Necessity of the interdisciplinary

[caption id="attachment_23501" align="aligncenter" width="450"] Click on the image for the Nature article[/caption]

A strange cosmic "crucifix" in 774 AD, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, could be explained by the occurrence of a supernova, perhaps rendered unobservable by a dense cloud of gas between Earth and the dying star that scattered all but some of the light. The real story, however, is that of Jonathon Allen, who came up with this idea after listening to a radio talk-show that mentioned a strange spike of C-14 content in three tree-rings in Japan. Because increased C-14 generation in the atmosphere can happen only with incoming cosmic radiation from supernovae or vicious solar flares, the two strange phenomena could be related. Such a development also does well to justify inculcating an interdisciplinary background amongst scientists (such as astronomy and history) because it would simply be hypocritical to assume that the laws of physics apply in one field but not in another.

The nature of machines

Every time there's a man-made disaster that's happened, a kind of talk finally emerges about Mother Nature biting us back for what we did and how it was a disaster waiting to happen. I don't think there's any such thing as a "disaster waiting to happen" (disasters happen because no one could have predicted their occurrence) but I digress.

We tend to say such things because they are a kind of background on which our civilization is based. Without it, we'd be nothing: all of our most important resources would disappear and the habitability of the world would decline alarmingly. Like some theoretical physicists say, we're background-dependent.

However, all that would still be just as right as it was about 200 years ago if our form of engagement with nature hadn't changed. With the advent of machines, humans moved out from within the resources-processing interface and into the processed-consumption interface.

Obviously, two-hundred years prior, the price of a product could have been determined by how dangerous it was to acquire the resources required to make it. Today, the price of the product is determined by how many people want to consume it.

As Adam Smith argued in the Wealth of Nations (Book 01 chapter 07):

The market price of every particular commodity is regulated by the proportion between the quantity which is actually brought to market, and the demand of those who are willing to pay the natural price of the commodity, or the whole value of the rent, labour, and profit, which must be paid in order to bring it thither. Such people may be called the effectual demanders, and their demand the effectual demand; since it may be sufficient to effectuate the bringing of the commodity to market. It is different from the absolute demand. A very poor man may be said in some sense to have a demand for a coach and six; he might like to have it; but his demand is not an effectual demand, as the commodity can never be brought to market in order to satisfy it.

The industrial interface has created a quick process through which absolute demand can become effectual demand (albeit for the purpose of capitalization): it makes previously unaffordable products wanted at first, and then cheaper, and then accessible.

In other words, our background dependence has shifted away from simply nature and towards simply industry. In fact, our engagement with nature is mediated in significant part by our engagement with various industries. Even if we ignore the very-real possibility that there's no clean way to do certain things, the immediate focus is more on consumption patterns than on industrial processes.

That's because everything is demand driven. If there is enough demand for a commodity, then it must be manufactured until the need has been satiated. Such thinking leaves no space for the evaluation of options during the resources-processing stage.

Who, then, watches the watchers? Who has an eye or, better yet, a hand over demand? Is there any such thing as consumer social responsibility? I suppose it's only been gaining traction for a decade or so with the coming of social media and greater general awareness on and accessibility of environmental issues.

However, it's not enough. Just because there are more people consuming than there are people producing doesn't mean the consumers will won; it can never be a war of numbers. On the other hand, I believe that those who engage with the environment in producing things for us to consume should have some say - and how much say should be the focus of policy-level debate. Consumer social responsibility can, at best, influence only how much wealth is created and not how it is created.

If anything, we should've learnt this from the penetration of social media, and technology by extension, into our lives: the way technology develops is hinged significantly on our perception of its capabilities. What technology becomes capable of doing is navigated by what we want it to do more than anything else.

Looks like I digressed anyway. What I (actually) wanted to ask was: with this new background-dependence on industrial processes, will the biggest disasters "waiting to happen" change from the natural kind to the industrial kind? Will they focus less on things such as resource depletion and more on possible resource use?

We've started to toy with industries in an effort to mitigate their impact on nature: if something's going wrong with the natural world, we quickly take a step back and make the necessary corrections on the industrial whiteboard. But because of a changing dynamic, surely this knee-jerk must have long-term effects.

--

This is an extension of something that Isaac Asimov touched on in one of his non-fiction pieces called 'The Robot Chronicles'.

My kingdom for a neutrino

In 1982, when the construction for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment was given the go-ahead, physics entered a very exciting period. It promised them the answers to their biggest questions and, in the event that that didn’t happen, it promised them ample evidence to come to a conclusion of their own.

Two decades later, with the device in full operation, results are emerging, some more improbable than the rest. The project was put in place to attempt to create the conditions of the Big Bang so physicists could detect the Higgs boson. However, nobody anticipated such a thing as evidence of super-luminary travel by neutrinos.

The existence of neutrinos was first proposed by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to account for the excess mass and energy left behind after a neutron disintegrated into a proton and an electron. The first direct observation was to be made only in the 1970s, more than 40 years later. The neutrino is one of the many indivisible particles of this Universe, and is of neutral charge and very little mass. In fact, amongst all the particles that have any mass, a neutrino is the lightest. This means that according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the mass of the particle will hit infinity only when it travels at speeds terribly close to that of light. And by terribly close, I’m talking 99.9999% close.

Such neutrinos were generated by the LHC over the course of some of its experiments and sent to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy for study. Located 730 km south of the LHC and almost a kilometre under Mt. Gran Sasso, the laboratory receives the particles in a massive tank of ultra-pure water.

Once a neutrino comes in contact with a proton of a water molecule, they react to form a neutron and a positron. The positron collides with an electron, its anti-particle, to annihilate each other, releasing two gamma rays. The neutron is captured by another nucleus to release a third gamma ray. Therefore, the signature of a neutrino capture is the release of three gamma rays.

[caption id="attachment_20371" align="aligncenter" width="439" caption="The Super-KamiokaNDE experiment in Japan contains a tank of 50,000 litres of water, fit with an array of tens of thousands of photo-multiplier tubes (as above) to detect the release of energy in case of a neutrino capture. The cylindrical container has other systems in place to detect the position of a capture, too."][/caption]

At the laboratory, as scientists waited for the neutrinos to arrive and set off the reactions, they were hardly prepared when the release of the gamma rays was detected precisely 60 nanoseconds before it was due. While such a small difference might seem trivial, the implication is that the neutrinos arrived before any other kind of electromagnetic radiation did. Since electromagnetic radiations possess the fastest speed attainable in this Universe according to Einstein, the speeding neutrinos have possibly defied the greatest physicist of the last century.

Where does that leave the world of physics?

Centuries of hypothesizing and experimenting by scientists have ingrained the importance of reasoned scepticism in their minds. While the Gran Sasso National Laboratory has claimed that 16,000 such instances have been recorded and documented, they haven’t ruled out any errors. For now, physicists the world over await similar conclusions, and so confirmations, from the two other colliders capable of replicating such conditions.

One of them is the J-PARC in Japan. Located along the coast of the Tohoku prefecture, the device was damaged and unable to operate for the next 12 months, at least, by the earthquake in March 2011 in nearby Fukushima. The other collider is the Fermilab Tevatron, an atom-smasher of considerable reputation, in the USA. After close to three decades of operation, the facility is scheduled to shut down permanently on September 30, 2011.

Collaboration rather than competition seems to be the emerging mantra. The shadow of CERN is beginning to loom large on most particle physics labs, and they’re finding it difficult to compete with CERN and its flagship project. Further, in these days of ballooning fiscal deficits and bond rating downgrades in the US, funding is hard to come by for such "creamy" projects.

Unsurprisingly, physicists are prepared to wait. Why won’t they when the speed of light – a form of electromagnetic radiation – has been the definitive cornerstone of some of the most important foundations of our understanding of this Universe? By defying that limit, neutrinos have brought upon them the scrutiny of the entire scientific community.

For one, by being faster than light, neutrinos speeding toward Earth from distant stars get here before the image of the star does, making it possible for astrophysicists to peek farther back into history. Second, the particle that carries electromagnetic energy, the photon, was thought to be massless so it wouldn’t violate the theory of relativity. However, the neutrino has mass, and that means all of Einstein’s works will have to be disrobed and studied. The larger consequence of this is that almost all high-energy installations on this planet, ranging from nuclear power plants (NPPs) that power cities to radio-telescopes searching for extra-terrestrial life, become available for changes as much as at the design level.

(In an NPP, the flow of single-phase coolants in pressurized water reactors is assumed to flow not faster than the speed of light. Even if the fluid dynamics of single-phase coolants has already been modelled on luminary principles, how could there be any changes at the design level?

If the speed of the coolants can be increased even higher, then the critical discharge, i.e., the maximum flow rate permissible, will also go higher. This translates into enhanced cooling, and this obviously means that fuel rods can be made even thicker and more power could be generated.*)

Similarly, the way the world works also is not going to change since the neutrino has always been working the same way for billions of years irrespective of how we thought it worked. But what is going to change is the way we understand electromagnetic concepts. The Standard Model of particle physics, the Big Daddy of all the theories of physics, won’t have to be tweaked so much as twisted around to accommodate this yet-unsubstantiated phenomenon.

Physicists will wait, and while they wait, they’ll debate. They’ll conduct more experiments, record more data, hypothesize more, refute more, argue more, all the while hoping that the Tevatron will be fired up for one last battle, that the J-PARC will be resuscitated for a one-of-a-kind challenge. In my opinion, no overbearing modifications will have to be made to the pool of knowledge we possess regarding physics as such. Even if the neutrinos did travel at super-luminary speeds - which I highly doubt and attribute to minute measurement errors adding up to cause the spike - it won't be long before the concept of the phenomenon is quickly subsumed by the search for other even greater truths. Yes, our perspectives are going to change, but more than anything, the discovery's original role as a tool with which to discover more about nature will not.

Let's not get carried away, though. After all, disproving the greatest minds of physics in history requires a future of its own.

*On the other hand, for example, the speed at which the gravitational force acts on any body is limited to the speed of electromagnetic radiations, but that doesn't mean discovery of a higher speed in this Universe is going to change anything. It's only a role reversal at the most (although the massiveness of the neutrino is going to make a difference) because the practically achievable velocity is going to remain the same.

My kingdom for a neutrino

In 1982, when the construction for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment was given the go-ahead, physics entered a very exciting period. It promised them the answers to their biggest questions and, in the event that that didn’t happen, it promised them ample evidence to come to a conclusion of their own.

Two decades later, with the device in full operation, results are emerging, some more improbable than the rest. The project was put in place to attempt to create the conditions of the Big Bang so physicists could detect the Higgs boson. However, nobody anticipated such a thing as evidence of super-luminary travel by neutrinos.

The existence of neutrinos was first proposed by Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to account for the excess mass and energy left behind after a neutron disintegrated into a proton and an electron. The first direct observation was to be made only in the 1970s, more than 40 years later. The neutrino is one of the many indivisible particles of this Universe, and is of neutral charge and very little mass. In fact, amongst all the particles that have any mass, a neutrino is the lightest. This means that according to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the mass of the particle will hit infinity only when it travels at speeds terribly close to that of light. And by terribly close, I’m talking 99.9999% close.

Such neutrinos were generated by the LHC over the course of some of its experiments and sent to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy for study. Located 730 km south of the LHC and almost a kilometre under Mt. Gran Sasso, the laboratory receives the particles in a massive tank of ultra-pure water.

Once a neutrino comes in contact with a proton of a water molecule, they react to form a neutron and a positron. The positron collides with an electron, its anti-particle, to annihilate each other, releasing two gamma rays. The neutron is captured by another nucleus to release a third gamma ray. Therefore, the signature of a neutrino capture is the release of three gamma rays.

[caption id="attachment_20371" align="aligncenter" width="439" caption="The Super-KamiokaNDE experiment in Japan contains a tank of 50,000 litres of water, fit with an array of tens of thousands of photo-multiplier tubes (as above) to detect the release of energy in case of a neutrino capture. The cylindrical container has other systems in place to detect the position of a capture, too."][/caption]

At the laboratory, as scientists waited for the neutrinos to arrive and set off the reactions, they were hardly prepared when the release of the gamma rays was detected precisely 60 nanoseconds before it was due. While such a small difference might seem trivial, the implication is that the neutrinos arrived before any other kind of electromagnetic radiation did. Since electromagnetic radiations possess the fastest speed attainable in this Universe according to Einstein, the speeding neutrinos have possibly defied the greatest physicist of the last century.

Where does that leave the world of physics?

Centuries of hypothesizing and experimenting by scientists have ingrained the importance of reasoned scepticism in their minds. While the Gran Sasso National Laboratory has claimed that 16,000 such instances have been recorded and documented, they haven’t ruled out any errors. For now, physicists the world over await similar conclusions, and so confirmations, from the two other colliders capable of replicating such conditions.

One of them is the J-PARC in Japan. Located along the coast of the Tohoku prefecture, the device was damaged and unable to operate for the next 12 months, at least, by the earthquake in March 2011 in nearby Fukushima. The other collider is the Fermilab Tevatron, an atom-smasher of considerable reputation, in the USA. After close to three decades of operation, the facility is scheduled to shut down permanently on September 30, 2011.

Collaboration rather than competition seems to be the emerging mantra. The shadow of CERN is beginning to loom large on most particle physics labs, and they’re finding it difficult to compete with CERN and its flagship project. Further, in these days of ballooning fiscal deficits and bond rating downgrades in the US, funding is hard to come by for such "creamy" projects.

Unsurprisingly, physicists are prepared to wait. Why won’t they when the speed of light – a form of electromagnetic radiation – has been the definitive cornerstone of some of the most important foundations of our understanding of this Universe? By defying that limit, neutrinos have brought upon them the scrutiny of the entire scientific community.

For one, by being faster than light, neutrinos speeding toward Earth from distant stars get here before the image of the star does, making it possible for astrophysicists to peek farther back into history. Second, the particle that carries electromagnetic energy, the photon, was thought to be massless so it wouldn’t violate the theory of relativity. However, the neutrino has mass, and that means all of Einstein’s works will have to be disrobed and studied. The larger consequence of this is that almost all high-energy installations on this planet, ranging from nuclear power plants (NPPs) that power cities to radio-telescopes searching for extra-terrestrial life, become available for changes as much as at the design level.

(In an NPP, the flow of single-phase coolants in pressurized water reactors is assumed to flow not faster than the speed of light. Even if the fluid dynamics of single-phase coolants has already been modelled on luminary principles, how could there be any changes at the design level?

If the speed of the coolants can be increased even higher, then the critical discharge, i.e., the maximum flow rate permissible, will also go higher. This translates into enhanced cooling, and this obviously means that fuel rods can be made even thicker and more power could be generated.*)

Similarly, the way the world works also is not going to change since the neutrino has always been working the same way for billions of years irrespective of how we thought it worked. But what is going to change is the way we understand electromagnetic concepts. The Standard Model of particle physics, the Big Daddy of all the theories of physics, won’t have to be tweaked so much as twisted around to accommodate this yet-unsubstantiated phenomenon.

Physicists will wait, and while they wait, they’ll debate. They’ll conduct more experiments, record more data, hypothesize more, refute more, argue more, all the while hoping that the Tevatron will be fired up for one last battle, that the J-PARC will be resuscitated for a one-of-a-kind challenge. In my opinion, no overbearing modifications will have to be made to the pool of knowledge we possess regarding physics as such. Even if the neutrinos did travel at super-luminary speeds - which I highly doubt and attribute to minute measurement errors adding up to cause the spike - it won't be long before the concept of the phenomenon is quickly subsumed by the search for other even greater truths. Yes, our perspectives are going to change, but more than anything, the discovery's original role as a tool with which to discover more about nature will not.

Let's not get carried away, though. After all, disproving the greatest minds of physics in history requires a future of its own.

*On the other hand, for example, the speed at which the gravitational force acts on any body is limited to the speed of electromagnetic radiations, but that doesn't mean discovery of a higher speed in this Universe is going to change anything. It's only a role reversal at the most (although the massiveness of the neutrino is going to make a difference) because the practically achievable velocity is going to remain the same.

A superficial look at tech's future

In the technological sphere, the end of history will be marked by its death, a definite conclusion that will establish the death of institutions and discrete social units as the technological community will recognize it to be. Connectivity as a measure of development, as a measure of a product's strength irrespective of its classification as a social media service, will dissolve into the greater and increasingly accessible resource called progression.

Before Facebook was launched in 2004, Wikipedia was the most prominent face of social media: what Wikipedia essentially represented was free information sharing (apart from providing a structure for the exercising of a collective social responsibility). After February 2004, the increased penetration of the social media tools into communities resulted in the conspicuous breakage of borders.

Consequently, products that addressed themselves to certain demographics found it harder to utilize the business value of such divisions, finding the way into the future being led not by the social parameters that were unaffected but by those that were indeed affected by social networking. People were confused and wanted to "belong" somewhere, to the same extent (if not more) as they did earlier, and so began to form communities on the web.

However, demand and supply of certain necessities were beginning to become skewed as well because, with increased social participation and representation, access to products began to increase. Therefore, users no longer came together based on what they needed as much as what they thought needed preservation in the face of a loss of context: their interests. In fact, both Facebook and Wikipedia have only magnified or downplayed necessities, and outright changes have not been effected simply because social media has not substituted any other social institution any of whose functions it replicates more efficiently.

Perhaps the most detrimental move at this point would be to attempt to institutionalize processes for the purpose of evaluation or commercial utilization. As technological advancements continue to happen, trying to create borders and limit the pervasion of continuity could very well result in the rigidization of such borders because discrimination at this point of time is bound to result in separately evolving data architectures and platforms, perhaps growing to acquire a significantly different morphology.

Being all complex mechanisms with which to express ourselves in essence, products and services like the smartphones, tablets, blogs, e-mail, and social networks will come to replace existing social mechanisms in their entirety.

For example, with the advent of citizen journalism and the easy access to blogging tools, information distribution systems such as media establishments will have to reorganize everything from their attitude toward journalism to their revenue models constantly. At some point, when broadband penetration has hit a maximum, for example, the fall of the newspaper will begin to accelerate drastically because news will no longer remain a commodity to be purchased but interactions with which are taken for granted.

When the trajectory of connectivity becomes flattened, when there exists the politico-economic gap mandated between those well-connected and those loosely distributed, any product and service created to enhance the experience of "being connected" is going to result in a bloating, resulting in an eventual defiance of its growth trends and a collapse into the primeval form of a newly-birthed successor trend: the direct deployment of the social network.

*

Beyond which point can it be said that humankind's access to the destructive elements of common technology has begun? I believe that it is our skin - the violation of our biological construction. All that has transpired in the past has been the result of the continued constitution of social institution.

And, for as long as we don't willingly violate that constitution, for as long as we continue to serve our naturally mandated purpose, for as long as we don't interfere with the evolutionary process, I think we ought to be safe from the harmful consequences of letting technology associate with us closely.

A superficial look at tech's future

In the technological sphere, the end of history will be marked by its death, a definite conclusion that will establish the death of institutions and discrete social units as the technological community will recognize it to be. Connectivity as a measure of development, as a measure of a product's strength irrespective of its classification as a social media service, will dissolve into the greater and increasingly accessible resource called progression.

Before Facebook was launched in 2004, Wikipedia was the most prominent face of social media: what Wikipedia essentially represented was free information sharing (apart from providing a structure for the exercising of a collective social responsibility). After February 2004, the increased penetration of the social media tools into communities resulted in the conspicuous breakage of borders.

Consequently, products that addressed themselves to certain demographics found it harder to utilize the business value of such divisions, finding the way into the future being led not by the social parameters that were unaffected but by those that were indeed affected by social networking. People were confused and wanted to "belong" somewhere, to the same extent (if not more) as they did earlier, and so began to form communities on the web.

However, demand and supply of certain necessities were beginning to become skewed as well because, with increased social participation and representation, access to products began to increase. Therefore, users no longer came together based on what they needed as much as what they thought needed preservation in the face of a loss of context: their interests. In fact, both Facebook and Wikipedia have only magnified or downplayed necessities, and outright changes have not been effected simply because social media has not substituted any other social institution any of whose functions it replicates more efficiently.

Perhaps the most detrimental move at this point would be to attempt to institutionalize processes for the purpose of evaluation or commercial utilization. As technological advancements continue to happen, trying to create borders and limit the pervasion of continuity could very well result in the rigidization of such borders because discrimination at this point of time is bound to result in separately evolving data architectures and platforms, perhaps growing to acquire a significantly different morphology.

Being all complex mechanisms with which to express ourselves in essence, products and services like the smartphones, tablets, blogs, e-mail, and social networks will come to replace existing social mechanisms in their entirety.

For example, with the advent of citizen journalism and the easy access to blogging tools, information distribution systems such as media establishments will have to reorganize everything from their attitude toward journalism to their revenue models constantly. At some point, when broadband penetration has hit a maximum, for example, the fall of the newspaper will begin to accelerate drastically because news will no longer remain a commodity to be purchased but interactions with which are taken for granted.

When the trajectory of connectivity becomes flattened, when there exists the politico-economic gap mandated between those well-connected and those loosely distributed, any product and service created to enhance the experience of "being connected" is going to result in a bloating, resulting in an eventual defiance of its growth trends and a collapse into the primeval form of a newly-birthed successor trend: the direct deployment of the social network.

*

Beyond which point can it be said that humankind's access to the destructive elements of common technology has begun? I believe that it is our skin - the violation of our biological construction. All that has transpired in the past has been the result of the continued constitution of social institution.

And, for as long as we don't willingly violate that constitution, for as long as we continue to serve our naturally mandated purpose, for as long as we don't interfere with the evolutionary process, I think we ought to be safe from the harmful consequences of letting technology associate with us closely.

A superficial look at tech's future

In the technological sphere, the end of history will be marked by its death, a definite conclusion that will establish the death of institutions and discrete social units as the technological community will recognize it to be. Connectivity as a measure of development, as a measure of a product's strength irrespective of its classification as a social media service, will dissolve into the greater and increasingly accessible resource called progression.

Before Facebook was launched in 2004, Wikipedia was the most prominent face of social media: what Wikipedia essentially represented was free information sharing (apart from providing a structure for the exercising of a collective social responsibility). After February 2004, the increased penetration of the social media tools into communities resulted in the conspicuous breakage of borders.

Consequently, products that addressed themselves to certain demographics found it harder to utilize the business value of such divisions, finding the way into the future being led not by the social parameters that were unaffected but by those that were indeed affected by social networking. People were confused and wanted to "belong" somewhere, to the same extent (if not more) as they did earlier, and so began to form communities on the web.

However, demand and supply of certain necessities were beginning to become skewed as well because, with increased social participation and representation, access to products began to increase. Therefore, users no longer came together based on what they needed as much as what they thought needed preservation in the face of a loss of context: their interests. In fact, both Facebook and Wikipedia have only magnified or downplayed necessities, and outright changes have not been effected simply because social media has not substituted any other social institution any of whose functions it replicates more efficiently.

Perhaps the most detrimental move at this point would be to attempt to institutionalize processes for the purpose of evaluation or commercial utilization. As technological advancements continue to happen, trying to create borders and limit the pervasion of continuity could very well result in the rigidization of such borders because discrimination at this point of time is bound to result in separately evolving data architectures and platforms, perhaps growing to acquire a significantly different morphology.

Being all complex mechanisms with which to express ourselves in essence, products and services like the smartphones, tablets, blogs, e-mail, and social networks will come to replace existing social mechanisms in their entirety.

For example, with the advent of citizen journalism and the easy access to blogging tools, information distribution systems such as media establishments will have to reorganize everything from their attitude toward journalism to their revenue models constantly. At some point, when broadband penetration has hit a maximum, for example, the fall of the newspaper will begin to accelerate drastically because news will no longer remain a commodity to be purchased but interactions with which are taken for granted.

When the trajectory of connectivity becomes flattened, when there exists the politico-economic gap mandated between those well-connected and those loosely distributed, any product and service created to enhance the experience of "being connected" is going to result in a bloating, resulting in an eventual defiance of its growth trends and a collapse into the primeval form of a newly-birthed successor trend: the direct deployment of the social network.

*

Beyond which point can it be said that humankind's access to the destructive elements of common technology has begun? I believe that it is our skin - the violation of our biological construction. All that has transpired in the past has been the result of the continued constitution of social institution.

And, for as long as we don't willingly violate that constitution, for as long as we continue to serve our naturally mandated purpose, for as long as we don't interfere with the evolutionary process, I think we ought to be safe from the harmful consequences of letting technology associate with us closely.