New Scientist reports on the possibility that NASA's FERMI satellite may be about to do that very thing, according to researchers for the University of California, Irvine. FERMI was created to detect gamma rays, and one of the expected sources of these rays is the annihilation of dark matter made up of "weakly interacting massive particles." Except, the researchers believe, the annihilation of these particles may also result in the creation of one photon and one giant particle... like the Higgs boson. According to the team's Tim Tait:

If there is a strong connection between the physics of dark matter and the physics of mass generation, those dark matter particles probably like to interact with the Higgs boson... FERMI has very good prospects of discovering the Higgs if this model is true.

Other scientists accept that this theory may not be entirely outside the realms of possibility. There's even a chance that the satellite has already discovered it, and we haven't realized it yet; FERMI has already captured data, but scientists haven't gone through it entirely. LHC scientists: The race is on.

Higgs in space: Orbiting telescope could beat the LHC [New Scientist]

The premise of FlashForward is that everybody in the world blacks out at the same time, and for a few minutes they see what's going to happen to them six months into the future. Hence, the "flashforward" of the title. Because everybody is blacked out during this flashforward, of course, chaos reigns. Planes and cars crash; people die. It's a strange and intriguing disaster, and now characters on the show are hinting that it was caused by a physics research facility in Palo Alto, clearly modeled on an actual facility associated with Stanford University in Palo Alto. On the website for the Stanford Linear Accelerator, SLAC for short, you can find an informative FAQ responding to FlashForward's science flailing.

They explain that plasma-wakefield acceleration experiments have gone on at SLAC, but only with electrons. They write:

SLAC does have a cutting-edge plasma-wakefield acceleration program that is creating the next generation of particle accelerators. However, it works by accelerating electrons (and their anti-matter cousin positrons) rather than the much heavier protons. At this time, there are no experiments that attempt to accelerate protons using plasma wakefields.

In addition, no matter what you did with these experiments, you wouldn't get a flashforward:

Plasma-wakefield acceleration is just an advanced technique to boost particles to high energies, something that particle physicists have been doing for decades. Even the most speculative theories rooted in real physics make no prediction that anything like a flashforward could occur.

"Although we can use particle accelerators to essentially look backward in time to recreate the conditions of the universe soon after the big bang, there is no known way to look into the future," says Mark Hogan, chief experimental scientist for the plasma wakefield program at SLAC's FACET.

In other words, FlashForward is full of crap. These scientists are too nice to say that directly, so I'll just say it for them.

via SLAC and Symmetry Breaking

The magazine quotes Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who identifies it as the failure-prone Bulava ballistic missile, launched from a submarine. McDowell said the Russian Navy is in the right geographical position to launch it. He added that Russia has denied that it was their missile, but "this could be because another Bulava failure is a huge and embarrassing setback for their programme."

As for why the perfect spiral shape was created:

McDowell says the shape suggests the failure occurred well above the atmosphere. If it had occurred at lower altitudes, atmospheric drag would have caused the missile to fall quickly to Earth, creating a downward-pointing corkscrew pattern whose contrails would have been blown "this way and that" by wind, he told New Scientist.

The Bulava missile has three stages that fire in succession as it climbs up in altitude. "Probably what happened is that stages 1 and 2 did just fine and were discarded in turn, and then stage 3 started burning and almost immediately went wrong," McDowell says.

He says the third stage's nozzle, which directs the rocket's exhaust plume, may have fallen off or been punctured, causing the exhaust to come out sideways instead of out the back. "The sideways thrust sends the rocket into a spin, spewing flame as it goes," he says.

"If thrust was terminated right away, then you wouldn't see the spiral," he continues. "The unusual thing this time is that the missile was allowed to carry on firing for a bit after it went wrong."

UPDATE: Jonathan McDowell writes in to say:

The Russians did send out a 'notice to mariners' in advance warning of a rocket launch, and they have now (Dec 10) admitted that there was a launch of the Bulava and that the third stage failed. Hope that answers some of the comments on your page.

via New Scientist

Three days after the restart, CERN announced that it has circulated two beams simultaneously, and has observed proton-proton collisions. It's an exciting first step, but still a very first step:

"It's a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. "But we need to keep a sense of perspective – there's still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme."

It will still be a while before the LHC can go fishing for the Higgs boson, but the CERN researchers are fired up about collecting data on the proton collisions. The next step will involve altering the intensity and acceleration of the beams while getting a feel for the LHC's performance.

Two circulating beams bring first collisions in the LHC [CERN]

The LHC is a 27-kilometer underground tunnel designed to accelerate atomic particles and smash them into each other. The goal is to see what happens when such particles interact with tremendous amounts of energy, the way they might under extreme conditions in outer space. The results of LHC experiments will reveal a lot about the origins of our universe, and the composition of matter within it.

CERN, the Swiss facility where the enormous underground experiment is located, has announced that test beams in the LHC have zoomed around most parts of the accelerator without incident:

Particles are smoothly making their way around the 27 km circumference of the LHC. Last weekend (7-8 November), the first bunches of injection energy protons completed their journey (anti-clockwise) through three octants of the LHC's circumference and were dumped in a collimator just before entering the CMS cavern. The particles produced by the impact of the protons on the tertiary collimators (used to stop the beam) left their tracks in the calorimeters and the muon chambers of the experiment.

One of the coolest parts about accelerators is that when the microscopic particles smash into the walls, they are moving so fast that they leave long tracks in their wakes. (Researchers can gain information from examining these tracks.)

If everything keeps moving smoothly, we could see some particle-on-particle smashage as early as two weeks from now. As long as the world doesn't end, we're going to get some long-awaited answers to our questions about our universe.

via CERN Bulletin

CERN is reporting that the Large Hadron Collider has been shutdown yet again after a piece of bread fell into the outdoor machinery. That part of the LHC's circuit normally operates at 1.9 Kelvin, but, thanks to the bread bomb, rose to 8 Kelvin, nearly causing the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets to cease superconducting. The incident could have crippled the LHC yet again — and caused significant physical damage to the lab had the LHC been fully operational at the time — but CERN claims that it won't delay the full reactivation of the device, scheduled for later this month.

Technicians believe that a passing bird dropped the bread into the machinery, just the LHC's latest run-in with Murphy's Law.

Large Hadron Collider scuttled by birdy baguette-bomber [The Register via Popular Science]

The panel discussion between nine physicists included the question "What keeps you awake at night?" and the answers can be reduced to, essentially, one simple thought: What if we don't - and can't - know everything?

New Scientists listed the main concerns from the panel, but what connected them all was the issue of whether or not our current knowledge was too limited; from Caltech's Sean Carroll wondering about the existences of other universes with entirely different laws of physics to Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan wondering what the 96% of existence that's not made of matter is, the issue really seemed to be about what we don't know. We're drawn, in particular, to Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, and his concern:

Zeilinger specialises in quantum experiments that demonstrate the apparent influence of observers in the shaping of reality. "Maybe the real breakthrough will come when we start to realise the connections between reality, knowledge and our actions," he says. The concept is mind-bending, but it is well established in practice. Zeilinger and others have shown that particles that are widely separated can somehow have quantum states that are linked, so that observing one affects the outcome of the other. No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.

Is the act of attempting to satisfy our curiosity about the universe creating more mysteries to be curious about? If so, then Lawrence Krauss' concerns about the limits of empirical science may have more weight than you may think... Something that cosmologist Neil Turok finds worth investigating:

We're used to thinking of theoretical physics as accidental. We need to ask whether there's a more strategic way to speed up understanding and discovery.

You can watch the full panel below:

Seven questions that keep physicists up at night [New Scientist]

How many universes are in the multiverse? [arxiv.org via Universe Today]

The quest to observe the Higgs boson has certainly been plagued by its share of troubles, from the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993 to the Large Hadron Collider's streak of technical troubles. In fact, the projects have suffered such bad luck that Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto wonder if it isn't bad luck at all, but future influences rippling back to sabotage them. In papers like "Test of Effect From Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal" and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," they put forth the notion that observing the Higgs boson would be such an abhorrent event that the future is actually trying to prevent it from happening.

"It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck," Dr. Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Dr. Nielson said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."

Nielsen and Ninomiya recognize that the theory sounds pretty crazy and that other projects involving a lot of delicate technology — such as the Hubble Telescope — have gone through their own periods of apparent bad luck. But their theory — wild as it is — is situated in current research in theoretical physics and time travel. If the observation of the Higgs boson would result in calamity, they claim it isn't outside the realm of possibility that someone from our future might exert influence on our time to stop it:

While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus. Although just why the Higgs would be a catastrophe is not clear. If we knew, presumably, we wouldn't be trying to make one.

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate [NY Times — Thanks to Boas_MC]

The Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn, an Australian-American, with the Physics Prize being awarded to Canadian-American Willard Boyle and British-American Charles Kao. The Chemistry Prize was shared between Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz and Israel's Ada E. Yonath.

Since 1985, Americans have dominated the science prizes, winning the Chemistry prize all but two years, the Medicine prize all but five years, and the Physics prize all but seven. Scientists are arguing that such results prove the need of government funding for long-term projects that may not show immediate return on investment; the National Institute of General Medical Sciences' Dr. Jeremy Berg cited Yonath's research as a good example of the kind of thing the government should be involved in:

I remember at the time being just completely stunned that she was somewhere between brave enough and crazy enough and because it was way, way, way beyond the technology available at that point... But it was seen as certainly completely unique and something potentially so important that it should be funded.

Nobel prize shows need for funding - scientists [Reuters]

Ryan North, of Dinosaur Comics fame, asked his friend Ben Tippett to write a scientific paper-style analysis of Superman's powers after listening to Tippett describe his unified theory of the Kryptonian's abilities. Tippett, trying to understand Superman's powers from a physics perspective, has posited that Superman doesn't have multiple superpowers, but one amazing ability:

It is our opinion that all of Superman's recognized powers can be unified if His power is the ability to manipulate, from atomic to kilometer length scales, the inertia of His own and any matter with which He is in contact.

Tippett then proceeds to explain how each of each of Superman's abilities — his superstrength, his senses, his flight, his freezing vision — are simply a manifestation of that ability, and offers helpful equations and diagrams to illustrate his points:

The folks at Metafilter are already poking and prodding at the theory, with the key argument being that, if Superman can manipulate matter in this way, why bother with heat vision and freezing breath? Why not simply heat and freeze matter with any part of his body?

A Unified theory of Superman's Powers [Dinosaur Comics via Metafilter]

A new paper from Davide Cassi at the Università di Parma, published this month in Physical Review E, explores how targets might be annihilated by "random walkers." These walkers might be any moving organism that can eliminate a target, but LiveScience notes that zombies are the perfect analogy for these "walkers" — organisms that meander without purpose and destroy any human they happen to come across.

The paper examines the likelihood of the targets surviving — that is, never coming into contact with these "random walkers" — if they remain immobile within various types of structures. One of Cassi's findings is that the more complex the hideout, the less likely a random walker is to encounter a target. This means that hiding out in a building filled with twisting corridors, such as a mall or a school, offers a better chance of survival than hiding out in the open or in more open structures.

Of course, all bets are off if your particular breed of zombie has a talent for sniffing out live humans — or if it's driven by an instinctive need to shop.

The Best Approach for Avoiding Zombies [LiveScience]

Up to now, magnetic monopoles have been the stuff of speculation. Physicist Paul Dirac conjectured that such monopoles might exist at the ends of magnetic strings. But these monopoles had never actually been observed in real materials.

Until now. The German research team looked for these monopoles in the material dysprosium titanate. They chose this stuff for its internal structure; it crystallizes into a sort of spaghetti, a mix of strings of magnetic material, illustrated in the image above. The team observed this structure by measuring how neutrons scatter through the material. At very low temperatures, and under an external magnetic field, the poles on these magnetic strings sort of fall apart, leaving magnetic monopoles at the ends of these strings.

It sounds like a pretty complex experiment with only a very specific outcome. But the implications are giant. Up to this point, magnetic monopoles were entirely theoretical. This experiment not only proves that the monopoles exist, but it proves that they consistently exist in the same situations and that they interact in predictable ways. It's always amazing to realize that as much as physicists know, they still manage to see new things all the time.

Magnetic Monopoles Detected In A Real Magnet For The First Time [via ScienceDaily]

Goldberg, a physics professor at Drexel University, and co-author of the upcoming book A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes and Quantum Uncertainty, says that amidst the current glut of more fantastical time travel dramas — in which he includes Lost, Star Trek, and Heroes — The Time Traveler's Wife is a breath of relatively accurate air.

Looking at the theories developed by Albert Einstein, Hugh Everett, Igor Novikov, and Kip Thorne, Goldberg creates a checklist for accurate time travel rules ("You can't visit any time before your time machine was built." "You can't kill your own grandfather."), and explains how well The Time Traveler's Wife fits within those rules. The verdict: the story bends the rules a bit, but in a somewhat justifiable way, and comes out leagues ahead of most popular time travel tales.

One point I wish Goldberg had addressed is whether nudity is a prerequisite for time travel, because personally when they build the time machine, I'd prefer to arrive fully clothed.

Time-Traveling for Dummies [Slate]

Levin, who has also written a beautiful, fascinating book about physics called How the Universe Got Its Spots, gives a technical explanation of her periodic table of black hole orbits:

Understanding the dynamics around rotating black holes is imperative to the success of the future gravitational wave observatories. Although integrable in principle, test particle orbits in the Kerr spacetime can also be elaborate, and while they have been studied extensively, classifying their general properties has been a challenge. This is the first in a series of papers that adopts a dynamical systems approach to the study of Kerr orbits, beginning with equatorial orbits. We define a taxonomy of orbits that hinges on a correspondence between periodic orbits and rational numbers. The taxonomy defines the entire dynamics, including aperiodic motion, since every orbit is in or near the periodic set. A remarkable implication of this periodic orbit taxonomy is that the simple precessing ellipse familiar from planetary orbits is not allowed in the strong-field regime. Instead, eccentric orbits trace out precessions of multi-leaf clovers in the final stages of inspiral. Furthermore, for any black hole, there is some point in the strong-field regime past which zoom-whirl behavior becomes unavoidable. Finally, we sketch the potential application of the taxonomy to problems of astrophysical interest, in particular its utility for computationally intensive gravitational wave calculations.

Kerr black holes are black holes that rotate, and that affects the gravity waves they generate. I love these charts of the many possible ways that objects might approach, orbit, and eventually get swallowed by a black hole. If you want to delve into the math Levin used to create these images, check out the whole paper. It's free online.

"A Periodic Table for Black Hole Orbits" via arXiv

Georgia Tech physicist Daniel Goldman and his team observed the sandfish as they swam through sand, using X-rays and tiny sensors placed in the sand that measured how grains were displaced as the lizards moved through them. One thing they discovered right away was that the sandfish were indeed "swimming" - they tucked their legs up next to their bodies and moved in an undulatory wave like fish through water. Another interesting finding was that the lizards could go slightly faster in tightly-packed sand, as long as they varied the frequency of the wave created by the movement of their bodies. Their work is published today in Science.

Says Goldman:

When started above the surface, the animals dive into the sand within a half second. Once below the surface, they no longer use their limbs for propulsion — instead, they move forward by propagating a traveling wave down their bodies like a snake . . . The large amplitude waves over the entire body are unlike the kinematics of other undulatory swimming organisms that are the same size as the sandfish, like eels, which propagate waves that start with a small amplitude that gets larger toward the tail . . . The results demonstrate that burrowing and swimming in complex media like sand can have intricacy similar to that of movement in air or water, and that organisms can exploit the solid and fluid-like properties of these media to move effectively within them.

There are implications for this research that go beyond understanding how lizards move through sand. Goldman and his team think it could help roboticists in designing rescue bots that could worm their way through collapsed rubble. It would also be useful for creating surveillance robots that can swim invisibly under sand, tracking enemy locations or even recording conversations that take place outdoors in sandy regions.

via Science and Georgia Tech

Physicist Che Ting Chan, of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told New Scientist:

Invisibility is just an illusion of free space, of air. We are extending that concept. We can make it look like not just air but anything we want.

With his equations, he can make visibility an illusion as well.

The device — which exists only as a design so far — would use existing metamaterial technology . It would create a series of filters that first render one object invisible and then another one visible. Continues New Scientist:

To make a cup look like a spoon, for example, light first strikes the cup and is distorted. It then passes through a complementary metamaterial which cancels out the distortions to make the cup seem invisible. The light then moves into a region of the metamaterial that creates a distortion as if a spoon were present. The result is that an observer looking at the cup through the metamaterial would see a spoon.

Although the technology as envisioned is active — requiring a knowing observer to watch the cup through the metamaterial to see the spoon, it could undoubtedly be made passive. The only current technological roadblock is the need for the metamaterial components to be smaller than a micrometer, as that's the wavelength of visible light. Scientists like John Pendry, who first came up with the theory behind invisibility cloaking, thinks that building it is well within the realm of human capacity.

Modified Invisibility Cloak Could Make The Ultimate Illusion [New Scientist]

[Image via NASA]

The Guardian's Ehsan Masood argues in a recent article that the amount of information we already have about everything that surrounds us shapes the way that we consider the unknown:

Scientists and science commentators often say that if yesterday's science needed outstanding individuals such as Darwin and Einstein, tomorrow's theories will be shaped by the vast quantities of data pouring forth from networked computers and from the labours of big research teams working in areas such as particle physics, the human genome and astronomy... [Science writer John Horgan] claimed that the basic scaffolding of the natural world is now mostly understood – the big bang theory, the structure of DNA and evolution by natural selection and the periodic table of elements are not going to change. Yes, many refinements are needed in our understanding of how things work, but as we are closer to reality in so many fields, the chances of seeing revolutionary new thinking will be that much less. Will we never witness a scientific revolution again? And will tomorrow's theories be guided by big data rather than revolutionary ideas?

Then again, perhaps the problem isn't the amount of knowledge, but the way in which scientific knowledge is presented, he argues:

It takes a lot of courage to challenge conventionally accepted views, and it needs a certain amount of stamina to constantly battle those who want to protect the status quo. Mavericks do not do well in large organisations, which is what some scientific fields have become. Progress in science needs researchers who are not afraid – or who are encouraged and rewarded – to ask awkward and difficult questions of theory and of new data. It is easier to question mainstream views if you are independently wealthy, as many scientists in previous ages tended to be. But I wonder how many of us would do so if we were employed by the state and our career progression depended on the validation of our peers?

So what is the solution? Masood suggests that, while biology may be pretty much done, there's the potential for another scientific revolution in physics... if only we can change the way we think of physics and scientific exploration in general. Such a small thing to ask for...

Are we witnessing the end of science? [Guardian.co.uk]

This week in Geophysical Research Letters, a group of scientists propose that the space shuttle's cloudy wake gives us a hint about what kind of object could have caused the Tunguska explosion. The space shuttle leaves high, icy clouds in the upper atmosphere called noctilucent clouds. Because these clouds contain so much ice, they often glow (see image) with reflected light from the ice particles.

Eyewitness accounts of the Tunguska explosion include reports of glowing clouds in the sky afterwards. Scientists speculate that these were noctilucent clouds left behind by an icy comet as it entered the atmosphere.

According to Xenophilia:

Following the 1908 explosion, known as the Tunguska Event, the night skies shone brightly for several days across Europe, particularly Great Britain - more than 3,000 miles away.

[Researcher Michael] Kelley said he became intrigued by the historical eyewitness accounts of the aftermath, and concluded that the bright skies must have been the result of noctilucent clouds. The comet would have started to break up at about the same altitude as the release of the exhaust plume from the space shuttle following launch. In both cases, water vapor was injected into the atmosphere.

The scientists have attempted to answer how this water vapor traveled so far without scattering and diffusing, as conventional physics would predict.

"There is a mean transport of this material for tens of thousands of kilometers in a very short time, and there is no model that predicts that," Kelley said. "It's totally new and unexpected physics."

This "new" physics, the researchers contend, is tied up in counter-rotating eddies with extreme energy. Once the water vapor got caught up in these eddies, the water traveled very quickly - close to 300 feet per second.

via Xenophilia