Lifecycles of Energy And Matter -- The National Science Foundation


   

Most up-to-date research may be found here

 

For those concerned with perceptions of the objective world....

National Academy Of Sciences...
http://books.nap.edu/html/particle/


COMMITTEE ON ELEMENTARY-PARTICLE PHYSICS | BOARD ON PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY | COMMISSION ON PHYSICAL SCIENCES, MATHEMATICS, AND APPLICATIONS

ROBERT C. DYNES, University of California at San Diego, Chair
ROBERT C. RICHARDSON, Cornell University, Vice Chair
IRA BERNSTEIN, Yale University
STEVEN CHU, Stanford University
VAL FITCH, Princeton University
IVAR GIAEVER, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
JOHN P. HUCHRA, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
ANTHONY C.S. READHEAD, California Institute of Technology
R.G. HAMISH ROBERTSON, University of Washington
KATHLEEN C. TAYLOR, General Motors Corporation
J. ANTHONY TYSON, Lucent Technologies
GEORGE WHITESIDES, Harvard University
DAVID WILKINSON, Princeton University
ROBERT C. RICHARDSON, Cornell University, Vice Chair
IRA BERNSTEIN, Yale University
STEVEN CHU, Stanford University
VAL FITCH, Princeton University
IVAR GIAEVER, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
JOHN P. HUCHRA, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
ANTHONY C.S. READHEAD, California Institute of Technology
R.G. HAMISH ROBERTSON, University of Washington
KATHLEEN C. TAYLOR, General Motors Corporation
J. ANTHONY TYSON, Lucent Technologies
GEORGE WHITESIDES, Harvard University
DAVID WILKINSON, Princeton University
PETER M. BANKS, Environmental Research Institute of Michigan
WILLIAM BROWDER, Princeton University
RONALD G. DOUGLAS, Texas A&M University
JOHN E. ESTES, University of California, Santa Barbara
MARTHA P. HAYNES, Cornell University
L. LOUIS HEGEDUS, Elf Atochem North America, Inc.
JOHN E. HOPCROFT, Cornell University
CAROL M. JANTZEN, Westinghouse Savannah River Company
PAUL G. KAMINSKI, Technovation, Inc.
KENNETH I. KELLERMANN, National Radio Astronomy Observatory
MARGARET G. KIVELSON, University of California, Los Angeles
DANIEL KLEPPNER, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
JOHN KREICK, Sanders, a Lockheed Martin Company
MARSHA I. LESTER, University of Pennsylvania
NICHOLAS P. SAMIOS, Brookhaven National Laboratory
CHANG-LIN TIEN, University of California, Berkeley


  Elementary-particle physics is basic research, driven by intellectual excitement and the desire to understand the underlying structure of the universe. Its discoveries illuminate all of science, and the technology developed in the course of this research may ultimately be applied for practical benefit.

    • Synchrotrons were developed to accelerate particles, cause collisions that create new particles, and provide clues about their interactions. A by-product of accelerating particles is the production of intense electromagnetic radiation from the visible part of the spectrum all the way to x rays. Several laboratories now operate synchrotrons purely for the purpose of generating such radiation; they are invaluable for researchers in surface chemistry, materials science and engineering, environmental science, and biology. Biological applications are growing at a rapidly accelerating pace and promise to give new insights into living systems.

    • Devices and techniques developed for elementary-particle physics research are important in several medical imaging techniques. Computer-aided tomography (the CT scan) and positron-emission tomography (the PET scan) use detectors largely developed for particle physics experimentation. Development of the industrial capability to produce large quantities of high-quality superconducting wire, in order to meet the demands of particle accelerators, led directly to the billion-dollar world market in this wire, primarily for use in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

    • The World Wide Web, which was developed to enable elementary-particle physicists around the world to share information quickly and easily, now gives every school with a computer access to the largest library of information on the globe.

  These and other offshoots have been immensely valuable and have had a profound impact on other sciences and on our society. Elementary-particle physicists take pleasure in making these contributions for the good of society, but their main goal is to understand the universe: why it looks the way it does today, how it evolved from the earliest moments, and what its ultimate fate will be. The intellectual significance of the field is reflected in the number of Nobel Prizes awarded to elementary-particle physicists, in the illumination that elementary-particle physics has provided to other branches of science, and most important, in the new picture it is developing of the way in which fundamental particles and forces shape our world.

  National support of endeavors such as astronomy and elementary-particle physics is dedicated to the proposition that deepening our knowledge of the world we inhabit increases the pleasure, richness, and value of life. When a nation takes pride in contributing to such explorations, it says something important about itself.

  The scientific strength of the United States in the field of elementary-particle physics is manifest in the quality and influence of the research it carries out. Members of this community, traditionally some 2,000 strong, have played important and leading roles in obtaining incisive experimental results, coaxing innovative technologies into existence, and developing important breakthroughs in theory. One measure of excellence is the fact that many of the best students in the world choose to come to the United States for their graduate training. Another is the leading role that U.S. physicists currently play in preparing and executing experiments aimed at addressing many of the most significant research questions in the field.


  • In addition, evidence of super symmetry would also support another even more comprehensive theory, called string theory. Traditionally, elementary particles have been modeled as points that take up no space at all. This approach leads to some theoretical problems because two particles could (in principle) get extremely close and exert arbitrarily large forces on each other. String theory solves this problem by picturing particles as extremely tiny vibrating loops, with the details of their vibrations determining their properties and interactions. This simple idea, with the aid of recent theoretical developments, leads to a theory that is able to encompass all of the forces of nature in a unified and self-consistent manner, including—for the first time—gravity.

  When particles of sufficiently high energy collide, new particles are created out of the energy of the collision. The higher the energy of the collision, the more massive are the particles it can produce. There are strong theoretical arguments that the key to understanding some of the most important issues before elementary-particle physics today is attaining a high rate of collisions in the tera-electron-volt (TeV; 1012eV) range, today's energy frontier.


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  An important aspect of experiments at all these accelerators is the great complexity and sophistication of the apparatus at the business end of the accelerator. Very high energy collisions generate a vast profusion of particles. To separate out the interesting events requires complex systems of detectors to trace the paths of the particles, using extremely high-speed electronics to evaluate the events in real time. All of this equipment must have capabilities that far exceed those available commercially. The processing power of the custom high-speed electronics used to untangle the massive bursts of data that cascade out of the detectors compares with the capabilities of the fastest supercomputers.

  Over the next two decades, questions of the greatest importance to understanding the universe at its most fundamental level will at last come within reach of experiment. How elementary particles acquire their mass and whether the known forces are simply manifestations of a single underlying force are two of the most significant issues that must be addressed in comprehending the world around us. It is deep and profound questions such as these that first capture the imaginations of bright young people, whether or not they work in particle physics, leading them to and sustaining them on the challenging and difficult road to a technological education. These are the very bright young people that eventually become our scientists and engineers. The committee believes that these issues are sufficiently compelling that the U.S. particle physics community should play a leading role in the international endeavor to conduct research capable of addressing them. If the recommendations in this report are adopted, the United States can be at the forefront of this profound and fascinating intellectual adventure.

  We are poised on the threshold of a new energy frontier, where discoveries are certain to be made and new phenomena are likely to be revealed. This is the TeV mass scale, where both well-established theory and revolutionary ideas predict new physics. First, the remarkable success of the Standard Model ensures that the secret of electroweak symmetry breaking will be revealed at this scale. Second, the exciting idea of super symmetry, which offers the hope of great insights into unification of all the forces of nature, predicts that a rich array of new particles can be produced. Finally, we will obtain the first glimpse of physics well above the typical mass scale of the Standard Model. In the past, when such a large step has been taken, dramatic experimental surprises have occurred. One might expect that similar revolutionary discoveries will be made at the TeV mass scale.


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  Other problems of great importance to the understanding of elementary particles do not require the highest energies for elucidation. One is understanding rare quark and lepton transitions. Another is the nature of CP violation—a phenomenon that bears on the apparent dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe. There are additional astrophysical questions of great importance that can likely be explained by particle physics dynamics, the most important being the nature of dark matter. A number of the most important findings in the field in the past two decades have been made by experiments studying problems such as these, and facilities presently being upgraded or under construction will allow such studies to continue. The committee believes it is crucial to support a well-targeted program in these areas. Given the limited resources that will be available, however, maintaining a proper balance between such efforts and those at the energy frontier will require difficult choices and keen foresight.

  Advances in elementary-particle physics have historically been tied to advances in accelerator technology. Accelerator research and development is of two general types—efforts targeted at the design and construction of specific facilities and more generic (and forward-looking) R&D targeting completely new methods of acceleration that will be required to support energy frontier facilities decades from now, should the physics demand it. This report contains specific recommendations with regard to the former. It is necessary to maintain an appropriate level of investigation in the latter area to secure the longer-term future of the field. Theoretical work in elementary-particle physics provides the intellectual foundation that motivates and interconnects much of experimental research. The more formal areas of theoretical physics, especially string theory, hold the promise of providing a picture of the universe that accounts for an extremely broad range of observations and phenomena. The committee believes that a healthy level of activity both in formal areas and in the more phenomenological investigations that touch directly on experiments now and in the coming decade should be maintained. Although the LHC will be the first machine to extensively explore electroweak symmetry breaking, some of the new particles associated with the TeV scale might exist within the reach of the Tevatron. In particular, the upgraded Tevatron collider facility might discover super symmetry. This would dramatically enhance our understanding of the universe.

  In the middle of the next decade, the LHC will supersede the Tevatron Collider as the highest-energy machine in the world. U.S. physicists, with their extensive experience at Fermilab and in the research and development toward construction and use of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), have established critical roles in the construction of the LHC machine and of the two largest experiments. The resources involved have been established in an agreement reached in 1997 by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and CERN, the host laboratory.

  A collider that complements or extends the reach of the LHC will require multiyear and multinational cooperation because of the magnitude of the resources needed. If the United States is to maintain a leadership role in this enterprise, it must participate both in accelerator technology development and in international decisions on the choice of technology and the location of the next facility. Although it is highly desirable to have a forefront facility located within the United States, it is crucial that the United States maintain a technological base sufficient to allow full participation in all aspects of the design, construction, and operation of such a facility, independent of its ultimate location.

In the mean time, at least the rest of us can reap the benefits of science pro-bono!!
 

 

 

Different Paths to the same God or Gods, or perhaps the question should be, how do you define "god..."

 

  Different perceptions to the same moral code:

  What is Islam?
http://islamicity.com/Mosque/uiatm/un_islam.htm

  Islam - Introduction
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/people/features/world_religions/islam.shtml

  Islamic philosophy - This is a Wonderful Article...
http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/H057

  A Brief History of Islam in the United States
http://www.islamamerica.org/history.cfm

  How Islam Evolved
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/islam/evolved.html

  The Religion of Non-compulsion

http://ireland.iol.ie/~afifi/BICNews/Harbinger/harbinger35.htm

   Muslim American Society

http://www.masnet.org/history.asp?id=422


  And More importantly, what Islam is Not: The manipulation of Islam by people to systematically torture others & spread hate... in this case towards women.

 http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=265

 http://www.roadstoiraq.com/?p=233
 

 

 

The Other Side Of The Coin: "fairness" doesn't mean taking advantage of others...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Justice For The 21st century : It's Amazing That Those That Have So Much Can Care So Little...

 

    I guess the poems of science are more sublime than the character of some people...    

    For example, as Einstein (1907) first showed, if we consider a physical system composed of point-particles, such as an ideal gas, the entire system can be considered as a single point-particle whose inertial mass increases as the kinetic energies of the component particles increase. Many particle-antiparticle collisions have been observed, such as collisions between electrons and positrons, where the entire mass of the particles is radiated away as energy in the form of light. Nevertheless, SR leaves open the possibility that a form of matter exists whose mass cannot become energy. This is significant because it emphasizes that mass-energy equivalence is not a consequence of a theory of matter; it is instead a direct consequence of changes to the structure of spacetime imposed by SR (see Section 3, Derivations of Mass-Energy Equivalence: History).

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/equivME
The Bibliography is included for your viewing pleasure :)

    Consequently, Einstein and Infeld argue, the distinction between matter and fields is no longer a qualitative one in relativistic physics. Instead, it is merely a quantitative difference, since "matter is where the concentration of energy is great, field where the concentration of energy is small"(1938, p. 242). Thus, Einstein and Infeld conclude, mass-energy equivalence entails that we should adopt an ontology consisting only of fields.

    For example, in Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits, he points out that "atoms" are merely small regions in which there is a great deal of energy. Furthermore, these regions are precisely the regions where one would have said, in pre- relativistic physics, that there was matter. For Russell, these considerations suggest that "mass is only a form of energy, and there is no reason why matter should not be dissolved into other forms of energy. It is energy, not matter, that is fundamental in physics" (1948, p. 291). Russell is proposing that mass is reducible to energy in the sense that the world consists only of energy.

    Einstein's further conclusion that "the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content" (1905b, p. 71) does not, strictly speaking, follow from his argument. As Torretti (1983) and other philosophers and physicists have observed, Einstein's (1905b) argument allows for the possibility that once a body's energy store has been entirely used up (and subtracted from the mass using the mass-energy equivalence relation) the remainder is not zero. In other words, it is only an hypothesis in Einstein's (1905b) argument, and indeed in all derivations of E = mc2 in SR, that no "exotic matter" exists that is not convertible into energy (see Ehlers, Rindler, Penrose, (1965) for a discussion of this point). However, particle-antiparticle annihilation experiments in atomic physics, which were first observed decades after 1905, strongly support "Einstein's dauntless extrapolation" (Torretti, 1983, p. 112).

    http://nobelprize.org/physics/articles/kullander/index.html
    Besides being required for ultra-precision subatomic microscopy, particles from accelerators colliding with target particles may lead to the creation of new particles, which acquire their mass from the collision energy according to the formula E=mc2. It is thus by conversion to mass of excess kinetic energy in a collision that particles, antiparticles and exotic nuclei can be created.

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I guess god does indeed like to "play dice...." but the more important concern is choice in considering our perceptions of caring and fairness...

Poverty, Inequality and the Distribution of Income in the G20
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/economics/discpapr/DP0203-10.pdf
Columbia University,  Department of Economics, Discussion Paper Series
Dr. Mohapatra & Dr. Sala-i-Martin

    The world distribution of income is the aggregate of all the individual country density functions. The G20 distribution is the aggregate of all countries in the G20. We notice that the World Distribution and the G20 Distribution are quite similar. The reason is that the G20 account for 63 % of the world’s population. The modes of both the G20 and the World distributions in 1970 occur at $900, below the two-dollar poverty line. About one half of the area under the G20 distribution lies to the left of the two-dollar line and almost one fifth-lays below the one-dollar line. The fraction of the G20 and world population living in poverty in 1970 was, therefore, staggering! 6 The distribution seems to have a local maximum at $8,700, which mainly captures the larger levels of income of
the United States, Japan, and Europe. Russia seems to be somewhere in between" (Mahaptra, 9).

    A second important difference between our estimates and those of the World Bank is that we scale individual income shares by GDP or Consumption as reported by the National Accounts whereas the World Bank adjusts by the average consumption reported by the surveys. It is well known that surveys tend to underestimate true consumption since people tend to underreport their consumption (or income). Bhalla (2002) estimates that the ratio of the mean consumption of the surveys to National Account consumption is as low as 0.73. If we divide our estimated poverty rates by 0.73 we would get that our consumption poverty rates for $1/day  would be 4.11% or 164
million people. With the adjustments, the $2/day poverty rate in 1998 would be 49% or 1.8 billion. ( Mahaptra, 12).

    These complex patterns of changes show us that we should think twice about simplistic characterizations of global economic change 'making the rich, richer, and the poor, poorer'. In fact, the poor in the G-20 (and the broader world) have been getting richer in unprecedented numbers, and beginning slowly to reduce the relative gap with the rich. We need to think more carefully about absolute poverty, relative poverty, intercountry inequality and intra-country inequality. What do we really care about most, and why? What can we change, and how?
The success of the G20 has been remarkable, but success does not mean victory. The number of poor is still embarrassingly large: in 1998, about 450 million people still had an income of less than two dollars a day. And even if the G20 is succeeding, the world at large is losing an important battle: the battle of Africa. In the 1970s, poverty was essentially an Asian phenomenon. It is now mainly an African problem. And, while the most powerful nations of the world can be happy about their performance and their success, they cannot be entirely happy with the state of the planet. The lessons learned in the G20 countries need to be applied to Africa. And they need to be applied fast.  (Mahaptra, 15)

To The Most Nobel of Causes.... Enjoy... Please Excuse the hullabaloo of the opera singer... hehe
http://nobelprize.org/nobel/events/video/ceremony-banquet-04/sthlm-prizeaward.ram
Translation of the Speeches at the 2004 Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm
http://nobelprize.org/nobel/events/dec_10/speeches/index-04.html

To which we should all aspire in creating a better world for ourselves and for all sentient beings!