Random Planet Formation Model Called Absurd

This is very good news, especially the comments from Anne Hofmeister, I have highlighted in red at the end of the article.


New model provides different take on planetary accretion

February 27, 2012

By Tony Fitzpatrick

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T. A. RECTOR & B. A. WOLPA, NOAO, AURA,

This image of the Eagle Nebula, made with data from the Kitt Peak telescope, corresponds more closely to the authors’ model than tothe traditional model. In their model planets form in a cold, three-dimensional cloud of gas and dust.

The prevailing model for planetary accretion, also called fractal assembly, and dating back as far as the 18th century, assumes that the Solar System’s planets grew as small grains colliding chaotically, coalescing into bigger ones, colliding yet more until they formed planetesimals. The planetesimals then collided until they formed planets as varied as the Earth and Jupiter.

The model assumes that this occurred in an extremely hot (as high as 1,600 degrees Celsius) environment for the inner Solar System, fostered by a dusty, two-dimensional disk post-dating the Sun.

The basic modern model, developed by Russian astronomer Victor Safronov, and further developed by planetary scientist George Wetherill, is called the Solar Nebular Disk Model and was made available in English in the early 1970s. It has remained essentially the same over the past 40 years.

ESO/L. CALÇADA

The planetary scientists say that the solar system we know today could not have formed out of a flat, hot disk that postdates the Sun, like the one shown in this artist’s impression.

But not everyone is convinced the model is correct. How could such a chaotic, haphazard process as fractal assembly lead to the regularities of the Solar System with all of the planets in a single plane, rotating in the same sense, spinning and orbiting around the Sun?

For the discontents, a new model, offered by Anne Hofmeister, PhD, research professor of earth and planetary sciences and Robert Criss, PhD, professor in earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, presents a different scenario. Their explanation is published in the March issue ofPlanetary and Space Science.

Using classical physics, the laws of thermodynamics and mechanics, Hofmeister, with assistance from Criss, presents an accretion model that assumes a three-dimensional (3-D) gas cloud. This pre-solar nebula collapses and forms the Sun and planets at essentially the same time, with the planets contracting toward the Sun.

The temperature is cold, not hot. The thermodynamic and mechanical model of 3-D accretion explains planetary orbits and spins, unlike the 2-D model, which does not.

Hofmeister and Criss explain compositional gradients across the Solar System in terms of lighter molecules diffusing faster than heavier ones. The model connects planet mass to satellite system size via gravitational competition.

Explaining planetary orbits and spins

“This model is radically different,” Hofmeister says. “I looked at the assumption of whether heat could be generated when the nebula contracted and found that there is too much rotational energy in the inner planets to allow energy to spill into heating the nebula.

“Existing models for planetary accretion assume that the planets form from the dusty 2-D disk, but they don’t conserve angular momentum. It seemed obvious to me to start with a 3-D cloud of gas, and conserve angular momentum. The key equations in the paper deal with converting gravitational potential to rotational energy, coupled with conservation of angular momentum.”

No energy left over for heat

“In the new model, heat production is not important in planetary formation,” Hofmeister says.

Criss says the prevailing notion that gravitational collapse is a hot process is a mis-interpretation of thermodynamics. He offers an analogy of a beaker of water placed outside in the winter. It slowly starts to freeze. Freezing water actually releases a latent heat, he says, because order (ice, a crystal) is being made from disorder (liquid).

The heat released is considerable, but it cannot warm the beaker because “it’s released only as fast as the environment will take it away,” Criss says. “If the heat would warm the water above 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the ice would melt. People clinging to the old accretion models want to make the ice and heat the beaker, too.”

Gravitational competition

The authors say 2-D models don’t explain why the inner Solar System is comprised of rocky planets and the outer gas giants.

“The first thing that happens in planet accretion is forming rocky kernels,” Hofmeister says. “The nebula starts contracting, the rocky kernels form to conserve angular momentum, and that’s where the dust ends up. Once rocky kernels exist, they attract gas to them, but only if the rocky kernel is far from the Sun, can it out-compete the Sun’s gravitational pull and collect the gas, as did Jupiter and its friends.

“But if the rocky kernel is close, like the Earth’s, it can’t out-compete the Sun. We describe this process as gravitational competition. This is why we have the regularity, spacing, and graded composition of the Solar System.”

Gravitational competition also offers a new view of formation of the moon that does not require an extremely low probability giant impact.

Not limited to the Solar System

Hofmeister says there is a continuum between single stars, binary stars, multiple stars, planets and even extrasolar planets.

“In all cases, the process is gravitational accretion of these cold, 3-D clouds making things contract and spin out, and that’s where the energy comes from,” she says. “It’s all happening in very cold temperatures, in 3-D instead of 2-D.”

Criss says there is plenty of observable evidence that the 2-D model is wrong.

“It patently doesn’t make sense that a bunch of random collisions between heavy, solid objects are going to produce a Solar System with planets orbiting the Sun in a beautiful plane, with everything having upright spins,” he says. “That’s like setting off a nuclear bomb and expecting all the trees in the world to end up neatly stacked.

Moreover, the Hubble pictures show stars being born in the Eagle nebula, and they’re formed in a cold 3-D cloud.”

Obama Mission: Destroy Science and Hope

First Obama presided over the end of America's manned space program, now it's fusion energy research. In other words, the very same scientific endeavors that are the most critical to the survival of this nation and humanity. Hope for what? How about sanity?

Brief Outline of Principles for Long Term Space Travel

Working from the principle embedded in Leonardo's design for  a perfect concert hall, (as Cusa earlier elucidated in his dialogue The Vision of God) and artificially biophysically bringing about the effect of Einstein's time dilation, it should be possible to enable human travel and population of other planetary systems.

What is required is the design of an artificial planetoid at once electromagnetically shielded  from radiation and particle bombardment through matter/anti-matter energy and propulsion that is capable of maintaining inertial gravity equivalence for the purpose human habitation.

The aspect of the time dilation effect must be achieved by alteration of a combination of a decrease in cellular aging via tuning the biological field that induces suspension of  telomeric quiescence. The circadian system likewise would need to be adapted such that the human life span would extend well beyond norms for mammalian aging. Thus overcoming a critical barrier to the time required to reach far distant destinations.

In uniquely achieving this plan, humanity will leave behind its heretofore mentally crippling and needlessly preoccupying fear of mortality, in order to participate in discovering what our continuing mission is in bringing about a harmonic dialogue within and among the great realms of being in our universal progression. This seeking of such an harmonic mission was foreshadowed in the historic attempts at self governance of humanity.

UnChristian Values-- Obama AND Santorum Have Plenty Enough to Go Around

All politics is schizophrenic these days...Santorum clumsily alleges that Obama's environmentalist worldview amounts to a theology. It does in fact. It's well known as the so called Gaia hypothesis and is old as the primordial ooze.
On the other hand, Santorum is wont to piously intone that the US must bomb Iran now. What is this but a warped Armageddonist phony theology?

Unfortunately, unless the people garner enough sense to reject such lunacy from both sides, I'm afraid the pox (or perhaps better fallout,) so to speak, will be on all our houses.

Dendritic Spine Synapse Formation--Riemann's Thought Masses?

Using a non invasive imaging technique, a research team has shown that clusters of synapses are newly formed when mice learn new motor skills. Some 150 years ago Bernhard Reimann intriguingly wrote that thoughts have a material form he called geistesmassen. While the creation of these referenced clusters are not human thoughts, it is clear that the principle of psycho-physical parallelism applies here. There should be no essential difference in this sort of phenomena in all varieties of mammalian motor cortex.

As mice learned a new task, repeated imaging of the same neurons over one-day intervals showed remodeling of synapses, with new branches (dendritic spines) forming and others eliminated during training. Image credit: Xu et al.

The noetic function of mind unique to mankind that allows us to change our practices such that we create new resources is a sort of higher material form that alters human practice. In this sense, higher ordered thoughts have physical expression. The reshaping of the landscape of human technological practice is metaphorically akin to another of Riemann's discoveries: the shockwave function.

So, the principle of geistesmassen can be characterized as operating on separate planes of reality. And in fact, it is not accidental that the notion of a Riemann function that appears on separate sheets of multiply connected manifold of n dimensions was an extension of the monadology of Leibniz. So too, Vernadsky's concept of noosphere builds upon this groundwork.

Model for Function of Neurogenesis in Olfactory Bulb

It has been a continuing feature of this blog to cover areas of research related to the human sensorium. While I do not take the view of the connectionists that the mind can be modeled on a silly Rube Goldberg-like grammar tree structure a la Nim Chimpsky, I do think that the memory and sense of smell have are shown to be dependent upon the creation of new brain cells.

It is not surprising that wave forms in the brain are of a spiral nature and that these waves correlate to organization of mental states. It has been hypothesized that the extinction of these wave allows for the succession of consciousness. Likewise it has been hypothesized that neurogenesis allows for new memories to form by perhaps displacing older patterns of connections along synapses. This paper makes a similar case for the role of neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb.

It certainly is striking how memories are often strongly evoked by the sense of smell such that certain smells have an almost seemingly supernatural vicarious appeal.

My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting its roses-
Its old agitations
Of myrtles and roses:

For now, while so quietly
Lying, it fancies
A holier odor
About it, of pansies-
A rosemary odor,
Commingled with pansies-
With rue and the beautiful
Puritan pansies.

Poe

Leonardo's Legacy

Contrary to the recent ignominious slander of Leonardo that he was not really a scientist, as a student of Luca Pacioli and Nicholas of Cusa he pushed the boundaries of many areas of research. Among these were his visually beautiful studies of vortical filament flows.

Therefore the just announced breakthrough that plasma corkscrew kink instabilities engender Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities that then result in the phenomena of reconnection that we see in solar flares is part of Leonardo's legacy. Thus, we must joyously commend Auna Moser and Paul Bellan for continuing in his footsteps.

An argon plasma jet forms a rapidly growing corkscrew, known as a kink instability. This instability causes an even faster-developing behavior called a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, in which ripples grow and tear the jet apart. This phenomenon, the Caltech researchers say, has never been seen before and could be important in understanding solar flares and in developing nuclear fusion as a future energy source. Credit: A. L. Moser and P. M. Bellan, Caltech

Solar "Tornadoes"

Genius versus Oligarchism

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading an article that convincingly argued that Jan Van Eyk was commissioned by the Duke of Burgundy to paint a copy of a famous Italian Annunciation altarpiece for the purpose of producing  what amounted to miracle so that the Duke would be "blessed" with an heir. It speaks volumes that this exact superstition was was parodied by Machievelli in his play The Mandragola.

 It is instructive to note that the dark ages in Europe had a iron grip on the beliefs of the "nobility." Kepler's office as court astrologer is a case in point. It is truly ironic in the classical sense that the greatest scientific leaps (Brunelleschi's perspective, for example) were uplifting such cultural backwardness at the same time. The fact the the mastery of the method of Socratic dialogue by figures like Nicholas of Cusa is telling as well. For the equivalent of the ritualistic worship of the Olympian gods and the Delphic oracle were deeply embedded in the rituals of both Catholics and Protestants alike.

Today, while there are pockets of magical believers here and there, the biggest cult worship is the supposedly ever so rational worship of money. All our pretentious political "dialogue" is at bottom motivated by nothing other than the irrational belief in the very same magical power of money. This often takes the form of some bombastic "talking head" intoning "We all agree, of course, that we must live within our means..." The fact is it is only by ending this stupefaction of our people that we may end the tyranny imposed on us by the modern day would be gods of Olympus: the incestuous royal families behind the city of London and Wall Street that so hate the great unwashed masses they think nothing of hatching wars and economic policies that will wipe them out.

Isaac Newton and Aleister Crowley are birds of a feather: loons...

It is certainly laughable that serious seeming gentleman are even now still frantically trying to prop up the illusion that Newton was a great scientist...He was a Cabalist pure and simple. (He "predicted" the end of the world in 2060, for instance.) The decrepit "English" nobility then and today are riddled with such superstitious twaddle. See the Globe theater's ceiling for example. It is no aberration that the Queen's beloved rock "musicians" are followers of Crowley's "do what thou wilt." British "liberalism" is at root nothing but evil and has led the planet time and again to war and ruination.

John Quincy Adams' Prophetic Speech that We Violate at Our Nation's Peril

"She [America] well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom."

These words delivered by Adams as Secretary of State in 1821 to Congress speak for themselves to anyone left with a scintilla of integrity and perspicacity in this God forsaken land.

Evidence for Uniqueness of Our Solar System in the Milky Way?

The recent startling discovery that there is a lower percentage of oxygen beyond our solar system's heliosphere from the data analysed from the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite confronts us with the question of whether this unexpected abundance in the solar system might be a precondition for life. One hypothesis is that the solar system may have been formed when it inhabited a more oxygen rich region of the Milky Way. Given that it has there evidence for a correlation for periodic extinction events on earth as the solar system bobs closest to our companion Andromeda galaxy, it seems to me rather premature for astronomer Geoff Marcy to state that this IBEX discovery has no bearing upon the habitability of exoplanets simply because there is plenty of oxygen being produced by stars in the galaxy.

Monetarist Lunacy vs. Physical Economy

Money does not and can ultimately never equal the production of goods and services which benefits society. Although money is a claim upon these benefits. The proper role of money is to facilitate increasing the productive power of society to sustain itself at ever higher standards of living. When this function is subverted crises result, such as the one we are currently experiencing. What is described here has nothing to do with bettering humanity, precisely the opposite. These types of detrimental gambling games should be abolished just as were the "bucket shops" of yesteryear. Anyone who would argue otherwise is either a fool or charlatan.

Ultrafast Trades Trigger Black Swan Events Every Day, Say Econophysicists

The US financial markets have suffered over 18,000 extreme price changes caused by ultrafast trading, according to a new study of market data between 2006 and 2011

KFC 02/09/2012

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On 6 May 2010, shares on US financial markets suddenly dropped on average by around 10 per cent but in over 300 stocks by more than 60 per cent. Moments later the prices recovered.

The event mystified economists because they had never seen anything like it (and have enough trouble explaining the ordinary workings of markets). Econophysicists have since blamed this so-called flash crash on the automated behaviour of ultrafast computer trades, which take place in periods measured in milliseconds. 

These kinds of trades appear to generate emergent behaviour that has nothing to do with the actual value of a company. Instead, these events are unavoidable properties of the system itself.

That raises an important question: how can authorities prevent flash crashes and price spikes in which billions of dollars can be won and lost?

The answer is that nobody knows, not least because econophysicists do not yet understand the nature of flash crashes nor how they emerge in complex systems. 

Today, however, Neil Johnson at the University of Florida in Miami and a few pals reveal an important insight into what's going on. These guys have found evidence that the behaviour of financial markets changes dramatically on timescales shorter than a certain threshold level. This threshold, they say, is more or less exactly equal to the human reaction times.

The implication is clear. When humans trade and when they monitor the behaviour of machine trading, they can step in to override any unwanted behaviour. In that regime, markets behave in a specific way. 

But when human oversight becomes impossible, because the trades take place faster than humans can react, a different behaviour occurs. That's when flash crashes and rises set in. 

The evidence comes from Johnson and co's study of stock price movements between 2006 and 2011. These guys looked for extreme changes in a stock price, which they defined as a change greater than 0.8 per cent, over timescales shorter than 1.5 seconds.

Since human reaction times are about a second, this spans the regime when trades begin to occur faster than humans can monitor and react to them.

The first thing they discovered is that flash crashes and rises are not at all rare. Johnson and co found over18,000 of them, that's more than one a day on average. They call them black swan events, using the terminology developed by Nassim Nicolas Taleb in his book The Black Swan.

Curiously, they found that that change in the occurrence of crashes occurs at timescales shorter than 650 milliseconds, while the transition for price spikes occurs at 950 milliseconds.

Johnson and co say this can be explained if humans are more alert to crashes than to price rises.  They point out that 650 milliseconds is about the fastest a human can react to any warning sign, so it's no surprise that the transition occurs here for crashes. 

Price rises, on the other hand, are usually beneficial and so require no immediate action, which is why the transition in behaviour occurs at slightly longer timescales.

They also say that the ten stocks most susceptible to flash crashes and rises are international banks. This, they say, “hints at a hidden relationship between these ultrafast ‘fractures’ and the slow ‘breaking’ of the global financial system post-2006.”

The work also hints at a solution: to somehow reproduce the effect of human oversight at ultrafast scales. How that can be done with regulation alone isn't clear but there is no disputing the urgency with which this matter should be addressed.

The markets are clearly changing. The need to outperform competitors is currently driving a multibillion dollar investment in machine trading at rates even faster than milliseconds. In one project, traders are financing the construction of a dedicated transatlantic cable that will shave just 5 milliseconds off the time it takes to trade stocks. 

Unless it is tackled in the near future, just what kind of behaviour this race-to-the-bottom will generate, is anyone's guess. 

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1202.1448: Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology

Why Rembrandt and Not Mannerism Was the True Successor of Raphael

Just as Beethoven's breakthroughs in contrapuntal composition surpassed even the genius of Mozart, so too Rembrandt's mastery of ironical visual "entrainment" and allegorical use of light went beyond even the artistry of Raphael.

The Florentine Renaissance celebrated man as in the image of a living Creator or "Imago viva Dei." Thus the depiction of an aesthetic physical form for humanity akin to the sculptural Greek ideal of Praxiteles, et al. is quite harmoniously lawful. For the rebirth of such classical forms along with the method of Socratic dialogue from the vantage point of Christianity's opposition to the decadence of the Roman Empire is the essence of what motivated the towering contributions of Nicholas of Cusa. Raphael's opus captures the drama of this ongoing polemical stance of the challenge to the then oligarchical order in Europe.

Just as there was in music an attempt to escape from the zenith of Mozart and Beethoven's implicitly pro American masterpieces into mere showy apolitical chromaticism of Liszt, so the display of mere surface illusion of the Mannerists was the equivalent escapism in the visual art of that period.

This is why Rembrandt represented the continuation of Leonardo and Raphael's legacy. For he went further in developing a method of composition the evoked an inner light and beauty of humanity independent from mere outward formal beauty as it struggles to imitate that which is truly divine.

Eatiology: Well Tempered Cuisine

Eatiology: Well Tempered Cuisine: In response to the Economist's article: "Synaesthesia-- Smells like Beethoven" There is a coherent reason why sound is organized by pitch...