TouchOfEvil

From the page: ""From Eternity to Here/The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time" (Dutton, 448 pages, $26.95), by Sean Carroll: This book should go down big with people who like discussing modern astronomy's "black holes" that swallow everything nearby, and the Big Bang of more than 13 billion years ago that some experts believe created the universe.

The book's title, "From Eternity to Here", a switch on that of James Jones' highly praised novel "From Here to Eternity" may be a disappointment for a careless purchaser.

Unlike the passionate tale Jones wrote on life in the American army of half a century ago, Sean Carroll's book is a learned contribution to current speculation on cosmology. The subtitle states its actual content: "The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time."

The text is enlivened by references to an imaginary cat named Miss Kitty. It analyzes the time she spends moving from her food bowl and her scratching post to a position under the sofa. It also cites a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt, about a man who grows younger with time.

Carroll envisions the possibility of time travel, into the past, but not, he says, into the future.

Such references are entertaining, but readers not familiar with the abstruse matters that physicists discuss these days may doze off and wake up wondering just what Carroll is driving at.

A "Prologue" begins: "This book is about the nature of time, the beginning of the universe, and the underlying structure of physical reality. We are not thinking small here."

Carroll must have been impressed by a quote from St. Augustine or he wouldn't have put it at the head of his first chapter: "What is time?" wrote the philosopher-saint. "If one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one who asketh, I know not."

The book concludes: "It's time we understood our place within eternity."

One earnest reader, at least, was not much helped to that end. But it did seem to confirm the guess that the place is pretty small.

Read more: sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi [sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi]

The cosmic afterglow left behind by Big Bang is called the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Researchers from the school of physics and astronomy at Cardiff University at Wales in the UK and Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford in USA used QUaD to study the afterglow.
QUaD is an extragalactic surveyor located at the South Pole in Antarctica. This team has further strengthened the belief that dark matter does make up 95 per cent of everything in existence. Detailed maps of the cosmic microwave background were released in the November 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
The team has been able to investigate not just where the dark matter existed but also how it was moving and thus how the universe looked shortly after cosmic bodies came into existence following the Big Bang.
The instruments used are highly sensitive and the observations though difficult to interpret very closely match the results hypothetically predicted by the existence of dark matter.
However these are findings of the universe 400,000 years after it was formed and so understanding what happened in that crucial moment of the Big Bang needs patience and more research.
Dark matter stretches throughout space where it attracts ordinary matter that coalesces into galaxies of billions of stars and planets. It forms a kind of cosmic skeleton that gives the universe its structure. Scientists believe they will find a family of invisible dark matter particles, each of which plays a different role. Some may explain why time always goes in the same direction.

According to Marco Taoso of CERN and colleagues, the famed Higgs could be leaving its imprint in the light produced in collisions of dark matter, the substance believed by most scientists to make up the vast majority of the universe's mass. In fact, the researchers think we could be seeing the tell-tale spectral signatures of Higgs in this way within a year - so sooner, potentially, than the LHC unscrambles data on the elusive particle.
The LHC was built to search for a wealth of new physics but its foremost target has always been the Higgs. The only fundamental particle in the Standard Model yet to be discovered, the Higgs - or more precisely its associated field - is supposed to "stick" to other particles and thus give them the property of mass. Many particle physicists have been hoping that the LHC's expected collision energies of 14 TeV will be powerful enough to finally unearth the Higgs, and in doing so wrap up the Standard Model.

However, Taoso's group, which includes members at Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University in Illinois, US, thinks experiments searching for traces of dark matter might get there first. Dark matter is thought to make up more than 80% of the matter in the universe but it does not interact via electromagnetism so its presence has only been inferred from its gravitational effects on normal matter.

Most models of the universe suggest that dark matter was more prevalent in the distant past, and this has led physicists to assume that dark-matter particles have been annihilating one another through collisions. Although dark matter itself doesn't interact with light (hence being "dark"), such an annihilation could generate a photon and another particle, possibly the Higgs.

The researchers claim that detecting this Higgs would be a matter of spotting the partner photon with an energy reflecting the Higgs's mass. If their calculations are correct, gamma-ray telescopes like Fermi might see the first evidence within a year.

From the page: Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg is worried. It's not that he thinks the LHC will create a black hole that will engulf the planet, or even that the restart will end in a technical debacle like last year's. No: he's actually worried that the LHC will find what some call the "God particle", the popular and embarrassingly grandiose moniker for the hitherto undetected Higgs boson.

"I'm terrified," he says. "Discovering just the Higgs would really be a crisis."

Why so? Evidence for the Higgs would be the capstone of an edifice that particle physicists have been building for half a century - the phenomenally successful theory known simply as the standard model. It describes all known particles, as well as three of the four forces that act on them: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces.

It is also manifestly incomplete. We know from what the theory doesn't explain that it must be just part of something much bigger. So if the LHC finds the Higgs and nothing but the Higgs, the standard model will be sewn up. But then particle physics will be at a dead end, with no clues where to turn next.

Hence Weinberg's fears. However, if the theorists are right, before it ever finds the Higgs, the LHC will see the first outline of something far bigger: the grand, overarching theory known as supersymmetry. SUSY, as it is endearingly called, is a daring theory that doubles the number of particles needed to explain the world. And it could be just what particle physicists need to set them on the path to fresh enlightenment.

So what's so wrong with the standard model? First off, there are some obvious sins of omission. It has nothing whatsoever to say about the fourth fundamental force of nature, gravity, and it is also silent on the nature of dark matter. Dark matter is no trivial matter: if our interpretation of certain astronomical observations is correct, the stuff outweighs conventional matter in the cosmos by more than 4 to 1.

Ironically enough, though, the real trouble begins with the Higgs. The Higgs came about to solve a truly massive problem: the fact that the basic building blocks of ordinary matter (things such as electrons and quarks, collectively known as fermions) and the particles that carry forces (collectively called bosons) all have a property we call mass. Theories could see no rhyme or reason in particles' masses and could not predict them; they had to be measured in experiments and added into the theory by hand.

These "free parameters" were embarrassing loose threads in the theories that were being woven together to form what eventually became the standard model. In 1964,Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and François Englert and Robert Brout of the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in Belgium independently hit upon a way to tie them up.

That mechanism was an unseen quantum field that suffuses the entire cosmos. Later dubbed the Higgs field, it imparts mass to all particles. The mass an elementary particle such as an electron or quark acquires depends on the strength of its interactions with the Higgs field, whose "quanta" are Higgs bosons.

Fields like this are key to the standard model as they describe how the electromagnetic and the weak and strong nuclear forces act on particles through the exchange of various bosons - the W and Z particles, gluons and photons. But the Higgs theory, though elegant, comes with a nasty sting in its tail: what is the mass of the Higgs itself? It should consist of a core mass plus contributions from its interactions with all the other elementary particles. When you tot up those contributions, the Higgs mass balloons out of control.

The experimental clues we already have suggest that the Higgs's mass should lie somewhere between 114 and 180 gigaelectronvolts - between 120 and 190 times the mass of a proton or neutron, and easily the sort of energy the LHC can reach. Theory, however, comes up with values 17 or 18 orders of magnitude greater - a catastrophic discrepancy dubbed "the hierarchy problem". The only way to get rid of it in the standard model is to fine-tune certain parameters with an accuracy of 1 part in 10exp(34).

From the page: The world's largest particle accelerator has performed its first collisions, and its first beam acceleration.
"These collisions are the first in the LHC at all," said Cern director of communications James Gillies. "We've been going into new territory. It's been going quite remarkably fast."
Scientists recorded the first collisions of protons on Monday, but that overnight one of the beams had been accelerated.
"This was the first acceleration in the LHC," said Gillies. "It's nice to know the LHC is able to work as a particle accelerator."On Monday night, the beam was accelerated from its initial injection energy of 450 giga-electron-volts (GeV) up to 540 GeV, said Gillies. This followed recorded collisions on Monday. Cern said in a press statement on Monday that the LHC had circulated two beams simultaneously so operators could test the synchronisation of the beams. These tests were successful, said the statement. "With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring. [...] From early in the afternoon, the beams were made to cross at points 1 and 5, home to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, both of which were on the look-out for collisions. Later, beams crossed at points 2 and 8, ALICE and LHCb." Scientists are ready for serious data taking in a few days time."Cern does not expect any new physics to come out of the initial beam collisions, as the beam intensity is not yet powerful enough. The accelerator was off on Tuesday so engineers could tweak the equipment, so that physicists can start analysing results. In the run-up to Christmas, the beams will be tested at increasing intensities, with the aim of reaching 1.2 tera-electron-volts before the break. Beam collisions will be performed for calibration work, while a programme of systematic measurements of LHC will take place over ten days before Christmas.The LHC was restarted on Friday after a hiatus of over a year. The giant experiment had to be shut down nine days after it became operational last September, following an explosion caused by a faulty copper splice.

From the page: Findings by an international team of scientists using a telescope located at the U.S. Antarctic Program's South Pole Station show that cosmologists probably do know what they believe they know about the universe.Their measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) -- a faintly glowing relic of the hot, dense, young universe -- confirm a significant prediction of the standard cosmological model. Specifically, their results show that dark matter and dark energy make up 95 percent of everything in existence, while ordinary matter makes up just 5 percent.The standard cosmological model -- popularly known as the Big Bang -- is the prevailing theory behind the formation process of the cosmos. In part, it proposes that dark matter and dark energy, neither of which can be seen, dominate the universe. Dark matter is an entirely different kind of matter that appears to suffuse galaxies without interacting with the ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and people.The second component, dark energy, is the energy of empty space itself. The presence of dark energy means that the universe is not just expanding, but that the expansion is accelerating. The exact nature of dark energy is unknown, but it is possible that the acceleration will continue until it rips the universe apart -- billions of years into the future."When I first started in this field, some people were adamant that they understood the contents of the universe quite well," noted Sarah Church , deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology , jointly located at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University ."But that understanding was shattered when evidence for dark energy was discovered," added Church, the U.S. principal investigator of the South Pole QUaD telescope project . "Now that we again feel we have a very good understanding of what makes up the universe, it's extremely important for us to amass strong evidence using many different measurement techniques that this model is correct, so that this doesn't happen again."

Cosmic dust explains why the intensity of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect is independent of Redshift.Sunyaev-Zeldovich EffectCollapsing cluster galaxies are implosions producing extremely energetic electrons at temperatures of about 10^8 K. Astronomers believe CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) photons passing through the collapsing galaxies gain energy by collisions with these electrons and blue-shift by the inverse-Compton effect. Measurement of CMBR in the direction of a cluster of galaxies shows a measurable, but almost imperceptible distortion called the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect (SZE). The SZE shows the 20 to 1000 GHz microwave emission from collapsing cluster galaxies is virtually identical to the CMBR. The SZE spectrum shows a decrease in intensity at frequencies lower than around 218 GHz with an increase in intensity at higher frequencies. Although electrons at 10^8 K emit X-rays, the thermal distortion of the CMBR is only of the order of one-thousandth of a Kelvin in temperature. At a given frequency, the SZE intensity varies in brightness in proportion to the mass distribution within the cluster. The SZE is usually only associated with massive objects such as clusters of galaxies, i.e., a single galaxy has insufficient mass to cause measurable distortions in the SZE.However, the most remarkable finding is the SZE intensity is independent of redshift Z.