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Is the Moon Alive?
By WILLIAM OREM • Aug. 18, 2008 @ 18:03 GMT
 | | image: stewartde |
Fascinating late-summer reading for FQXi-fans can be found here, in a Time magazine article from December . . . 1967. The article outlines the various precautions that our boys in the Apollo space program would be taking against inadvertently bringing moonlings back to Earth – that is, against accidentally transporting indigenous lunar bacteria home.
Most folks I talk to are unfamiliar with this part of Apollo and find it a bit hard to credence. Isn’t the moon just a “dirty beach,” even geologically inactive, the quintessential dead rock floating in space? The fact is that we all pretty much assume this, but we really don’t know.
Which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Consider the fact that we didn’t actually know until the last decade whether there was water ice preserved in deep craters on the moon. This is fairly basic information. When the lunar module landed in July of ’69, Apollo planners now admit, it wasn’t by any means certain that it wouldn’t just keep sinking into meters of dust. There’s a lot we are guessing about with regard to our nearest neighbor.
Besides, the risk of microbial cross-contamination from other words is an entirely sensible concern, as anybody involved with the Phoenix Lander missions can tell you. Since the rovers aren’t coming back, no one at Phoenix has to worry about a sudden outbreak of bacterial or -- heavens! -- viral infection stemming from the red planet. (One wonders whether alien viruses would be able to infect human hosts, say if they had a different DNA coding system, but who wants to find out?) Rather, their concern has tended in the other direction. One of the most important things to rule out in scooping up soil samples on Mars is the possibility -- increased, by the way, by the damaged biobarrier -- that any living things you find were actually transported by your machine to Mars in the first place.
So could we accidentally carry disease across the intervening hundreds of kilometers of space in the same way we unwittingly carried pathogens across the oceans?
Here’s NASA on Apollo 11:
"After splashdown, the crew donned biological isolation garments and exited the CM into a rubber boat, where they were scrubbed down with an iodine solution to protect against “lunar germs.” They were then retrieved by helicopter and taken to the primary recovery ship, where they arrived 63 minutes after splashdown. The CM was recovered 125 minutes later . . .
The crew, the recovery physician, and a recovery technician, along with lunar samples, entered the Mobile Quarantine Facility aboard the recovery ship for transport to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory in Houston."
Reasonable as it sounds, the quarantine procedure was probably full of holes (the crew was scrubbed down with iodine?) and was in any event dropped for everything after Apollo 14. Anyway, how could it not be inadequate? The crew of Apollo 11 underwent a waiting period to see whether anybody got sick, but of course that waiting period was based on terrestrial models for infection (see “terran” thinking). For all we know, waiting a few weeks to see whether anyone felt bad was as reasonable as the old European habit of maintaining hygiene by avoiding baths.
Granted, the lunar surface is hostile to life, being 110 degrees or -200C, depending in whether its day or night, as well as subject to direct cosmic rays. But we already know of extremophiles on Earth that laugh off seemingly lethal doses of radiation. Deinococcus radiodurans’ DNA, blasted apart by high-energy photons, simply rezips itself. We have found extremophiles now in arctic ice, in hot springs, even living in acid. For all we know, the lunar surface could be downright pleasant for some life-forms, at least in a dormant state. And one has to wonder whether a quick scrub down with iodine in an open-air boat would really have spelled the end for any of these guys.
The Chinese and Japanese have been courting the moon recently with orbiters, and recurrent talk of a Chinese landing in 2020 has not been quelled by suspicion that this may prove economically infeasible. The U.S. still has a return to the moon on the books at NASA, though our resources are currently being used up in other ventures. But the day will dawn, and not too long from now. Should we be thinking again about life on our nearest neighbor before we begin making travel plans once more?
 | | image: l*u*z*a |
Foundational Physics Apartheid?
By ZEEYA MERALI • Aug. 12, 2008 @ 15:48 GMT
I recently read the hugely enjoyable novel “Final Theory”, a physics thriller in which the hero chases after Einstein’s long-lost Theory of Everything. It seemed like harmless summer reading, but a new article on the rise of a “Scientific Apartheid” made me rethink what the content of the book could imply for future research into foundational physics.
The novel, by Mark Alpert, is based on the intriguing idea that Einstein fulfilled his ambition and discovered a Theory of Everything. (FQXi members may be disappointed to learn that it neither involves string theory nor is it exceptionally simple.) However, mindful of the horrors that physics unleashed in the form of the atomic bomb, Einstein chose to keep his final theory a secret. The story follows science historian David Swift’s adventures as he tries to piece the theory together, while evading various sinister organisations who want the theory for their own nefarious purposes, which could threaten the world.
I’d highly recommend the book (and I’d also be interested in what people think of the physics in the novel). After putting it down, however, I didn’t spend too much time seriously questioning whether governments should be controlling who is involved in foundational physics research, for the safety of the world. But then I came across an article, to appear in Physics Today, by Ahmad Shariati of Alzahra University in Tehran, Iran, suggesting that governments may soon be doing just that.
Shariati’s article is written in response to “Learning to build the bomb,” by Alisa Carrigan, an expert on international security at FirstWatch International. Carrigan calls on the international community to be more vigilant over the problems of “knowledge proliferation,” as scientists come to the US and Europe from hostile nations to study nuclear physics.
I’m not sure if Carrigan is calling for anything that new. In today’s political climate it is already harder for scientists and students specialising in “high risk” disciplines to come from certain nations to work or study in Western countries. Last month, for instance, a “terrorism suspect” was banned from enrolling in a high school chemistry class in the UK, while an Egyptian nuclear physicist is suing the US Department of Energy over the revocation of his security clearance.
The question that Shariati raises in his article is, if we accept the need for Carrigan’s “knowledge nonproliferation treaty,” where is this going to end? He notes that you can’t just stop at nuclear physics, or even just chemistry, chemical engineering, pharmaceutical and biological sciences, physics, or mechanics. To the list, Shariati adds number theory, software engineering, and quantum computing, which have applications in cryptography and so could, say, open airline computer systems up to attack. Throw in Alpert’s novel linking a theory of everything to world destruction, and research into any aspect of foundational physics could be classed as a threat to international security.
Shariati argues that if we close all these research areas off to nations we don’t trust, we are creating a “scientific apartheid” where “good” people are allowed to have knowledge and must stop others from gaining it.
How far can and will this be enforced? Even if you control the movement of scientists, how can you stop the movement of knowledge through books and published papers to other countries? It brings to mind the old joke about school teacher who is thrown off an airplane for carrying a protractor, slide-rule, and other weapons of math instruction. Except the way that Shariati tells it, the joke doesn’t sound so funny:
“An inevitable conclusion in line with Carrigan’s arguments would be that good people should control other people in the sense that if other people were approaching dangerous knowledge (even by themselves), good people should prevent them even if necessary by force, even if necessary by getting rid of the scientists of other people and destroying their scientific facilities, including their libraries and equivalent digital resources.”
It does seem that we are headed down a slippery slope. Turning back to Alpert’s book linking foundational physics research with a threat to international security, will FQXi be asked to refuse funds to promising applicants from undesirable locations, in the future? I sincerely hope not. (Incidentally, you can check out the latest FQXi grant awardees here.)
And in such a nightmare scenario, could Alpert be arrested for inciting students in hostile nations to research foundational physics, threatening the safety of the world? Again, I hope not. Not least because I hear that he is working on a second novel, and I am very much looking forward to reading it.
 | | www.jaxTshirts.com |
Shutdown of the LHC, by Kevin Black
By ZEEYA MERALI • Aug. 5, 2008 @ 16:27 GMT
As the LHC supposedly gears up, Harvard physicist Kevin Black, based at CERN, investigates rumors that the particle accelerator may, in fact, soon be shut down—by ripples from the future.
From Kevin Black:
 | | (Image: CERN) |
I came across a bizarre paper recently suggesting that the LHC might be shut down. Not because of the funding cuts that have been threatening particle physics projects around the world, nor because of law suits accusing the LHC of threatening life on Earth. (Not even because we at the LHC have recently been accused of having far too much fun rapping.)
No, the paper suggested that future effects caused by the production of particles, such as the Higgs, could ripple backwards in time and prevent the LHC from ever operating.
If it hadn't been written by two very well respected and accomplished theoretical physicists, I would have stopped reading at the title alone:"Test of Effect from Future in Large Hadron Collider; A Proposal". To be completely honest, the title reads like titles that occasionally appear in my inbox—“Relativity Principle Untenable," "Quantum Mechanics a Hoax," and other nerdy versions of the emails from the supposed attorney of my long-lost Nigerian uncle who apparently has died and left me millions of dollars, if I can only send him $50,000 so that he can get it to me.
But I didn't stop. I read the article. I read it for another reason other than the somewhat awkwardly sounding title and not just because the authors, Holger Nielsen, of the University of Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya, of Kyoto University, are somewhat famous. I read it because when I come across such things it tends to remind me of the first time I learned about quantum mechanics. To be honest, if it hadn't come from a professor at a university and a published text book I would have thought that the whole thing was some sort of a scam as well. I mean, really? Sometimes it acts as a wave and sometimes it acts as a particle? The first time I heard about wave/particle duality I was expecting to be asked to send the authors money (perhaps to Nigeria?).
So what did the article say? Well, it started out with a reasonable enough point. One of the basic assumptions of classical physics is that time flows in one direction and that when describing a physical system one needs to know the equations of motion and the initial conditions in order to predict the future behavior of a classical system.
However, quantum mechanics changes this a bit. Classical mechanics can be formulated in such a way that one sets up an “action” integral. The solution to the physical system can be expressed as the path that minimizes the action integral. It turns out that in quantum mechanics one needs to not simply take one path—but take the sum over all possible paths. For example, if you want to work out how a photon gets from a lightbulb to your eye, you need to take into account not just its straight-line trajectory, but contributions of all possible paths it could have taken, including paths where the photon bounces round the room. It's a bit strange, but it seems to work and 60 years+ of detailed experiments have confirmed this description over and over again to remarkable quantitative precision.
The authors of this paper claim to show that other terms can be added to the quantum mechanical action that are consistent with current theory and experiment. However, some of these possible terms include conditions in the future that need to be taken into account and summed over. That is to say, what happens in the future could (according to this paper) affect what happens in the present.
Why the LHC? The authors argue that these sorts of time-violating interactions could be associated with whatever new particles we create at the LHC. For example, the production of a large number of Higgs particles in the future could have a backwards-in-time causal effect on the machine that produced them, stopping the machine from ever running. As possible “evidence” for such a backwards-in-time effect, the authors cite the now-canceled Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)—a particle accelerator that was meant to hunt the Higgs and was partially constructed in Texas before Congress pulled the plug on the project. As the authors write in their paper: “Such a cancellation after a huge investment is already in itself an unusual event that should not happen too often. We might take this event as experimental evidence for our model in which an accelerator with the luminosity and beam energy of the SSC will not be built.”
It’s as though the Higgs plays the role of the time traveler who goes back to the past and murders his grandfather, thus preventing his own birth.
Now, I must admit that this is where I started to get a bit skeptical. The authors go on to suggest that the LHC is also under threat from a possible “miraculous” shutdown caused by the backward influence of particles like the Higgs, which it may create in the future: “Since the LHC has a performance approaching the SSC, it suggests that also the LHC may be in danger of being closed under mysterious circumstances.”
Visions of the X-Files’ Fox Mulder launching into some hour-long diatribe about future conditions (and of course government conspiracies) started to appear. But I read on nonetheless, becoming a little bit more amused and a lot more confused as I tried to finish the paper.
 | | (Image: margot mystic) |
In order to make it topical they proposed an experiment. Play a game of cards—a kind of particle physics tarot—to determine if future LHC conditions could affect the draw of the cards. The idea being that if the cards were arranged to represent different possible LHC outcomes—discovery of the Higgs particle, discovery of SUSY, failure or cancellation of the LHC, destruction of the world by the creation of mini-black holes, etc—then what actually happens in the future could affect the outcome of the card drawn now.
As crazy as it sounds, it’s at least a novel idea. Certainly, time travel and causality violation are topics that physicists, such as FQXi’s Ken Olum, are seriously investigating (see “Charting the River of Time”); so why not look for backwards causation at the LHC?
As an experimentalist working at CERN, I’m ready to pull cards out of a hat in the name of science, even at the risk of prognosticating the demise of the LHC. However, I can't get my head around one basic thing. How can this possibly prove or disprove the theory? They went through some argument (which I can't say I completely understood) claiming that a concrete test of this idea could be put in place, but I am not convinced. Even if I pull the “shutdown card” and the LHC is indeed shut down, how will I know that this is proof and not just a strange coincidence?
Conventionally, scientific hypotheses are considered “scientific” if and only if they can be falsified by some experiment (at least in principle). That is to say, it may not be technically possible to conduct such an experiment right now but at least in principle such an experiment could be made. That's the part I couldn't get my head around. How could you ever design an experiment that would disprove future causal influence on a current condition? I just can't imagine how one could do that, but I am open to suggestions. Any ideas?
So, for now, I will just put down the paper and get back to the grind of my usual days—debugging software and trying to commission the ATLAS muon spectrometer. I will pass this paper off as quirky, but probably not likely to lead to any major discoveries. But then again, one day I might be teaching this experiment out of a text book to incredulous students who think I am trying to sell them the Brooklyn bridge...
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Kevin Black is a postdoc at Harvard University. He works with the ATLAS experiment at CERN, and sincerely hopes that LHC isn’t shut down any time soon.
The Nature of Time? You tell us.
By ANTHONY AGUIRRE • Aug. 4, 2008 @ 17:52 GMT
I believe that Henri Bergson, one of my favorite philosophers, once said that "Time is what prevents everything from happening at once." I've also heard it remarked that this clearly is not working anymore.
This isn't just a (true) comment on my own schedule, but also to point out that as well as announcing the results of the second round of large FQXi grants, we're also simultaneously very excited to launch FQXi's first essay contest, on "The Nature of Time."
I'm very much looking forward to hearing what some really careful thinkers really think about time (when encouraged by the possibility of some cash and fame) as well as to the opportunity to take part in what I hope will be a really fun and interesting discussion of a foundational question that is at once both intimately familiar and deeply mysterious. Have at it!
Finally, as another piece of current news, we're happy to welcome Zeeya Merali (from whom you've already seen blog entries) as both a new sometimes blogger and editor-in-chief of the FQXi community site.
A Close Encounter
By WILLIAM OREM • Aug. 4, 2008 @ 17:49 GMT
 | | image: Adam Baker |
What a great way to wrap up the summer. Cassini finds liquid hydrocarbons on Titan, making it the only other place we know of with natural lakes and charging up the search for life outside Earth. Phoenix Lander finds water ice in the Martian soil, adding credence to the suspicion that microbes might once have evolved there. And, oh yeah, an Apollo astronaut admits that the government has been covering up alien encounters for sixty years.
You heard right. Grays are back in the news this month, though lamentably they make no appearance in the new X-Files movie, which I feel obliged to warn readers against seeing (unless you enjoy being simultaneously bored and nauseated). This time, however, their existence was promoted almost offhandedly as established fact by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, MIT graduate and the sixth human being to walk on the moon.
Dr. Mitchell’s commentary, which can be heard here, was made on Britain’s Kerrang radio. Among the highlights:
'I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real . . .
'It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it . . .
'I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited.'
Heads spun – mine did, anyway – when this one hit the blogosphere. And that’s my fault; I fell prey to one of the most common errors in thinking, known in logician circles as ipse dixit.
Ipse dixit, Latin for “he said it himself,” is a mistake in reasoning that occurs when we confuse authority in one field for authority in all fields. I happen to agree with many of Albert Einstein’s opinions on human rights and nuclear non-proliferation, but if I accepted them on the grounds that he was a brilliant physicist, I would be guilty of ipse dixit: physics and politics are different endeavors. Celebrity in particular may often be confused for credibility, especially in our current media-saturated environment. For the most part this confusion results in little more dangerous than Britney telling us the administration is truthful and Bruce telling us it isn’t. But every time we think it sensible that Angeline Jolie should represent the U.N., or that Bono should spearhead a campaign for African debt relief, we confuse credibility as a pop star for credibility, however well intentioned, in vastly different pursuits.
 | | image: Daquella manera |
Things are a bit more subtle in Dr. Mitchell’s case. You take your chances listening to Dr. Phil, who isn’t, you know, an actual “physician” or anything; Dr. Mitchell has literally been to the moon. But that’s still ipse dixit, because walking on Earth’s satellite doesn’t give one special authority to pronounce on all things outer space. The mild shock we experience when hearing a high-level NASA employee of any sort seemingly outing a worldwide governmental conspiracy to conceal alien contact is lessened somewhat when we discover that during his space flight Mitchell spent time trying to establish psychic contact with friends on Earth. It trembles when we read that he feels he was cured of kidney cancer by a teenage “remote healer.” And it crashes like a saucer at Roswell when we find that after his exemplary service on Apollo 14 he went on to co-found the Institute of Noetic Science, which conducts research into ESP, parapsychology and other “paranomal” stuff.
So astronauts turn out to be actual people, a fact I have celebrated on this blog before (as well as the fact that there are foundational questions we already know can’t pay off and so aren’t worth the asking). They are susceptible to the same faulty reasoning which we all, as a species, inherit. This doesn’t, of course, mean Dr. Mitchell’s claims about aliens are false -- to leap to that conclusion would be to commit another error in reasoning, this time the “genetic fallacy” -- but that any such claim must stand or fall based on its own merits. We should also keep in mind that such an extreme claim would require rigorous and compelling evidence indeed.
Unfortunately, those merits turn out to be nothing much. Dr. Mitchell is personally convinced that some of the UFOs people have seen are of extraterrestrial origin (ipse dixit), he’s talked to people who have met aliens (hearsay), unnamed intelligence people have told him (hearsay) that they believe (ipse dixit) the Roswell crash was real, and so on. There’s nothing new here, except perhaps the suggestion that the Vatican is in on the secret and is gradually building a PR campaign to make the inevitable revelation of E.T. contact less threatening to their ideology. Indeed, given the almost commonplace nature of this narrative – Roswell, grays, government secrecy, Phoenix lights, smoke-filled room -- it’s hard to see in what way this information has been “covered up."
But wait. Is there nevertheless something Dr. Mitchell *has* experienced first-hand – something profoundly unusual on which can he speak as a direct witness? Yes. And it is something, as it turns out, far more interesting than Scully and Mulder. In his own words:
“I was coming back from the moon after completing a successful mission on the moon. My job was being responsible for the lunar spacecraft for the lunar surface activities. So on the way home, my successful job had been mostly completed and we were just coming home. We still had experiments and work to do, but the big stuff was done.
“We were orientated such and rotating in order to keep the thermal balance of the spacecraft so that every two minutes you could see the Earth, the moon, the sun and a 360-degree panorama of the heavens came through the window every two minutes. That's powerful stuff, particularly since it's space. Without the atmosphere to block, the stars don't twinkle, and there's 10 times as many as you could possibly see on Earth because of the lack of interference and it's much closer to what you could see through the Hubble Telescope these days, with those pictures and I hope you've looked at some of those: it's overwhelming -- and I realized as that happened, because I do have a PhD from MIT and I studied astronomy at Harvard and MIT and knew that molecules of matter in my body and in the spacecraft and in my partners' bodies were made in some ancient generation of stars. That's where matter is created.
“Suddenly I realized that the molecules in my body were created in an ancient generation of stars and suddenly that became personal and visceral, not intellectual and I had never had this experience. It was accompanied by bliss, an ecstasy I had never experienced.”
This rapture of the skies changed Dr. Mitchell, and he has been pursuing its implications for his own life ever since. I don’t follow him, or others, when those implications lead in what I consider irrational directions, but I applaud him for having both the intelligence and the largeness of soul to respond so completely to an experience of this magnitude. I feel this rapture myself not infrequently -- when looking through a backyard scope on sharp, clear night in winter; when discussing foundational research projects with FQXi grantees who are studying micro black holes or quantum reality or the possibility of a multiverse; when contemplating our slowly evolving awareness as it has proceeded through philosophers and scientists from Democritus and Aristotle up to Spinoza, Newton, Einstein. It is the sense of immensity, both internal and external, that is the incalculable gift of science—the awareness that we are part of an infinite nature.
I envy Dr. Mitchell his close encounter with the Milky Way. The experience must have been immense.
 | | image: image editor |
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