Woman in love with .... the Berlin wall

Well this is kind of off topic of science/physics, but is interesting from a mental health perspective, and why not include psychology in a discussion about science. Anyway a friend sent me a link about a woman in love with the Berlin wall. Since it was taken down some twenty years ago, she is in despair the way a normal person would be if their lover/spouse died. The woman claims to have married the Berlin wall on June 17, 1979.

As if that weren't strange enough, it appears that this woman is not alone. An entire community of people find themselves sexually attracted to inanimate objects. According to this website, they claim that this bizarre behavior is actually a sexual orientation. People with this condition are "attracted" to objects possessing a certain geometry or function, and they even "fall in love" with inanimate objects.

Wow. This is interesting on several levels. For one, it illustrates the complexity of the human brain and what can go wrong. Taking sexuality and love and directing it towards an inanimate object is obviously not going to help you from a Darwinian perspective. No passing on of the genes there. What is really interesting is that somehow an inability to form attachments with humans translates into forming attachments with inanimate objects. This is pretty dysfunctional. In a way its kind of harmless, if someone is in love with a brick wall I guess that's their problem, but it is pretty sad. Also what if its YOUR wall. I'm not sure I want someone sexually attracted to my wall around my house.

Click on the "Expressions" link and read about the woman who married the Eiffel tower.

Large Hadron Collider as a Time Machine?

Time travel is one of the most radical ideas of science. What's fascinating about it is that it may be allowed by relativity. Now then, as if worrrying about the Large Hadron Collider destroying the world with an earth-eating black hole or ball of strangelets were not enough. I. V. Volovich and I. Ya. Aref'eva are proposing the device can function as a time machine. In a paper posted last year, the pair proposed that the LHC would be capable of producing wormholes, which can function as time machines-at least in principle. The researchers state:

"Causality is one of fundamental physical principles. We suggest in this note that there is a
possibility to test causality in experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This
is related with a possibility of wormhole production in proton-proton collisions at the LHC.
The wormholes contain small spacetime regions with closed timelike curves (CTC) which
violate the standard causality condition."

Well this is unlikely, but certainly fascinating. This idea was also proposed in another very interesting paper which discusses how to detect the presence of such time machines here.

Paparazzi Physicists?

As if the bubble fusion controversy was not enough, now there's the "Pamela" controversy. Two papers have been published on the "archives" which basically hijacked data from a presentation given by an Italian-led research team. The data in question involves the recent reported observation of "dark matter". Doing something I find absolutely incredible, Marco Cirelli and Alessandro Strumia published this paper on the archive and Lars Bergstrom, T. Bringmann, and J. Edsjo published this paper. Both papers used data obtained by taking photographs of slides shown at a presentation given by the scientists who compiled the PAMELA data. Un-f&*%king-believable.

These so-called paparazzi physicists took photographs of slides that researchers were displaying at a talk about the PAMELA project, then used the photographs to write the aforementioned papers! Naturally, the project lead for PAMELA, a P. Picozza was extremely upset by the use of their data in other people's papers in this manner.

To his credit, Marco Cirelli acknowledged the source of the data in his paper. But he said "we had our cameras ready". To me, this sounds completely cheesy. Photographing someones data and writing a paper based on it is incredibly self-serving and is nothing more than looking for a shortcut.

Honestly I don't care what justification Cirelli or the others make. This behavior can only be described as childish. When you think about it, the bubble fusion controversy and this one both come down to the same thing. Pressure on scientists to publish, publish, publish, and get grant money.

But that doesn't excuse the scientists. Honesty and ethics need to take priority. Since Cirelli did acknowledge the source of his data, on an unethical scale maybe this is a 3/10, but it still doesn't make Cirelli look all that great in my book. Taking a photograph of someone's data and then writing a paper about is just lame. The authors should demonstrate that they are adults and professionals by taking the papers down now.

These days waaaaaaaay too many papers are published. Probably 2/3 of the papers on the archive are a waste of space, people publishing for the sake of getting papers out. So stop publishing papers for the sake of getting yet another one out.

NASA to extend Space Shuttle life?

The space shuttle started out as a novel concept-a reusable spacecraft-but ended up being relatively unsafe and basically a waste of money in a dead end space program that lacks any vision.

In recent years, the Bush administration, in one of the few good things its done-put the brakes on the space shuttle with the announcement of the "constellation" program. In addition to setting a goal of returning humans to the moon, constellation aims to replace the space shuttle. I say great idea. The space shuttle is too complicated, its out of date, and its a huge waste of money. I used to hear stupid arguments from people I knew that worked at NASA that we MUST keep the space shuttle going to keep humans in space. I don't think that follows. Being against the shuttle doesn't mean you're against humans flying in space. It means your against wasting huge amounts of money to fly people around and around and around in orbit.

I once heard that each shuttle mission costs in the neighborhood of $600 million. Are you kidding me? What if we had taken all that money starting say 10 years ago and put it into a moon program. If we had, instead of insisting on continuing to develop the "international space station", a tin can in the sky, we would be well along the way to sending humans back to the moon.

Well one thing about government programs is they never go as planned, at least in the United States. It looks like NASA's planned retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 may be put on the shelf. One concern is deteriorating relations with Russia. There seems to be some concern that reliance on the Russians for space flights to the international space station could be risky business. A group of senators, including Presidential hopeful John McCain, urged NASA to hold off on a final decision about retiring the shuttle for at least another year. Further complicating matters, the Orion space ship, which looks quite a bit like Apollo in drawings I've seen, won't be ready until 2015. Well that is the projection. Since the US government is involved, I would say 2018 is a more realistic date. Or maybe they'll wait until say 2014, after billions have been spent on it, and cancel the program. Remember the superconducting super collider? Instead of letting the U.S. hold onto the lead in particle physics congress spent billions shutting down the program after billions had already been spent starting to construct it. Government has already set a precedence in willingness to do stupid stuff like that, so why not cancel Orion at the last minute?

I for one say good riddance to the space shuttle and the space station. I'm not against space exploration, in fact I'm all for it. But lets be real about it. Set real concrete goals that get people and missions out in space instead of doing endless studies on weightlessness in a tin can.

Regardless of your point of view, you can read the article on BBC news here.

Quantum Computer Building Block Created

The holy grail of computing might be quantum computing. Exploiting the bizarre ability of microscopic systems to be in a superposition of two exclusive possible states at once, a quantum computer relies on a "quantum bit" to do computation. Unlike an ordinary bit, which can be in a state 0 or state 1, a quantum bit can be in a superposition of 0 and 1. Although when you measure it the result is either 0 or 1, the fact it exists in a superposition in between measurements allows you to do lots of things that are impossible using today's computer technology. In fact, a quantum computer, if it could be built, would be able to do things a computer based on today's design principles could never do, even in principle or how advanced technology became.

One of those things a quantum computer could do is create unbreakable codes. A regular computer could create a code that is very hard to break, and that is what banks, the FBI, and the Defense department do today. But while those codes are hard to break, they could be broken, meaning they aren't completely secure. And it turns out quantum computers would be very good at breaking codes too. The ability to put states in superpositions allows quantum computers to factor numbers quite easily-if only a quantum computer could be built. If you could factor numbers easily you could break anyone's secure code very quickly. So a quantum computer would make today's secure codes obsolete but at the same time give people the ability to achieve total data security.

With that in mind its no surprise that the quest for a quantum computer is on the minds of lots of people. Keeping a quantum bit in a superposition of 0 and 1 for any useful length of time has been a challenge, and researchers have also been concerned about scalability, that is the ability to build a useful computing system out of individual quantum building blocks. One hope for scalability is to build a quantum computer out of semiconductors. This would be done using quantum dots and maybe silicon. The good news is that we already know a lot about manufacturing silicon devices on a large scale.

Recently it was revealed that the news is even better, because researchers figured out a way to make a reasonably stable superposition state for a quantum bit in a semiconductor. They do this by putting a trapped electron in the desired superposition state using lasers. The electron is in a so-called "dark state", meaning it doesn't interact with light and hence the state is stable in regards to additional photon interactions. This would allow researchers to put a quantum bit into a superposition state and keep it there, making quantum computing, including "programming", possible.

It remains to be seen whether this development will really lead to stable, useful quantum computers. Also, what will those computers be able to do when actually built. There has been a lot of hype around this area of research, maybe this development will let us gain a glimpse into the reality of quantum computers.

To learn more about quantum computers, read George Johnson's A Shortcut Through Time.

Large Hadron Collider Rap

As if the lawsuit to prevent the Large Hadron Collider from going into operation was not enough, science writer Kate McAlpine has produced a rap video about the device. Personally I think its pretty corny. The video has been viewed 723,000 times on YouTube.

Moon Video

The video I mentioned the other day about the Apollo missions to the moon (For All Mankind) is this one: