Determinism, superfluously.

Not being able to move around within the dimension of change - known otherwise as "time" - makes us perplexed about what it really us. We can move in three dimensions of space, create and destroy entities within it, and even measure time from within it. However, these degrees of freedom wouldn't be possible without being able to experience change. If time stood still, there could be no movement, no progress, evolution or degeneracy of any kind: everything would be as it was when it was first conceived. Without time, birth and death would coincide.

Because there's time, we want to "slow down" or "speed up" different events. Because of our inability to look ahead in time, we're just not aware of the outcome of our actions, and that gives us both pertinent and illusory freedoms. There's no way to know if the outcome of every action has already been planned out or if we exercise the capacity to make decisions that give rise to alternate universes every time they're made. We hope then that by being deterministic ourselves—by modeling our behaviour on orderliness—we stand a chance of some aspects of future-events being ordered themselves. In other words, we expect the nature of the future to inherit the nature of the present.

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Of course, there are no guarantees. Chaos is not ordered, and if it is to exist in the future of an ordered present, it must have been introduced randomly, in an unpredictable and irreversible way. That means we have no means of knowing when and how it will be introduced while we languish in the present. Moreover, there's no way to discount the interference of ordered uncertainties, either: planning for a game tomorrow and an unanticipated shower leaving it abandoned is a very real sequence of events. Therefore, beyond the construction of determinism by behaving in an orderly manner, we also hope that nothing gets in the way of our plans.

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Apart from the "quality" of time, there's also the quantity—rather, the quantification. Time is understood to be linear. There is no moving sideways in time, just forward or backward. And because moving backward in time is impossible for various reasons, time could be imagined to be a two-dimensional vector in some higher-order complex space, a subset of which is our space. To put it simply, time is a degree-of-freedom that is associated not with individual objects in 3D space but 3D space itself. If time chooses not to lend its support to the behaviour of 3D-space, then omnipotent stagnation would be the official party line.

Within such a quantification of time, imagine the existence of alternate realities: because of time, A's 3D-space could be constructed differently than B's 3D-space. A can be deterministic to the point of hoping the future will inherit his present to a greater extent than it will inherit B's present.

At the same time, A's actions would be different according to whether or not he's aware of B's existence. If A didn't know B existed and was constructing an alternate reality, A's actions will not contain any elements of deterrence, for instance. Accounting thus for the billions of self-aware people on this planet, it's so close to impossible to actually be impossible to assume that individual actions are deterministic in any measure on an individual scale.

Simultaneously, even if we assume that determinism takes shape only within a democratic framework, it must be impossible to make individual decisions. The only reasonable conclusion is that each future of a particular present must be constructed differently. Otherwise, if they were coincidental, the two thinkers would occupy the same quantum state, per se.

Wouldn't they?

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In an infinite universe—one that has unlimited time and space to exist (but not necessarily with the same laws of existence)—there will come a time when determinism will break down. Even if the aspired philosophical scope tends toward absolutism, the idea itself has been created within the context of the extant laws of physics. Someday, these laws will break down. The universe will have expanded, cooled, stars will have died, nebulae will have run out of gas, and the last light will be fading from all space. Only Boltzmann brains will think.

The learner as far-seer

I recall a trivial incident from December 13, 2011, which was the day when the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) announced a possible sighting of the Higgs boson particle. It was not so much an incident as something I'm observing now: when the announcement was being made by Fabiola Gianotti, who's in-charge of ATLAS, I had to pause the live-streamed video once every few seconds to look up what she was talking about. A 20-minute-long presentation took more an hour to be understood.

The reason I remember the experience is that, more often than not, one doesn't know when the learning phase of life ends - many, like me, don't even know what comes after it if it ends. However, earlier today, when I was reading a journal article on using laser-induced plasma and the technology's application in particle accelerators, I surprised myself by understanding the entire thing without stopping even once; I could get what the authors were saying even when they were speaking only via formulae.

It was strangely dejecting because one of the most likeable things about particle physics in my opinion is its tendency to throw up previously unknown information just when we least expect it. In fact, even the one thing we thought we knew about this universe - the highest speed possible - was defied last year by some 15,000 neutrinos. And in such a scenario, when the picture suddenly becomes clear, when I can see the jigsaw puzzle board and the different empty shapes here and there waiting to be filled, it's as if I'm ready to start answering the bigger questions and leave the smaller ones behind.

[caption id="attachment_21624" align="aligncenter" width="334" caption="Clinton Davisson (left) and Lester Germer conducted an experiment since named after them - as the Davisson-Germer experiment - in 1927. Six years earlier, Einstein had won the Nobel Prize in physics for his discovery that particles were discrete encapsulations of energy called quanta. In 1927, French physicist Louis de Broglie presented his thesis that all particles have a wave-like characteristic. In the Davisson-Germer experiment, the two Americans stumbled across an electron diffraction pattern where they were expecting an electron diffuse-reflection pattern while studying the surface of nickel.  This proved de Broglie's informed conjecture true."][/caption]

I feel like the depressed man whose psychiatrist suggests he witness a performance by a clown in town. The depressed man then admits he is that clown.

At this point, I see two outcomes. The first one hints that I only want to keep learning and I'm not as interested in "deploying" that knowledge usefully. That is only partly true because, hey, I don't have a particle collider in my backyard that introduces new particles into my life so I can piece the universal puzzle together better. The second outcome suggests that my knowing a lot of things - science-wise and not - is, for the most part, a product of this fear of what-will-or-won't-come-next.

The first outcome doesn't bother me much because I've discovered I like teaching. Even though I may not be using my knowledge of IC engines to fix vehicles on desolate highways, I try and ensure as many people as possible understand how such engines work and do what they want with that knowledge. The same applies for particle physics. However, in this case, the dimension of teaching acquires more weight because its capacity to be misunderstood is great: it's a developing field whose foundations are currently under fire, whose experiments are so complex that multiple governments are helping fund it, whose conclusions are so counter-intuitive that the layman and the physicist are today many perspectives apart.

The second outcome is something I learnt while writing this post. The impetus that holds my two-decade-long learning spree up is nothing but fear, a fear of the unknown. Not learning something on a given day, with me, seems like forgoing a chance to imagine something we might not physically live. It's like the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics - a.k.a. Schrodinger's cat: for as long as I don't open the box, the cat is both dead and alive, the experience is both there and not there.

Saying "I learn not because I want to" is too bland: I learn because I want to look into the darkest corners of the universe and not see something that I can't understand or gauge in some way.

The popularly perceived notion of beauty comes with inexplicability: the capacity of an entity to defy definition and/or predictability, to defy structure and exhibit a will of its own in form and function. However, the silent reminder we are everyday given that, no matter how far out into the universe we venture or how deep we probe into the atom, the laws of physics are the same is the soul of beauty. And the inexplicability I seek to defy by learning is simply understanding how the same thing that gave us the dung beetle also gave us the Carina Nebula, that the same thing that gave us the Monarch butterfly also have us black holes.

[caption id="attachment_21625" align="aligncenter" width="335" caption="This image of the Carina Nebula is composed of multiple shots taken from the Atacama Desert in South America."][/caption]

I think that's a fear I've enjoyed and enjoy having.

The Middle Earth of physics: Where Tolkien and the physicists meet to have tea

Studying physics is like reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy. At first, there is a general excitement about things to come, how the small events at the beginning are going to avalanche into something portentous. Then, there comes the middle section where things get slow and a tad boring, but it's still a section that you have to understand before you can get on to bigger things. And then, there's the finish: spectacular and very memorable.

Things are the same with physics. First, there are the atoms, the hobbits of the physical realm. With them, the molecules, bonds and a wide variety of interactions between different particles. There is enough about their behaviour to stoke one's curiosity, to explore how they interact under different circumstances toward different results. Then, as the basic structure of all materials has been understood, we move on to the universe in which they exist and how they shaped it. That's where things get tricky and, quickly, mindboggling.

At one point, however, all the concepts that are trying to be understood suddenly coalesce into one big, beautiful picture of the universe. There are stars, novae, nebulae and black holes, and diamonds, rubies and emeralds, and light and its millions of colours. This is where the beauty of physics becomes really evident, summoning appreciation and awe at its poignancy. This is also where the audience's focus is while, all the time, the physicist labours in the middle section to understand more, to explore more.

- The Pillars of Creation (one of the most beautiful images from outer space)

A lot of what goes on in the beginning is taught at schools. The foundation is laid such that wheresoever the student's interest lies, he finds himself equipped enough to move ahead confidently in that direction. All of what happens in the middle is locked up in universities, research labs and journals. That is where the core of the scientific community resides, constantly hypothesizing, experimenting, reviewing and publishing. The contents of the spectacular finish is what is circulated in the media: in news reports, TV shows, etc., the stuff that we see even if we don't care to look in the right places.

A book as comprehensive as The Lord of the Rings in its delineation of fantastic plots and sub-plots, of valorous and scheming characters, and of strange places and their stranger legends is bound to become both heavily inspirational and literarily restricting. Since 1955, when the trilogy was first published, there have been hundreds of books that show some sign or the other of the author having borrowed from Tolkien's brainchild. At the same time, many of them experienced only fleeting success simply because they were measured against the scope of the big daddy.

Physics isn't different. Every time there is a revolution - which has been happening less frequently of late because (we think) we're in the vicinity of a Solution to Everything - there is reluctance, reaffirmation, and then reorienting, in that order, of the scientific community. More recent discoveries add more meaning not only to the present but also to the past. Similarly, more recent knowledge is even more significant because the past has aged. As we gradually zero in on something, the more difficult it becomes to think radically, to think way out of the box, because such suggestions are considered abnormal in comparison to something groundbreaking that came before.

- Thomas Kuhn is known for his controversial 1964 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he characterized the now-staple concept of a paradigm as the entity that undergoes rigorous testing before the scientific community can induct a once-anomalous fact.

This phenomenon is something that ought not to be eradicated: it is necessary to weed out the unscalable and the superficial. It is persistence in such an environment that reaps the greatest rewards, even though the idea may sound oddly masochistic.

For example, in the case of Dan Shechtman, whose story was popularized after he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2011: even though the abrasive interference of Linus Pauling was unfortunate, the atmosphere of doubt was heavy because the conviction of Shechtman's peers got in the way of his immediate success. However, at all other points of time, that conviction is necessary to sustain research.

- Dan Shechtman

This doesn't mean all knowledge in physics follows from what came before it. After all, the only things fixed in nature are the laws of physics, and it is by closely observing them that we begin our first lessons in the subject.

For the next few decades after the 1950s, the spell of The Lord of the Rings over fantasy fiction couldn't easily be broken (check postscript), so pervasive was its influence. Only gradually did writers realize that fantasy fiction is simply what the world is not, and that thought resurrected a treasure-chest of ideas, giving us the pleasurable writing of Steven Erikson, Ursula Le Guin, Terry Goodkind, Stephen Donaldson, Robert Jordan and others.

Analogously, after Albert Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity (GR) and quantum mechanics (QM) was brought up by Schrodinger, Planck, Pauli, Maxwell and others, there was a fallout amongst physicists. The two monumental theories couldn't be reconciled, resulting in academic chaos. It was in such an atmosphere that two factions of radical thought emerged: loop quantum gravity and M-theory (a.k.a. string theory), and neither of them had attempted to work off what was set down in GR or QM. (In fact, through an attempt at reconciliation, these two theories have evolved to explain some of the most fundamental secrets of the universe).

- "A Calabi-Yau manifold is a special type of [smooth surface] that shows up in certain branches of mathematics such as algebraic geometry, as well as in theoretical physics. Particularly in superstring theory, the extra dimensions of spacetime are sometimes conjectured to take the form of a 6-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold." - Wikipedia

Ultimately, the lessons with which we journey into the future of science (or is it already here?) are all encapsulated in the spirit of The Lord of Rings, at least in my opinion. Both the magnum opus and physics have been and are seminal in various ways. Even though the trials and tribulations of Middle Earth may not have been the cause of great relief and healing like physics has, the journey into their causes was a teaching experience nonetheless.

The similarities that I have made a note of are simply empirical and born out of my fondness for both entities, but they are also equally undeniable. For instance, while the division of physics into three "realms" may seem perfunctory to some, it is a good place to begin to understand why what Elsevier Publications is up to is horrible.

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PS:

1. "Do you remember [...] The Lord of the Rings? [...] Well, Io is Mordor [...] There's a passage about "rivers of molten rock that wound their way ... until they cooled and lay like dragon-shapes vomited from the tortured earth." That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter of a century before anyone saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.", Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two, Chapter 16 'Private Line'


2. http://www.moongadget.com/origins/lotr.html


3. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons: "How did it influence the D&D game? Whoa, plenty, of course. Just about all the players were huge JRRT fans, and so they insisted that I put as much Tolkien-influence material into the game as possible. Anyone reading this that recalls the original D&D game will know that there were Balrogs, Ents, and Hobbits in it. Later those were removed, and new, non-JRRT things substituted–Balor demons, Treants, and Halflings. Indeed, who can doubt the excellence of Tolkien’s writing? So of course it had a strong impact on A/D&D games." Link: http://www.theonering.net/features/interviews/gary_gygax.html

Leonard Hofstadter vs. Leslie Winkle: What's at stake

As far as TV shows are concerned, I'm a big fan of The Big Bang Theory. I've always thought nerds were cool, but the show only popularized that opinion - at least in some circles that wouldn't have accepted, to use lingo from the show, the paradigm. My only problem with the show is the character I really like, Dr. Sheldon Cooper, is a string theorist and a character I find annoying, Leslie Winkle, is an LQG-adherent (Loop Quantum Gravity).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9YBgqxpaLk]

I haven't received any formal training in particle physics. I believe that understanding the natural philosophy of the universe can happen to perfection just by a lot of reasoned thought with a compatible dose of theories and a few formulae.

On that note: I'm an advocate of LQG, and I'm going to spend the rest of this post on detailing why that is and how it works. Or, if you like, I'm going to try and explain what the squiggles on Sheldon's and Leonard's boards mean and what the squiggles on Leslie's board could mean.

The story must begin the way all histories of physical theories do: with Isaac Newton. In describing the fundamental laws of classical mechanics, Newton needed a frame reference, a fixed entity with reference to which objects could accelerate. Without a frame of reference, we'd never be able to understand how an apple falls from a tree, for example. We know it did because we see it against an unmoving background. Thinking as he was in much more stripped-down terms, Newton conceived of a background space against which all things could be measured.

- Sir Isaac Newton

In the 19th century, there was a breakthrough by Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell. Working with electricity, Faraday imagined that two charges interacted via a mediating electric field. He established that the field lines started and ended with charges, and in a space where there were no charges, the field lines bent around and formed loops. These field lines were called Faraday lines. Maxwell then transcribed Faraday's hypothesis onto paper and birthed the Maxwellian equations, which described the behaviour of electromagnetic fields in much the same way.

- The image shows a point source generating a field. Notice how the field lines are all parts of closed loops.

And then, there was Albert Einstein, whose principle contribution was the idea that gravity is not just a force but an inherent attribute of space-time itself. However, when attempting to work this into his general theory of relativity, he realized that gravitational force also had to be mediated by a field like electricity and magnetism were. This meant that a gravitational field had to exist with loops, lines and everything else.

Einstein also stumbled across one other astounding realization. All those years ago, when Newton had conceptualized a background space to serve as a frame of reference, he'd described acceleration in terms of a gravitational force - a discovery he's the most known for. Einstein found, however, that this Newtonian background space was nothing other than gravitational field itself. Because the field permeated through space-time and gave mass to objects that interacted with the field, it became a frame of reference.

These "stumblings" gave rise to two important conclusions.

1. Loops didn't exist in a background space (as was previously thought) but on another layer of loops. And those loops? On yet another layer of loops. And those loops? You get the idea.


2. Because there was a gravitational field that mediated gravity, low-frequency excitations of the field had to manifest as some particle. Just as the low-frequency manifestation of an electric field are electrons and of an electromagnetic field are photons, the excitations of a gravitational field are called gravitons. (Note: these have nothing to do with the Higgs boson)

This lack of a background space was disturbing to many physicists. At this point, some decided to ignore this outcome of general relativity and proceeded as if there was background space - a region that didn't have any underlying loops. In fact, these theorists went on to postulate that the gravitational field was the resultant when a background space and a quantum field acted together. These are today known as the string theorists.

- xkcd comic #171

The other faction decided to take into account this lack of background space and set about trying to formulate a background-independent theory of the nature of the universe. These are the LQG-advocates. According to them, the universe offers no background space naturally but they are created when the Faraday lines of the gravitational fields are quantum-excited.

Let me explain.

The gravitational field exists on another layer of loops (we don't know what they are). Because the point sources that created the gravitational field - Higgs bosons - quickly decayed long ago, the lines are large closed loops. The gravitational field permeates throughout the space-time continuum, and therefore there are infinitely many such loops.

- One of the decay signatures of a Higgs boson is a tau lepton-antilepton pair, shown above. Tau leptons are extremely hard to detect because they decay too quickly. However, other signatures include quark-antiquark pairs and electron/muon lepton-antilepton pairs, which are relative more long-lived.

When one of these loops is excited to some energy, physical space is created. It is important to understand that the loops are not in that space but that they are the space. Earlier, there was a conundrum: if there are two loops that are separated by a really small distance, then each loop will represent one degree of freedom for the universe, i.e. one avenue of change.

Since there are infinitely many such loops, the universe has to have infinite degrees of freedom. But that is not the case. That was dissolved after physicists realised that all the loops were a part of the same field, and no space could have separated the loops because the loops were space.

- In LQG, the point where two loops intersect is called a node. The region that corresponds to a node is called a cell, the section of a loop joining two nodes is called a link, and the surface of a cell that a link passes through is called a... well, a surface.

So, that is the story of the universe - according to some. The string theorists believe that long, one-dimensional strings exist in a background space, and their vibrations manifest as particles that make up the universe.

I chose to be on the LQG side of things because I see no reason to disregard Einstein's conclusion that there is no background space. Also, string theory has turned up no testable hypotheses because it claims the strings exist at the Planck scale (one-hundred-billion-trillion-trillionth of a metre) whereas the mathematics of LQG has been able to explain the formation of black holes (I'll save that for another post, another day).

- While string theory claims that the universe exists as strings at the Planck scale, LQG claims that at such scales, the granular cells that the space-time continuum is made of should show up. But such claims are yet untested.

In conclusion: when Leonard says he prefers his universe stringy, not loopy, all this is what he means. However, I can sympathise with Leslie when she leaves in a huff after Leonard wants to "let the kids decide" which hypothesis to choose.

The Microfluidics Orchestra

A friend of mine honestly believes that when scientific knowledge has been used to deconstruct something she thought was pretty, it's no longer pretty.  I disagree (of course). The ability to discern prettiness in such things lies in being able to appreciate how those things work, and how the laws of physics allow them to work that way.

With that brief introduction, let me introduce my infatuation for this week: microfluidics. I hit upon it after watching a curious and pretty demonstration on YouTube, where an arrangement of valves and capillaries were used to channel microscopic volumes of coloured liquids against an orchestral background score. What I found prettiest about it was the simplicity behind its working: how often do things get so elegant? Here's it for your viewing pleasure.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVSDRglikuM]

On the leftmost is the inlet valve which branches out into a series of smaller valves that then lead out into the horizontal chamber. As the video plays out, it becomes evident that the speeds at which liquids are being brought in correspond to high-performance pumps and liquids that are more cohesive than adhesive, i.e. low solubility. However, that may not be the case if they could somehow be made to travel in a straight line once they've been ejected.

That is effected by ensuring a few physical dimensions, and that's the essence of microfluidics: the pipes that the liquid travels through have a very low diameter, effectively making them capillaries.

When a liquid is inside a capillary, it doesn't obey the laws of gravity because then its atomic properties begin to dominate (something like how quantum mechanics takes over from classical mechanics). At the atomic level, there is an interplay of two forces brought on by two different entities. The inter-atomic interaction in the liquid, called the adhesive force, becomes more prominent because only a microscopic volume of the liquid is in play. The adhesive force gives rise to a so-called surface tension on the open surface of the liquid.

Second, the interaction between the atoms of the liquid and those of the capillary surface, manifested as the cohesive force, gives rise to the formation of a meniscus.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="318"] The meniscus here is concave. A common example of a liquid that has a concave meniscus is water. Mercury, on the other hand, has a convex meniscus.[/caption]

The meniscus is bent inward (concave) if the cohesive forces are stronger than the adhesive forces, i.e. the liquid's atoms are friendlier with the capillary than with others of their own kind. The meniscus is bent outward (convex) if they are more nationalist in the same context. All this while, there is a struggle between cohesion and surface tension that causes it to lift the liquid through the capillary. Once the struggle ceases, the liquid stops moving, but I don't think that happens.

Microfluidics works with this struggle, called the capillary action, and adds to it by allowing a wide variety of ways to interact with the fluids. The one that interests me most is called acoustic droplet ejection (ADE). In ADE, ultrasound pulses are shot into a liquid in a capillary. Because they have very high frequencies, ultrasounds also pack quite a bit of energy into very short pulses (however, higher the frequency after a point, lesser the energy in the pulse). This energy can be transferred, effectively allowing a human controller (working with an ultrasound-emitter) to push and pull the liquid.

This possibility reserves a de facto application in drug synthesis and delivery, where extremely small quantities of proteins and other substances can be controlled and injected into cells to study their behaviour. ADE is a gentle process, and thus works well with medical instrumentation - where there is a proliferation of systems that demand very high precision and very low error rates. Because there are no nozzles touching the liquid or the capillary, there is no chance of their composition being corrupted. The coefficient of variation—which is the measure of a system's deviation from an ideal behaviour—has also been found to be statistically low.

This video shows an ADE at work.

Other industries that work with small quantities of fluids are those that manufacture substrates for use in microscopic solid-state physics devices, micro-electromechanical systems (which also have biotechnological applications), high-resolution printers, fluid flow sensors and gauges, and any experiments that involve the study of the atomic or molecular properties of materials. Come to think of it, I can use microfluidics to determine up to nine decimal places how much alcohol can actually overpower my inhibitions. I wonder if that's what Feynman was thinking of when he said, "There's plenty of room at the bottom!"

Star of the Orient

India’s first particle physics observatory is to be constructed in the district of Theni in Tamil Nadu at an expense of Rs. 1,200 crore (USD 250 million). Called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), the entire experiment will be situated 1.3 km under a hill to keep other radiations and cosmic rays from interfering with the study. This is because the neutrinos that the detector will be studying rarely interact with matter and pass through it at the rate of three or four interactions per nearly 85 trillion trillion trillion. The gouging of a tunnel 7m wide and 1.9km long for accessing the cavern that will house the systems was commenced on October 14, Friday, and is expected to take a year.

Twenty-seven days ago, a startling discovery set off tremors across the scientific community when the Gran Sasso National Laboratory inItalyreported that certain fundamental particles called neutrinos had been observed moving faster than light. The reason this observation caused such dissonance and a flurry of excitement is that, according to the physics megagiant Albert Einstein, the Universe would allow nothing to travel faster than light.

Then again, conclusive proof was not presented by the physicists at the lab—at least, not anything that was within the infamous six-sigma accuracy tolerance limit: 99.99999 per cent. It was little surprise, then, that within a week of the report, engineers were working in full-swing atJapan's Kamioka reactor, at theUSA's dreaded Fermilab, at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory inCanada, to recreate the conditions at Gran Sasso. Far away, in India, a country that had until then been the principle centre for processing second-hand information, a 22-year old plan was finally being mobilized.

With just a 29-year old history, the energy frontier of physics research was supposed to last at least until 2018—the year of the Super Large Hadron Collider. With such unprecedented discoveries, however, a shift away from high-energy research and toward ultra-rare processes has become conspicuous. For the INO, the timing couldn’t have been better.

The decision to locate the observatory at Theni was finalized after evaluating the local topography, seismic stability, environmental disturbance, rock quality, availability of electricity and water, and rain patterns. In order to further minimize the impact of the project’s logistical and infrastructural operations, an extant but little-used road is being re-laid for the trucks and earthmovers to use, instead of having them move through five villages.

Funded by the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), the INO will host a supersensitive static detector called the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL), incorporating a magnet exactly four times as large as the one in use at the Large Hadron Collider. Such an effort will involve the INO-industry interface in a big way, drawing heavily on available industrial infrastructure, in issues related to mechanical structure, electronics and detector-related technology.

The detector will consist of a stack of alternating plates of iron and borosilicate glass, each totally numbering 30,000 and measuring 12m to a side. The glass plates, in turn, will consist of glass sheets with a noble gas sandwiched in between—an arrangement referred to collectively as a resistive plate chamber (RPC). When a neutrino interacts with iron, it will knock out an electron from its orbit around an atom and send it into the RPC. Once there, the electron will be picked up by positively charged electrodes sewn into the glass, translated into a signal, and sent to the data processors.

The source of the neutrinos will be the sun, supernovae, cosmic rays and other intergalactic phenomena, and the output will correspond to the particle’s mass, position of interaction, velocity, type, degree of oscillation and charge.

There are two reasons the INO stands out from its peers: the first is that the ICAL is going to be devoted to studying neutrinos and neutrinos only, and the second is that the ICAL will study them continuously without stopping (except for scheduled maintenance). Because of such principled and technical dedication, physicists expect the detector to shine light on some of the more elusive characteristics of neutrinos, such as flavour oscillations and neutrino-neutrino interactions.

These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent ofIndia's GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country—30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.

However, simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists (the last home-grown scientist to win a Nobel Prize was Sir C. V. Raman in 1930). In this direction, the INO is a giant leap forward because of its capacity to sustain research in subjects at the energy and cosmic frontiers, because of the special and exotic experimentation environments it will support, and because of the invaluable access it will provide to the Indian scientific community to cutting-edge information.

Star of the Orient

India’s first particle physics observatory is to be constructed in the district of Theni in Tamil Nadu at an expense of Rs. 1,200 crore (USD 250 million). Called the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO), the entire experiment will be situated 1.3 km under a hill to keep other radiations and cosmic rays from interfering with the study. This is because the neutrinos that the detector will be studying rarely interact with matter and pass through it at the rate of three or four interactions per nearly 85 trillion trillion trillion. The gouging of a tunnel 7m wide and 1.9km long for accessing the cavern that will house the systems was commenced on October 14, Friday, and is expected to take a year.

Twenty-seven days ago, a startling discovery set off tremors across the scientific community when the Gran Sasso National Laboratory inItalyreported that certain fundamental particles called neutrinos had been observed moving faster than light. The reason this observation caused such dissonance and a flurry of excitement is that, according to the physics megagiant Albert Einstein, the Universe would allow nothing to travel faster than light.

Then again, conclusive proof was not presented by the physicists at the lab—at least, not anything that was within the infamous six-sigma accuracy tolerance limit: 99.99999 per cent. It was little surprise, then, that within a week of the report, engineers were working in full-swing atJapan's Kamioka reactor, at theUSA's dreaded Fermilab, at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory inCanada, to recreate the conditions at Gran Sasso. Far away, in India, a country that had until then been the principle centre for processing second-hand information, a 22-year old plan was finally being mobilized.

With just a 29-year old history, the energy frontier of physics research was supposed to last at least until 2018—the year of the Super Large Hadron Collider. With such unprecedented discoveries, however, a shift away from high-energy research and toward ultra-rare processes has become conspicuous. For the INO, the timing couldn’t have been better.

The decision to locate the observatory at Theni was finalized after evaluating the local topography, seismic stability, environmental disturbance, rock quality, availability of electricity and water, and rain patterns. In order to further minimize the impact of the project’s logistical and infrastructural operations, an extant but little-used road is being re-laid for the trucks and earthmovers to use, instead of having them move through five villages.

Funded by the government of India and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), and coordinated by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMS), the INO will host a supersensitive static detector called the Iron Calorimeter (ICAL), incorporating a magnet exactly four times as large as the one in use at the Large Hadron Collider. Such an effort will involve the INO-industry interface in a big way, drawing heavily on available industrial infrastructure, in issues related to mechanical structure, electronics and detector-related technology.

The detector will consist of a stack of alternating plates of iron and borosilicate glass, each totally numbering 30,000 and measuring 12m to a side. The glass plates, in turn, will consist of glass sheets with a noble gas sandwiched in between—an arrangement referred to collectively as a resistive plate chamber (RPC). When a neutrino interacts with iron, it will knock out an electron from its orbit around an atom and send it into the RPC. Once there, the electron will be picked up by positively charged electrodes sewn into the glass, translated into a signal, and sent to the data processors.

The source of the neutrinos will be the sun, supernovae, cosmic rays and other intergalactic phenomena, and the output will correspond to the particle’s mass, position of interaction, velocity, type, degree of oscillation and charge.

There are two reasons the INO stands out from its peers: the first is that the ICAL is going to be devoted to studying neutrinos and neutrinos only, and the second is that the ICAL will study them continuously without stopping (except for scheduled maintenance). Because of such principled and technical dedication, physicists expect the detector to shine light on some of the more elusive characteristics of neutrinos, such as flavour oscillations and neutrino-neutrino interactions.

These are boom times for Indian science. The national spending on science and technology has gone up in the last five years and is inching towards two per cent ofIndia's GDP. Hordes of new institutes are coming up in the nook and corner of the country—30 new central universities, 5 new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new Indian Institutes of Technology and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are in various stages of conception and completion.

However, simply increasing the number of institutes will not lead to better scientific prowess. The education system needs a complete rethink in order to attract more students to science and produce world class scientists (the last home-grown scientist to win a Nobel Prize was Sir C. V. Raman in 1930). In this direction, the INO is a giant leap forward because of its capacity to sustain research in subjects at the energy and cosmic frontiers, because of the special and exotic experimentation environments it will support, and because of the invaluable access it will provide to the Indian scientific community to cutting-edge information.

Employment opportunities for the neutrino!

With the discovery of (a possible case of) superluminary travel, physics is surely set to change. At the same time, the volume of physical information we are capable of perceiving and interacting with can't change. Our communication systems will continue to be modeled with photonic properties in mind. Time machines will continue to languish in the cells of science fiction because of the elusive nature of the neutrino. What I'm really excited about are:

1. The "tweaks" that will be made to the Standard Model to accommodate this para-relativity phenomenon,


2. Possible new explanations for the information paradox associated with black holes,


3. The resurgence of and boost for neutrino telescopy


4. Detectors based on superluminary sensors, and


5. The rise of the string theorist!

Employment opportunities for the neutrino!

With the discovery of (a possible case of) superluminary travel, physics is surely set to change. At the same time, the volume of physical information we are capable of perceiving and interacting with can't change. Our communication systems will continue to be modeled with photonic properties in mind. Time machines will continue to languish in the cells of science fiction because of the elusive nature of the neutrino. What I'm really excited about are:

1. The "tweaks" that will be made to the Standard Model to accommodate this para-relativity phenomenon,


2. Possible new explanations for the information paradox associated with black holes,


3. The resurgence of and boost for neutrino telescopy


4. Detectors based on superluminary sensors, and


5. The rise of the string theorist!

Black holes and information theory

When you see a star in the night sky and think to yourself of its beauty, you're doing the following things.

1. Deciding to look up at the night sky


2. Firing a sequence of signals through the motor neurons in the central nerve system


3. Powering up muscles and lifting bones


4. Positioning your eye to receive optimal amounts of light


5. Employing a photo-chemical reaction at the back of the retina


6. Sending electric signals to the brain


7. Evaluating the beauty by accessing your memory


8. Understanding the beauty and feeling it by letting it manifest as a suitable configuration of muscle positions

One way or another, we're using up energy to receive information, process it and convert it into another form which we can use. In fact, even the information we receive is a form of energy. When you log in to access your Facebook account, the letters and numbers on the screen are digitized data, and that means they're a series of data modification pulses shipped in through hundreds of optical cables, electronic circuitry and wireless data transmission systems to appear on your screen. Every physical manifestation of intention and will, in this world, is the conversion of energy from one form into another.

Now, the law of conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy in this Universe is fixed and cannot ever be changed. In that case, shouldn't the amount of information we receive and generate be fixed? At any point of time, would it be possible to generate more information than this Universe can contain? And since this Universe seems equipped only to contain so much information, is it fair to consider either that humankind's capabilities are limited or that humankind will never have to worry about that limit because they won't get there?

Second: because of the nature of the origin of this Universe, it is assumed to be a constantly expanding volume of space, and so, the amount of information that the Universe can contain also increases with it. What is the rate of increase, then? A simple answer to this question can be arrived at by considering two concepts: the Kepler problem in general relativity and black holes.

A black hole is a singularity. A singularity is a point in space where the quantities used to measure space-time change in a way that is independent of the coordinate system. Imagine just having neatly pressed your new sheets, and then finding somewhere a small crease that you aren’t able to iron out, as if it wasn’t there at all when you last looked there, but now won’t go away however hard you try. That’s your black hole.

[caption id="attachment_20246" align="aligncenter" width="545" caption="Depiction of a black hole"][/caption]

A black hole is a point in space, whereas the large black spheres we imagine them to be are true if only because that is the region around which the black hole exerts its influence. This “sphere of influence” doesn’t have a definite boundary. For the sake of convenience, which physicists also see the need for from time to time, there’s the event horizon: a hypothetical sphere whose surface marks the point of no-return.

Because of there massive densities, black holes exert a gravitational force that is just as strong as they are dense. Now, the Standard Model of particle physics dictates that photons, the packets of energy that carry electromagnetic radiation like light, have no mass. The most important consequence of masslessness is non-conformance to the forces of gravity, and that means light should be able to pass through black holes with no reflection, refraction or absorption. However, that’s not the case; in fact, black holes swallow light completely and burp a small amount of heat out. This happens because, instead of bending rays of light into themselves, black holes distort the shape of the space-time continuum itself.

Now, imagine a long stretch of flat land parallel to the surface of which a missile is fired. The missile is such that it guides itself to stay 1m above the ground at all points of time. If, suddenly, a gorge opens beneath the missile, it dips down and continues to follow the surface. Light behaves like the missile when the ground is the space-time continuum, and the only known phenomenon capable of distorting the continuum like that is a black hole – the only difference is that a black hole wraps the continuum around itself.

Now, this distortion lends itself to a very useful technique with which to measure the rate of expansion of the Universe, a technique called gravitational lensing. Consider the animated image below.



Beams of light coming from the galaxy in the background are bent around the black hole. As a result of this bending, two consequences arise:

1. Increase in the illumination and the size of the image


2. Apparent change in the position of the source of the image (irrelevant for this discussion)

During lensing, the distance traveled by a beam increases while the net displacement doesn't change, thereby keeping the colours of the image intact but changing its brightness and dimensions. Therefore, the black hole behaves like a convex mirror or, more commonly, a fish-eye lens. Now, the Kepler problem in general relativity gives rise to the formula:

θ = (4GM / rc²)

Here, θ is the angle through which the light beam is deviated by the bending object (as depicted in the latest image), G is the universal gravitational constant, M is the mass of the bending object, r is the distance between the beams and the bender (between "missile" and "ground"), and c is the speed of light (note how the forces of gravity are not instantaneous but also travel at the speed of electromagnetic radiations).

Think of the space-time continuum as an elastic fabric and the various phenomena and objects as special designs on its surface. When, at a point, the weave is wrapped around a spherical object, the surface area at that point goes from being flat to being rounded, giving rise to a bulge that enlarges the image. In physical terms, the angular size of the image is said to have been increased.

By calculating the value of θ, the distance between the galaxy and the black hole can be established. Over the course of, say, one year, the initial and final values of θ between two objects can be computed to give the distance by which they have been moved apart in that year. The perfect way to understand is the "raisin bread" model of the Universe. Consider a loaf of bread embedded with raisins. If the loaf is expanded, the number of raisins and the shape of the raisins do not change, but the distance between them changes proportionately.

With that, we are in a position to understand by how much the information-carrying capacity of the Universe changes as it itself becomes more voluminous. That leaves a third and last question to be answered, the question of information transfer.

Information transfer



In the process flowchart shown above, an idea is encapsulated by certain words that are then transmitted by an "information generation" controller (which is duty-bound to filter out noise and other such chaotic elements from the message). Next, the message is conveyed through a medium to an "information reception" controller (which is also duty-bound to filter out noise), and then the message is understood as an idea.

Now, while the message is being conveyed, certain errors and losses could creep in into the transmission process. For instance, because of the incapacity of the system itself, data loss and/or data corruption could occur. Further, if the right medium is not chosen for the most-efficient conveyance of the message, it might be understood differently, which is also a kind of data corruption. In order to avoid such possibilities, the message is sometimes amplified.

During amplification, two processes can be said to occur:

1. The information being carried is modified: it is made stronger in order to survive the journey


2. An accompanying signal is sent to the receiver to inform it about the changes that have been made

As such, the amplification and abridgment processes have to accompany the conveyance-medium-conveyance subsystem because they compensate for the shortcomings of the conveyances (just as if A lends money to B and B lends that amount to C, it is only B's responsibility to retrieve it from C and return it to A). That being said, let's move on to the idea of interstellar magnifiers.

Interstellar magnifiers

If human civilization were to spread out from Earth and distribute itself across other planets in other galaxies, communication between the various systems is bound to become a pain. In that case, suitably modified electromagnetic signals (such as light, RF waves, etc.) can be pulsed into the sky, aimed at objects with strong gravitational forces that would further amplify, or boost, them on their way. With the assistance of suitably positioned satellites, the broadcast information can then be "narrowcasted" down to the receiving stations on some planet.

[caption id="attachment_20245" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Cassini's gravity-assistance"][/caption]

A significant hindrance posed to this method of communication is a phenomenon called galactic extinction: when intercepted by a cloud of galactic dust, the waves are absorbed and scattered into space, the information becoming lost in the process. In order to minimize the amount scattered, polarized radiation may be considered.

The no-hair theorem

What happens when light, instead of bending around a black hole, enters into it? The answer to this question is a puzzler because of something called the no-hair theorem, which states that every black hole is characterized only by its mass, charge and angular momentum. That means that if my laptop flies into a black hole, no information about the laptop can be retrieved if the mass, charge and/or the angular momentum of the black hole is/are not changed! If you cannot open an invisible door floating around my room, and if I step inside the door someday, how will you find me?

If any mass enters a black hole and is swallowed, there should be a subsequent increase in the mass of the black hole. Astronomers observed that this didn't happen in the case of energy, which meant that just as the black hole consumed some energy, it must also have radiated some energy in order to maintain its overall state.

This radiation is called Hawking radiation (in honour of its discoverer), and later observations found that it lay in the thermal section of the electromagnetic spectrum, i.e. a black hole radiated heat more than anything else. And since the black hole radiated heat, it must slowly be losing energy and, at one point, must also completely evaporate without a trace left behind. Using equations available in the theory of relativity, it was found that smaller black holes evaporated faster than larger ones. In fact, a black hole with the mass of a car would evaporate in 10^-88 seconds.

[caption id="attachment_20247" align="aligncenter" width="545" caption="Hawking radiation mechanism"][/caption]

After complete evaporation... what about my laptop? Ultimately, we have a paradox: if my laptop went into the black hole, which then burped out some heat in the form of Hawking radiation, then is the no-hair theorem violable? Because my laptop's mass has caused a change in the interior energy of the black hole, which shouldn't happen according to the theorem.

Is the information then lost forever? Not possible; if it is, then the law of conservation of energy stands violated. Does the information also evaporate during the evaporation of the black hole? Not possible; if it did, then Hawking radiation would become inexplicable. Does the information jump out during the last moments of evaporation? Not possible; if it did, then a smaller black hole must have held on to that information that didn't participate in the evaporation. Does the information slip into a baby universe that we can't interact with? If your imagination can understand the creation of such a universe, sure. Does the information get lost in the time dimension? Nah.

Where is the information, then?

Black holes and information theory

When you see a star in the night sky and think to yourself of its beauty, you're doing the following things.

1. Deciding to look up at the night sky


2. Firing a sequence of signals through the motor neurons in the central nerve system


3. Powering up muscles and lifting bones


4. Positioning your eye to receive optimal amounts of light


5. Employing a photo-chemical reaction at the back of the retina


6. Sending electric signals to the brain


7. Evaluating the beauty by accessing your memory


8. Understanding the beauty and feeling it by letting it manifest as a suitable configuration of muscle positions

One way or another, we're using up energy to receive information, process it and convert it into another form which we can use. In fact, even the information we receive is a form of energy. When you log in to access your Facebook account, the letters and numbers on the screen are digitized data, and that means they're a series of data modification pulses shipped in through hundreds of optical cables, electronic circuitry and wireless data transmission systems to appear on your screen. Every physical manifestation of intention and will, in this world, is the conversion of energy from one form into another.

Now, the law of conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy in this Universe is fixed and cannot ever be changed. In that case, shouldn't the amount of information we receive and generate be fixed? At any point of time, would it be possible to generate more information than this Universe can contain? And since this Universe seems equipped only to contain so much information, is it fair to consider either that humankind's capabilities are limited or that humankind will never have to worry about that limit because they won't get there?

Second: because of the nature of the origin of this Universe, it is assumed to be a constantly expanding volume of space, and so, the amount of information that the Universe can contain also increases with it. What is the rate of increase, then? A simple answer to this question can be arrived at by considering two concepts: the Kepler problem in general relativity and black holes.

A black hole is a singularity. A singularity is a point in space where the quantities used to measure space-time change in a way that is independent of the coordinate system. Imagine just having neatly pressed your new sheets, and then finding somewhere a small crease that you aren’t able to iron out, as if it wasn’t there at all when you last looked there, but now won’t go away however hard you try. That’s your black hole.

[caption id="attachment_20246" align="aligncenter" width="545" caption="Depiction of a black hole"][/caption]

A black hole is a point in space, whereas the large black spheres we imagine them to be are true if only because that is the region around which the black hole exerts its influence. This “sphere of influence” doesn’t have a definite boundary. For the sake of convenience, which physicists also see the need for from time to time, there’s the event horizon: a hypothetical sphere whose surface marks the point of no-return.

Because of there massive densities, black holes exert a gravitational force that is just as strong as they are dense. Now, the Standard Model of particle physics dictates that photons, the packets of energy that carry electromagnetic radiation like light, have no mass. The most important consequence of masslessness is non-conformance to the forces of gravity, and that means light should be able to pass through black holes with no reflection, refraction or absorption. However, that’s not the case; in fact, black holes swallow light completely and burp a small amount of heat out. This happens because, instead of bending rays of light into themselves, black holes distort the shape of the space-time continuum itself.

Now, imagine a long stretch of flat land parallel to the surface of which a missile is fired. The missile is such that it guides itself to stay 1m above the ground at all points of time. If, suddenly, a gorge opens beneath the missile, it dips down and continues to follow the surface. Light behaves like the missile when the ground is the space-time continuum, and the only known phenomenon capable of distorting the continuum like that is a black hole – the only difference is that a black hole wraps the continuum around itself.

Now, this distortion lends itself to a very useful technique with which to measure the rate of expansion of the Universe, a technique called gravitational lensing. Consider the animated image below.



Beams of light coming from the galaxy in the background are bent around the black hole. As a result of this bending, two consequences arise:

1. Increase in the illumination and the size of the image


2. Apparent change in the position of the source of the image (irrelevant for this discussion)

During lensing, the distance traveled by a beam increases while the net displacement doesn't change, thereby keeping the colours of the image intact but changing its brightness and dimensions. Therefore, the black hole behaves like a convex mirror or, more commonly, a fish-eye lens. Now, the Kepler problem in general relativity gives rise to the formula:

θ = (4GM / rc²)

Here, θ is the angle through which the light beam is deviated by the bending object (as depicted in the latest image), G is the universal gravitational constant, M is the mass of the bending object, r is the distance between the beams and the bender (between "missile" and "ground"), and c is the speed of light (note how the forces of gravity are not instantaneous but also travel at the speed of electromagnetic radiations).

Think of the space-time continuum as an elastic fabric and the various phenomena and objects as special designs on its surface. When, at a point, the weave is wrapped around a spherical object, the surface area at that point goes from being flat to being rounded, giving rise to a bulge that enlarges the image. In physical terms, the angular size of the image is said to have been increased.

By calculating the value of θ, the distance between the galaxy and the black hole can be established. Over the course of, say, one year, the initial and final values of θ between two objects can be computed to give the distance by which they have been moved apart in that year. The perfect way to understand is the "raisin bread" model of the Universe. Consider a loaf of bread embedded with raisins. If the loaf is expanded, the number of raisins and the shape of the raisins do not change, but the distance between them changes proportionately.

With that, we are in a position to understand by how much the information-carrying capacity of the Universe changes as it itself becomes more voluminous. That leaves a third and last question to be answered, the question of information transfer.

Information transfer



In the process flowchart shown above, an idea is encapsulated by certain words that are then transmitted by an "information generation" controller (which is duty-bound to filter out noise and other such chaotic elements from the message). Next, the message is conveyed through a medium to an "information reception" controller (which is also duty-bound to filter out noise), and then the message is understood as an idea.

Now, while the message is being conveyed, certain errors and losses could creep in into the transmission process. For instance, because of the incapacity of the system itself, data loss and/or data corruption could occur. Further, if the right medium is not chosen for the most-efficient conveyance of the message, it might be understood differently, which is also a kind of data corruption. In order to avoid such possibilities, the message is sometimes amplified.

During amplification, two processes can be said to occur:

1. The information being carried is modified: it is made stronger in order to survive the journey


2. An accompanying signal is sent to the receiver to inform it about the changes that have been made

As such, the amplification and abridgment processes have to accompany the conveyance-medium-conveyance subsystem because they compensate for the shortcomings of the conveyances (just as if A lends money to B and B lends that amount to C, it is only B's responsibility to retrieve it from C and return it to A). That being said, let's move on to the idea of interstellar magnifiers.

Interstellar magnifiers

If human civilization were to spread out from Earth and distribute itself across other planets in other galaxies, communication between the various systems is bound to become a pain. In that case, suitably modified electromagnetic signals (such as light, RF waves, etc.) can be pulsed into the sky, aimed at objects with strong gravitational forces that would further amplify, or boost, them on their way. With the assistance of suitably positioned satellites, the broadcast information can then be "narrowcasted" down to the receiving stations on some planet.

[caption id="attachment_20245" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Cassini's gravity-assistance"][/caption]

A significant hindrance posed to this method of communication is a phenomenon called galactic extinction: when intercepted by a cloud of galactic dust, the waves are absorbed and scattered into space, the information becoming lost in the process. In order to minimize the amount scattered, polarized radiation may be considered.

The no-hair theorem

What happens when light, instead of bending around a black hole, enters into it? The answer to this question is a puzzler because of something called the no-hair theorem, which states that every black hole is characterized only by its mass, charge and angular momentum. That means that if my laptop flies into a black hole, no information about the laptop can be retrieved if the mass, charge and/or the angular momentum of the black hole is/are not changed! If you cannot open an invisible door floating around my room, and if I step inside the door someday, how will you find me?

If any mass enters a black hole and is swallowed, there should be a subsequent increase in the mass of the black hole. Astronomers observed that this didn't happen in the case of energy, which meant that just as the black hole consumed some energy, it must also have radiated some energy in order to maintain its overall state.

This radiation is called Hawking radiation (in honour of its discoverer), and later observations found that it lay in the thermal section of the electromagnetic spectrum, i.e. a black hole radiated heat more than anything else. And since the black hole radiated heat, it must slowly be losing energy and, at one point, must also completely evaporate without a trace left behind. Using equations available in the theory of relativity, it was found that smaller black holes evaporated faster than larger ones. In fact, a black hole with the mass of a car would evaporate in 10^-88 seconds.

[caption id="attachment_20247" align="aligncenter" width="545" caption="Hawking radiation mechanism"][/caption]

After complete evaporation... what about my laptop? Ultimately, we have a paradox: if my laptop went into the black hole, which then burped out some heat in the form of Hawking radiation, then is the no-hair theorem violable? Because my laptop's mass has caused a change in the interior energy of the black hole, which shouldn't happen according to the theorem.

Is the information then lost forever? Not possible; if it is, then the law of conservation of energy stands violated. Does the information also evaporate during the evaporation of the black hole? Not possible; if it did, then Hawking radiation would become inexplicable. Does the information jump out during the last moments of evaporation? Not possible; if it did, then a smaller black hole must have held on to that information that didn't participate in the evaporation. Does the information slip into a baby universe that we can't interact with? If your imagination can understand the creation of such a universe, sure. Does the information get lost in the time dimension? Nah.

Where is the information, then?

Science that's not everyday stuff

Stuff I'm working/reading/solving problems on.

Ferrofluids

A ferrofluid is a colloidal solution of nanoparticles in a carrier fluid. A colloid is a "mixture" of certain extremely small particles that are equally distributed inside a fluid, and in this case, the particles are a few nanometres across and are ferromagnetic (i.e., attracted by and magnetizable by magnets).

When an external magnetic field is applied across this ferrofluid, the nanoparticles begin to clump together because they become magnetized and the magnetic force begins to draw them together. In order to "declump" the particles once the field is switched off, the particles are given a thin coating of a surfactant (like sodium citrate).

With precisely controlled fields, ferrofluids assume beautiful formations and arrangements in space. The primary use of this fluid is in two industries:

1. X-ray spectroscopy - The principle purpose of this device is to resolve high-energy electromagnetic radiation, and for that, it must be remain extremely stable during operation. Refrigerators built with ferrofluids are called adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators (ADR) and their working temperatures are between 0 K and 100 mK, and provide the low temperatures required for stability.


2. Armour - Battle tanks have moved on from possessing just one thick layer of metallic armour to two layers sandwiching a second material. This material is a ferrofluid. During an explosion in the immediate surroundings of a tank, the first layer presses down on the ferrofluid. Because of the increased pressure, the nanoparticles in the fluid clump together and increase the density and the viscosity of the fluid (the more viscous a fluid is, the less easily it flows). This makes it more hardy and imparts an increased resistance to let the shockwaves from the blast penetrate the second layer of metal.

Once the pressure subsides, the fluid becomes less viscous and, more importantly, less dense. This decrease in density is important for the vehicle to retain its working brake-horsepower.

Technical illustrations

Illustrating for science is tricky business. At first glance, the proportions have to be precise; I've known whole projects that had to be abandoned because someone got the metric wrong by 5% or less. Once you begin to scrutinize the images, it also becomes evident that the generation of a visual stimulus has to be carefully manipulated in order to evoke certain associations.

For example, consider three objects, A, B and C, within a frame. If A and B are considered to be more important than C is, then using the same colour to highlight A, B and C would make that distinction harder to grasp. Of course, the demarcation could be invoked using other methods, but why bother when colour is so easily represented and accessible? Using blue for A and B and grey, a slightly more muted colour, for C establishes distinction, significance and association all in one.

My last comment is on the object itself: if A is a kind of lizard, then showing it from the top or the side won't make the same impact as would its depiction in a characteristic pose, like preparing itself to lunge at prey.

[caption id="attachment_20186" align="aligncenter" width="357" caption="Association by posture, hue and position (Source: Wikimedia Commons)"][/caption]

Large Hadron Collider

According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the Universe is composed of leptons, hadrons, gluons, bosons and quarks. Leptons are light, hadrons are heavy, gluons are sticky, bosons are bossy and quarks are weird. At least, those were what physicists thought necessary until Einstein came along and asked, "What makes things heavy?" A clever mathematician by the name of Peter Higgs (amongst others) solved Einstein's equations for general relativity and in his solutions, proposed an elementary, hypothetical particle called in his honour today as the Higgs boson, and said it "gave" everything mass.

When the Big Bang happened all those years ago, the Higgs boson is thought to have formed as a result of the extreme pressure and temperature. Because of its unstable nature, it quickly decayed, but not before mediating the gravitational force between the other particles that were beginning to form, thereby giving them mass.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the largest science experiment in history, and has been built for the sole purpose for recreating the conditions of the Big Bang so that another Higgs boson may form. Since each particle has a distinct decay pattern, detectors, censors and other data acquisition devices have been mounted over certain sections of the LHC to quickly capture the energy signature of a decaying Higgs. If that happens, the only thing particle physics will have left to explain is dark matter.



These sections where the detectors are mounted are where the protons (or, Hydrogen nuclei) are going to be smashed together 40 million particles per second at speeds approaching that of light. In fact, data has emerged that speeds of 0.99c have been attained, which means the particles were each traveling at 296,794.5 km/s. That's 11 times around the earth in a second. At such speeds, the mass of the particles climbs monstrously, and the temperatures at the time of the smash beat the temperature of a billion suns.

Awesome.

Tsar Bomba

Tsar Bomba is the strongest man-made nuclear weapon to be detonated in the history of mankind. Imagine the amount of energy released by every bullet, missile, grenade, bomb, shell, flamethrower, chemical and reaction in World War II (incl. Little Boy and Fat Man), sum them up, and understand that Tsar Bomba's yield beat it by 10 times.

Conceptualized by scientists and constructed by engineers of the Soviet Union through 1960 and 1961, the bomb was originally supposed to have a yield of 100 MT. However, during the testing phase, it was found that any suitable site that would be exposed to such a fallout was populated by Soviet citizens. Consequently, the yield was reduced to 50 MT, and is considered to have been the cleanest explosion in history (relative to its yield).

Tsar Bomba was a 3-stage explosive:

1. The first stage was a fission reaction. During a fission reaction, the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts, release free neutrons, photons and gargantuan amounts of energy. Inside a cavity within the fissioning material, the second stage is placed.


2. The second stage was a small fusion reaction. During a fusion reaction, two or more nuclei fuse to form a larger nuclei, releasing such amounts of energy as to dwarf a fission reaction. The fusion reaction releases energy when the participating nuclei have individual masses less than the atomic mass of iron, and absorbs otherwise. Inside a cavity within the fusing material, the third stage is placed.


3. The third stage was a large fusion reaction. Identical in every way but in quantity to the second stage, the third stage contained larger numbers of nuclei waiting to fuse. As the first stage went off, nuclei in the second stage become heated and compressed to a tortuous extent, generating the critical mass required for the first, smaller fusion reaction to commence. As that happened, the energy from it generated the critical mass for the final stage to go off.

In order to reduce the yield from 100 MT to 50 MT, a reexamination of the fusion tampers was required. Between the first and second stages and the second and third stages, something called a tamper was used to accelerate the fission process. As the fission reaction subsided and the first fusion stage took off, free neutrons released would collide with the tamper, made of uranium-238, and set of a fast fission reaction. This result was provided for to enhance the yield of the bomb. When reducing the yield became necessary, engineers removed the uranium tamper and replaced it with one made of lead.

The lead trapped the free neutrons. Fusion reactions took over. Fast fission became prohibited. Game over.

Science that's not everyday stuff

Stuff I'm working/reading/solving problems on.

Ferrofluids

A ferrofluid is a colloidal solution of nanoparticles in a carrier fluid. A colloid is a "mixture" of certain extremely small particles that are equally distributed inside a fluid, and in this case, the particles are a few nanometres across and are ferromagnetic (i.e., attracted by and magnetizable by magnets).

When an external magnetic field is applied across this ferrofluid, the nanoparticles begin to clump together because they become magnetized and the magnetic force begins to draw them together. In order to "declump" the particles once the field is switched off, the particles are given a thin coating of a surfactant (like sodium citrate).

With precisely controlled fields, ferrofluids assume beautiful formations and arrangements in space. The primary use of this fluid is in two industries:

1. X-ray spectroscopy - The principle purpose of this device is to resolve high-energy electromagnetic radiation, and for that, it must be remain extremely stable during operation. Refrigerators built with ferrofluids are called adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators (ADR) and their working temperatures are between 0 K and 100 mK, and provide the low temperatures required for stability.


2. Armour - Battle tanks have moved on from possessing just one thick layer of metallic armour to two layers sandwiching a second material. This material is a ferrofluid. During an explosion in the immediate surroundings of a tank, the first layer presses down on the ferrofluid. Because of the increased pressure, the nanoparticles in the fluid clump together and increase the density and the viscosity of the fluid (the more viscous a fluid is, the less easily it flows). This makes it more hardy and imparts an increased resistance to let the shockwaves from the blast penetrate the second layer of metal.

Once the pressure subsides, the fluid becomes less viscous and, more importantly, less dense. This decrease in density is important for the vehicle to retain its working brake-horsepower.

Technical illustrations

Illustrating for science is tricky business. At first glance, the proportions have to be precise; I've known whole projects that had to be abandoned because someone got the metric wrong by 5% or less. Once you begin to scrutinize the images, it also becomes evident that the generation of a visual stimulus has to be carefully manipulated in order to evoke certain associations.

For example, consider three objects, A, B and C, within a frame. If A and B are considered to be more important than C is, then using the same colour to highlight A, B and C would make that distinction harder to grasp. Of course, the demarcation could be invoked using other methods, but why bother when colour is so easily represented and accessible? Using blue for A and B and grey, a slightly more muted colour, for C establishes distinction, significance and association all in one.

My last comment is on the object itself: if A is a kind of lizard, then showing it from the top or the side won't make the same impact as would its depiction in a characteristic pose, like preparing itself to lunge at prey.

[caption id="attachment_20186" align="aligncenter" width="357" caption="Association by posture, hue and position (Source: Wikimedia Commons)"][/caption]

Large Hadron Collider

According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the Universe is composed of leptons, hadrons, gluons, bosons and quarks. Leptons are light, hadrons are heavy, gluons are sticky, bosons are bossy and quarks are weird. At least, those were what physicists thought necessary until Einstein came along and asked, "What makes things heavy?" A clever mathematician by the name of Peter Higgs (amongst others) solved Einstein's equations for general relativity and in his solutions, proposed an elementary, hypothetical particle called in his honour today as the Higgs boson, and said it "gave" everything mass.

When the Big Bang happened all those years ago, the Higgs boson is thought to have formed as a result of the extreme pressure and temperature. Because of its unstable nature, it quickly decayed, but not before mediating the gravitational force between the other particles that were beginning to form, thereby giving them mass.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the largest science experiment in history, and has been built for the sole purpose for recreating the conditions of the Big Bang so that another Higgs boson may form. Since each particle has a distinct decay pattern, detectors, censors and other data acquisition devices have been mounted over certain sections of the LHC to quickly capture the energy signature of a decaying Higgs. If that happens, the only thing particle physics will have left to explain is dark matter.



These sections where the detectors are mounted are where the protons (or, Hydrogen nuclei) are going to be smashed together 40 million particles per second at speeds approaching that of light. In fact, data has emerged that speeds of 0.99c have been attained, which means the particles were each traveling at 296,794.5 km/s. That's 11 times around the earth in a second. At such speeds, the mass of the particles climbs monstrously, and the temperatures at the time of the smash beat the temperature of a billion suns.

Awesome.

Tsar Bomba

Tsar Bomba is the strongest man-made nuclear weapon to be detonated in the history of mankind. Imagine the amount of energy released by every bullet, missile, grenade, bomb, shell, flamethrower, chemical and reaction in World War II (incl. Little Boy and Fat Man), sum them up, and understand that Tsar Bomba's yield beat it by 10 times.

Conceptualized by scientists and constructed by engineers of the Soviet Union through 1960 and 1961, the bomb was originally supposed to have a yield of 100 MT. However, during the testing phase, it was found that any suitable site that would be exposed to such a fallout was populated by Soviet citizens. Consequently, the yield was reduced to 50 MT, and is considered to have been the cleanest explosion in history (relative to its yield).

Tsar Bomba was a 3-stage explosive:

1. The first stage was a fission reaction. During a fission reaction, the nucleus of an atom splits into smaller parts, release free neutrons, photons and gargantuan amounts of energy. Inside a cavity within the fissioning material, the second stage is placed.


2. The second stage was a small fusion reaction. During a fusion reaction, two or more nuclei fuse to form a larger nuclei, releasing such amounts of energy as to dwarf a fission reaction. The fusion reaction releases energy when the participating nuclei have individual masses less than the atomic mass of iron, and absorbs otherwise. Inside a cavity within the fusing material, the third stage is placed.


3. The third stage was a large fusion reaction. Identical in every way but in quantity to the second stage, the third stage contained larger numbers of nuclei waiting to fuse. As the first stage went off, nuclei in the second stage become heated and compressed to a tortuous extent, generating the critical mass required for the first, smaller fusion reaction to commence. As that happened, the energy from it generated the critical mass for the final stage to go off.

In order to reduce the yield from 100 MT to 50 MT, a reexamination of the fusion tampers was required. Between the first and second stages and the second and third stages, something called a tamper was used to accelerate the fission process. As the fission reaction subsided and the first fusion stage took off, free neutrons released would collide with the tamper, made of uranium-238, and set of a fast fission reaction. This result was provided for to enhance the yield of the bomb. When reducing the yield became necessary, engineers removed the uranium tamper and replaced it with one made of lead.

The lead trapped the free neutrons. Fusion reactions took over. Fast fission became prohibited. Game over.

Philosophiae homis

The 'Book Summary' makes me wonder... why are the likes of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman so few and so far in between? The popularization of science may not seem like a necessary fixture to its acceptance in mainstream media, but over the years it has become increasingly necessary to clarify its role in the eyes of the common man—even roles such as those played in the maintenance of the Large Hadron Collider or of the International Space Station. That Einstein's papers on special and general relativity need a "redesigning" betokens a moment's reflection on the dependence of our day-to-day activities on scientific research and development, whether the increasing investment in experimental apparatuses sees justification just like military spending does, and if anyone ascribes the need for that investment to anything apart from science's utilitarian value.

Philosophiae homis

The 'Book Summary' makes me wonder... why are the likes of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman so few and so far in between? The popularization of science may not seem like a necessary fixture to its acceptance in mainstream media, but over the years it has become increasingly necessary to clarify its role in the eyes of the common man—even roles such as those played in the maintenance of the Large Hadron Collider or of the International Space Station. That Einstein's papers on special and general relativity need a "redesigning" betokens a moment's reflection on the dependence of our day-to-day activities on scientific research and development, whether the increasing investment in experimental apparatuses sees justification just like military spending does, and if anyone ascribes the need for that investment to anything apart from science's utilitarian value.