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And how often do you knead them?! Gross!
Nevermind, it's time to lift this board out of the gutter into which you're trying to drag it, and let's get things back on track, folks!
Signs of water found on one of Saturn's moons
Planet has 31 known moons
Friday, March 10, 2006; Posted: 5:33 p.m. EST (22:33 GMT)
(CNN) -- The Cassini space probe has found evidence of geysers erupting from underground pools of liquid water on Saturn's moon Enceladus, scientists announced on Thursday.
High-definition pictures beamed back from the probe showed huge plumes of ice coming from the moon's south pole.
"We're inferring that there is a liquid water reservoir under the surface and it's erupting in a geyser-like fashion, maybe like the Yellowstone geysers you would see," said Linda Spilker, Cassini Deputy Project Scientist.
Spilker said it was very surprising to see this much activity on such a small, cold moon. The average temperature at Enceladus' south pole is minus 307 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 188 Celsius) -- that's a little warmer than the moon's equator, which was minus 316 Fahrenheit (minus 193 Celsius).
She said that the water was likely kept at the relatively warm temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit (zero Celsius) by tidal or radioactive forces. It freezes instantly as it escapes vents in the surface.
"At first we thought it might be like an ice volcano, with little ice particles coming out. And then, as the analysis continued, we looked at the amount of material coming out ... there had to be more of a pressure source underneath," she said.
Water might be an indication that life could exist on Enceladus. But Spilker was not ready to suggest life existed there.
"That's a very tough question to answer, but certainly something that we'll be thinking about now that there appears to be a liquid water source on Enceladus," she said.
"Because on the Earth, in ocean beds that are deep on the ocean floor, where there is no sunlight or anything, you get life forms that can exist in those conditions where you get the ingredients for life out of those volcanic vents."
Scientists are searching for signs of water on Mars and believe that Jupiter's moon Europa has a liquid ocean deep under its frozen crust. (Watch finding puts Enceladus in an elite group -- 1:22)
"Now Enceladus joins the ranks of those bodies, Mars and Europa, that have evidence of liquid water in them and also energy sources coming from radioactive heating and tidal heating that make the very interesting places to look for the origins of life," said Torrence Johnson, a member of the Cassini team. "These are habitats that are similar to types of places we think life may have originated and could possibly survive in today."
The finding's were published in this week's issue of "Science."
Cassini is scheduled to fly within 217 miles (350 kilometers) of Enceladus in 2008, and Spilker said scientists may try to have it fly through the plumes and collect samples.
In the meantime, Spilker said Cassini probably would take measurements from a distance.
"Thinking ahead, maybe this might mean that some day we might want to land a probe near a crack on Enceladus or something and maybe be able to probe more precisely what's happening," she said.
Spilker said the findings already have answered some questions about Saturn's rings.
"One of the questions that Cassini came in with was that the E-ring around Saturn was thickest around Enceladus, and we knew somehow Enceladus was involved in being the source of the E-ring," she said. "And now we know how that's happening. Through these geyser-like plumes, that's the material that goes on to create the bulk of the E-ring."
Cassini, which was funded by NASA and the European and Italian space agencies, launched in 1997 and took seven years to make the 934 million-mile (1.5 billion-kilometer) trip to Saturn.
Last January, the European Huygens spacecraft detached from Cassini and landed on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. (Full story)
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/03/09/cassini.enceladus/index.html
You can start that one. I need all mine.
Oh wait, is this board Extra Terrestrial? I thought it said Extra Testicle. Never mind.
Good to have you back in one piece, burp.
Another board that might peak your interest is Nuclear Planet. http://www.investorshub.com/boards/board.asp?board_id=5289
With you & the hurricanes gone, I had lots of time on my hands.
Hilarious! Last November, I was contemplating making a board just like this! In fact, I had the "new board" wizard open, and was typing in the title and the iBox, but never submitted it because I knew I was taking off. The title was giving me fits. I think I had something like, "Astronomy, Astrophysics, Planetary Sciences" sort of along the lines of the hurricane board with a long title. You nicely dodged that dilemma with simply ET. Also, in my iBox text, just like you I also had a comment about wanting the UFO people to post elsewhere. I wanted the board to encompass everything from space-related stocks, to NASA projects, to asteroid mining schemes, to outside the galaxy and beyond.
Nice to see great minds think alike. I had even mentioned it at the time in a PM to Novomira but she wouldn't remember it. Nice work.
Bookmarked.
Researchers find evidence of dark energy in our galactic neighborhood, University of Washington, 16-Mar-2005
Astrophysicists in recent years have found evidence for a force they call dark energy in observations from the farthest reaches of the universe, billions of light years away.
Now an international team of researchers has used data from powerful computer models, supported by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, to find evidence of dark energy right in our own cosmic neighborhood.
The data paint a picture of the universe as a virtual sea of dark energy, with billions of galaxies as islands emerging from the sea, said Fabio Governato, a University of Washington research associate professor of astronomy and a researcher with Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics.
In 1929 astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrated that galaxies are moving away from each other, which supported the theory that the universe has been expanding since the big bang. In 1999 cosmologists reported evidence that an unusual force, called dark energy, was actually causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
However, the expansion is slower than it would be otherwise because of the tug of gravity among galaxies. As the battle between the attraction of gravity and the repellent force of dark energy plays out, cosmologists are left to ponder whether the expansion will continue forever or if the universe will collapse in a "big crunch."
In 1997, Governato designed a computer model to simulate evolution of the universe from the big bang until the present. His research group found the model could not duplicate the smooth expansion that had been observed among galaxies around the Milky Way, the galaxy in which Earth resides. In fact, the model produced deviations from a purely radial expansion that were three to seven times higher than astronomers had actually observed, Governato said.
"The observed motion was small, and we could not duplicate it without the presence of dark energy," he said. "When we added the dark energy, we got a perfect match."
Governato is one of three authors of a paper describing the work, scheduled for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, an astronomy journal in the United Kingdom. Co-authors are Andrea Maccio of the University of Zurich in Switzerland and Cathy Horellou of Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. The work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council.
The authors, part of an international research collaboration called the N-Body Shop that originated at the UW, ran simulations of universe expansion on powerful supercomputers in Italy and Alaska. Their findings provide supporting evidence for a sea of dark energy surrounding galaxies.
"We studied the properties of galaxies close to the Milky Way instead of looking billions of light years away," Governato said. "It's like traveling from Seattle to Portland, Ore., rather than from Seattle to New York, to measure the Earth's curvature."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-03/uow-rfe031605.php
Dark energy may rip apart Universe http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s942245.htm
Some say the Universe will end in a "Big Crunch," others expect a "Big Chill," and now some U.S. physicists are saying the end could be something more like a "Big Rip".
Assistant Professor Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and colleagues publish their unusual hypothesis in the current issue of Physical Review Letters.
According to the theory, which is actually called the "Big Rip", the continuous growth of the Universe's "dark energy" pushes things apart and may account for much of the Universe's expansion since the "Big Bang."
If dark energy increases fast enough, in about 20 billion years the repulsive force could become so strong that it pushes apart galaxies, stars, solar systems and eventually even atoms will fly to pieces: "It's a runaway process," said Caldwell.
The dark energy called on by Caldwell is different from the more famous dark matter in that it has no mass or gravity. In fact it's a sort of anti-gravity called on to explain why stars and galaxies are flying away from each other so quickly.
Based on detailed observations of exploding stars, astrophysicists have been able to estimate that dark energy makes up about 70 % of "stuff" in the universe. The rest is made of dark matter (25 %) and regular matter that makes up stars, planets and us (5 %).
In Caldwell's scenario, the universe will last about 20 billion more years. Sixty million years before the end, dark energy will cause the Milky Way galaxy to fly apart. Three months before the end solar systems will break down, flinging planets helter-skelter. Finally, at a tiny fraction of a second before the end of everything, dark energy will be so great that it will overcome the powerful forces that hold matter together, throwing apart atoms.
"It's as plausible as the other [scenarios]," said astrophysicist Professor Abraham Loeb of Harvard University. "And it's good to know what the possibilities are".
The other scenarios, the "Big Crunch" and "Big Chill" call on too much or too little gravity in the universe, respectively. If there is too much gravity, all matter will come back together in a tremendous "crunch." Too little gravity and the present expansion of the universe will continue forever - until every star burns out and the universe becomes a very cold and dead. In this scenario, entropy wins.
Only improved measurements of cosmic forces by astronomers will tell which scenario is likely to prevail, Caldwell said.
Dark energy rules the universe http://www.infosatellite.com/news/2002/11/p181102darkenergy.html
Chandra X-Ray Observatory: Images of Galaxy Clusters and Dark Energy Concepts http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/darkenergy/more.html
What are 'dark matter' and 'dark energy'? http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMLK4VZJND_index_1.html
(Scroll right & down... WOW!)
Dark Energy Changes the Universe 02.27.04
Dark energy has the cosmoslogists scratching their heads. Observations taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and future space telescopes will be needed in order to determine the properties of dark energy, which makes up about 70 percent of the universe. http://www.nasa.gov/missions/deepspace/f_dark-energy.html
Cosmologists to plot strategy for dark energy research campaign at Chicago workshop Sept. 17-20, 2003
http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/03/030903.darkmatter.shtml
Dark Energy: http://www.dboccio.com/einstein.htm
Cosmologists have known since the 1920's that the universe is expanding, its galaxies racing away from one another in all directions. Just a few years ago, however, a study of very distant supernovas added a confounding twist: the cosmic expansion is speeding up. Distant galaxies are racing outward at faster velocities. And that doesn't make sense. Gravity is supposed to slow the cosmic expansion -if not to an outright halt (eventually), then at least to a steady pace. Yet here we are, picking up speed. What's going on?
To explain this conundrum, cosmologists have postulated that a strange, previously undescribed repulsive force, which they call dark energy, is at work, counteracting gravity and pushing galaxies apart at an accelerating rate. That's what dark energy does, anyway; what dark energy is. .. well, that's still unclear. this year, astronomers and astrophysicists uncovered convincing new data to confirm that dark energy, whatever it is exactly, really exists. In September, a team of University of Chicago astronomers found evidence of dark energy in subtle fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background - a haze of microwave energy that formed just 400,000 years after the Big Bang and still pervades the universe. In November, a separate team, studying how galaxies bend the light from distant quasars behind them, likewise detected the fingerprints of dark energy. And not only is dark energy real, but the new experiments indicate it's also running amok. Until a couple billion years ago, dark energy was a relatively minor force; now it comprises two-thirds of all the energy in the universe.
Dark energy marks the coming of age of cosmology. The latest telescopes and technology now enable researchers to probe the oldest structures in the universe, to conduct experiments on - and confirm or refute predictions about - the beginning of time itself. Astronomy, astrophysics, particle physics and theory have merged into a true, hard science. Einstein gave us this idea in 1915….From now on Physics must accept this new force!
HC 408: Cosmology, Fall Quarter 2004, Univeristy of Oregon. http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/
The universe a giant dark energy star, maybe? Is that in Genesis too? Great find, AK.
Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer
09 March 2006
Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition
Zeeya Merali
DARK energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in turn, remove black holes from the lexicon of cosmology.
The audacious idea comes from George Chapline, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin of Stanford University and their colleagues. Last week at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara, California, Chapline suggested that the objects that till now have been thought of as black holes could in fact be dead stars that form as a result of an obscure quantum phenomenon. These stars could explain both dark energy and dark matter.
This radical suggestion would get round some fundamental problems posed by the existence of black holes. One such problem arises from the idea that once matter crosses a black hole's event horizon - the point beyond which not even light can escape - it will be destroyed by the space-time "singularity" at the centre of the black hole. Because information about the matter is lost forever, this conflicts with the laws of quantum mechanics, which state that information can never disappear from the universe.
Another problem is that light from an object falling into a black hole is stretched so dramatically by the immense gravity there that observers outside will see time freeze: the object will appear to sit at the event horizon for ever. This freezing of time also violates quantum mechanics. "People have been vaguely uncomfortable about these problems for a while, but they figured they'd get solved someday," says Chapline. "But that hasn't happened and I'm sure when historians look back, they'll wonder why people didn't question these contradictions."
While looking for ways to avoid these physical paradoxes, Chapline and Laughlin found some answers in an unrelated phenomenon: the bizarre behaviour of superconducting crystals as they go through something called "quantum critical phase transition" (New Scientist, 28 January, p 40). During this transition, the spin of the electrons in the crystals is predicted to fluctuate wildly, but this prediction is not borne out by observation. Instead, the fluctuations appear to slow down, and even become still, as if time itself has slowed down.
"That was when we had our epiphany," Chapline says. He and Laughlin realised that if a quantum critical phase transition happened on the surface of a star, it would slow down time and the surface would behave just like a black hole's event horizon. Quantum mechanics would not be violated because in this scenario time would never freeze entirely. "We start with effects actually seen in the lab, which I think gives it more credibility than black holes," says Chapline.
With this idea in mind, they - along with Emil Mottola at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina in Columbia and colleagues - analysed the collapse of massive stars in a way that did not allow any violation of quantum mechanics. Sure enough, in place of black holes their analysis predicts a phase transition that creates a thin quantum critical shell. The size of this shell is determined by the star's mass and, crucially, does not contain a space-time singularity. Instead, the shell contains a vacuum, just like the energy-containing vacuum of free space. As the star's mass collapses through the shell, it is converted to energy that contributes to the energy of the vacuum.
The team's calculations show that the vacuum energy inside the shell has a powerful anti-gravity effect, just like the dark energy that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Chapline has dubbed the objects produced this way "dark energy stars".
Though this anti-gravity effect might be expected to blow the star's shell apart, calculations by Francisco Lobo of the University of Lisbon in Portugal have shown that stable dark energy stars can exist for a number of different models of vacuum energy. What's more, these stable stars would have shells that lie near the region where a black hole's event horizon would form (Classical Quantum Gravity, vol 23, p 1525).
"Dark energy stars and black holes would have identical external geometries, so it will be very difficult to tell them apart," Lobo says. "All observations used as evidence for black holes - their gravitational pull on objects and the formation of accretion discs of matter around them - could also work as evidence for dark energy stars."
That does not mean they are completely indistinguishable. While black holes supposedly swallow anything that gets past the event horizon, quantum critical shells are a two-way street, Chapline says. Matter crossing the shell decays, and the anti-gravity should spit some of the remnants back out again. Also, quark particles crossing the shell should decay by releasing positrons and gamma rays, which would pop out of the surface. This could explain the excess positrons that are seen at the centre of our galaxy, around the region that was hitherto thought to harbour a massive black hole. Conventional models cannot adequately explain these positrons, Chapline says.
He and his colleagues have also calculated the energy spectrum of the released gamma rays. "It is very similar to the spectrum observed in gamma-ray bursts," says Chapline. The team also predicts that matter falling into a dark energy star will heat up the star, causing it to emit infrared radiation. "As telescopes improve over the next decade, we'll be able to search for this light," says Chapline. "This is a theory that should be proved one way or the other in five to ten years."
Black hole expert Marek Abramowicz at Gothenburg University in Sweden agrees that the idea of dark energy stars is worth pursuing. "We really don't have proof that black holes exist," he says. "This is a very interesting alternative."
The most intriguing fallout from this idea has to do with the strength of the vacuum energy inside the dark energy star. This energy is related to the star's size, and for a star as big as our universe the calculated vacuum energy inside its shell matches the value of dark energy seen in the universe today. "It's like we are living inside a giant dark energy star," Chapline says. There is, of course, no explanation yet for how a universe-sized star could come into being.
At the other end of the size scale, small versions of these stars could explain dark matter. "The big bang would have created zillions of tiny dark energy stars out of the vacuum," says Chapline, who worked on this idea with Mazur. "Our universe is pervaded by dark energy, with tiny dark energy stars peppered across it." These small dark energy stars would behave just like dark matter particles: their gravity would tug on the matter around them, but they would otherwise be invisible.
Abramowicz says we know too little about dark energy and dark matter to judge Chapline and Laughlin's idea, but he is not dismissing it out of hand. "At the very least we can say the idea isn't impossible."
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18925423.600.html
Unless it's raining.
The same thing when my hand reached for the light switch.
You are traveling in a car at the speed of light. You turn on your headlights. What happens?
:)
Beam me up, Scotty.
Quantum Teleportation http://www.crystalinks.com/teleportation.html
String Theory http://www.crystalinks.com/stringtheory.html
String theory is a physical model whose fundamental building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects (strings) rather than the zero-dimensional points (particles) that were the basis of most earlier physics. For this reason, string theories are able to avoid problems associated with the presence of pointlike particles in a physical theory. Detailed study of string theories has revealed that they describe not just strings but other objects, variously including points, membranes, and higher-dimensional objects. As discussed below, it is important to realize that no string theory has yet made firm predictions that would allow it to be experimentally tested.
The term 'string theory' properly refers to both the 26-dimensional bosonic string theories and to the 10-dimensional superstring theories discovered by adding supersymmetry. Nowadays, 'string theory' usually refers to the supersymmetric variant while the earlier is given its full name, 'bosonic string theory'.
Interest in string theory is driven largely by the hope that it will prove to be a theory of everything. It is one viable solution for quantum gravity, and in addition to gravity it can naturally describe interactions similar to electromagnetism and the other forces of nature. Superstring theories also include fermions, the building blocks of matter. It is not yet known whether string theory is able to describe a universe with the precise collection of forces and matter that we observe, nor how much freedom to choose those details the theory will allow.
On a more concrete level, string theory has led to advances in the mathematics of knots, Calabi-Yau spaces and many other fields. Much exciting new mathematics in recent years has its origin in string theory. String theory has also led to much insight into supersymmetric gauge theories, a subject which includes possible extensions of the standard model.
Wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory
The Speed of Light Q & A
WHENEVER WE MENTION THE SPEED OF LIGHT in the pages of Scientific American, readers send us questions. Here we try to lay a few perennial puzzles to rest.
1. I read that charged particles traveling faster than light emit Cerenkov radiation--but how can anything go faster than light? Isn't it supposed to be the universal speed limit?
2. What is the speed of light?
3. Why is c a speed limit anyway?
4. Aren't there quantum effects that propagate instantaneously and therefore faster than c?
5. Weren't there experiments recently that sent light itself faster than c?
6. Doesn't Hubble's Law imply that galaxies far enough away are receding from us faster than the speed of light?
------------------------------------------------------------
1. I read that charged particles traveling faster than light emit Cerenkov radiation--but how can anything go faster than light? Isn't it supposed to be the universal speed limit?
This goes to the heart of much confusion about the speed of light. "The speed of light" has two quite distinct meanings. One is "the speed at which light travels," and that speed varies depending on the medium: fastest in a vacuum, a tiny bit slower in air, two thirds as fast in glass.
The second meaning, the universe's speed limit, is phrased more carefully as "the speed of light in a vacuum" and is given its own symbol: c. The velocity c seems to be an absolute, unchanging quantity. The speed at which light travels through a vacuum is only one of c's manifestations, however. We call c the speed of light only because of the historical accident that scientists first encountered c in its role as the velocity of light and other electromagnetic waves. Some physicists advocate renaming c "Einstein's constant."
When we distinguish these two speeds of light, the conditions for Cerenkov radiation are no puzzle. In water, light travels at about 0.75 c. Particles can go faster than that through water without breaking the speed limit of 1.00 c.
2. What is the speed of light?
c is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second.
2a. Exactly? How can it be a whole number?
Some metrological sleight of hand is at work: nowadays the meter is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Metrologists define the meter that way because doing so results in a quantity that is more precise and more convenient to reproduce than the alternatives. The definition of a second is based on an atomic frequency that can be reproduced and measured to an accuracy of about 2 parts in 1015, which is thousands of times more precise than the meter could be defined using a direct length measurement.
3. Why is c a speed limit anyway?
This relates to the real importance of c: it defines a fundamental relation between space and time. A distance of 299,792,458 meters is equivalent to a time interval of one second. This is one of the messages of Einstein's theory of special relativity: space and time are different aspects of a single entity called spacetime. Omitting the vestigial hyphen from "space-time" emphasizes that this "spacetime" is conceptually something new and not merely the old space stapled to the old time.
In spacetime, if one can travel faster than c, one can devise ways to travel through time into the past. Time travel would unleash logical paradoxes of cause and effect, which convinces many physicists that such travel (and even transmission of information faster than c) must be impossible. This is perhaps the most fundamental reason for believing c to be an absolute speed limit, but there are other reasons or clues to support the idea.
The laws of special relativity make it impossible to accelerate an object beyond c. As the object's speed approaches c, its mass increases. If you keep on applying a force to make the object go faster, more and more of the energy that you transfer to the object goes into increasing its mass (the old E=mc2). Because of the object's greater mass, the force you apply increases the object's speed more slowly. The object's speed becomes incrementally closer to c without ever quite reaching it. Achieving c would take infinite energy.
However, that reasoning only rules out the possibility of accelerating objects continuously from below c to above c. One can postulate the existence of elementary particles that always travel faster than c. These particles, called tachyons, would have fundamental properties unlike those of familiar particles such as electrons. For example, tachyons would gain mass as they were slowed down closer and closer to c. Conversely, their energy would decrease as they sped up, reaching a minimum at infinite velocity--which would be as accessible to a tachyon as zero velocity is to an ordinary particle. The mass of a tachyon would be imaginary, in the sense of imaginary numbers and the square root of minus one.
Such tachyons are not a part of the standard model of particle physics (which accurately describes almost all particle physics experiments to date) or the standard model's most plausible extensions.
In the end, the idea that c is a speed limit is supported empirically by the lack of evidence of any physical object or signal traveling faster than c.
4. Aren't there quantum effects that propagate instantaneously and therefore travel faster than c?
The classic example of such a phenomenon is what Einstein famously called spooky action at a distance. Two particles, say A and B, are "entangled" (meaning their quantum states are intrinsically linked or blended together) and separated by a large distance. A measurement performed on particle B will always give results consistent with the results of a corresponding measurement performed on A--even if there has not been time for anything physical (such as a signal, or a propagating wave of some sort) to travel between A and B to force the measurement results to agree. Naively, it looks as if some sort of information must have traveled faster than c between the particles, and that the effect could be used to transmit information that rapidly. Instead, however, the random nature of the individual quantum measurement results makes it impossible to use this effect to transmit information faster than c. The accepted explanation is not in terms of anything traveling faster than c, but is related to the "nonlocal" nature of quantum mechanics: the two entangled particles do not have well-defined individual states; all that is well-defined is their combined state, which is not localized in one place.
5. Weren't there experiments recently that sent light itself faster than c?
Yes, last year a group at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ, performed this feat by sending pulses of light through a cell of gas irradiated with laser beams. See our September 2000 issue for a more complete report. Similar experiments actually date back to 1982. The key here is that a pulse of light has many different velocities associated with it. Some of those velocities can be greater than c without violating special relativity.
One description of what happens in the NEC experiment is that the front portion of their light pulse is amplified, which makes it appear as if the peak of the pulse has been shifted forward. The velocity based on the location of the peak is greater than c. (Actually it's worse than that: the velocity is negative, meaning the peak exits the far side of the experiment's gas cell before it enters the near side.) Yet it seems clear that no energy has moved faster than c: the extra energy at the front of the pulse is presumably added from the laser-excited gas.
In addition, the system cannot be used to send information faster than c. In a preprint posted in January, the NEC group and collaborators take into account quantum fluctuations that their system necessarily adds to each pulse. They prove theoretically that these fluctuations make it impossible for someone waiting downstream with a photon detector to know that an individual pulse is arriving any sooner than they would if it the pulse had simply traveled through a vacuum at speed c all the way.
One other point is worth noting with the NEC experiment. The pulses of light that they used were about a kilometer long. The brief period of travel "faster than c" shifted those pulses forward about 20 meters, a mere 2 percent of the pulse length.
6. Doesn't Hubble's Law imply that galaxies far enough away are receding from us faster than the speed of light?
Yes. Hubble's Law, v = Hd, tells us that a galaxy that is d megaparsecs away from us will be receding at velocity v. And if we take the current best measurement of Hubble's constant H (72 kilometers per second per megaparsec), simple algebra predicts that galaxies 4.2 gigaparsecs (4.2x109 parsecs) away are receding at velocity c. More distant galaxies recede faster than c. This indeed violates special relativity--but that's not a problem because over such cosmological distances general relativity applies. Special relativity assumes that spacetime is flat and not expanding, while general relativity happily deals with a curved, expanding spacetime.
In general relativity the speed limit c only applies locally: One cannot have a particle traveling faster than c relative to another particle that is nearby. To compare velocities over very large distances in a curved, expanding universe requires some sophisticated mathematics. It is no longer as simple as measuring a distance and seeing how fast the distance changes.
Let's say galaxy Omega is 5 gigaparsecs away. The distance between us and galaxy Omega will be increasing at a rate faster than c. But that is because the spacetime between us and galaxy Omega is itself stretching and becoming larger at that rate, not because galaxy Omega is exceeding the speed of light in its local part of spacetime. This description may sound like doubletalk, but it is grounded in well-defined mathematics of curved spacetimes.
If we could build a telescope to see across 4.2 gigaparsecs what would we see? We can't see that far. The galaxies that we see a billion light years away appear to us today as they were a billion years ago. Before our telescope "reaches" 4.2 gigaparsecs, what we can see runs so far back in time that we hit the Big Bang, or more precisely, we hit the first moment at which light began traveling freely through space. In a sense we can already "see" that far: that oldest and farthest traveling light is none other than the cosmic microwave background.
This answer has also glossed over details such as the changing rate of expansion of the universe over the aeons, which modifies the simple law v = Hd, but the principles remain the same.
--Graham P. Collins, staff writer and editor
http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/sf/topics/lightfreeze/0701haubox1.html#hubble_law
Do you realize how hard it was for the photographer to get that image?
You sure, AK? Looks different from this angle. http://www.faucetline.com/item_description.asp?prodcat=Bathroom&prodid=7992
Yes, that's the site. But it still looks like a Kohler. :)
According to your pic properties http://www.technovelgy.com/graphics/content05/wormhole.jpg
it came from http://www.technovelgy.com/
Not sure of the source...American Standard? Kohler?
Is that a Lorentzian or Euclidean wormhole, AK? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole
I don't want to end up in any old black hole... or white hole for that matter.
Sure...
To get the full effect, visualize yourself as a t-rd and somebody just flushed.
Got a pic of one of those wormholes? Wait... here's one.
How's your French? http://www.astrosurf.org/lombry/trou-de-ver-wormhole.htm
Only if it doesn't find the wormhole.
CG4 is about 1,300 light years from Earth
So we've got some time, AK. Whew!
More info on that image...
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr06/pr0607.html
The Universe according to Hubble. http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/category/nebula/
I trust that's not the Milky Way in the bullseye, AK!
Galaxy eating nebula...
Free online courses for anyone who wants to brush up on their Astronomy... http://www.free-ed.net/free-ed/Science/Astronomy/default.asp
Physics... http://www.free-ed.net/free-ed/Science/Physics/default.asp
or other sciences... http://www.free-ed.net/free-ed/Science/default.asp
or math... http://www.free-ed.net/free-ed/Math/default.asp
or whatever... http://www.free-ed.net/free-ed/FreeEdMain01.asp
"Who's Out There? 1975" - National Archives film explores the new view of extraterrestrial life (1975)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6292577234133732501&q=649442
According to his biographer, Carl Sagan kept it quiet...
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?hl=en&lr=&q=Carl%20Sagan%3A%20A%20Life&btnG=Search&...
Many things are revealed in the biographies that were not known outside a close circle of friends. For much of his adult life, Sagan used marijuana and believed that it gave him many of his best ideas. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/475954.stm
Carl Sagan was an avid user of marijuana, although he never publicly admitted it during his life. Under the pseudonym "Mr. X," he wrote an essay concerning cannabis smoking in the 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered, whose editor was Lester Grinspoon[4]. In his essay, Sagan commented that marijuana encouraged some of his works and enhanced experiences[4]. After Sagan's death, Grinspoon disclosed this to Sagan's biographer, Keay Davidson[5]. When the biography, entitled Carl Sagan: A Life, was published in 1999, the marijuana exposure stirred some media attention[6]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan
As was Timothy Leary on LSD! http://deoxy.org/leary.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary
Not into weed, never was, even though a child of the 60s. Never turned on or tuned in, but did drop out & enlist in the Nuclear Navy during Nam.
Sound medicinal or therapeutic uses make sense, & research should continue.
However, recreational or experimental use of mind & mood altering drugs is very risky. I knew a number of souls who altered their consciousness & never recovered, yes, even on grass. Habitual pot robbed them of their motivation and ability to face the challenges of daily life, just like alcohol or other drugs can. Many others did just fine, and have (had) accomplished, rewarding lives like Carl Sagan.
Carl Sagan was also an adament supporter of the use of marijuana to enhance ones creativity and complexity of thinking. He says that helped him in a lot of his scientific findings. Do you agree with his thoery on marijuana usage?
Scientist earmarks planets most likely to hold alien life!
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
The Independent, Published: 20 February 2006
Astronomers have identified a star in our Milky Way galaxy that is the most likely candidate for possessing a companion planet that harbours intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
It is a sun-like star called beta CVn in the constellation Canes Venatici and it appears to possess all the necessary preconditions that would allow an advanced civilisation to flourish on a nearby planet.
The star is 26 light years away - 153 trillion miles - and it heads a shortlist of five stars that astronomer Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution in Washington believes could be the focus of fresh attempts to make contact with other intelligent beings.
Dr Turnbull selected her top five from an initial catalogue of 17,129 stars that could be "habitable stellar systems" where the physical conditions would not be too extreme to limit the evolution and development of intelligent life and its technology.
She said she made her choice purely on the characteristics of the stars themselves. "Stars are not all the same, and not all of them are like the Sun," Dr Turnbull told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St Louis.
The first criterion is that the star had to be at least 3 billion years old, which is about the time it has taken life on Earth to evolve to its present stage. That would be long enough for companion planets to form and for complex life to develop on them. Dr Turnbull said.
Stars on the shortlist also had to be no bigger than about 1.5 times the mass of the Sun - bigger stars tend not to live long enough to produce habitable zones, she explained. Each shortlisted star also had to have enough metallic iron in its atmosphere - at least 50 per cent of the iron content of the Sun - otherwise it is unlikey that rocky planets similar to Earth would form around it.
The stars also had to be at the right stage of stellar evolution, which eliminated red giant stars or dwarf stars, which would not be suitable for complex life to survive for very long on a nearby planet.
"We are intentionally biased towards stars that are like the Sun. These are places I'd want to live if God were to put our planet around another star," Dr Turnbull said.
Jill Tarter of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) Foundation, a privately-funded attempt to detect the non-natural radio signals from advanced civilisations in space, said her organisation will now train its radio telescopes on the five shortlisted stars.
Dr Turnbull has also identified the star she believes is most likely to have a companion planet similar to the Earth where simple life could evolve because of the presence of liquid water - thought to be necessary for life.
Her top choice is epsilon Indi A, a star that is only one tenth as bright as the Sun about 11.8 light years away in the constellation Indus. It has enough intrinsic luminosity to suggest good prospects for a habitable zone but not so bright as to overwhelm attemps to take images of the planet with telescopes.
Dr Turnbull said that the shortlist of habitable zone stars with either advanced civilisations or Earth-like planets is by no means definitive but a reasonably accurate guide for other astronomers to follow.
"There are inevitable uncertainties in how we understand these stars. If I took 100 stars, it would be very difficult for me to tell which one is the best," she said.
However, there are certain conditions that would preclude the development of life and by concentrating Seti's efforts on the best candidates, scientists are more likely to get results even though no one is quite sure what will be done if astronomers ever detect a radio signal from ET.
"There is no formal policy of what to do if we discover extraterrestrial life," Dr Turnbull said.
Top five stars for planets with advanced life
* beta CVn, a sun-like star about 26 light years away in the constellation Canes Venatici
* HD 10307, another solar analogue about 42 light years away. It has almost the same mass, temperature and metallicity of the Sun. It also has a benign companion star.
* HD 211415, about half the metal content of Sun and a bit cooler, this star is just a little farther away than HD 10307.
* 18 Sco, a popular target for proposed planet searches. The star, in the constellation Scorpio, is almost an identical twin to the Sun.
* *51 Pegasus. Already famous. In 1995, Swiss astronomers reported they had detected the first planet beyond our solar system in orbit around 51 Pegasus. An American team soon verified the finding of the Jupiter-like object
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article346547.ece
Robert Bradbury's Favorite or Memorable Quotes http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/quotes.html
Creation date: circa 1996
Last Modified: 11 August 2005
"But here is still more of the truth and all I’ll try to say about it.
Although long life can be a burden, mostly it is a blessing.
It gives time enough to learn,
time enough to think,
time enough not to hurry,
time enough to love."
-- Lazarus Long, in Time Enough For Love (1973) by Robert Heinlein
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"The world needs uninhibited thinkers, not afraid of far out speculations;
it also needs conservative hard-headed engineers who can make their dreams come true."
-- Arthur C. Clarke, Chapter 1: "In the Hall of the Knights" from
1984 Spring: A Choice of Futures, Ballantine (1984)
derived from a speech at the 8th Marconi Fellowship Award, 11/6/82.
"Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable."
-- Alan Harrington, The Immortalist (1969)
"The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying."
-- Sir Thomas Browne
There are many virtues to growing old. (long pause)
I'm just trying to think of what they are.
-- Somerset Maugham at 80
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.
I want to achieve it through not dying."
-- Woody Allen
"Life is either a glorious adventure or nothing"
-- Helen Keller (?)
"If you do not change the direction in which you are going,
you are likely to end up where you are headed."
-- Chinese Proverb
"That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones,
which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been,
into every corner of our minds."
-- John Maynard Keynes
"The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest his patients
in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."
-- Thomas A. Edison
"...(that) any general system of conveying passengers would ... go at a velocity
exceeding ten miles an hour, or thereabouts, is extremely improbable"
-- Thomas Treadgold, railway engineer (1835)
"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
-- D. P. Barron
"The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might suspect, by the ignorant mass --which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught--but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a two-fold threat to academic mediocrities; it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole laboriously constructed intellectual edifice may collapse."
-- Arthur Koestler in The Sleepwalkers
"The history of human civilisation and social development is strongly intertwined with the pervasive role of MATERIALS--
namely, the substances that are accessible to mankind and can be processed to exhibit the desired properties for making things."
-- Lawrence H. Van Vlack, author of Elements of Materials Science and Engineering
"When we die, we die - finally and completely and forever."
from The Faith of an Atheist by George Liles,
written about Cornell Biology Prof. William Provine.
"MD" Magazine, March, 1994 pg. 60
"It is impossible to make significant change by force.
The only way to make significant change is to make the thing you want to change obsolete."
-- R. Buckminster Fuller
"There is infinite hope, but not for Man."
-- Frank Kafka, Holocaust Century Fabulist
from David Zindell's Neverness, pg 1.
"If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed,
I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only
persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm."
-- Marcus Aurelius, MEDITATIONS, VI, 21 (courtesy of Chris Russo)
"Drosam pieder pasaule" (The world belongs to the brave.)
-- a Latvian proverb (courtesy of Amara Graps)
"The deterioration of the environment produced by technology is a technological problem
for which technology has found, is finding and will continue to find solutions."
-- Sir Peter Brian Medawar
"Be happy while you're living, for no matter how long you live, you're a longer time dead."
-- Scottish Proverb (courtesy of J. R. Molloy)
"Impossible is a word humans use far too often."
-- Seven of Nine (courtesy of Adam Beberg)
"The more you love, the more you can love-and the more intensely you love.
Nor is there any limit on how many you can love.
If a person had time enough, he could love all of the majority who are decent and just."
-- Robert A. Heinlein (Time Enough For Love)
"You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place."
-- Jonathan Swift (courtesy of Alan Eliasen)
"The best way to predict the future is to create it."
-- Peter F. Drucker
"Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves possess."
-- Gandalf the Grey (J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings")
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-- Robert Frost, Harper’s Magazine, December 1920
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
-- Max Plank, from the Scientific Autobiography of Max Plank
"The transfer of allegiance from one paradigm to another is a conversion experience that cannot be forced."
-- Thomas Kuhn
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."
-- Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
"The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur."
-- Alfred North Whitehead
"62,400 repetitions make one truth."
-- Aldous Huxley in Brave New World
"It doesn't matter whether it is a white cat or a black cat.
As long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat."
- Deng Xiaoping
"That there's none so blind
As those who will not see."
-- The Moody Blues, I Know You're Out There Somewhere
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal,
not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,
but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion
and sacrifice and endurance."
-- William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech
"The idea is to die young as late as possible."
-- Ashley Montague
"I'll Sleep when I'm dead."
-- Warren Zevon (1947-2003)
"....
Harry Stamper: What's your contingency plan?
Truman: Contingency plan?
Harry Stamper: Your backup plan. You gotta have some kind of backup plan, right?
Truman: No, we don't have a back up plan, this is, uh...
Harry Stamper: And this is the best that you c - that the government, the U.S. government could come up with? I mean, you're NASA for crying out loud, you put a man on the moon, you're geniuses! You're the guys that're thinking shit up! I'm sure you got a team of men sitting around somewhere right now just thinking shit up and somebody backing them up! You're telling me you don't have a backup plan, that these eight boy scouts right here, that is the world's hope, that's what you're telling me?
Truman: Yeah.
..."
-- Script from the movie Armageddon (~1998)
"...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons..."
-- Popular Mechanics (March 1949)
--------------------------------------------------------------
"On one mission, Mr. Johnston's chopper and a second Black Hawk carried six dead American soldiers, which would have been an impossible fit if their bodies had not been so broken from the bomb blasts."
-- Juliet Macur in "The Heavy Burden of Retrieving Fallen Americans in Iraq", The New York Times October 1, 2005.
--------------------------------------------------------------
WWW Quotations Sources
Thinkexist.com Quotes
Dr. Didier Müller: Murphy's Laws and Corollaries
Adam L. Beberg: Words of Wisdom
Famous quotes showing a lack of foresight from Permanent.com
William Horton, "Horseless Carriage Thinking", American Society for Information Science (8 Apr 2000).
Negative Science and "The Outlook for the Flying Machine", Essays of an Information Scientist 3:155-166 (1977)
Robert Bradbury's Grand Unified Theory of Aging http://www.fightaging.org/archives/000071.php
Matrioshka Brain - Robert Bradbury
A Matrioshka Brain is a megascale structure constructed at atomic scale limits. It is essentially a Dyson Shell supercomputer, that uses all of the energy a star produces and all of the material in a solar system for "computronium". Because of their size, immense observational and computational abilities, Matrioshka Brains should have longevities at least as long as those of stars (~1014 years for smaller stars).
Whether or not Matrioshka Brains or similar structures exist in our galaxy currently is presently unknown. As discussed in the papers below, the astronomical evidence lies someplace between provocative and suggestive. Even should they not currently exist, they are worthy of further study because it is likely that humans will possess the technological capability of building one in our solar system or around nearby stars within the next century.
Some may ask how does a Matrioshka Brain differ from a Dyson Shell? The answer is that the original concept, as envisioned by Freeman Dyson, was a single layer of habitats for human beings orbiting the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Given the material requirements of "habitats" it is possible that a civilization may be required to construct them in such a way that the star they surround would remain visible. (This may be why anthropocentric SETI searches for Dyson Shells point their telescopes and radio receivers at visible stars. Alternatively this may just be a problem that insufficient thought has been devoted to the evolution of technological civilizations.) A Matrioshka Brain, in contrast to a Dyson Shell, is a set of nested shells (like the nested Russian Matryoshka Dolls) that surrounds a star most likely from orbits that would range from inside Mercury's to outside Neptune's in our solar system. The material requirements of its computronium are sufficiently low that there is nothing to prevent the civilization from completely harvesting all of the more useful energy produced by the star resulting in it being essentially invisible at visible wavelengths. The computronium would support advanced technological civilizations whose thought architectures and capabilities go far [really far(!)] beyond those found in human brains and humanity as they currently exist.
One way to think about Matrioshka Brains is to ask the question, "What is the highest capacity thought machine (computer) that can be constructed using the smallest scale technology (e.g. molecular nanotechnology) within a solar system?" The basis for discussing Matrioshka Brains is to adhere to generally accepted laws of physics and forego the invention of new laws (something that is required for some lines of thought in Science Fiction).
http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/index.html
Robert Bradbury's CURRICULUM VITAE
Last Updated: July 29, 2005
Full Name: Robert John Bradbury
Born: 5 October, 1956
Contact Information:
Address: Aeiveos Corporation, PO Box 31877, Seattle, WA, 98103
Phone: (206) 782-9474
Email: bradbury@aeiveos.com
Education:
1974-1977 Harvard University, Applied Mathematics
1988-1991 University of Washington, Microbiology and Biochemistry
1992-2000 Attended more than 70 professional conferences on various topics including aging and anti-aging therapeutics, bioastronomy, biotechnology, cancer, computer science, demography, free radicals, genomics, gerontology, gene therapy, gravitational microlensing, MEMS, molecular nanotechnology, telescope engineering and transhumanism.
Professional Experience:
1975-1978 Programmer, Commercial Union Leasing Corporation, New York, NY
1979-1980 Development Manager, Graphics Management Systems, New York, NY
1980-1981 Consultant, Yourdon, Inc., New York, NY
1981-1983 Consultant, Time Inc., New York, NY
1981-1982 Consultant, Oracle Corporation, Menlo Park, CA
1983-1987 UNIX Development Manager, Oracle Corporation, Menlo Park, CA
1987-1988 Consultant, Oracle Corporation, Redwood City, CA
1996-1997 Founder & President, Aeiveos Sciences Group
1992-2001 Founder & President, Aeiveos Corporation
2001-2003 Founder & CEO, Robiobotics LLC
Professions: Systems Analyst, Corporate Development Manager, Researcher
Programming Languages Known: Fortran, Basic, PPL, C, Bliss, SQL, Perl, 5+ assembly languages
Long-term Objectives:
Understand the processes involved in aging and promote research and technology development to indefinitely extend the longevity of as many human minds as possible. Further, to comprehend the evolution of organisms and civilizations towards increasing complexity and determine the limits of those processes.
Society and Board Memberships (past and present):
American Association for the Advancement of Science (www.aaas.org)
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (www.ieee.org)
International Society for Optical Engineering (www.spie.org)
Gerontological Society of America (www.geron.org)
American Aging Association, Member of the Board, VP-elect (www.americanaging.org)
LifeEx Technologies, Scientific Advisor (www.LifeEx.com)
Foresight Institute, Senior Associate (www.foresight.org)
Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, Senior Associate (www.imm.org)
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
A. PUBLISHED PAPERS - Peer Reviewed
Gaziev, A. I., Podlutsky, A. Ja., Panfilov, B.M., Bradbury, R., "Dietary supplements of antioxidants reduce hprt mutant frequency in splenocytes of aging mice," Mutat Res. 338(1-6):77-86 (Oct., 1995).
Sirota, N. P., Bezlepkin V. G., Kuznetsova E. A., Lomayeva M. G., Milonova I. N., Ravin V. K., Gaziev A. I., Bradbury R. J., "Modifying effect in vivo of interferon alpha on induction and repair of lesions of DNA of lymphoid cells of gamma-irradiated mice," Radiat Res. 146(1):100-5 (Jul, 1996).
Ushakova, T., Melkonyan, H., Nikonova, L., Mudrik, N, Gogvadze, V., Zhukova, A., Gaziev, A. I., Bradbury, R., "The effect of dietary supplements on gene expression in mice tissues," Free Radic. Biol. Med. 20(3):279-84 (1996).
Gaziev, A. I., Sologub, G. R., Fomenko, L. A., Zaichkina S. I., Kosyakova, N. I., Bradbury R. J., "Carcinogenesis Effect of vitamin-antioxidant micronutrients on the frequency of spontaneous and in vitro gamma-ray-induced micronuclei in lymphocytes of donors: the age factor," Carcinogenesis 17(3):493-9 (Mar, 1996).
Ushakova, T., Melkonyan, H., Nikonova, L., Afanasyev, V., Gaziev, A. I., Mudrik N, Bradbury, R., Gogvadze V., "Modification of gene expression by dietary antioxidants in radiation-induced apoptosis of mice splenocytes," Free Radic. Biol. Med. 26(7-8):887-91 (Apr, 1999).
Cirkovic, M. M., Bradbury, R. J., "Galactic Gradients, Postbiological Evolution and the Apparent Failure of SETI," [astro-ph/0506110] (June, 2005), submitted.
B. PUBLISHED PAPERS - Non-Peer Reviewed
Bradbury, R. J., "Life at the Limits of Physical Laws", SPIE 4273-32 OSETI III (Jan 2001). [Preprint: PS format]
Bradbury, R. J., "Dyson Shells: A Retrospective", SPIE 4273-27 OSETI III (Jan 2001). [Preprint: PS format]
Bradbury, R., "Life at the Limits of Physical Laws", "Frontiers of Life" (XIIèmes Rencontres de Blois) 25 June - 1st July, 2000.
C. BOOKS & PAPERS REVIEWED:
R. A. Freitas Jr., "Microbivores: Artificial Mechanical Phagocytes using Digest and Discharge Protocol," Zyvex Publication (March 2001). [local copy]
R. A. Freitas, "Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators with Public Policy Recommendations" (May, 2000).
Nanomedicine: Volume I: Basic Capabilities, Robert A. Freitas, Jr., Landes Bioscience (1999).
R. A. Freitas, "Respirocytes: A Mechanical Artificial Red Cell: Exploratory Design in Medical Nanotechnology" (1999).
Nanomedicine: Volume IIA: Biocompatibility, Robert A. Freitas, Jr., Landes Bioscience (1999).
D. POSTERS AND TALKS PRESENTED AT SCIENTIFIC MEETINGS:
Bradbury, R., "Life at the Limits of Physical Laws", presentation at "Frontiers of Life" (XIIèmes Rencontres de Blois) 25 June - 1st July, 2000.
Bradbury, R., "Microlensing meets SETI: Observations of evolutionary endpoints?", Microlensing 2000, Cape Town, South Africa, 21-25 February 2000.
Bradbury, R., "Dyson Shell Supercomputers as the Dominant 'Life Form' in Galaxies", Bioastronomy 99: A New Era in Bioastronomy, Kohala Coast, Hawaii, 2-6 August 1999.
E. INVITED PRESENTATIONS:
"Biotechnology & Nanomedicine: Molecular Technologies for the Extension of Life", presentation to the Medical Technology Interest Group (MTIG) of the Medical School and Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, November 6, 2000.
"Nanomedicine - Molecular Technology for the Extension of Life", Physicians CME seminar at the Valley Regional Medical Center in Brownsville, Texas, July 20, 2000.
"Genomes, Biobots and Nanobots: Implications for 21st Century Medicine", 7th International Conference on Anti-Aging and Biomedical Technologies, December 11-13, 1999.
"Genomes, Biobots and Nanobots: Implications for 21st Century Medicine", Extro4, August 7-8, 1999.
"Paths to Immortality", presentation Extro3, August 9-10, 1997.
F. MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
Circa 1978-1979, in conjunction with Forrest Howard, wrote a PDP-10 simulator that ran on a PDP-11/70 computer. This allowed the compilation of the DEC PDP-11 Fortran compiler (written in Bliss-11) on a PDP-11 (minicomputer) rather than a PDP-10 (mainframe). The simulation of a PDP-10 with 36-bit words, on a PDP-11 with 16-bit words required more than an insignificant amount of ingenuity.
Circa 1981-1983, adapted the Yourdon C-compler to several computer architectures including the IBM Series-1 and System 370 and the National Semiconductor 16000 chip.
From 1982-1988 was responsible for the adaptation of the Oracle Relational Database management system to more than 10 different computer hardware and operating system combinations. Was responsible for the development of the tools that ensured the portability of the Oracle Relational Database Management system across a variety of systems.
During 1985-1987, participated in the ANSI X3J11 committee to standardize the C programming language. Several library function specifications (memmove, memcpy) were a direct result of my contributions.
Establishing the Aeiveos Corporation Research Library Web Site (www.aeiveos.com). Since 1993, before most people had heard of the "WWW", this has been one of the largest collections of information related to aging and longevity available to researchers and the public. Development of the Aeiveos Library was terminated circa 1998 because other larger organizations (e.g. The National Library of Medicine, The Life Extension Foundation and eMedicine.com) fulfilled many of the functions the Aeiveos Library previously fulfilled.
From 1992-1995, established a number of collaborations with Russian research groups involving gene cloning, differential gene expression studies, the creation of transgenic animals for bioreactors, dietary supplement studies directed towards the reduction of DNA damage and the development of high throughput DNA sequencing devices. A patent was secured on methods for the transformation of the mammary glands of animals for the production of foreign proteins.
Founding, securing $8 million in financing for, and managing successfully through the initial startup phases, Aeiveos Sciences Group. During 1996 and 1997, ASG was the second largest company doing research in the molecular biology of aging (after Geron Corporation). The scientific advisory board for ASG included noted professionals in the field of aging and biomedical research, including Dr. Stuart Aaronson, Dr. Steven Austad, Dr. Ranajit Chakraborty, Dr. George Martin, Dr. Michael McClelland and Dr. Robert Robbins, and Dr. Jan Vijg. ASG was a pioneer in the exploration of the genetics of aging (genotyping) and studies of differential gene expression in aging. ASG ceased operations in early 1998 due to uncertainties regarding the property rights on genes derived from the human genome and the improper timing regarding the methods and scale of research required to understand and develop interventions in age-related pathologies.
From 1997-2001, developed the concepts involved in a realistic supercomputer architecture spanning solar system sized scales, constructed using molecular nanotechnology (a Matrioshka Brain). Educated scientists such as those involved in the exploration of currently unexplained astronomical phenomena and those searching for extraterrestrial civilizations regarding the probable forms that advanced technological civilizations will adopt.
From 2001-2003, developed a business plan and started Robiobotics, LLC to accomplish the development of "whole genome engineering" and attempted to obtain in excess of $10 million in private financing for this effort. Due to the poor financial markets it proved impossible to secure financing. During this period several other NIH and DOE funded companies were able to secure funding for similar purposes. It is my belief that such technologies will be necessary to address both retarding the rate of aging as well as potentially reduce the damage caused by the cryonics freezing processes.
http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/CV.html
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