Sunday, September 30, 2012

astro picture for the day


Image Credit & Copyright: John Davis

------------------------------------------------crazy science/tech for the day?

There's a lot of good stuff!

just some idea of remarkable these quantum computers will be,

Some groups are saying quantum computing isn't hear yet, others are solving problems with quantum computing,


starting to create protein nano-machines

a spacetime crystal, an eternal clock; really, we don't know what applications this will lead to.

and last and least, Spanish archaeologists have found ruins back to the times of Troy and even the Pyramid building times.  Being in France, this pushed much further west anybody's idea of how soon an advanced civilization could have developed. 

general view of the ruins

some more views of these great ruins

some important person for these peoples

the usual artifacts, still, the use of metals is a good sign for any culture back then.

Maybe they had art, maybe they didn't; but, these ruins appear to be very militaristic. Maybe they were under too much pressure to do art and science; but, it just seems to me that if a culture learns to just do science, that will get them to places far removed from other militants.  But, these people didn't embrace the scientific ethic.





Tuesday, September 25, 2012

astro picture for the day


Nasa Hubble Space Telescope image

This picture combines data over a ten year period; telescopes before the Hubble space telescope could view the universe back to seven billion light years; the Hubble calculated the Big Bang to 13.7billion years old precisely, and has imaged it here to 13.2 billion light years distant.

cultural and dealing with nature connections

planetary emergency due to global warming

James burke tries to show social connections; jacob bronowski says a lot how evolution of the last tent thousand years has been more due to social stimulous than biological.  And yet, the original stimulous for mankind may have been more biological or more geological(even astronomical); or, was it?

What started me on these thoughts/question has been an effor to find more James Burkian connections; i've mentioned before how things like science and auto racing lead to spinoff technologies/james burkian connnections.  Well, one thought of mine has been how the implications of our scientific knowledge has allowed us the possibility(not always taken advantage of by our leaders) to predict nature - weather, space weather, asteroids, maybe in the future supernova, earthquakes, volcanoes,

Mankind is defined and distinguished from the other life of the Earth by it's dependence on science and technology.  This certainly started occuring four, now maybe five if not more, million years ago. Still, one would think the reasons for any Australopithacine or Erectus to move from one place to another was environmental - drought, cold.  Well, maybe Homo Erectus did originaly migrate to Europe and Asia were environment; but, they quickly tamed fire and probably did things because of it(for instance the cave paintings almost certainly were not possible without the use of fire).

I bring this up because Jacob Bronowski remarks i'm thinking in the second episode of his "Ascent of Man" how approximatelly ten thousand years ago, change in human life was almost always predominantly due to cultural forces, and that James Burke's "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changes" almost exclusivelly deals with cultural influences for change and the connections between everything. And yet, a major reason for doing any science and making any technology is to deal with nature and the problems it sometimes presents(like too hot or too cold, or a volcanic eruption, earthquakes and hurricanes).

A little while ago, I noted that around the end of world war 2, science and technology funding became much more established amongst all countries in the world.  Science and technology still struggles here and there from those who are not scientifically inclined or spirited, but for the most part, they have a lot harder time argueing against the necessity for funding and exploring the universe.  I noted how science often times since world war 2 makes the excuse of 'spin-off' technologies.  I was looking for more James Burkian 'connections.' Well, I've found that the connections have also come full circle from cultural reasons to dealing with nature - earthquake, volcano, and hurricane prediction; also solar storms, asteroid detection and hopefully the eventual means of deflection.  Viruses can only be delt with officially with a mature nanotechnology which we're getting pretty close to doing.

With these connections between almost all the human condition, I thought I'd leave you with another Arthur C Clarke mysterious world episode!

Friday, September 21, 2012

astro picture for the day


credits are in the picture!

-----------------------------crazy science/technology for the day!

printing revolution comes to nanomanufacturing

There's probably problems of keeping the masks aligned precisely(could be done with stms); but, one could imagine stamping out any desired molecularly precise pattern, maybe if one wanted to, one could stamp out chips of nano-stms; or, one may not even need to make nano-assemblers to make things to atomic specifications anymore!  This could sidestep the need to make molecular machines of molecular precision to make nanomanufacturing happen!

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

astro picture for the day

M7: Open Star Cluster in Scorpius
Image Credit & Copyright:
Dieter Willasch (Astro-Cabinet)
-----------------------------crazy science/technology for the day------------------------------------------

dna nanomotor advances

This is probably just a beginning for making nanomotors(and hence nanomachines) whether out of dna or not.  One can almost feel the affects of the recent advances in being able to make dna nanotechnologies.

On the other hand, I saw a remark by Chris Phoenix a few weeks ago(there was a dna nanotechnology article that I did not bother posting here); he said more or less, "yes, dna nanotechnology can eventually get there . . . bootstrapping to Feynman/Drexlerian nanomanufacturing . . . but, other pathways will get there sooner."  I'm thinking Chris Phoenix is thinking of stms and the new nano piezo advances that could help make at least microscale stms possible.  I didn't ask him what he meant.  I just figure he's in the know on stuff not mentioned.  If he's correct, there could be some surprising announcements in a year or two!

--------------------------------update for crazy science/tech for the day


This is a microelectrodynamicaly controlled sensor that can be used for cantilevers for atomic force microscopy; hence, for sizing down stms!(scanning tunneling microscopes; devices that can image and position single atoms; size these guys down, mass produce them on chips, and we can start to see some molecular manufacturing systems pretty soon!).

- another breakthrough that can help size down stms to at least microtech levels

Saturday, September 15, 2012

astro picture for the day


Credit: IBM

- no, this isn't a star, or a stellar gas cloud(star factory), or a galaxy, or a planet, or even a lifeform!  It is an image of atoms in a molecule and the electron orbitals.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

astro picture for the day


Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2 Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin.

and


Credit: ESO

----------------------------crazy science/technology for the day----------------------------------------

star trek space warp possible?

In the 1990s, various mathematical scientists proved that wormholes are possible and came up with some warp drive concepts as well . . . mathematically.  They showed that cassimir forces could make for a exotic matter usefull for keeping a wormhole open.  Only problem is that one needs a jupiter size amount of it to do anything usefull.  Recently, someone may have found a way around that problem as well! 

Experimental work is in full swing!

- there is of course numerous other great things going on,

nano electromagnetism made possible Eric Drexler for one didn't think this was possible.  More barriers to molecular machines keep falling!

Vast generalisation of the human genome project completed!

more clues that the brain cannot be separated from the body in how thinking works

unified field theory? Well, maybe a step in the right direction and unifying/solving dark matter and dark energy





Monday, September 3, 2012

RAMANUJAN: Letters from an Indian Clerk


"They must be true.  Because if they weren't true, no one would have had the imagination to invent them." - G.H. Hardy

Srinivasa Ramanujan's case history is a little bit of a challenge to my ideas.  One thing that can be said is that not all his results were proven true; some were proven wrong.  Another thing that can be said is that mathematicians have created all this mathematics including proving them deductively without knowing how the mind works. Point is that while mathematics can be created without formal proof, the mathematics isn't finished till it's proved; i've brought up this point before when noting a few observational proofs of my and Jacob Bronowski's ideas. Logical proof itself has evolved in standards of rigor.  Another way of saying this is that people can think logicaly without noting it down.


I found it!  I finaly got to watch this! I saw like the last five minutes of this on PBS like in 1988, and I never got to watch this no matter how hard I tried.  I've checked to see if this had been uploaded to youtube for many years as well! 

To say the least, Srinivasa's story shows that you can never know who, or where, or when knowledge spreads and inspires someone.  It's one of the great things of the internet!  The internet can really help people get inspired by knowledge that either is not acceptable in certain social groups, or someone does something with knowledge that certain social groups are not suitable to do something with it(Srinivasa Ramanujan's case). 

---------------------------exciting science/technology for the day----------------------------------------

Directed evolution of proteins which makes molecularly precise materials.

"some silicateins self-assembled into sheets and made dispersed mineral nanoparticles, as opposed to more typical agglomerated particles formed by natural silicateins. In some cases, crystalline materials were also formed, demonstrating a crystal-forming ability that was acquired through directed evolution, said Bawazer."

and

"The research was published in Proc. Nat. Acad Sci. USA [abstract, open access full text]. It looks like these researchers have found a way to discover new materials through in vitro enzyme selection. Perhaps the next challenge is to assemble such novel materials into complex devices.
—James Lewis, PhD"

A couple of articles about it,

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/artificial-cells-evolve-proteins-to-structure-semiconductors/

http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/pa/display.aspx?pkey=2754

------------------------------------------Fractals method making Ramanujan/Hardy's circle method partially obsolete

Well, after my excitement over finaly getting to see Ramanujan:Letters from an Indian Clerk, I've just found a youtube over one of the most exciting recent mathematical breakthroughs.  It relates fractals to partitions of numbers.  Fractals have been a mathematical curiosity for over a hundred years now. But, they havn't made much of a contribution to much mathematics for awhile now.  Now, they've made an unexpected connection to number theory!


There's even connections to Riemann hypotheses.  I've often thought that the distribution of primes are fractal.  I've noted that in the baker transformation, you get points that end up next to one another often after the baker transformation happens.  In the prime distribution, one often gets twin primes. Well, Ken Ono has made some connections between some aspect of number theory and fractals; maybe, someday Riemann's hypotheses can be proved by means of fractals!




Sunday, September 2, 2012

William Thurston passed away recently - August 21, 2012



I thought I'd seen signs in a vidoe lecture of the Poincare conjecture at the Clay mathematics institute; but, I never confirmed that he was having health problems.

William Thurston's work formed the basis of the great "Not Knot" video found in the farely beginning of my blog(and of course, you can find it easily be typing in non knot at youtube).

I remember when in junior high, I elected to go to the library during lunch instead of mess around.  One article in a "Science News" magazine was about turning a sphere inside out; William Thurston had a big hand in that; mathematicians went on to show you can turn a tube inside out and even more exotic shapes as well! 

In the 1930s, mathematicians had solved a classification problem for two dimensional surfaces  William thurston solved the third dimension.  That's one way of saying his mathematical importance.  Another would be to say that his work went a long way towards solving the Poincare conjecture recently - officially by Perelman.  A lot of his work seems to me to be analysing geometry and topology by means of cartesian products - actually, geometric generalisations of the cartesian product.  A cartesian product is like a is a A, and b is a B.  Relations are subsets of cartesian products; functions are special cases of relations.  Cartesian products can be viewed as cartesian coordinates.  Foliations are a vast generalistion of this it appears to me.

 I've literaly just about finished reading his Geometry and Topology of 3-manifolds.  I'm two pages to go.  I just wanted to read it; and really, the book is turning out to be every easy example of the mathematics he's created.  It's kind of a modern day "Geometry and the Imagination" from David Hilbert. I wanted to at least read it because I figured that reading it gives me the best account of the implications of the Poincare conjecture. Seems to me that the Poincare conjecture can generalise lie theory is some ways(Lie theory can be generalised in many ways).  Lie groups were used by those working on the classification of simple groups.  Lie algebra of E8 was one recent major accomplishment.  Both the classification of simple groups and E8 are hugh deductive structures.  These are amongst the great achievements of mankind right now.  One can see the abundance and remarkable connections between all mathematics with William Thurston's work.

There's so much to say!  Mathematicians really back in Poincare's day and maybe before him had started to see that hyperbolic geometry is the ideal viewpoint from which to do mathematics.  William Thurston's work established that at least for the third dimension. 

Some of the connections with other mathematics are that of the uniformatisation theorem that Poincare did a good amount of work to solve with his automorphic functions(a group theoretic generalisation of elliptic functions.)  The elliptic functions were used to solve galois theory and number theory.  So, the solving of the Poincare conjecture points to a vast generalisation of the algebraic geometric relation between elliptic functions, Riemann surfaces.

To say the least, I havn't describe algebraic number theory(much less David Hilbert's algebraic field theory) and it's relations to algebraic geometry.  And, there's plenty more mathematics to describe or at least give some hint at the full scope of twentieth and now twenty first century mathematics.

------------------------------------crazy science/technology extra for the day

I thought I'd give some more nanotech news because the nanomanufacturing revolution is really picking up and it's disappointing that William Thurston couldn't make it(nanomanufacturing could dramatically extend human lifespans).

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/new-insights-into-how-the-most-235718.aspx

"The combination of computational design and molecular biology "leads to a catalyst for whatever reaction is needed, if we can get this all to work properly," Houk said."

or

"Or maybe to design catalysts to attach to specific locations on a DNA origami lattice to accomplish a multistep reaction to synthesize some complex molecular building block?
—James Lewis, PhD"

------------------------------------back to William Thurston; really, kind of wild thought on my part;

When I try to think about the extent of mathematics, I often wonder if I can see what's next to do.  I try to see if I can dam up nature(see my origin of mathematical knowledge article; third post from the first of this blog if you havn't done so); but, I find that after the initial abstractions of number and geometry, the daming up that creates more mathematics occurs within mathematics.  Still, one can see in mathematics that if one wants to create new mathematics, just go to the next degree equation, or the next higher dimension.  After Perelman's dotting of the i's for the Poincare conjecture, mathematicians(and really our scientific species, the Homo Sapiens) pretty much settled the third dimension.  There's still work to do; but, the major action for mathematicians is the fourth dimension(the mathematics of Donaldson).  One could say that we've reached the third dimension and are now working on the fourth dimension.

Now, sometime in the 1950s, Enrico Fermi was sitting around talking with a couple of physics friends, and he asked, "where are they?"  Fermi was asking where's the extraterrestrial civilizations?  If there was a big bang ten to twenty billion years ago(because of the Hubble Space Telescope, we have this number down to 13.7 billion years now almost precisely), and the earth is only 4.5 billion years . . . factor in that it takes a couple of generations of supernova to create the higher elements/atoms to create Earths . . . and supernova go off in a few hundred million years(for supergiant stars. for stars like ours, they don't go bang like that; and, they take a lot a lot longer to age), there should be five to fifteen billion years for extraterrestrial civilizations to storm the cosmos.  Look at all those stars!

The Fermi question has been generalised since then with knowlede of what a.i. coupled with nanomanufacturing can do.  Basically, we're seeing that a species only a hundred years older than us must be rediculously more advanced!  And, 99.9% of the extraterretrials must be thousands if not millions and maybe billions of years more advanced than we are!  What I'm doing is saying, what if we met an extraterretrial civilization sometime.  What will we ask them?  Perhaps, we could ask them, what degree of mathematics are they working on!  Could be meet degree 100 cultures?  How about a thousand?  Hundred thousand?  Million!?  Billion would be like meeting you know who!  Only, you know they're not gods.  They're just gods to us!