Day: 09/09/2016

The Possible 6th Taste Explains A Lot About Our Eating Habits

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If we’re playing favorites on the food pyramid, it’s hard to deny that carbs reign supreme. Downing a bowl of buttery pasta or nibbling a slice of fresh bread simply feels good. And the cozy, comforting feeling we associate with complex carbohydrates may lie right in their taste.

 Researchers at Oregon State University at Corvallis think they may have discovered a sixth taste. You’re most likely already familiar with the original five: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Well soon, we may officially be adding “starchy” to the list.
Juyun Lim, the researcher behind this potential discovery, explained to New Scientist that up until recently, most food scientists didn’t believe that we could really taste complex carbohydrates because enzymes in our saliva break starches down into sugars. But Lim didn’t buy this theory. She said, “Every culture has a major source of complex carbohydrate. The idea that we can’t taste what we’re eating doesn’t make sense.”

Lim conducted a study in which volunteers were given a variety of carbohydrate solutions containing both long and short carbohydrate chains. They were also given compounds that block the detection of sweetness. Lim found that the volunteers could still make out “floury” flavors. According to Lim, “This is the first evidence that we can taste starch as a flavor in its own right.”

Starchy cannot yet be officially named a flavor until it’s met a few other criteria. New Scientist reports that one of those is that the flavor must be considered “useful.” Lim certainly believes that the taste is useful, and that’s why people are so crazy for carbs. She explains, “Sugar tastes great in the short term, but if you’re offered chocolate and bread, you might eat a small amount of the chocolate, but you’d choose the bread in larger amounts, or as a daily staple.” As people who love French fries, baguettes, and pasta of any kind, we think Lim’s is a pretty solid argument.

Super Powers Helped Doctors Look Inside Human Bodies Without Machines

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The most renowned ancient Chinese doctors are said to have exhibited supernormal abilities, including being able to look into a person’s body to see the cause of an illness.

Here’s a look at some extraordinary doctors and their abilities.

1. Hua Tuo (140 to 208 A.D.)

Hua Tuo is known as the first surgeon in Chinese medicine. He is also said to have used supernatural abilities to see the tumors and other internal problems to identify them as the cause of an illness.

When he told Emperor Cao Cao he had a tumor in his brain, Cao Cao thought Hua Tuo wanted to kill him, using the pretext of performing head surgery. Hua Tuo died in prison and Cao Cao died of his illness.

Hua Tuo was a humble man, uninterested in fame and self-interest. Though he examined the emperor, he usually worked with the common people. He was forced to diagnose the emperor after he had already refused the offer to become the emperor’s official physician.

Hua Tuo was called the “Divine Physician,” or “Shenyi,” in Chinese. He is also known for developing a type of qigong exercises. Many physicians in ancient China paid much attention to their spiritual cultivation and strived to maintain a high moral character. Their supernormal abilities could only come to them this way.

Without any method to scan the inner body, the surgeries Hua Tuo performed were believed to be guided by divine vision.

2. Bian Que (c. 500 B.C.)

An account of Bian Que’s life is given in “The Records of the Grand Historian,” (“Shih Chi,” in Chinese) by the famed historian Sima Qian. Bian Que met a man with supernatural powers who gave him a mysterious medicine.

The man instructed Bian Que to ingest the medicine with water “that has not touched the ground,” such as dew. A month later, Bian Que had X-ray vision.

Bian Que passed the funeral procession of a prince, but Bian Que saw that the prince could still be revived. Indeed, it turned out the prince was just in a coma and after he was treated with acupuncture, the prince became well again.

3. Zhang Zhongjing (150 to 219 A.D.)

“A Treatise on Cold Injury” (“Shang Han Lun” in Chinese), one of the oldest clinical textbooks in the world, compiled by Zhang Zhongjing. (Wikimedia Commons)

When Zhang Zhongjing was 20 years old, he met an official named Wang Zhongxuan. Zhang told Wang his eyebrows would fall out at the age of 40 and that when this happens, Wang will die within half a year. Zhang gave Wang a prescription to prevent this occurrence.

Wang accepted the medicine, but did not take it, because he was offended and did not believe Zhang.

Days later, Zhang asked Wang if he had taken the medication and Wang lied, saying he had. Zhang wasn’t fooled. He said: “It looks like you didn’t take it. Why don’t you care about your life?”

Years later, when Wang was 40 years old, his eyebrows fell out. As predicted, he died within half a year.

Watch the video. URL:https://youtu.be/5BLeX0mC-w0

Legendary physicist Freeman Dyson talks about math, nuclear rockets, and astounding things about the universe 

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Mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson has had a career as varied as it has been successful. A former professor of physics at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, he has worked on the unification of the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Richard Feynman, nuclear reactors, solid-state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, biology, and the application of useful and elegant math problems. One of his ideas, the Dyson Sphere, was featured in a “Star Trek” episode.Today, Dyson frequently writes about science and technology’s relationship to ethics and social issues. Business Insider sat down with him and talked about math, war, the human brain, the education system, and the Orion Project.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Elena Holodny: Who has most inspired you in either math or science?

Freeman Dyson: Oh, definitely [Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard] Feynman. Dick Feynman … he has now become famous, to my great joy, because when I knew him he was completely unknown. But I recognized him as being something special. He was only for a short time at Cornell when I was a student and he was a young professor. So I didn’t work with him, but I just sat at his feet, literally, and listened to him talk. He was a clown, of course, and also a genius. It was a good combination.

richard feynman

Holodny: What does it mean to you to be a good mathematician-slash-scientist versus a great one?Dyson: I would say it’s just like any other art – mathematics is really an art, not a science. You could say science also is an art. So I would say the difference is something you can’t really describe – you can only recognize. You hear somebody playing the violin, and it was Fritz Kreisler or it was somebody else, and you can tell the difference.

It is so in almost every art. We just don’t understand why it is that there are just a few people who are just completely off the scale and the rest of them are just mediocre. And we don’t know why. But I say it’s certainly true of mathematics.

Holodny: What are your thoughts on math as an absolute versus as a way to measure things?

Dyson: Well, both, of course, are real. That’s the beauty of it. You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too.

That’s, of course, the beautiful thing about science – that it’s all about things we don’t understand, not just the things we do understand.

And that, by some miracle, the language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That’s just an amazing piece of luck, which we don’t understand.

Holodny: It’s interesting that in some fields – for example, in economics – that math models do not perfectly reflect what’s happening in the real world in the same way that they do in physics.

Dyson: Yes, that’s another mystery. That’s, of course, the beautiful thing about science – that it’s all about things we don’t understand, not just the things we do understand.

In fact, there’s a wonderful essay that I was just reading by [German mathematician David] Hilbert. When he was quite an old man, he gave a wonderful talk in Konigsberg, about in 1930, about the relation between physics and mathematics, essentially. Only what is quite amazing is that he talked also about genetics – and with an expert knowledge. I mean, I was amazed. That’s Hilbert, the very purest of mathematicians, and he understood all about the genetics of fruit flies and how you could axiomatize genetics of fruit flies and deduce the existence of a linear structure for heredity. And, of course, just 10 years before DNA was identified. But Hilbert really understood it. Because nobody was listening.

Holodny: Could you talk about your experience working on the Orion Project?

Dyson: Well, that was of course a great adventure. It was just good luck. Again, everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say “yes” to anything crazy. Orion was obviously crazy. So I said “yes” and had a great time.

The key to having an interesting life is to always say ‘yes’ to anything crazy.

The idea was to explore the universe with a spaceship driven by atomic bombs. And so the double objective was to be scooting around very fast in space, which would’ve been great, and also getting rid of the bombs, which was also great. It was the only really good way of getting rid of bombs. And, unfortunately, of course it never happened, but we really believed in it at the time.

The project started in 1958 – just at the same time as the Apollo project to go to the moon. So we were competing with Wernher von Braun. Von Braun won, of course, but he was friendly to us. [Laughs] After he had won, he was helpful to us.

But after the first two years or so, it was no longer really practical. Then it was just a theoretical program to understand what you could do. But still it was interesting. So I came back after two years and continued living here, in Princeton. The project went on for another five years, but it was no longer people really expecting to fly.

Project Orion_propulsion module_section

Holodny: You participated in World War II as an analyst. What was that like?

Dyson: I was lucky. I was protected. Because of [Henry] Moseley. Moseley was a British scientist. He was a very, very brilliant young man who discovered the connection between chemistry and X-rays, that you can identify chemical elements just by looking at the X-rays.

That was Moseley’s Law, which he discovered in 1913 when he was just a young kid. And he definitely would’ve had the Nobel Prize.

However, in 1914, war broke out. In England, that was a volunteer war, and all the young people volunteered, including Moseley. And he went to Gallipoli and got killed.

So that was a huge tragedy for English science. And the English government then decided before World War II that this time the scientists were going to be kept alive. It was government policy that if you were a bright, young scientist, you were not allowed to get killed […] I thought it was terribly unfair. I was one of the beneficiaries, so I was given a safe job. Meanwhile, my friends were getting killed. So I had a very bad feeling about the whole situation.

But anyway, I was sent to the headquarters of the bomber command to work as a scientist, collecting information about the bombing of Germany. And there, it was exactly the same as it’s been in Afghanistan in the last few years. It’s amazing – it’s exactly the same mistakes are made over and over again. It’s the same situation, essentially.

Henry_Moseley

There was one of the generals in Afghanistan who wrote a paper, which was leaked by somebody, describing what happened in Afghanistan – and it’s exactly what happened to us in World War II.They had this huge system of information gathering in Afghanistan. They had satellites. They had drones flying over all the time, and people on the ground collecting information. This was all then collected and sent to some place in Virginia, where there were thousands of expert analysts looking at all this information.

So you had this whole apparatus gathering intelligence – all one way, just going from Afghanistan to Virginia. But nothing ever came back. This was all so secret. It wasn’t allowed for the information to get back to the soldiers, who might have used it.

And exactly the same thing happened to us. I was one of these analysts, sitting at the command headquarters in England. The bombing was disastrously costly, and we were losing bombers at a horrible rate – something like 40,000 young men were killed just on the bombing. And we were supposed to find out how they were being killed, in order to do something about it.

We never understood what was going on. Nothing that we ever discovered ever went back to the crews who may have done something with it. The whole thing was a disaster. I was, of course, completely aware of this. So from my point of view, that was a horrible time. And the bombing did very little to help the war. It killed a lot of people, but that was about it. […]

It’s a horrible business, of course. I mean, the killing, what’s going on now in Syria is … inexcusable from any point of view. They certainly don’t need to be told how war is bad. I don’t know what can be done in Syria, but, clearly, our being there is not helping.

Anyway, that’s what I learned from World War II. Things are always more complicated than most people believe.

Holodny: Although we’ve been talking about war, you are generally optimistic about the future. You once said, “We just came down from the trees rather recently, and it’s astonishing how well we can do.” How do you maintain that optimism?

Dyson: Well, I think we’re doing pretty well. It’s clear the media, of course, always gives you the bad news. And people who rely on the media, like Mr. Trump, think that everything is a disaster. [Laughs] The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it’s mostly rubbish. It’s a point of fact that we’re doing extremely well.

The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India. … They’re the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago.

The thing that makes me most optimistic is China and India – both of them doing well. It’s amazing how much progress there’s been in China, and also India. Those are the places that really matter – they’re half of the world’s population. They’re the places where things are enormously better now than they were 50 years ago. And I don’t see anything that’s going to stop that.

People who travel in China tell me that the mood there is still very upbeat, because their media is different from our media. Chinese media emphasize how well things are going and suppress the bad news and publish the good news. Of course, we do just the opposite. […]

The point of fact is, just in simple ways, you can see how much better things have gotten. I mean, when I was a child, I lived in England, and England was just amazingly polluted. We didn’t use that word. We just said it was it all covered with soot. [Laughs] If you went to London for a day, in the evening the color of your shirt was black. So much soot in the air. And of course there were no fish in the Thames. The whole place was filthy and everybody was burning coal.

Anyhow, it didn’t take very long to clean that up. If you go to London now, not everything is beautiful, but it’s amazingly better than it was. And the Thames is certainly a lot better: There are fish in the Thames.

Holodny: With only three eyes?

Dyson: Actually, they’re very healthy! In so many ways, nature, in fact, has been preserved. Of course, the English countryside is completely artificial. It was naturally a forest; they chopped down the trees and made it into what it is now: really a beautiful country. And even New Jersey is not so bad.

Holodny: You won the Templeton Prize for your contributions to science and its relation to other disciplines such as religion and ethics. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the interplay of science and religion?

Dyson: Yes, because I don’t believe in it. I think they should be separate. Of course, it’s a personal question. Some of my friends like to keep them together, but I certainly like to keep them separate. For me, science is just a bunch of tools – it’s like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it’s an instrument I know how to play. It’s almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that’s how I feel when proving a theorem.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools – it’s like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it’s an instrument I know how to play.

Anyway, religion is totally different. In religion, you’re supposed to be somehow in touch with something deep and full of mysteries. Anyhow, to me, that’s something quite separate.

Holodny: Do you think that there’s a way they could complement each other? Or are they just in two completely different lanes?

Dyson: Well, they are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it’s the same universe with two different windows. I like to use the metaphor “windows.”

The science window gives you a view of the world, and the religion window gives you a totally different view. You can’t look at both of them at the same time, but they’re both true. So that’s sort of my personal arrangement, but, of course, other people are quite different.

Holodny: The brain’s another interesting thing. On the one hand, it’s an organ, and that’s just plain old biology. But on the other hand, the thoughts are something else.

447px Anonymous Astana_Graves_Wei_Qi_Player

Dyson: Well, what I have been thinking about – this doesn’t answer your question – but I think that the artificial-intelligence people are making a lot of noise recently, claiming that artificial intelligence is making huge progress and we’re going to be outstripped by the machines. They found out how to play Go, which, of course, is a big step.But, in my view, this sort of – this whole field is based on a misconception. I think the brain is analog, whereas the machines are digital. They really are different. So I think that what the machines can do, of course, is wonderful, but it’s not the same as what the brain can do.

The brain, being analog, is able to grasp images so much better. The brain is just designed for comparing images and some patterns – patterns in space and patterns in time – which we do amazingly well. Computers can do it, too, but not in anything like the same kind of flexibility.

So, anyway, that’s sort of my view about the brain. That we won’t really understand the brain until we can make models of it which are analog rather than digital, which nobody seems to be trying very much.

Holodny: In your opinion, what’s the biggest misconception about mathematics?

Dyson: I think the biggest misconception is that everybody has to learn it. That seems to be a complete mistake. All the time worrying about pushing the children and getting them to be mathematically literate and all that stuff. It’s terribly hard on the kids. It’s also hard on the teachers. And I think it’s totally useless.

To me, mathematics is like playing the violin. Some people can do it – others can’t. If you don’t have it, then there’s no point in pretending. So I think that’s the fundamental mistake. Because I’m prejudiced about education altogether. I think it’s terribly overrated.

Holodny: Yeah, I noticed you don’t have a Ph.D. Are you not into the Ph.D. system?

Dyson: Oh, very much against it. I’ve been fighting it unsuccessfully all my life.

Holodny: Any reason in particular?

Dyson: Well, I think it actually is very destructive. I’m now retired, but when I was a professor here, my real job was to be a psychiatric nurse. There were all these young people who came to the institute, and my job was to be there so they could cry on my shoulder and tell me what a hard time they were having. And it was a very tough situation for these young people. They come here. They have one or two years and they’re supposed to do something brilliant. They’re under terrible pressure – not from us, but from them.

freeman dyson

So, actually, I’ve had three of them who I would say were just casualties who I’m responsible for. One of them killed himself, and two of them ended up in mental institutions. And I should’ve been able to take care of them, but I didn’t. I blame the Ph.D. system for these tragedies. And it really does destroy people. If they weren’t under that kind of pressure, they could all have been happy people doing useful stuff. Anyhow, so that’s my diatribe. But I really have seen that happen.And also, of course, it wastes a tremendous amount of time – especially for women, it’s particularly badly timed.

If they’re doing a Ph.D., they have a conflict between raising a family or finishing the degree, which is just at the worst time – between the ages of 25 to 30 or whatever it is. It ruins the five years of their lives.

And I see the difference in the business world. My daughter happens to be a businesswoman, so I meet a lot of her young friends.

The life there is so much easier for women. They start a company when they’re 20; they go bust when they’re 22. [Laughs] Meanwhile, they have a kid, and nobody condemns them for going bust. If you’re in the business world, that’s what’s expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it’s a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It’s also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.

[The Ph.D. system] was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it’s fine. But the trouble is that it’s become a kind of a meal ticket – you can’t get a job if you don’t have a Ph.D. So all sorts of people go into it who are quite unsuited to it. […]

Anyway, so, I’m happy that I’ve raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D.

Holodny: So then, what would you say to a young person who is interested in math and science?

Dyson: Try it out, I would say. The fact is some people have it and others don’t. So find out if you’re really good. And if you are, that’s wonderful, and if you’re not, then find something else. Make it an experiment.

I think it’s a big mistake to decide too soon what you’re going to do with your life.

Holodny: Is there anything else that’s been on your mind?

Dyson: Well, I do have one other thing on my mind … but it’s not relevant to this talk. Do you know the name Sarant? Or the name of Staros? It’s the same person!

450px Freeman_dyson

Anyhow, Alfred Sarant was a good friend of mine in the old days when I was a student at Cornell and Albert was a young professor of engineering.In those days, it was just after the war. We were all sort of still with the wartime ethic of shared hardships, and everybody helped everybody else. So he built a house, and we all helped. I remember putting up the roof on the house. It was a great time; we all enjoyed it. And he was there with his wife and two kids.

Next door, there was another professor called Bruce Dayton with his wife, Carol. Also had a house and two kids. So it was friendly community, and they were all living happily.

Anyway, one day, the wife of Alfred Sarant woke up and she found her kids were in bed in the morning, but the husband had disappeared. In the same morning, Bruce Dayton woke up and found his kids were still there, but his wife had disappeared.

Holodny: Oh boy.

Dyson: Anyhow, it was a big deal. It was a huge search for these missing people and nobody ever found a trace of them. They just disappeared from the face of the earth.

Anyway, so it’s now, whatever it is, 65 years later. I met a lady in California who is the wife of a mathematician, who emigrated from Russia. So he’s now living happily in California – he’s a very good mathematician – and his wife is there with him. And I happened to meet these people at lunch just recently. I started talking to the wife, and it all became a little bit strange. She was talking about her life – and turns out she’s the daughter of the missing pair!

Anyhow, so, she’s doing fine. And it turns out, her father and mother actually did fine in Russia. So he changed his name to Staros, and they became Russian. He became, in fact, a leading computer expert in Russia. He was a personal friend of Khrushchev, rose very high in the Soviet system. So it was, on the whole, a story with a happy ending. They had three more kids in Russia who are still there.

And, of course, they were spies. They were tipped off – they were actually working with the Rosenbergs who were executed. They got tipped off just in time. So they left and did pretty well.

Holodny: What’s the most astounding thing about the universe to you?

Toucan_at_the_Beardsley_Zoo

Dyson: Almost everything about the universe is astounding. I don’t know how you would measure astounding-ness… I think the most amazing thing is how gifted we are – as you were saying at the beginning, that we are only monkeys who came down from the trees just recently.We have these amazing gifts of music and mathematics and painting and Olympic running. I mean, we’re the animal that is best of all the animals at long-distance running. Why? It is quite amazing. Superfluous gifts you don’t really need to survive.

Of course, long-distance running has to do with the fact that we’re hunters. There’s a book about that, called “Why We Run,” by Bernd Heinrich. He’s a wonderful guy. He’s a German who came to live in this country. He came to this country with no money. He wanted to study the wildlife. He really loves the wildlife; that’s his passion. He now writes books about the wildlife. […]

But in order to get an education in the United States, he had to be an athlete. So he took up long-distance running, and actually he had the world record for 100 miles. He’s a real long-distance runner, an amazing runner. And he also wrote this book about running. Really remarkable character. […]

The world is just – it’s wonderful when you look at all the detail – it’s just amazing. Nothing is boring if you look at it carefully.

He’s a professor at the University of Vermont and he lives in Maine. He wrote a wonderful book called “Ravens in Winter,” describing how ravens organize their lives. They live on big animals that die in the snow. And so you have enough food for 100 ravens, suddenly, and it’s only there for a short time.

So how do they deal with that? Well, the answer is they have a very good communication system. They gather all their friends and relations for miles and miles away – as far as 100 miles – they come flying and feast on this animal that’s dead. Many of these birds survive only by flying long distances, but they have to have a signaling system so they know where to go. Anyhow, it’s a very interesting study. […]

He came into our kitchen once and looked out of the window. And he immediately identified 14 species of birds – just outside our window. We only knew two of them!

The world is just – it’s wonderful when you look at all the detail. It’s just amazing. Why are there so many kinds of birds? And then you have to be a very special kind of person to know them. Nothing is boring if you look at carefully.

I think that’s what it would say: It’s us that’s really amazing. As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species – there’s nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could’ve done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort.

Why you should hold your iPhone in your right hand to make phone calls 

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Why you shouldn't hold your iPhone in your left hand to make phone calls

If you hold your iPhone in your left hand to make calls, you might want to reconsider.

A study has shown that the way you hold the phone can affect signal strength, and that it becomes weaker when held in the left.

Some other brands are affected by different hands too, but Apple is the company that it really seems to make an impact for.

Look at this table, via Quartz:

pic - ATLAS/Data: Gert Frølund Pedersen/Aalborg University Why you should hold your iPhone in your right hand to make phone calls

The results come from the Nordic Council of Ministers, investigating how well different phones picked up and transmitted radio signals.

Apple’s new iPhone 7, which was released this week, wasn’t part of the study.

Maybe in that place where the headphone jack used to be, they might have sorted it out?

Otherwise, just stick to the hands free maybe.

Twin Comets Whizzed By Earth, Fulfilling The Last Hopi Prophecy Before The Arrival Of Nibiru

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Please scroll down for video 10.8K Many people do not know about the Hopi tribe, these are ancient native American Indians who live in North East Arizona. They have a rich indigenous culture and are considered to be the very spiritually enlightened.

They were in the limelight with this ancient prophecy of theirs which goes on like this— They predicted the arrival of a binary star (our sun’s twin) which comes into orbit every 3,600 years. It is a fact rather than an exception that the sun always has its twin, and it is believed that it can be seen from some parts of the world in the morning. The Hopi tribe had predicted the coming of Red Kachina (Nibiru aka sun’s twin) and stated that the Red Kachina would paint the sky with red colour, and we will know that the purifications will start to begin. But before that, a blue star (Blue Kachina) and a twin comet will pass the earth. With the recent passage of the twin, comet people have pointed out that this prediction has come true, and it is an indication that the Purifier (Nibiru) will be coming soon. The prophecy is quite long and detailed mostly related to spirits and humanity, but one of these lines intrigues me “ When the Blue Star Kachina makes it appearance in the heavens .

This will be the day of purification …. In the final day, we will witness the appearance two brothers who helped to create this world in the birthing time …. Our brothers from the start will rebuild this earth but not after the purifier has left its mark upon the universe. No living things will be untouched here and in the heavens. Our relatives from the stars are coming home to see how we have fared in our journey. It is time to reconnect with your Spirit and your Earth Mother. Peace and Blessings.”

It is predicted that the Nibiru will come very close and according to the prophecy and will bring around massive changes (destruction) around us and then the earth will be re-built. So it sounds like doomsday coming. Some people may be sceptical and need more evidence, but the fact that this tribe already knew the presence of Nibiru whereas we are still unaware or do not know much about it. How did this ancient tribe know about the future events when they had no technological instruments with them? Have they imparted the knowledge (warned) by the extra-terrestrial themselves when they visited earth in ancient times and were worshiped as Gods?

Watch the video. URL:https://youtu.be/7Y1GdKdNhY4

SCIENTIST THINKS HE’S PROVEN HAWKING’S THEORY THAT BLACK HOLES GLOW

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You might think of black holes as evil interstellar whirlpools, massive balls of who-knows-what so dense that their gravity prevents even light from escaping. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking made waves (this is a physics joke) in the science world by theorizing that maybe black holes weren’t so dark; maybe they let out a faint glow of particles that barely escape the pull. A scientist thinks he’s recreated that glow.

Black Hole Devouring Star

Jeff Steinhauer from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel created an analogue to a black hole in his lab, using the laws of sound, rather than light. His black hole let out a telltale signature providing compelling evidence for Hawking’s namesake theory, Hawking radiation. This research implies that black holes might not be the bottomless voids we thought they were. It also has broader implications in the field of physics as a whole, where a major goal is creating one theory that links the vast distances required by gravity theories and the tiny lengths studied in particle physics.

“I think this work stands on its own as verification of Hawking’s calculations,” Steinhauer told Popular Science.

Instead of a light-sucking behemoth, Steinhauer’s black hole is a line of cold rubidium atoms in a lab, as a form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. Using lasers, he created a kind of waterfall: there’s a lot of atoms on one side moving slowly, but then pouring over the edge faster than the speed of sound to the other side. This means that phonons, individual units of sound, can’t escape past the boundary up the energy waterfall. This is like a black hole, except with space black holes, its light particles can’t escape gravity’s light-speed pull. Steinhauer published his results today in the journal Nature Physics.

Steinhauer with his black hole machine

Jeff Steinhauer

Steinhauer with his black hole-making machine

Quantum mechanics is strange, and on the smallest scales, particles will appear alongside their antiparticles and disappear. In real black holes, Stephen Hawking predicted that these particles might randomly appear on either side of the furthest extent of the black hole’s pull, so one particle gets sucked into the black hole and the other just manages to escape. Steinhauer observed this same effect on either side of his atomic waterfall; a stream of particles that fell into the black hole, and a matching stream that came out on the other side. Steinhauer was able to show that these two particles were entangled, meaning the properties are dependent on each other no matter how far away they were separated, which is a requirement of so-called Hawking radiation

It’s important to emphasize that Steinhauer isn’t using real black holes, Grant Tremblay, astrophysicist and NASA Einstein Fellow at Yale University told Popular Science in an email. You can’t immediately translate the results to say that the black holes we see in space have the same behavior. However, physicists like Brain Greene frequently discuss uniting gravity with electromagnetism and the forces inside atoms with theories like the string theory and quantum gravity to make a theory of everything. Observing the interactions of particles with gravity in the case of the black hole would add further support that these theories can actually be united, noted Steinhauer. Seeing Hawking radiation in Steinhauer’s black holes show that his sound analogues are useful tools in making models of the real thing.

“This result is an incredibly elegant example of how a Bose-Einstein condensate can act as a black hole analogue in a laboratory environment,” said Tremblay, “enabling experiments that could never be done on a real black hole.”

Does black-hole entropy make sense?

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Abstract

Bekenstein and Hawking saved the second law of thermodynamics near a black hole by assigning to the hole an entropySh proportional to the area of its event horizon. It is tempting to assume thatSh possesses all the features commonly associated with the physical entropy. Kundt has shown, however, thatSh violates several reasonable physical expectations. We review his criticism, augmenting it as follows: (a)Sh is a badly behaved state function requiring knowledge of the hole’s future history; and (b) close analogs of event horizons in other space-times do not possess an “entropy.” We also discuss these questions: (c) IsSh suitable for all regions of a black-hole space-time? And (b) shouldSh be attributed to the exterior of a white hole? One can retainSh for the interior (respectively, exterior) of a black (respectively, white) hole, but we reject this as contrary to the information-theoretic derivation of horizon entropy given by Bekenstein. The total entropy defined by Kundt (all ordinary entropy on space-section cutting through the hole, no horizon term) and that of Bekenstein-Hawking (ordinary entropy outside horizon plus horizon term) appear to be complementary concepts with separate domains of validity. In the most natural choice, an observer inside a black hole will use Kundt’s entropy, and one remaining outside that of Bekenstein-Hawking.

Observing Psychokinesis in a Lab—Researchers Taking Psi Mainstream?

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Dr. W.J. Ross Dunseath in his lab at the University of Virginia's Division of Perceptual Studies on Feb. 6, 2015. (Tara MacIsaac/Epoch Times)

Dr. W.J. Ross Dunseath in his lab at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.

In Beyond Science, Epoch Times explores research and accounts related to phenomena and theories that challenge our current knowledge. We delve into ideas that stimulate the imagination and open up new possibilities. Share your thoughts with us on these sometimes controversial topics in the comments section below.

Exuding mysterious and strange forces from one’s mind to bend a spoon or otherwise affect a physical object has long seemed to many a rather unscientific pastime. But in a state-of-the-art lab at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), psychokinesis isn’t a sensationalized magic-show talent. Its subtle forms are studied and scientifically measured in various ways.

Dr. Ross Dunseath, an electrical engineer, has made advances in fine tuning novel sensors that can pick up on psychokinetic forces. His instruments are also able to measure physiological changes in people performing psychokinesis tasks. His research partner, Dr. Ed Kelly, a Yale- and Harvard-educated psychologist and neuroscientist, has studied psi phenomena since the 1970s (Psirefers to any psychic phenomenon, such as psychokinesis, telepathy, or clairvoyance).

 Identifying the physiological changes associated with psi could really help bring psi research into the mainstream.
Identifying the physiological changes associated with psi could really help bring psi research into the mainstream, Kelly explained. “Showing that a psi event is connected to some other thing is good, because that anchors it. It’s not just a free-floating anomaly, it’s something related to something else. And if the ‘something else’ is physiological, in the contemporary frame of mind, that’s particularly good.”

This could resolve a lot of the issues most often brought up by critics of psi research. For example, the physiological research could give greater control in the lab. If certain biological characteristics or states are identified as correlating with psychokinetic powers, those states or characteristics could perhaps be induced in subjects. This way, psychokinesis could take place on demand in a controlled manner.

More than half the battle for Dunseath and Kelly is finding subjects who have psychokinetic abilities. And their nearly impossible task is finding such subjects who can use these abilities on demand. Furthermore, the person must be able to do so under conditions that work with the given measurement tools. A subject must remain relatively still while his brain activity is being measured using an electroencephalogram (EEG) or a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine.

One subject Dunseath and Kelly studied was able to enter a sort of ecstatic state on demand. But testing him in an MRI machine or with an EEG was difficult, as he moved around quite a bit in this state. Nonetheless, the researchers were able to pinpoint with some certainty parts of the brain activated in this altered state of consciousness and found that they correspond to some physiological effects found in advanced meditators.

While Kelly and Dunseath have witnessed impressive psi events in the past, they have yet to hit on a really outstanding test subject on whom to use their new equipment. Some minor successes provide hope that in the future, when someone with outstanding psi abilities enters their lab, they will be able to measure what’s happening during psi events in a way no one has before.

An example of such success concerns the little blasts of charge detected by Dunseath’s new sensors. Crystals attached to an amplifier act as a charge detector. Sometimes little blips are recorded by the device when no one is around, but blasts of charge appear more often when someone is there trying to make it happen. These are recorded in correspondence with EEG readings.

It’s a start, and the researchers are confident these little starts could pan out into big results. “Come back in a year,” Kelly said. He’s hoping to bring one of his most promising subjects back to the lab for tests. In the early 1970s, Kelly had the opportunity to work with Bill Delmore, a Yale law student at the time.

In his book “Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration,” David Ray Griffin described Delmore’s success in tests of psychic ability involving playing cards: “In a total of 46 runs (of 52 guesses each), Delmore had exact hits (correctly naming both the suit and the denomination) 6 percent of the time (compared with the less than 2 percent that would be expected by chance). The odds against this occurring by chance are a million trillion trillion to one. Especially remarkable was Delmore’s success on ‘confidence calls,’ which are those in which he was most confident that he was correct. On these, he was indeed correct 14 out of 20 times.”

Delmore is now a retired lawyer and Kelly is still in touch with him. Reading the brain activity of such a reliable subject could yield great insights.

The ability to pinpoint physiological changes related to psi could also give researchers statistical control. Kelly said, “Suppose it’s an ESP [extra-sensory perception] test, for example, and we can figure out what EEGs go with hits. Well, then you have a kind of statistical control. You could go into a body of data without ever looking at the ESP part and pick out trials that have the right physiological signature with the expectation that there’s going to be a higher hit-rate in those trials than in the experiment as a whole.”

From Conflict to Compromise

The scientific community has often showed a division in its approach to psi. On one side are the dualists, who say the mind and brain are totally separate. On the other side are the physicalists who say the mind does not exist beyond the brain. Dunseath and Kelly provide a middle ground. Their work doesn’t require a commitment to either perspective.

“I think everybody would agree that at some stage mind and brain are very intimately connected. So there ought to be some reflection in physiology of things that are going on mentally,” Kelly said. He and Dunseath study this intimate connection. Kelly also described his approach to the massive anthropological literature on psi in a paper titled “A Psychobiological Framework for Psi Research,” written in 1983: “What we wanted to focus on particularly was not so much the evidence that psi had occurred (which we assumed would in many or most of these cases be defective from a modern point of view), but rather on the circumstances under which it was believed to have occurred. When one does this it quickly becomes overwhelmingly clear that the strong outbursts of psi are heavily concentrated in a relatively small variety of individuals and circumstances.”

The Facilities

Dunseath opened the bulky door of the electromagnetically and acoustically shielded chamber in his lab.

Because of the shielding, if a subject sitting in that room is able to pick up on what another subject in another room is thinking, the researchers can be sure he did not receive that information via normal means (such as a text message, since no communication signals could penetrate).

Epoch Times reporter Tara MacIsaac poses with an EEG cap on in a shielded chamber in the lab at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, where the physiobiological effects of psychokinesis are studied, on Feb. 6, 2015. (Epoch Times)

The old armchair in the middle of the chamber gives it the feel of grandpa’s den. The chamber is carpeted and the wooden cupboards containing some of the sensor devices were built in a homey style. The idea is to make the subject as comfortable as possible. The subject is given some time to relax before focusing on some of the sensors and trying to influence them psychokinetically.

It’s hard enough to perform a psychokinetic task under any circumstances. But in the lab, additional difficulties are introduced if the environment is cold and sterile. A relaxed inner state is often said to be conducive to psychokinesis. Wearing an EEG cap, the subject is already distracted by the thought of having to keep still so it can work properly, even paying attention to not tensing the forehead.

Tweaking the measurement tools to increase the subject’s comfort and better suit the delicacies of psi research has led to advancements that can be applied beyond this field.

How Psi Research Could Help Other Fields of Study

Dunseath’s improvements on EEG design have broad applications, including for use in epilepsy studies, for example.

“One of the ways in which psi researchers can begin to break down this terrible kind of professional isolation that we’ve suffered under for many years is to begin aggressively making contributions to some of these neighboring research areas.”

— Dr. Ed Kelly, psychologist, neuroscientist

Kelly wrote: “One of the ways in which psi researchers can begin to break down this terrible kind of professional isolation that we’ve suffered under for many years is to begin aggressively making contributions to some of these neighboring research areas. There’s no reason why we can’t do that. In fact, in our group we’ve already made some significant contributions to EEG methodology, and we expect to make more in the future.”

For Kelly, there is no division between the usual functions of the brain and the supernormal functions of the brain. Whether it’s performing psychokinesis or remembering what you ate for breakfast, it’s all part of this wonderfully complex and important part of ourselves—our consciousness.

“I don’t distinguish between the hard problems and the easy problems [in neuroscience],” Kelly said. “I don’t think there are any easy problems. Ultimately, to understand any of this, we’re going to have to understand all of it, including the supernormal stuff. We’ll find that it all has a common theoretical underpinning.”

Understanding how the brain works during psi events could give insights into “personality growth and integration, unusual creativity, and striking expansions of various kinds of cognitive abilities, including even such things as reading speed,” according to Kelly.

For him, it isn’t a question of whether psi exists or not, it’s already clear to him that it does. It’s about how psi research can help us further understand our consciousness in a broad sense.

Kelly wrote: “In my opinion, the existence of psi phenomena has been established beyond any reasonable doubt. Some of my colleagues would perhaps find that too strong a statement, but I think that’s because we’ve grown too accustomed to bending over backward to accommodate critics who, by and large, are behaving extremely irresponsibly. The existing literature of the field is very large, and no one is qualified to express a global opinion about the subject who has not taken the trouble to study that literature in some depth. Nevertheless, at the present time we are confronted with the sad and frustrating spectacle of a number of rather distinguished scientists who are freely offering sweepingly negative opinions about the field without having taken that time and trouble.”

In Beyond Science, Epoch Times explores research and accounts related to phenomena and theories that challenge our current knowledge. We delve into ideas that stimulate the imagination and open up new possibilities. Share your thoughts with us on these sometimes controversial topics in the comments section below.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.—Exuding mysterious and strange forces from one’s mind to bend a spoon or otherwise affect a physical object has long seemed to many a rather unscientific pastime. But in a state-of-the-art lab at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), psychokinesis isn’t a sensationalized magic-show talent. Its subtle forms are studied and scientifically measured in various ways.

Dr. Ross Dunseath, an electrical engineer, has made advances in fine tuning novel sensors that can pick up on psychokinetic forces. His instruments are also able to measure physiological changes in people performing psychokinesis tasks. His research partner, Dr. Ed Kelly, a Yale- and Harvard-educated psychologist and neuroscientist, has studied psi phenomena since the 1970s (Psirefers to any psychic phenomenon, such as psychokinesis, telepathy, or clairvoyance).

Identifying the physiological changes associated with psi could really help bring psi research into the mainstream.

Identifying the physiological changes associated with psi could really help bring psi research into the mainstream, Kelly explained. “Showing that a psi event is connected to some other thing is good, because that anchors it. It’s not just a free-floating anomaly, it’s something related to something else. And if the ‘something else’ is physiological, in the contemporary frame of mind, that’s particularly good.”

Quantum Engineer Talks Untapped Potential of Human Mind, Major Problems in Science Today

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Right: Dr. Garret Moddel (Courtesy of Dr. Garret Moddel) Background: (Flowgraph/iStock)

In Beyond Science, Epoch Times explores research and accounts related to phenomena and theories that challenge our current knowledge. We delve into ideas that stimulate the imagination and open up new possibilities. Share your thoughts with us on these sometimes controversial topics in the comments section below.

Dr. Garret Moddel teaches a course at the University of Colorado that explores psychic phenomena, such as remote viewing. Preliminary studies in his classroom have even seemed to suggest that students can accurately predict stock market changes!

His students have told him that the course has opened their minds, but not just in terms of becoming aware of psi phenomena (Psi refers to any psychic phenomenon, such as psychokinesis, telepathy, or clairvoyance). Perhaps more importantly, Dr. Moddel has taught them how science works, and how to think more critically about science.

Science by Consensus Is a Problem

If 97 percent of scientists say something is true, does that make it true? A large portion of the general public may think so. But, Dr. Moddel said, “That’s not the way that science works. It’s not a consensus sport. In fact, it’s often the lone mavericks who, in the end of it, are right.”

If 97 percent of scientists say something is true, does that make it true?

“We know based on historical examples that most of the science that we now believe is going to be modified, so nothing that we have is really cast in stone,” he said. “Scientific progress is slowed by cascading opinions.”

He watched a classic example of this take hold of his mother’s life. In the 1950s, nutritionist Ancel Keys conducted what is now known as the “Seven Countries Study,” commissioned by the U.S. Public Health Service. Keys found that countries with less dietary fat had healthier populations. “He was very influential, and once he stated that opinion, it stuck,” Dr. Moddel said.

For the past 50 years, the United States has been operating on this belief, with manufacturers cutting fat in foods, but sometimes adding sugar and other unhealthy elements to compensate for lost flavor. Though many studies after Keys’ showed his conclusions to be incorrect, it’s only in the past five years that the scientific community has really begun to recognize that sugar, not fat, is the enemy.

Dr. Moddel’s mother made great efforts as she got older and continually gained weight to cut fat from her diet. He blames this cascading effect. He said the incorrect conclusion, perpetuated in spite of much evidence to the contrary, has probably cost many people their lives.

While many scientists who go against the grain are cut down by their colleagues, tenure thankfully allows many of today’s mavericks—including Dr. Moddel—to study psi and other not-quite-popular topics without professional repercussions.

His more mainstream work, in quantum engineering, has earned Dr. Moddel a position of respect in the scientific community. His conventionally minded colleagues are “respectful, at least on the surface” of his psi work, Dr. Moddel said. The university, after making him jump through some hoops to establish his psi-studies course as a critical-thinking course, now treats him with “benign neglect,” he said.

Though the security of tenure is far out of reach for Dr. Moddel’s students, some of them are eager to jump right into psi studies. “I’m the one who injects caution,” he said. He tells them, “You’ve got a career to think about. Yes, please look into this, but in order not to sabotage yourself, make sure you do really good mainstream work.”

Remote Viewing in Dr. Moddel’s Classroom

The United States government declassified documents in the 1990s showing it has extensively studied and used remote viewing. Dr. Moddel has brought Paul Smith, a U.S. Army-trained remote viewing researcher, into the class to help his students.

Dr. Moddel gave an example of a student project. The student wanted to see what would happen if he removed one of the two people involved in remote viewing and replaced the human with a machine. In remote viewing experiments, a person is usually asked to draw whatever image comes to mind. Two images have been preselected by those conducting the experiment, each corresponding to an event in the future.

For example, the image of a bowling ball could be designated as meaning the value of a particular stock will rise the following day. The image of a rabbit means the value of that stock will fall the following day.

So one person, unaware of which images have been chosen, draws an image that randomly comes to mind. The other person involved in the experiment is the judge. The judge looks at the picture the person has drawn and decides if it looks more like a bowling ball or a rabbit. If the images drawn seem to consistently correspond to the actual stock market outcomes of the following day, it would seem the person who drew the pictures is the one performing remote viewing. But, Dr. Moddel reminds us, the judge could also be exercising some psi ability.

Instead of having a person draw the images, the student had a machine do so. He used a random number generator (a machine designed to randomly create bits) to output the bit stream to a computer, which used the stream to form an image. The random number generator was situated next to a person who served as the viewer, and presumably the random number generator output was being influenced by the viewer.

Even with the machine, the student got some statistically significant results. In previous experiments, Dr. Moddel’s students have been able to predict changes in the stock market at a rate above chance (correctly seven times in seven attempts).

 Dr. Moddel’s students have been able to predict changes in the stock market at a rate above chance (correctly seven times in seven attempts).
He and fellow researchers are currently engaged in a crowdfunding campaign to further investigate this. He has talked before about the importance of intention in psi experiments—it’s been suggested by other experiments in his classroom that the enthusiasm or belief in psi of the subjects or the experimenters can affect the results—so we wondered what role intention might play in a stock market experiment

4 Common Misconceptions About Quantum Physics

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Left: (Miszaqq/iStock) Background: (AGS Andrew/iStock)

 

In Beyond Science, Epoch Times explores research and accounts related to phenomena and theories that challenge our current knowledge. We delve into ideas that stimulate the imagination and open up new possibilities. Share your thoughts with us on these sometimes controversial topics in the comments section below.

Quantum physics is so fascinating that it appeals to a broader lay audience than a lot of other topics in science. It’s also so difficult to grasp and attempts to simplify it for a lay audience may open it to misunderstanding.

It is invoked to explain all sorts of strange, even paranormal, phenomena. Yet these explanations are often based on misconceptions about quantum physics. Quantum physics may indeed have the potential to explain such phenomena, since much remains to be discovered about it. But it is important to remain clear on what it does and does not actually claim at this point in its development.

1. No Indication That Entanglement Transfers Information

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which pairs or groups of particles that have been in contact with each other seem to remain connected over vast distances. When actions are performed on one of the particles, corresponding changes are observed on the others.

Some have said that this entanglement may explain psi phenomena (psi refers to psychic phenomena, including telepathy, clairvoyance, et cetera).

(Jezperklauzen/iStock)

Some have said that this entanglement may explain psi phenomena.

Garret Moddel, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado who has worked extensively with quantum mechanics, warned that the effect “is a very subtle one. It’s not a causal effect, it’s a correlational effect. What the distinction between those two is requires a rather patient and detailed explanation.”

“People tend to think that quantum entanglement means that when I shake one particle, I’ll be able to see the effect on another, but that’s not so,” he said. “It’s been shown quite rigorously that you cannot use quantum entanglement to convey information, only to convey correlation. So, it’s not a signaling mechanism.”

“It’s possible that psi and the whole world works by correlation and not transfer of information in a causal way, but that’s a much deeper discussion.”

2. Consciousness Is Not Necessarily the Key to Collapsing the Wave-Function

The observer effect in quantum physics is often seen as the most shocking and interesting aspect of quantum physics. The outcome of a particular action—the wave-function collapse—is suspended until it is observed. This seems to suggest that human consciousness is able to physically affect an experiment. But, Moddel warned, it is not generally thought by physicists that consciousness is necessary to collapse the wave-function.

(DM Bbaker/iStock)

A detector is sufficient, as most physicists see it. Of course, it is possible that a human checking the detector is the key, but quantum physics as it is generally conceived does not currently hold this to be necessary.

Astrophysicist Mario Livio also discussed this misconception in a post on NASA’s “A Curious Mind” blog. He wrote: “Perhaps the most common misconception is that the observer plays a crucial role in the uncertainty principle—namely, that the principle really stems from the influence of the observer of the phenomenon being observed. This misunderstanding has even led some to conclude that the principle could be directly applied to a variety of everyday experiences.”

3. It Doesn’t Only Describe the Subatomic Level

Achim Kempf, a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Waterloo in Canada, explained via email that quantum physics does not only describe phenomena at very small scales and only in special circumstances.

“In reality, quantum physics determines most of what we see in daily life, such as the color, elasticity, and heat capacity of everyday things such as water, rocks, metals, and also biological matter. On larger scales, the way in which stars, in their interior, fuse primordial hydrogen into the elements of the periodic system is also governed by quantum physics,” he said.

“Our universe itself may have arisen from a quantum fluctuation inside a mother universe.”

— Achim Kempf, University of Waterloo

Furthermore, researchers speculate that our universe may have inflated so rapidly during its genesis that quantum fluctuations were “dragged along and thereby stretched to cosmological size.”

“Our universe itself may have arisen from a quantum fluctuation inside a mother universe,” he said. Though this hypothesis fits with the current standard model of cosmology, however, no concrete evidence has supported it so far, Kempf said.

4. Speaking of a ‘Wave-Particle Duality’ Is Not Exactly Correct

It’s a popular conception that in quantum mechanics microscopic objects, such as electrons or photons, are neither pure particles nor pure waves—they are both waves and particles. In some conditions they behave as waves, in some conditions, they behave as particles.

Serious textbooks on quantum mechanics, however, only talk about waves, or wave-functions, noted theoretical physicist Hrvoje Nikolic of the Rudjer Boskovic Institute in Croatia in a 2008 paper titled, “Quantum Mechanics: Myths and Facts.”

“The word ‘particle’ has a very different meaning than the same word in classical physics.”

— Hrvoje Nikolic, Rudjer Boskovic Institute

“Electrons and photons always behave as waves, while a particle-like behavior corresponds only to a special case. In this sense, the wave-particle duality is nothing but a myth,” he said. We can say that electrons and photons are “particles,” if we keep in mind that “the word ‘particle’ has a very different meaning than the same word in classical physics,” Nikolic said. But this is a matter of linguistics. They are waves according to the usual interpretation.

The De Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics, he said, comes close to a kind of wave-particle duality, but it still treats “particles” very differently than “particles” are treated in classical physics. The De Broglie-Bohm is not one of the most popular interpretations.