Hope For A Future If You Can Win It

CERN physicists trap antihydrogen atoms for more than 16 minutes

June 5, 2011

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This is an artistic representation of the ALPHA neutral antimatter trap, suggesting the nature of the ALPHA apparatus as a container for antihydrogen. Credit: Chukman So, copyright © 2011 Wurtele Research Group. All rights reserved.

Trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has become so routine that physicists are confident that they can soon begin experiments on this rare antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

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"We've trapped antihydrogen atoms for as long as 1,000 seconds, which is forever" in the world of high-energy particle physics, said Joel Fajans, UC Berkeley professor of physics, faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

The ALPHA team is hard at work building a new antihydrogen trap with "the hope that by 2012 we will have a new trap with laser access to allow spectroscopic experiments on the antiatoms," he said.

Fajans and the ALPHA team, which includes Jonathan Wurtele, UC Berkeley professor of physics, will publish their latest successes online on June 5 in advance of print publication in the journal Nature Physics. Fajans, Wurtele and their graduate students played major roles in designing the antimatter trap and other aspects of the experiment.

Their paper reports that in a series of measurements last year, the team trapped 112 antiatoms for times ranging from one-fifth of a second to 1,000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds.

Since the experiment first successfully trapped antihydrogen atoms in 2009, the researchers have captured 309.

"We'd prefer being able to trap a thousand atoms for a thousand seconds, but we can still initiate laser and microwave experiments to explore the properties of antiatoms," Fajans said.

In November 2010, Fajans, Wurtele and the ALPHA team reported their first data on trapped antihydrogen: 38 antiatoms trapped for more than one-tenth of a second each. They succeeded in capturing an antiatom in only about one in 10 attempts, however.

Toward the end of last year's experiments, they were capturing an antiatom in nearly every attempt, and were able to keep the antiatoms in the trap as long as they wanted. Realistically, trapping for 10-30 minutes will be sufficient for most experiments, as long as the antiatoms are in their lowest energy state, or ground state. 

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"These antiatoms should be identical to normal matter hydrogen atoms, so we are pretty sure all of them are in the ground state after a second," Wurtele said.

"These were likely the first ground state antiatoms ever made," Fajans added.

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In an antihydrogen atom (top), a positively charged antielectron, or positron, orbits a negatively charged antiproton: the mirror image of an ordinary hydrogen atom (bottom). Credit: Chukman So, copyright © 2011 Wurtele Research Group. All rights reserved.

Antimatter is a puzzle because it should have been produced in equal amounts with normal matter during the Big Bang that created the universe 13.6 billion years ago. Today, however, there is no evidence of antimatter galaxies or clouds, and antimatter is seen rarely and for only short periods, for example during some types of radioactive decay before it annihilates in a collision with normal matter.

Hence the desire to measure the properties of antiatoms in order to determine whether their electromagnetic and gravitational interactions are identical to those of normal matter. One goal is to check whether antiatoms abide by CPT symmetry, as do normal atoms. CPT (charge-parity-time) symmetry means that a particle would behave the same way in a mirror universe if it had the opposite charge and moved backward in time.

"Any hint of CPT symmetry breaking would require a serious rethink of our understanding of nature," said Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark, spokesperson for the ALPHA experiment. "But half of the universe has gone missing, so some kind of rethink is apparently on the agenda."

ALPHA captures antihydrogen by mixing antiprotons from CERN's Antiproton Decelerator with positrons – antielectrons – in a vacuum chamber, where they combine into antihydrogen atoms. The cold neutral antihydrogen is confined within a magnetic bottle, taking advantage of the tiny magnetic moments of the antiatoms. Trapped antiatoms are detected by turning off the magnetic field and allowing the particles to annihiliate with normal matter, which creates a flash of light.

Because the confinement depends on the antihydrogen's magnetic moment, if the spin of the antiatom flips, it is ejected from the magnetic bottle and annihilates with an atom of normal matter. This gives the experimenters an easy way to detect the interaction of light or microwaves with antihydrogen, because photons at the right frequency make the antiatom's spin flip up or down.

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This is an artist's image of the ALPHA trap which captured and stored antihydrogen atoms. Credit: Chukman So

Though the team has trapped up to three antihydrogen atoms at once, the goal is to trap even more for long periods of time in order to achieve greater statistical precision in the measurements.

The ALPHA collaboration also will report in the Nature Physics paper that the team has measured the energy distribution of the trapped antihydrogen atoms.

"It may not sound exciting, but it's the first experiment done on trapped antihydrogen atoms," Wurtele said. "This summer, we're planning more experiments, with microwaves. Hopefully, we will measure microwave-induced changes of the atomic state of the antiatoms."

More information: "Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds," Nature Physics, http://www.nature. … s/index.html

Provided by University of California - Berkeley (news : web)

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Americans' Obsession with Folly or the Tale of the Twitteratti

As the brilliant Pascal observed the emperor needs must be feted with frivolity and games in order to keep his or her mind off his or her mortality. This is why fools and madmen alike obtain knighthood. I heard it said yesterday, or rather read it, that double entendres are a sign of immaturity. My imagination immediately seized upon the name of the greatest of playwrights and  put up a vocal utterance of "really?" Perhaps this this attitude can be likened to a deservedly obscure "thinker" by the name of Vico, who opined that the Roman Empire was the coming of age of the ancient world. I suppose that Lycurgus, like Shakespeare, would be strictly a puerile jurist in Vico's bizarre world view. Aeschylus a schoolboy, Hamilton a ninny, hardly worth wasting one's breath on...and so on.

This brings us to Weinergate. As the astute reader of this so called blog knows by now, I see the repugnant Twitter bubble as a "sign of the (end)times" much like Robert Burton viewed the calamity of  his days' everyman, who having the silver to publish any abject drivel to his liking. Plays, in those days were deemed not serious art. And how many of Shakespeare's contemporary and serious Latin poets share the dusty fate of Ozymandias? And so is it any wonder when a member of our ever estimable polity is suspended in delicto by his own rather prominent petard that we cannot withhold a hearty guffaw at his expense...Even in this post modern dark age that has come upon us a laugh or two may do us good.

A Diversionary Tack?

Marchers want WikiLeaks suspect freed from prison

By JOE LAMBE

The Kansas City Star

Megan True

Andrew Frey (center) of Manhattan, Kan., was one of the marchers who came to Leavenworth on Saturday to protest the government’s handling of the case of WikiLeaks suspect Pfc. Bradley Manning.

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About 250 demonstrators from across the nation gathered in Leavenworth on Saturday in a rally supporting the man charged with leaking classified military information to a website.

They credit past rallies and Internet efforts with getting Army Pfc. Bradley Manning transferred in April from harsher prison conditions to a new facility at Fort Leavenworth.

Now they are trying to get him released, they said. They marched for blocks in the hot sun outside the fort waving signs and banners and chanting “Free Bradley Manning.”

Supporters say they have raised $150,000 for Manning’s legal defense and are planning rallies nationwide and an Internet effort worldwide. They think they can apply enough pressure to free Manning.

“It’s going to take a movement like nothing we’ve seen since Vietnam,” said Jeff Paterson of Oakland, Calif., project director for Courage to Resist, a group that works to help military personnel who get in trouble for speaking out or refusing to fight.

Before the march, those gathered listened to spokespeople for a wide range of allied groups including anarchists, anti-war activists, gay rights activists and others.

Paterson and others said that if Manning is guilty, he is a whistleblower who revealed information that should be made public, including a video shot from the cockpit of a helicopter that shows American airmen shooting down a group of men in Baghdad.

Supporters also say diplomatic cables he leaked helped catalyze democratic revolts across the Middle East.

Manning was an intelligence specialist in Baghdad during 2009 and early 2010, when the Army alleges he downloaded classified documents that included details of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that landed on the WikiLeaks website.

Since then the information has been regarded as politically embarrassing and a grave breach of military security.

Before his transfer to Fort Leavenworth, Manning was in solitary confinement in a Marine jail in Quantico, Va. He was forced to sleep in boxers with no blankets or pillow because he was deemed at risk for suicide.

The detention conditions caused State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley to call the treatment “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid.” Crowley was forced to resign days later.

Supporters say they also hope to raise money for billboards supporting Manning in Kansas City and other cities.

He could go to a military trial late this year, they said.

I think Webster Tarpley's take on Wikileaks as an IPS-like intelligence operation is instructive. The movement  of well heeled liberals to spring Manning is purely diversionary while Obama's City of London and Wall Street controllers continue to loot this nation with impunity.

The World of Edgar Allan Poe: The Poetic Principle

Poe's stance on the poetic principle needs to be set up in contrast (almost in one's preconscious or out of the corner of the eye, so to speak) with the writings of two of his most poetic contemporaries. I refer to Shelley and Keats. While I totally disagree with the opinion of Empson's nasty and dismissive, assertion as to Poe's poetry providing evidence of his smoking peyote, he is certainly correct in his evaluation of Shelley and Keats. (Sadly, Empson seemed to be inflicted with the intellectual virus of kowtowing to existential modern muck. This is to be seen clearly in his adulation of T.S Eliot and echoing of Henry James.)


Shelley's ideal that poets are the true legislators of the world might, one supposes, stand as an instance of what Poe derides as didacticism. However, Shelley's poems have no tarnish of the dogmatic about them. Contrast them in your mind's eye, if you will, with those rather blistering and truly didactic verses of John Donne.


Keats' usage of the writings on melancholy of Burton, on the other hand do comport with Poe's principle of poetic sentiment. None other than the towering figure of Ibn Sina wrote as much centuries earlier when he wrote of the soul's metaphorical condition as a forlorn wish to be able to soar as a bird. This thought if properly teased out inexorably leads us to Leonardo's quest and today's extra terrestrial imperative as much as Shelley's skylark.


Which is to agree with Edgar that for the common prosaic soul (or should I have ventured to say commoner here, dear reader?) the didactic 'sdeath, so to speak. But the exceptions (and most ironically Mr. Poe is one of them) are the soul of true poesy, as Keats would have it in his ode to a Grecian urn.


To explain, Poe was and always will be himself most thoroughly a patriotic American scientist willy-nilly. As was Shelley. But not of the sort of the proverbial Yankee ingenuity lampooned by Twain. In fact, Poe's war with what he the Boston Brahmin frogpondians is instructive and to the point here.


Poe is a scientific detective into the political motives of such as Disraeli, Young America's Margaret Fuller, and the bilge of poetaster Pre-pre-Raphaelite Thomas Carlyle. Which is to say, there is a moral hazard in taking the politics out of Poe. For instance, the correspondence and quite uncharming embrace of Margaret Fuller with Mazzini's Young Europe gets us rather immediately to the kernel of Poe's patriotic detective work. (And let it not go unsaid that it is most unfortunate that Paulding seemed to have been turned against Poe.) The overriding point being that the same Young American political outfit were supporters of the confederacy, i.e. pawns of Lord Palmerston's unholy political zoo of movements and isms.


While Poe is absolutely correct in his aspersions cast against the quite evil Francis Bacon, Martin Van Buren, and Andrew Jackson, he was nonetheless unfortunately taken in by the hoax of the greatness of Sir Isaac Newton and Pierre-Simon Laplace. One does wonder if he had lived would he have come to know the ageless genius of Leibniz and have realized his error, similarly to Shelley's conversion via Raphael Sanzio. (Although Poe did refer to Leibniz in reverential terms as the great "master.")


If you understand the foregoing, dear reader then it should not shock you that Poe was vilified for his potential that he threatened in his modus of debunking the politics of America's literati and their desire to return us to mother (as in MI5) England. This is the apparatus that carried out the hatchet job against both Keats and Poe.


P.S. I ran into a rather nasty patch of this type of skulduggery while investigation the literary association of an ancestor of mine: John Curtis Chamberlain. Poe's satire of the Folio Club is instructive here. For it turns out that he was a Harvard educated lawyer in a certain literary circle headed by an obscure Harvard publisher by the name of Joseph Dennie. In particular, Dennie's dismissal of Leibniz in one of letters while attending Harvard, stuck in my craw. For my experience at the University of Buffalo when introduced to Leibniz' Monadology was rather like Keats' metaphor of wild surmise. That is, I was as if thunderstruck by Leibniz thoroughly principled use of the Socratic absolute negation in his irrefutable theodicy. How the anglophilic Dennie could wave Leibniz off as stuffy and boring evinces a clear instance of what Schiller might have referred to as the soul of a mere bread learner masquerading as a lover of the arts. But the issue of Leibniz versus Newton was a sort of intellectual puntum saliens of the those days. (Dennie appears later to have somewhat come to his senses via his publishing association with John Quincy Adams in Philadelphia.) The cult of Newton worship is a more powerful weapon in a certain sense in the hands of MI5's Bertrand Lord Russell than was his openly evil avowed desideratum to bomb the Russians previous to their having developed the hydrogen bomb.

Please Pardon The Doggerel, But Sometimes I Get A Flash of Insight and Can't Let It Go

Oh, Canada
Glorious and Free (!)
Oh, Canada...
We Stand In Line And Pee

Things We Would Like to See More Of

How sweet it is...



Collier County, Florida -- Have you heard the one about a homeowner foreclosing on a bank?

Well, it has happened in Florida and involves a North Carolina based bank.

Instead of Bank of America foreclosing on some Florida homeowner, the homeowners had sheriff's deputies foreclose on the bank.

It started five months ago when Bank of America filed foreclosure papers on the home of a couple, who didn't owe a dime on their home.

The couple said they paid cash for the house.

The case went to court and the homeowners were able to prove they didn't owe Bank of America anything on the house. In fact, it was proven that the couple never even had a mortgage bill to pay.

A Collier County Judge agreed and after the hearing, Bank of America was ordered, by the court to pay the legal fees of the homeowners', Maurenn Nyergers and her husband.

The Judge said the bank wrongfully tried to foreclose on the Nyergers' house.

So, how did it end with bank being foreclosed on? After more than 5 months of the judge's ruling, the bank still hadn't paid the legal fees, and the homeowner's attorney did exactly what the bank tried to do to the homeowners. He seized the bank's assets.

"They've ignored our calls, ignored our letters, legally this is the next step to get my clients compensated, " attorney Todd Allen told CBS.

Sheriff's deputies, movers, and the Nyergers' attorney went to the bank and foreclosed on it. The attorney gave instructions to to remove desks, computers, copiers, filing cabinets and any cash in the teller's drawers.

After about an hour of being locked out of the bank, the bank manager handed the attorney a check for the legal fees.

"As a foreclosure defense attorney this is sweet justice" says Allen.

Allen says this is something that he sees often in court, banks making errors because they didn't investigate the foreclosure and it becomes a lengthy and expensive battle for the homeowner.

The Harbinger of the E Coli Mutation

As we adopt the lunatic zero growth, green fascism of Prince Phillip and company, which of course will cause a devastating collapse of the standard of living and public health, we should expect his prophecy of his desired reincarnation as a deadly virus to become a reality. (This whether his evil personage is consigned to the tomb or not, for it is quite obvious to the astute observer that the death of his soul happened long ago.)

What Cusa Could Teach Us

In the End Is the Beginning
A daring theory of how the universe, instead of expanding indefinitely, could start again in another Big Bang.

 By PETER WOIT

In recent years, Roger Penrose has attracted a popular audience with thought-provoking books on physics, consciousness and the theory of computation, beginning with "The Emperor's New Mind" in 1989. But the work that established his status as one of the most remarkable mathematical physicists of our era was done in the 1960s and '70s. Along with Stephen Hawking, he developed mathematical techniques for studying the structure of the geometries that describe black holes and the Big Bang. These techniques allowed a precise characterization of the infinitely dense singularities found at the center of a black hole or at the moment when the expansion of the universe began.
With "Cycles of Time," Mr. Penrose has turned his attention back to the Big Bang and some of the seemingly imponderable questions it provokes: What came "before" the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago, and how might the universe it brought into being come to an end?
The currently accepted Big Bang model looks at what we can see of the past and projects this behavior into the future. Our best observations come from looking at patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the thermal radiation that was produced 380,000 years after the Big Bang, at the time atoms formed and light could propagate freely. The manner in which the universe has continued to expand since suggests that, in the future, the universe will just keep expanding, with matter and radiation dispersing, entropy increasing and our fate a rather boring and lonely one to contemplate.
Many find unsatisfying this picture of the universe's distant past and future. First, it does nothing to answer the question of "what came before." Second, a universe that does something better than peter out would provide a more inspiring vision of our future. Mr. Penrose thinks he might have a better answer, which he calls "Conformal Cyclic Cosmology." The key words are "conformal" and "cyclic," and to explain Mr. Penrose's theory, it is best to take them in reverse order.
"Cyclic" indicates that the universe somehow circles back to a condition at which it could start all over again, in another Big Bang, an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Such cyclicity is a feature of several other recent speculative cosmological models, including some in which the Big Bang is just one of a sequence of collisions among multidimensional membranes or "branes."
"Conformal" refers to a particular type of geometry, which Mr. Penrose is a master of and which he thinks might explain why the universe won't merely keep expanding forever. (A geometry is said to be "conformal" if its properties don't change when it is transformed in a way that preserves angles but not distances.) Mr. Penrose's crucial point is that, in physics based on a conformal geometry, there is no way to characterize either distances or energy levels as "small" or "large."
Mr. Penrose points out that, as one goes back toward the infinite energy density of the Big Bang, the geometry of the early universe could in some sense be called conformal. Likewise, as one goes far enough into our distant, boring future, if everything turns into massless radiation, there's no usable energy scale—and the geometry is also conformal.
Mr. Penrose's radical suggestion is that, somehow, this distant past and distant future can be matched together, since they share the same geometry. A universe at either extreme of its existence is one that has no fixed ideas about what is big and what is small. Perhaps this curious coincidence indicates that one can pass continuously from one extreme to the other, and this transformation is what happened at the moment of the Big Bang.
Mr. Penrose does not write books that are, by any measure, easy to read. His 2004 book, "The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe," lived up to its title, with more than a thousand pages explaining how physics and geometry are interrelated at a fundamental level. To grasp everything in that book one needed doctoral-level training in mathematics or physics, but with a lesser background much of it was accessible.
That's also the case with "Cycles of Time." If his audience were merely specialists, Mr. Penrose could have outlined his speculative hypothesis in a few dense pages. Instead, he has included large amounts of background material designed to help anyone interested in the subject. The early chapters just about anyone should be able to follow, and much of the explanatory content is visual, embedded in wonderful drawings drafted in Mr. Penrose's own hand. But by the end, even experts will have trouble keeping up.
As Mr. Penrose acknowledges, there are various problems with his hypothesis. There is no real evidence that the universe will ever stop expanding, and it is unclear whether Mr. Penrose's use of conformal geometry can really solve that. As far as we know, electrons are stable, with unchanging non-zero mass. That means they will always be around to provide an energy scale, no matter how far out into the future one goes, ruining the conformal symmetry needed to ultimately match up with the Big Bang.
Another important question is whether Conformal Cyclic Cosmology could ever be tested experimentally. Mr. Penrose suggests only that we might observe some remnant structures in the Cosmic Microwave Background that have survived from the previous cycle. Readers should be forewarned that what they have in their hands is un-refereed research of a sort that may very well not pan out and convince other scientists. A surprising and unorthodox work disguised in the jacket of a popular science book, "Cycles of Time" should prove both deeply enlightening and just as deeply mystifying for anyone who dares to follow along.

The crux of the issue here truly lies within the province of metaphysics. As such, there has been no material improvement in the line of metaphysical dialog since Nicholas of Cusa essentially resolved Plato's Parmenides paradox with his work "The Non-other." The common reading of Cusa as a "Christian mystic" is a crass nominalist misreading of his influence that leads through DaVinci, Toscanelli (Christopher Columbus' mapmaker,) Leibniz, Gauss, and Bernhardt Riemann. The same Riemann whose formulation of n dimensional non-Euclidian geometry made possible Einstein's theory of relativity. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of today's apparently educated and degreed scientists and mathematicians have almost no familiarity with this...

Krugman Misses the Boat Again

This from Krugman in the NY Times:

"The core of our economic problem is, instead, the debt — mainly mortgage debt — that households ran up during the bubble years of the last decade. Now that the bubble has burst, that debt is acting as a persistent drag on the economy, preventing any real recovery in employment. And once you realize that the overhang of private debt is the problem, you realize that there are a number of things that could be done about it.

"For example, we could have W.P.A.-type programs putting the unemployed to work doing useful things like repairing roads — which would also, by raising incomes, make it easier for households to pay down debt. We could have a serious program of mortgage modification, reducing the debts of troubled homeowners. We could try to get inflation back up to the 4 percent rate that prevailed during Ronald Reagan’s second term, which would help to reduce the real burden of debt.

"So there are policies we could be pursuing to bring unemployment down. These policies would be unorthodox — but so are the economic problems we face. And those who warn about the risks of action must explain why these risks should worry us more than the certainty of continued mass suffering if we do nothing."

All this earnest seeming palaver of Professor Krugman misses the only real means to tackle the speculative debt that is dragging all the globe's economies into the cesspool. What is required is an end of "too big to fail." And contrary to the blackout by the media there is legislation already introduced in the House of Representatives that would do just that. It is Marcy Kaptur's HR 1489. This would return our nation to the Glass-Staegall principle of separation of commercial banking, which is necessary to sustain the actually productive economy, from investment banking, which is what lead to the lunacy of the speculative bubble of derivative securities like mortgage indexed derivatives. This would mean a return to FDR's virtuous fight against the city of London and Wall Street investment banking houses, instead of the lick-spittle fawning of President Obama's favorite Treasury Secretary Geithner...

The Angels of Retrodictive Functional Time

Fechner would have it that our substance does not die with our mortal quietus, but rather is transformed, either willfully or not,  into a higher state of being presaged by our wakeful consciousness. This, along with Fechner's positing of a world soul, at first glance, might appear as merely some sort of attempt at a Christian/Avestic syncretic religion. However, it would do well to keep in mind that his acolyte in this said weltanshaung was none other than the arguably most important thinker in the the last 200 years: Bernhardt Riemann.

This brings up the question of the metaphor of the angelic soul. Take Schiller's designation of Joan of Arc as typifying that rather angelic sublime soul in her sacrificial overcoming the hellish ignominy of the Inquisition. Like Beatrice leading Dante to imagine the relativity of our transit through the firmament from the emperial perspectiva of the moon, we are visited by such angels. As Fechner posits, there is forever a dialog of  past generations within our psyche, which we have the power to compose in a fugue or failing this the discordance of insanity.

May we not convincingly assert that the real Plato has acted with what his follower Liebniz determined sufficient causality over these millenia to transform society away from the clutches of its own would be Erinyes? With what sort of outre poetic sentiment may we not then agree with LaRouche that time is not mere sequential happenstance but a function by which we enrich retrodictively the contributions of humanity's better angels? Like some higher power that thus operates among us...