicting that the photons are not independent of each other in the long run. They interact with each other and redistribute their energies to other energies and other wavelengths.”

Fahr also suggests another experimental test that could decide between standard and alternative interpretations of the microwave background. According to conventional cosmology, the microwave background harkens back to when the universe had cooled enough to become transparent to light for the first time, about 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Previous to this cosmic epoch of “recombination,” the universe had been a dense and opaque plasma through which light could not propagate. When plasmas recombine, they produce a burst of light at a set of wavelengths characteristic of the energy levels of the hydrogen atom. This so-called “Lyman series” of spectral lines is a familiar landmark for anyone studying the behavior of plasmas in astronomy. But no evidence of a Lyman series has been observed in measurements of the microwave background.

That doesn’t mean that such a series doesn’t exist. Fahr notes that any cosmic Lyman spectral lines would be strongly Doppler shifted over the past 13.5 billion years, and so would be strongest in the infrared part of the spectrum. No one has yet tried to observe the cosmic background radiation in the infrared, in part because it would be very difficult. The Milky Way galaxy is even noisier in the infrared than it is in the microwave, making cosmic signals even harder to tease out from contaminating foreground galactic noise. This year’s big cosmic microwave background discovery—claiming to uncover evidence of gravitational waves practically from the moment of the universe’s genesis, but potentially contaminated by foreground signals—offers a cautionary tale in this regard.

But if scientists looked for a Lyman spectrum in the infrared, and didn’t find it, it would be another chink in modern cosmology’s armor.

Joan Solà, a cosmologist at the University of Barcelona, gives points to Fahr for the ingenuity of his theory, but isn’t convinced. “His playing around with numbers is entertaining, but he cannot provide a closed story that is internally consistent in itself,” Solà says.

For example, one of the arguments Fahr makes for his vacuum microwave background theory is that it can explain the observed ratio of photons to matter particles in the universe (it’s 1 billion to one). But Solà points out that one of the numbers Fahr uses for this calculation (the ratio of hydrogen to helium in the universe) comes right out of standard Big Bang theory itself, making the argument internally inconsistent.

Fahr counters that, while Big Bang theories correctly predict helium-to-hydrogen ratios, some recent studies have found much less lithium in the universe than they predict, whereas some non-Big Bang models have claimed a better fit. By questioning the ratios of elements created through nucleosynthesis in the early universe, and the interpretation of the microwave background, Fahr is attacking two of the three main pillars of evidence supporting standard Big Bang theory. The third pillar is based on the observation that the farther away a galaxy is, the greater its redshift, which suggests that our universe is expanding. Yet in his 2009 paper, Fahr cites one study from 1993 that argues for a similar distance-redshift relationship in a non-expanding universe—one which had no Big Bang.

From Solà’s perspective, such doubting of the standard Big Bang model can quickly devolve into crackpot science. But he does not count Fahr as a crackpot. “I cannot stand kooks and illuminated fools,” Solà says. “Of course Fahr is nothing at all of this sort… He is a real scientist, and a good one by the way. But this is one thing, and the other is to buy all his ideas.” Even though he is a skeptic of Fahr’s unorthodox cosmology, Solà says the debate itself has value. “Science makes progress only because we disagree from time to time with the ancient ideas. So it is good to keep trying.”

I posted the whole article here for further use, if anyone is interested.

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Andromeda


Jupiter


Carina Nebula Pillar


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'Science giveth, and science taketh away'

Originally I started the thread with the idea to give it some more philosophical, or spiritual if that would read better here, direction.
But at the same time, probably because this is the most complex matter I can imagine, it is understandable how I pushed it in the area of pure science - physics, biology, mathematics, and so on. I have spent a lot of time in different types of observation, but at present gathering more spiritual understanding, at a time when the whole of this world starts realigning its understanding more to the universal areas of area of philosophy than to the object-driven past hundreds of years, it is becoming a pleasure to be able to observe how science and spirit converge and dance together much more often when given the chance and the necessary for that to happen conditions.

I also have observed the appearance and unfolding of similar to this threads, and how each one is unique with its inherent specifics and direction given by those who have created them.
From my standpoint, when combined they give a much richer and complete picture of what surrounds us, a picture of 'becoming'.

Probably because of my own personal choices and preferences, science on itself gives me the sense of a more cold and technical approach to something alive and complex. That is why in order not to lose the site of the forest for the separate trees, I wanted to post two videos with John Van Auken, and subsequently an article.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=63RkVC8WhIA

[Cristian]

Originally I started the thread with the idea to give it some more philosophical, or spiritual if that would read better here, direction.
But at the same time, probably because this is the most complex matter I can imagine, it is understandable how I pushed it in the area of pure science - physics, biology, mathematics, and so on. I have spent a lot of time in different types of observation, but at present gathering more spiritual understanding, at a time when the whole of this world starts realigning its understanding more to the universal areas of area of philosophy than to the object-driven past hundreds of years, it is becoming a pleasure to be able to observe how science and spirit converge and dance together much more often when given the chance and the necessary for that to happen conditions.

[chocolate]

More like that: http://r.weavesilk.com/?v=4&id=ifcqrmldw1

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You are always welcome to post, because you add heart to your physics.

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Listening to The Emerald Tablets of Thoth:
Tablet 4

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=75zz62sPlPo

[Wind]

I like spirit and science, when they are combined. That's why I like this channel. After all, that's what this forum should be about!

"For He has promised to meet thee in thine own temple, in thine own body, through thine own mind . . . And then enter into the holy of holies, within thine own consciousness; turn within; see what has prompted thee. And He has promised to meet thee there. And there shall it be told thee from within the steps thou shouldst take day by day, step by step. Not that some great exploit, some great manner of change should come within thine body, thine mind, but line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little. For it is, as He has given, not the knowledge alone but the practical application--in thine daily experience with thy fellow man--that counts." - Edgar Cayce reading 922-1

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FSmdSw9eEIA

[chocolate]

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Another one of my favorite videos:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QBFj97eOzb8

Very much on topic here.

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[Skyhaven]

Posted by chocolate (here)
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Another one of my favorite videos:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QBFj97eOzb8

Very much on topic here.

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It went into my list of favorites too. Thank you.

[chocolate]

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The human body expresses complexities beyond imagination.

This presentation reveals the beauty of that perfection by showing its relationship to sacred geometry, the underlying metaphysical principle of Divine Proportion, or the Golden Mean.

A Lecture by Sue Brown ( doesn't look like much of a post, but this is probably one of the most uplifting and informative lectures I have heard, or seen, in a while ): http://www.theosophicalinstitute.org...F-3BB1CDB3F5F2

[chocolate]

Posted by chocolate (here)
*

Do We Have the Big Bang Theory All Wrong?
From http://nautil.us/issue/15/turbulence...eory-all-wrong

A professor of astrophysics at the University of Bonn in Germany, Hans-Jörg Fahr has taken a stand against nearly the entire field of cosmology by claiming that the diffuse glow of background microwave radiation which bathes the sky is not, as is commonly believed, a distant echo of the Big Bang, the universe’s fiery moment of creation. The idea held by the cosmology community that tiny temperature fluctuations in this microwave background tell us about the clumpiness of the early universe, he says, is wrong. The rank and file cosmologist may as well be doing Rorschach tests.

[...]

Fahr counters that, while Big Bang theories correctly predict helium-to-hydrogen ratios, some recent studies have found much less lithium in the universe than they predict, whereas some non-Big Bang models have claimed a better fit. By questioning the ratios of elements created through nucleosynthesis in the early universe, and the interpretation of the microwave background, Fahr is attacking two of the three main pillars of evidence supporting standard Big Bang theory. The third pillar is based on the observation that the farther away a galaxy is, the greater its redshift, which suggests that our universe is expanding. Yet in his 2009 paper, Fahr cites one study from 1993 that argues for a similar distance-redshift relationship in a non-expanding universe—one which had no Big Bang.

From Solà’s perspective, such doubting of the standard Big Bang model can quickly devolve into crackpot science. But he does not count Fahr as a crackpot. “I cannot stand kooks and illuminated fools,” Solà says. “Of course Fahr is nothing at all of this sort… He is a real scientist, and a good one by the way. But this is one thing, and the other is to buy all his ideas.” Even though he is a skeptic of Fahr’s unorthodox cosmology, Solà says the debate itself has value. “Science makes progress only because we disagree from time to time with the ancient ideas. So it is good to keep trying.”

I posted the whole article here for further use, if anyone is interested.

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UPDATE:

A Cyclic Universe

Ingenious: Paul J. Steinhardt
The Princeton physicist on what’s wrong with inflation theory and his view of the Big Bang
Source: http://nautil.us/issue/17/big-bangs/...l-j-steinhardt

"What if we didn’t start from the Big Bang? Maybe that’s not the beginning of space and time; and maybe what we think of as a bang, is really a bounce: a transition from a preexisting phase—let’s say of contraction—[and then] a bounce into expansion. Now suddenly there’s a whole new domain of time, before the bounce, before the bang, [with] which you can introduce processes that would naturally smooth and flatten the universe."

Paul J. Steinhardt does not look like a firebrand. With his wiry spectacles and buttoned-up bearing, he would not seem out of place in an office of accountants. But the Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science is an academic agitator, vocally criticizing the leading theory of the universe’s infancy, a theory that he himself helped create more than 30 years ago. According to this picture, called inflation, space itself expanded faster than the speed of light just after the universe’s birth in the big bang, doubling in size 100,000 times in less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second.

But once started, inflation is hard to stop entirely, so pockets of space should constantly be budding off into new universes with different properties. In such a multiverse, anything that can happen will happen somewhere, and that is a fatal flaw for Steinhardt—a theory that cannot rule anything out is not scientific, he argues. He has been pursuing an alternative scenario where our universe cycles between periods of expansion and contraction, so that the big bang was really a big bounce. Most other researchers are skeptical of the approach, but Steinhardt is undeterred.

And his search for alternative schemes is not limited to cosmology. For decades, he has been pondering the different ways atoms might be arranged in crystals, discovering that arrangements previously thought to be impossible were actually allowed. In recent years he even struck out into the wilderness of the Russian Far East to look for the rarest arrangements in nature, an expedition that yielded minerals new to science, including one dubbed “steinhardtite".

Please, if interested, visit the article to watch the video questions posted there.

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And now comes the vacuum, with its structure...

[chocolate]

A horizontal section through A Brain?

Simulations reveal an unusual death for ancient stars
http://phys.org/news/2014-09-simulat...h-ancient.html

[chocolate]

Has a big problem with a tiny particle revealed a brand new force of nature?
Curious goings-on at the heart of the atom may be pointing to a new force of nature
From NewScientist



Until recently, it was unthinkable to question the size of the proton. Its radius is so well known that it appears on lists of nature's fundamental constants, alongside the speed of light and the charge of an electron. So when Randolf Pohl and his colleagues set out to make the most accurate measurement of the proton yet, they expected to just put a few more decimal places on the end of the official value. Instead this group of more than 30 researchers has shaken the world of atomic physics. Their new measurement wasn't just more accurate, it was decidedly lower. The proton had apparently been on a diet.

Freak results do turn up from time to time in physics. Witness the furore in 2011 over the neutrinos that appeared to travel faster than light and whose unbelievable powers were traced months later to a dodgy cable connection. Yet the proton puzzle first came to light in 2009, and several experiments later we are running out of ways to explain how the particle can have seemingly shrunk. No experimental flaws have been found. The theory has been checked and rechecked. Physicists are now facing the possibility that a new phenomenon is at work. Has a big problem with a tiny particle revealed a brand new force of nature?

It wouldn't be the first time we have had to rethink the physics inside the atom. Rewind 100 years and the atom is pictured as a miniature solar system, with negative electrons as planets orbiting a sun-like bundle of positive protons and neutrons at the center. Holding it all together is a force – not the gravity that influences the whole solar system, but electromagnetism.

[...]

Perhaps the protons are actually changing size. According to quantum chromodynamics, the theory that describes the inner workings of a proton, the idea isn't totally implausible. It says that a proton can sometimes distort when receiving a photon from an orbiting electron – a bit like how the oceans gravitate towards our orbiting moon to form tides. Such a distortion can unsettle the normal hopping of photons from electrons or muons to protons, and in turn affect the Lamb shift.

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So, it turns out that according to some current scientific data:

- the universe is not what it has been thought to be, starting from the 'big bang' which probably wasn't a big bang at all, as it is understood right now, see this post;

- the existence of the 'black holes' is under question:
Mysterious quasar sequence explained, posted on a previous page;

- the protons are not what they have been thought to be, in size as well as in appearance, as shown in this current post above;

- probably not just the protons will keep appearing differently, but electrons, and the whole 'atom' as well;
Ultracold atoms juggle spins with exceptional symmetry

- that there are particles who travel apparently faster than the speed of light, something even I know to be lying outside the scientific 'thinking box';

- light can be manipulated with magnetic fields;
article here: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-defying...field.html#jCp

- Fluid mechanics suggests alternative to quantum orthodoxy:

http://phys.org/news/2014-09-fluid-m...odoxy.html#jCp

Is the universe a stable quantum system?
http://phys.org/news/2014-09-univers...um.html#ajTabs

etc.

So I guess, we do need to rethink what we have been thought to believe, and the way we observe the world.

May be, perhaps, there is indeed no box, but only the idea of it and the idea that we definitely need to fit in it...

Just some thoughts of mine.

[Cristian]

Posted by chocolate (here)

- that there are particles who travel apparently faster than the speed of light, something even I know to be lying outside the scientific 'thinking box';

In 2011, the OPERA experiment mistakenly observed neutrinos appearing to travel faster than light. Even before the mistake was discovered, the result was considered anomalous because speeds higher than that of light in a vacuum are generally thought to violate special relativity, a cornerstone of the modern understanding of physics for over a century.[1][2]

OPERA scientists announced the results of the experiment in September 2011 with the stated intent of promoting further inquiry and debate. Later the team reported two flaws in their equipment set-up that had caused errors far outside their original confidence interval: a fiber optic cable attached improperly, which caused the apparently faster-than-light measurements, and a clock oscillator ticking too fast.[3] The errors were first confirmed by OPERA after a ScienceInsider report;[4] accounting for these two sources of error eliminated the faster-than-light results.[5]

Faster-than-light neutrino anomaly


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[chocolate]

Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed
Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/...l#.VC0enn40lNs

A CERN experiment claims to have caught neutrinos breaking the universe's most fundamental speed limit. The ghostly subatomic particles seem to have zipped faster than light from the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to a detector in Italy.

Fish that physics textbook back out of the wastebasket, though: the new result contradicts previous measurements of neutrino speed that were based on a supernova explosion. What's more, there is still room for error in the departure time of the supposed speedsters. And even if the result is correct, thanks to theories that posit extra dimensions, it does not necessarily mean that the speed of light has been beaten.

"If it's true, it's fantastic. It will rock the foundation of physics," says Stephen Parke of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. "But we still have to confirm it."

Neutrinos are nearly massless subatomic particles that are notoriously shy of interacting with other forms of matter. An experiment called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emusion tRacking Apparatus) sent beams of neutrinos from a particle accelerator at CERN to a detector in the Gran Sasso cavern in Italy, 730 kilometres away.

The neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have if they had been travelling at the speed of light, the team says.

Supernova contradiction

If real, the finding will force a rewrite of Einstein's theory of special relativity, one of the cornerstones of modern physics (and a theory whose predictions are incorporated into the design of the accelerators at CERN). "It's not reasonable," says theorist Marc Sher of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

One problem is that the CERN result busts the apparent speed limit of neutrinos seen when radiation from a supernova explosion reached Earth in February 1987.

Supernovae are exploding stars that are so bright they can briefly outshine their host galaxies. However, most of their energy actually streams out as neutrinos. Because neutrinos scarcely interact with matter, they should escape an exploding star almost immediately, while photons of light will take about 3 hours to get out. And in 1987, trillions of neutrinos arrived 3 hours before the dying star's light caught up, just as physicists would have expected.

The recent claim of a much higher neutrino speed just doesn't fit with this earlier measurement. "If neutrinos were that much faster than light, they would have arrived [from the supernova] five years sooner, which is crazy," says Sher. "They didn't. The supernova contradicts this [new finding] by huge factors."

Fuzzy departure

It's possible that the neutrinos that sped to the Italian mine were a different type of neutrino from the ones streaming from the supernova, or had a different energy. Either of those could explain the difference, Sher admits. "But it's quite unlikely."

A measurement error in the recent neutrino experiment could also explain the contradiction.

"In principle it's a very easy experiment: you know the distance between A and B, you know how long it takes the neutrinos to get there, so you can calculate their speed," Parke says. "However, things are more complicated than that. There are subtle effects that make it much more difficult."

For instance, although the detectors in Italy can pinpoint the neutrinos' time of arrival to within nanoseconds, it's less clear when they left the accelerator at CERN. The neutrinos are produced by slamming protons into a bar-shaped target, sparking a cascade of subatomic particles. If the neutrinos were produced at one end of the bar rather than the other, it could obscure their time of flight.

Sher also mentions a third option: that the measurement is correct. Some theories posit that there are extra, hidden dimensions beyond the familiar four (three of space, one of time). It's possible that the speedy neutrinos tunnel through these extra dimensions, reducing the distance they have to travel to get to the target. This would explain the measurement without requiring the speed of light to be broken.

Antonio Ereditato with the OPERA collaboration declined to comment until after a seminar to be held at CERN today at 4 pm Geneva time.

Extraordinary evidence wanted

In the meantime, Parke is reserving judgement until the result can be confirmed by other experiments such as the MINOS experiment at Fermilab or the T2K experiment in Japan.

"There are a number of experiments that are online or coming online that could be upgraded to do this measurement," he says. "These are the kind of things that we have to follow through, and make sure that our prejudices don't get in the way of discovering something truly fantastic."

In 2007, the MINOS experiment searched for faster-than-light neutrinos but didn't see anything statistically significant.

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Another POV:

Neutrinos don't outpace light, but they do shape-shift

The faster-than-light neutrino saga is officially over. Today, at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, Japan, the OPERA collaboration announced that according to their latest measurements, neutrinos travel at almost exactly the speed of light.

"Although this result isn't as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down," said CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci in a statement.

With the dust settling, OPERA is getting back to its real job: finding tau neutrinos. This week the team also announced that they have found the second-ever instance of a muon neutrino morphing into a tau neutrino, strengthening the case that neutrinos have mass.

Close to light speed

OPERA shocked the world in September 2011 when it announced that neutrinos zipping from CERN in Switzerland to detectors beneath the Gran Sasso mountains in Italy were outpacing the speed of light, a feat that violated Einstein's rules of relativity and opened the door to exotic physics. But over the next few months, two errors – a leaky fibre-optic cable and a malfunctioning clock – emerged, which slowed the neutrinos back down, dashing post-Einsteinian dreams and causing chaos within the OPERA collaboration.

The measurement wasn't a waste of time, says OPERA team member Dario Autiero. The new, preliminary result shows that neutrinos arrived at OPERA 1.6 nanoseconds slower than light would have, with an error of 6.2 nanoseconds. That error should shrink with further analysis, says Giovanni De Lellis of the Italian National Nuclear Physics Institute (INFN) and co-spokesman for OPERA.

"This is the first time that velocity was measured with that level of accuracy," Autiero says.

But all of that was a sidebar to the experiment's real goal: catching shape-shifting neutrinos in the act. Neutrinos come in three flavours: electron, muon and tau. Several experiments had seen evidence for neutrinos spontaneously switching, or oscillating, from one type to another. Those oscillations proved, to many physicists' surprise, that the supposed massless particles must have some infinitesimal mass, and offered a route to explaining why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe.

Oscillate wildly

Before OPERA, all the evidence for neutrino oscillations came from disappearances: detectors would end up with less of a certain type of neutrino than they started with, suggesting some had morphed into other flavours. Then in 2010, OPERA found the first tau neutrino in a beam of billions of muon neutrinos streaming to the Gran Sasso detectors from CERN. The discovery was a big deal at the time, but the team said they needed more tau neutrinos to make it statistically significant.

Now, a second tau neutrino has shown up in the detectors, they report.

"This result shows that the collaboration is definitely and effectively back to its original goal of discovering neutrino oscillations in appearance mode," De Lellis says.

OPERA will need at least six tau neutrinos to definitively claim they're seeing the oscillation effect, so they're not there yet. And when they do, they may find they've been scooped: in another experiment, the team behind the T2K detector in Japan announced this week that they have seen 10 muon neutrinos shifting into electron neutrinos.

From here.

...

I am not exactly a physicist, so I usually just skim through the articles, but I have a basic 'knowledge' and the practice to turn complex matter into simple concepts, that is why I skipped some articles, or parts of them. But yes, facts and data have been collected for some time now. It only is a matter of gaining the correct perspective and point of view.

I personally see neutrinos as the expression of the mind into matter, i.e. for me they seem to be a part of the invisible light spectrum which affects the polarity of a layer of 'matter' ( a layer or layers of the 'astral', if I can be brave enough here ).

Why I think like that? Because I am a bit weird. But seriously, see post #120 and #121.

[Skyhaven]

So, it turns out that according to some current scientific data:

- the universe is not what it has been thought to be, starting from the 'big bang' which probably wasn't a big bang at all, as it is understood right now, see this post;

- the existence of the 'black holes' is under question:
Mysterious quasar sequence explained, posted on a previous page;

- the protons are not what they have been thought to be, in size as well as in appearance, as shown in this current post above;

- probably not just the protons will keep appearing differently, but electrons, and the whole 'atom' as well;
Ultracold atoms juggle spins with exceptional symmetry

- that there are particles who travel apparently faster than the speed of light, something even I know to be lying outside the scientific 'thinking box';

- light can be manipulated with magnetic fields;
article here: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-defying...field.html#jCp

- Fluid mechanics suggests alternative to quantum orthodoxy:

http://phys.org/news/2014-09-fluid-m...odoxy.html#jCp

Is the universe a stable quantum system?
http://phys.org/news/2014-09-univers...um.html#ajTabs

etc.

So I guess, we do need to rethink what we have been thought to believe, and the way we observe the world.

May be, perhaps, there is indeed no box, but only the idea of it and the idea that we definitely need to fit in it...

Just some thoughts of mine.

I've been picking up about the same contradictory topics... theoretical physics has a lot of bubbles in it, especially if the physicists don't add the 'spooky' nature of quantum mechanics into their equations.

The latest thing that surprised me was that scientists in the quantum mechanics field have now managed to create 'solid' light:

http://www.iflscience.com/physics/cr...eals-potential

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( or as in qi gong sword finger. I think Star Wars mistakenly understood the light saber to be an actual weapon, while in fact it was the life force being guided by the masters of the 'force' )

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Breaking the 'science' of empirical knowledge with universal knowledge (some call it gnosis ):

The science of all:
Alchemy - The Great Work

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=flOK86Pnr9Q

This post is part of a post on the previous page, #134 .

Alchemy

from http://www.fbrt.org.uk/pages/fbrt-he...t-alchemy.html

The word Alchemy, the name of the Hermetic work, is derived from the words Al and chemia. Al is an ancient word meaning ‘God’ in the sense of the ‘All’, the ‘Absolute’. As part of the word Alchemy it means ‘divine’ or ‘universal’. The word was used in many ancient languages and cultures, including the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew and Celtic. Later, the Hebrew form of the word came to be written as El, which in the Christian Bible is translated as ‘God’. In Islam the word appears as Allah.
Chemia is from the Greek word khemia, which itself is derived from the Ancient Egyptian word kemit, meaning ‘black earth’. This referred to the dark fertile silt deposited in the Nile valley after each annual inundation of the river, which made possible the whole cultivation and civilisation of that otherwise desert area of north Africa. The word also referred to the prima materia or ‘first matter’ – the dark, formless ether (chaos), in which and out of which all form (cosmos) is born by means of the Word of God. Our word chemistry is derived from chemia.
Alchemy thus means ‘the universal or divine chemistry’, or ‘the chemistry of the universe’, or ‘the chemistry of God’. It refers to the fundamental process of life and all its sub-processes.
Solomon, in his second proverb, says: ‘Take away the dross from the silver, and there shall come forth a finer vessel.’[1] This is an extremely succinct summary of what is known as the alchemical process, whereby by purifying ourselves (i.e. our psyche, symbolised by silver and the moon) we may acquire the capacity to see, understand and know the wisdom (symbolised by gold and the sun), and hence be illumined by it. There are laws governing this process that are, naturally, useful to know.
Francis Bacon was called ‘Apollo’ by his peers and ‘Solomon’ by King James, whom Bacon served. Whilst always having Christ as his ultimate exemplar, Bacon patterned himself on Solomon, in the sense of what Solomon ideally did, or is reputed to have done, which was to ask God for wisdom and with that wisdom to write ‘excellent parables or aphorisms concerning divine and moral philosophy’ (e.g. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Wisdom), allegorical and mystical poetry (e.g. The Song of Songs), a Natural History, and Mysteries (i.e. sacred drama) for the purposes of initiation (e.g. Freemasonic ritual drama) and temple worship in the temple that he designed and caused to be built (Solomon's Temple). Solomon was a philosopher, writer, poet and alchemist, endowed with great wisdom. He was also a cabalist, initiated into the profoundest secrets of the Cabala (Kabbalah) as handed down from Moses, and before Moses from Thoth/Hermes, and before Hermes from Enoch, king of Atlantis.

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As is the human body, so is the cosmic body
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.
As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm.
As is the atom, so is the universe.
~ The Upanishads

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And immediately after this video some may enjoy the following:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=USE7NoXXjaU

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutheranism




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Hermetic Alchemical Rose Cross






clue: the videos above.