As the propatainment media hysteria over the Lieber-Wuhan-Fauci (rhymes with Grouchy) virus continues, and as everyone throws in their two cents on what they think is going on and what “they” hope to accomplish with all of this, I’ve been hearing from teachers. I have a few friends who are teachers, and there are a few members of this site who are teachers. And I can assure the regular readers of my blogs, that without exception, none of them were in favor of the Common Core curriculum and agenda being promoted by Darth Hillary, Jeb What’s-his-Name, and Billious Hates.
Most of their criticism of the whole miserable thing was its reliance on computer standardized tests that were “adaptive”, i.e., that in addition to the normal multiple guess questions on standardized tests composed by “experts”, the tests would be adapted to individual students by computer algorithms, algorithms again prepared by “experts.” The problem with standardized tests, as I and so many others have so often pointed out, is that multiple guess questions do not require reasoning, nor that one shows one’s reasoning. They are tailor-made to present narratives, and this particularly so in the so-called “soft” disciplines like history. Consider the following hypothetical question on a standardized test for, say, late elementary school or middle school: “Who killed President John Kennedy?” You know that the establishment edugarchy – a word we’ll return to in a moment – will push the narrative of the Warren Report. Answer: “Lee Harvey Oswald.” Never mind all the vast amounts of research that has been done since that event that have raised serious questions about that event.
But as my co-author Gary Lawrence and I pointed out in our book about Common Core, Rotten to the (Common) Core, the standardized tests had massive problems even in their presentations of questions and answers for the so-called hard sciences. In the book, we pointed out a controversy in the late 1950s and early 1960s between mathematician Banesh Hoffman – a friend of Albert Einstein – and the Educational Testing Service over some questions about physics where the Educational Testing Service’s “correct answer” to a question was manifestly and seriously flawed. Hoffman wrote articles about the controversy at the time which ran in various national magazines and newspapers. All to no avail. The Educational Testing Service’s explanations of their “reasoning” for insisting a wrong answer was correct, only dug themselves into further difficulties (and please note, they were allowed to explain their process of reasoning for insisting a wrong answer was in fact correct, while their test subjects were not allowed to do so). We call this attitude and the people behind it the “edugarchy.”
And all of this before Common Core’s “adaptive” tests.
So what’s the goal? Get everyone addicted to “computer books” and the easy sound-bite of a google search, and call that “research”, just so long as you agree with the promoted narrative (and with Google designing the search algorithms, how could it be anything but?). And along the way, reduce teachers to classroom proctors for standardized tests, break the teachers’ unions, and gain total control of a curriculum in a one-size-fits-all federal monster, which, incidentally, tracks you throughout your entire “academic” career.
So as this propatainment media hysteria over the Fauci-Lieber-Wuhan virus has taken down schools, and forced teachers into “distance learning” and “online classrooms,” I’ve been wondering whether or not that may have been one of the operational objectives of this whole plandemic. Just a few weeks ago, the pushback from parents and teachers against Common Core – not to mention its disastrous results as I’ve blogged about recently – were in, and Common Core was in trouble.
Not so any more, as one of our regular readers, N.S., caught this tweet from Andrew Cuomo, New York’s infanticide-approving governor:
As we prepare to reopen we have the opportunity to reimagine and build back our education system better.
We will work with the @gatesfoundation and develop a blueprint to do this.
Yes, what a great idea: let’s turn our edgykayshun system over to the man whose vaccines have allegedly killed people in India (which has banned him), who has invested in 3d printed “meat,” who has made his fortune by designing the world’s worst and most-virus ridden operating software and who wants to tell everyone how to deal with real viruses, and who was a major backer of the Common Core fiasco.
Funny how all this has worked out to his benefit, isn’t it?
Genius can be defined as a high IQ, extreme creativity, or something else altogether.
Credit: DeepArt
What makes a genius?
Perhaps for athletes, a genius is an Olympic medalist. In entertainment, a genius could be defined as an EGOT winner, someone who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award. For Mensa, the exclusive international society comprising members of “high intelligence,” someone who scores at or above the 98th percentile on an IQ or other standardized intelligence test could be considered genius.
The most common definition of genius falls in line with Mensa’s approach: someone with exceptional intelligence.
Making a genius
In his new science series “Genius” on PBS, Stephen Hawking is testing out the idea that anyone can “think like a genius.” By posing big questions — for instance, “Can we travel through time?” — to people with average intelligence, the famed theoretical physicist aims to find the answers through the sheer power of the human mind.
“It’s a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived,” Hawking said in a statement. “Being an optimist, I think they will.”
Optimism aside, answering a genius-level question does not a genius make — at least, not according to psychologist Frank Lawlis, supervisory testing director for American Mensa.
“The geniuses ask questions. They don’t know the answers, but they know a lot of questions and their curiosity takes them into their fields,” Lawlis told Live Science. “[They’re] somebody that has the capacity to inquire at that high level and to be curious to pursue that high level of understanding and then be able to communicate it to the rest of us.”
You must statistically be a genius to qualify for Mensa, with a measured intelligence that exceeds 98 percent of the rest of the population. However, Lawlis said even these tests can exclude some of the most brilliant of thinkers.
“The way you put items together to test for intelligence is that you already know the answer,” Lawlis said. “That’s the whole point. You create questions that have real answers.”
For instance, Albert Einstein would have likely done poorly on IQ tests, Lawlis said.
“It really comes down to thinking outside the box, and you really can’t test that,” Lawlis said. “When they take these tests, instead of directing their attention to the correct answer, they think of a jillion other answers that would also work, so consequently they get confused and do very poorly.”
A genius’s process
Consisting of a mixture of intelligence, creativity and contribution to society, genius is hard to pinpoint, said Dean Keith Simonton, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis.
In the Scientific American Mind magazine’s special issue on genius, Simonton hypothesized that all geniuses use the same general process to make their contributions to the world.
They start with a search for ideas, not necessarily a problem in need of a solution. From this search, geniuses will generate a number of questions, and begin a long series of trials and errors. They then find a solution, for a problem others may not have even been aware of.
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see,” Simonton said, quoting the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.
“Exceptional thinkers, it turns out, stand on common ground when they launch their arrows into the unknown,” Simonton said.
Inside the brain of a genius
In an attempt to “discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains,” psychiatrist and neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen at the University of Iowa used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.
Andreasen selected the creative subjects from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a control group from a mixture of professions. The control group was matched to the writers based on age, education and IQ — with both test and control groups averaging an IQ of 120, considered very smart but not exceptionally so, according to Andreasen.
Based on these controls, Andreasen looked for what separated the creative’s brains from the controls.
During the fMRI scans of participants, the subjects were asked to perform three different tasks: word association, picture association and pattern recognition. The creatives’ brains showed stronger activations in their association cortices. These are the most extensively developed regions in the human brain and help interpret and utilize visual, auditory, sensory and motor information.
Andreasen set out to find what else, in addition to brain processes, linked the 13 creatives’ brains.
“Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses,” Andreasen wrote in The Atlantic, referring to participants in her study. “Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill.”
And then there are people who fit into both categories.
What Andreasen found is that there is another common mark of creative genius: mental illness.
Through interviews and extensive research, Andreasen discovered that the creatives she studied had a higher rate of mental illness, which included a family history of mental illness. The most common diagnoses were bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety and alcoholism. The question now is whether the mental illness contributes to the genius or if it’s the other way around, she said.
In a study of the brain of one of the most famous geniuses in history, Einstein, scientists found distinct physical features, which may help to explain his genius, Live Science reported when the study came out in the journal Brain in 2012.
Previously unpublished photographs of the physicist’s brain revealed that Einstein had extra folding in his gray matter, the part of the brain that processes conscious thinking, the study researchers found. His frontal lobes, the brain regions tied to abstract thought and planning, had particularly elaborate folding.
“It’s a really sophisticated part of the human brain,” Dean Falk, study co-author and an anthropologist at Florida State University, told Live Science, referring to gray matter. “And [Einstein’s] is extraordinary.”
Be it high IQ, curiosity or creativity, the factor that makes someone a genius may remain a mystery. Though Mensa can continue to test for quantitative intelligence in areas such as verbal capacity and spatial reasoning, there is no test for the next Einstein, Lawlis said.
“I don’t know anybody that could really predict this extremely high level of intelligence and contribution,” Lawlis said. “That’s the mystery.”
Original article on Live Science.
– See more at: http://www.livescience.com/55028-what-makes-a-genius.html#sthash.Rw8Wqa9N.dpuf
Finally I can tell you what I’ve been working on over the past several months — even going back several years — now ready for somewhat of an announcement.
Be ready, this is huge, and I’m not joking in the least.
Reserve your judgement at the door please. I urge you to read with an open mind.
‘True Universal Time’ — Equation outline
by Dutchsinse (michael janitch)
I have developed an overall theory of “time” as it relates to Mass , Space, and Energy.
Not referring to “time on a clock”, but ACTUAL time of the greater Universe. Time as a force, not as you imagine it on a wall clock.
The actual physical force of “time” is what I am calling “True Universal Time” being the “time” in which Mass and Space operate.
This true universal time allows for Mass and Space to exist in the same way that Space allows for mass to exist, and conversely mass allowing for a TIME for the space to be occupied by said mass.
A 3D cube showing a XYZ axis in a “space”. In order for the cube to even be there to begin with, the space must be created, and the time forms as a byproduct of “the beginning” or “the first time” that the mass was placed into the space. Time would then be proportional to the amount of mass, and the distance the mass traveled through space, or the amount of space the mass occupies.
Mass, Space, and Time all must simultaneously exist in order for each other to exist.
You cannot have mass without a space for it to occupy, and you cannot have space without some kind of mass (or lack of mass) to define it (even if that space is a void it is still occupied by a void), and finally you cannot have mass in a space without a “time” for it to occupy that space.
You simply cannot have one without the other. All three must exist at once in order for mass to move through space.
In other words, you can’t have an object in a space without having ‘space’ to begin with.. and you can’t have space for a mass unless there is a TIME in which the mass was placed in the space to begin with.
The “time” of the placing of mass into a space would be called “beginning” I suppose, even if it is an energy placed into a void, the “time” the energy appeared in the void would be called “the first time” the energy was placed in the void.
Thus we have the “True Universal Time” concept which I have developed , which was born out of the aforementioned truths.
“True Universal Time”consists of other physical elements and is fully based upon the laws of physics.
Time is a physical byproduct of energy and distance through space (but yet a requirement for energy and space to exist).
Read on, don’t scoff yet!
We know that Mass = Energy from Einsteins famous E=mc2 proofs, and we know that space exists for multiple reasons… mainly we know there is “space” for mass to exist because we ourselves are made of “mass” too , and since we are here inside of this “space” which mass inhabits.
We call this space which mass inhabits “the universe“.
We know the space of the universe is subject to mass. We know that “space” , even though it is an empty “void” , somehow bends around objects with great mass.
How can “nothing” bend?
Obviously “space” and “void” aren’t exactly good terms to describe the Universe in which our mass inhabits. Clearly space itself (the Universe which supplies space for our masses to reside) is actually physical in some way.
If space is empty, how can a large mass warp it? People talk of Gravity causing the warping .. but never discuss WHAT IS WARPED?
They may say “space time” is warping.. but what is this “space time” made of ? I’ll address this question further down.
I digress in the rhetorical question asking.
Einstein proved mass = energy…. if Mass = Energy then we can replace everything above where it says “mass” and interchange it with “energy”.
Now we get to the actual “theory” portion which I will be presenting in detail at a later date via video…
What is this “time”, and what is it made of? How is it formed from Energy + Space?
“True Universal Time”, as I am understanding this concept, consists only of how “long” energy exists in space.
“True time” (for short) is = to Energy expended over a distance in space.
In an equation, it would appear simply at T = ED squared or T=ed2
This is my theory which I claim today publicly, not to be ripped by someone else.
Time = Energy over distance (squared). Or T=ED2
In the irony of ironies, I would like to point out Ted Theodore Logan now makes a lot more sense. (just a coincidence I promise).
Time is equal to Energy over a distance. Einsteins equations in relativity also back up my “theory” on this — as mass is accelerated to the speed of light, “time” begins to change.
Of course now we can understand that since Time=Energy X Distance — when mass passes through space “faster”, that “time” can be altered based upon the speed in which mass is pushed to.
If we want to know the “real” time of the Universe, we can apply T=ED in reverse to determine (T)
DE=T … Distance X Energy = “Time” …
ET=D ….. Energy X “Time” = Distance
TD = E … Time X Distance = Energy
Because Time is = to Energy over a distance , thus a constant energy over a greater distance = a longer time.
I’ll break down the hard equations and proofs in a video (when I get them done).
But for now, I’ve got to get it out there in case something happens to me (by accident or otherwise).
Based upon these ideas, of course the possibility and talk of “time travel” comes into play. Can T=ED be tweaked or applied to this famous concept of traveling “through” time.
We can determine that IF time = Energy over Distance ….. would it then be possible to apply Distance and Energy in such a way as to influence “Time” around the energy we are sending across the distance.
Now I know why TED rides in a phone booth!
In all actuality, the way I’m now comprehending this, yes.. time travel could be possible — if Time is nothing more than energy over a distance, then you would need to apply energy to mass to accelerate your time.
Since we are talking about Universal time.. one would need to access the background universes “energy” in order to “travel” through this medium.
I’m assuming that the background Universal medium is electrical / plasmoid in nature. That the one constant in the “sea of Energy” is indeed electricity or close to it when trying to describe what it is that makes up all things in the “universe”.
If you were able to envelope yourself somehow inside a pure electrical field, independent of outside sources.. theoretically I suppose that the interior “space” would be protected, while the “outside” of the electrical field could be manipulated from the interior in order to allow for a “traveling” through time.
I also suppose that since there is a “time” for every mass in space at every point in the past, that IF you were “inside” energy, and IF you could apply a + and – charge to the electrical field.. that all you would need to do is apply a negative or positive electrical charge to move back and forward through time INSIDE this “mass” of energy.
LOL @ at that concept, but there it is!
To head off the conspiracy theorists, NO .. I’m not a time traveler from the future — at least not yet that is to say 😀
Cheers, and much love to all those who read this and understand — and please don’t scoff until I’ve presented the full breakdown for you to review.
This is just a teaser for the most part, and to prevent anyone from ripping me off.
Proving Einstein Wrong with ‘Spooky’ Quantum Experiment
by Jesse Emspak, Live Science Contributor | March 26, 2015
Credit: agsandrew | Shutterstock
Quantum mechanics is one of the best-tested theories in science, and it’s one of the few where physicists get to do experiments proving that Einstein was wrong.
That’s what a team at Griffith University and the University of Tokyo in Japan did this week, showing that a weird phenomenon — in which the measurement of a particle actually affects its location — is real.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Albert Einstein said he couldn’t support this idea, which he called “spooky action at a distance,” in which a particle can be in two places at once and it’s not until one measures the state of that particle that it takes a definite position, seemingly with no signal transmitted to it and at a speed faster than light. When the particle takes its definite position, physicists refer to this as its wave function collapsing.
Quantum mechanics is one of the best-tested theories in science, and it’s one of the few where physicists get to do experiments proving that Einstein was wrong.
That’s what a team at Griffith University and the University of Tokyo in Japan did this week, showing that a weird phenomenon — in which the measurement of a particle actually affects its location — is real.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Albert Einstein said he couldn’t support this idea, which he called “spooky action at a distance,” in which a particle can be in two places at once and it’s not until one measures the state of that particle that it takes a definite position, seemingly with no signal transmitted to it and at a speed faster than light. When the particle takes its definite position, physicists refer to this as its wave function collapsing.
The phenomenon was outside of contemporary experience in physics and seemed to violate the theory of relativity, which posits that the speed of light is an absolute limit on how fast any information can travel. Einstein proposed that theparticle isn’t in a superposition state, or two places at once; but rather it always has a “true” location, and people just couldn’t see it. [How Quantum Entanglement Works (Infographic)]
Using a single photon (particle of light), the Australian and Japanese researchers ran an experiment showing that measuring a property of a quantum particle in one place will affect what one sees in another place. That is, they showed that superposition and collapsing wave function are real phenomena.
Alice and Bob
The phenomenon is demonstrated with a thought experiment in which a light beam is split, with one half going to Alice and the other to Bob. Alice then indicates if she detected a photon and if so what state it is in — it might be the phase of the wave packet that describes the photon. Mathematically, though, the photon is in a state of “superposition,” meaning it is in two (or more) places at once. Its wave function, a mathematical formula that describes the particle, seems to show the photon has no definite position.
“Alice’s measurement collapses the superposition,” meaning the photons are in one place or another, but not both, Howard Wiseman, director of Griffith University’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, who led the experiment, told Live Science. If Alice sees a photon, that means the quantum state of the light particle in Bob’s lab collapses to a so-called zero-photon state, meaning no photon. But if she doesn’t see a photon, Bob’s particle collapses to a one-photon state, he said.
“Does this seem reasonable to you? I hope not, because Einstein certainly didn’t think it was reasonable. He thought it was crazy,” he added, referring to the fact that Alice’s measurement looked like it was dictating Bob’s.
The paradox was partially resolved years later, when experiments showed that even though the interaction between two quantum particles happens faster than light (it appears instantaneous), there is no way to use that phenomenon to send information, so there’s no possibility of faster-than-light signals. [10 Implications of Faster-Than-Light Travel]
Splitting photons
The team at Griffith, though, wanted to go a step further and show that the collapsing wave function — the process of Alice “choosing” a measurement and affecting Bob’s detection — is actually happening. And while other experiments have shown entanglement with two particles, the new study entangles a photon with itself.
To do this they fired a beam of photons at a splitter, so half of the light was transmitted and half was reflected. The transmitted light went to one lab and the reflected light went to the other. (These were “Alice” and “Bob” of the thought experiment.)
The light was transmitted as a single photon at a time, so the photon was split in two. Before the photon was measured, it existed in a superposition state.
One lab (Alice) used a laser as a reference, to measure the phase of the photon. If one thinks of light as a repeating sine wave, phase is the angle one is measuring, from 0 to 180 degrees. When Alice changed the angle of her reference laser, she got varying measurements of the photon: Either her photon was in a certain phase or it wasn’t present at all.
Then the other lab (or Bob) looked at their photons and found the photons were anti-correlated with Alice — if she saw a photon he did not, and vice versa. The state of Bob’s photon depended on what Alice measured. But in classic physics that shouldn’t happen; rather, the two particles should be independent of one another.
Quantum computing
Akira Furusawa, professor of applied physics at the University of Tokyo and one of the co-authors on the study, said the experiment helps explore different kinds of quantum information processing — and with it, communications and computing.
“Usually there are two types of quantum information processing,” he said. “There’s the qubit type, the digital information processing, and there’s continuous variable, a sort of analog type of quantum information. We are trying to combine them.” Conventional processing often relies on counting photons, but this kind of measurement of single photons is more efficient, he said.
Wiseman said one application is in the security of communications.
“Our experiment is a more rigorous test of the properties of such states than has ever been done before, in the sense that we don’t have to trust anything that is happening in Alice’s laboratory. This could be useful for communicating secrets when not all the parties are trusted.”
The experiment is described in the March 24 issue of the journal Nature Communications.
Einstein with Edwin Hubble, in 1931, at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, looking through the lens of the 100-inch telescope through which Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe in 1929. Courtesy of the Archives, Calif Inst of Technology.
In 1917, a year after Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity was published—but still two years before he would become the international celebrity we know—Einstein chose to tackle the entire universe. For anyone else, this might seem an exceedingly ambitious task—but this was Einstein.
Einstein began by applying his field equations of gravitation to what he considered to be the entire universe. The field equations were the mathematical essence of his general theory of relativity, which extended Newton’s theory of gravity to realms where speeds approach that of light and masses are very large. But his math was better than he wanted to believe—his equations told him that the universe could not stay static: it had to either expand or contract. Einstein chose to ignore what his mathematics was telling him.
The story of Einstein’s solution to this problem—the maligned “cosmological constant” (also called lambda)—is well known in the history of science. But this story, it turns out, has a different ending than everyone thought: Einstein late in life returned to considering his disgraced lambda. And his conversion foretold lambda’s use in an unexpected new setting, with immense relevance to a key conundrum in modern physics and cosmology: dark energy.
The Static Universe Before Hubble
Einstein had what would have seemed a very good reason for ignoring what the math was telling him. Few people know that Einstein was not merely a superb theoretician, but also a physicist skilled in observations and experiments. In 1914, Einstein was wooing a young Scottish-German astronomer, Erwin Finlay Freundlich, to seek proof of relativity through shifts in apparent star locations during a total solar eclipse that was to take place in the Crimea (which ended badly because of the outbreak of World War I). Letters that Einstein wrote to Freundlich during 1913-4 reveal that Einstein had a burgeoning interest in astronomy and understood much about the field, including technical details of lenses and mirrors.* Ironically, his deep knowledge of astronomy would lead Einstein to make the greatest blunder of his entire career….Or not.
Astronomical knowledge of the time told Einstein that the universe was unchanging in its size. How could someone think that? Well, this was the second decade of the twentieth century, and telescopes were still relatively small and not very powerful. They were strong enough to allow astronomers to discover all the now-known planets in our solar system, to get good views of “cloudy patches” of the sky such as the Orion nebula, and to view several galaxies, including the Great Andromeda Galaxy—our nearest neighbor at 2.3 million light years’ distance.
But astronomers believed that all these fuzzy objects they were seeing were somehow part of our own Milky Way. (The great Eddington even believed at that time that the Sun was the center of this universe! And an idea about the distances to the most faraway stars only began to emerge through the work of Harlow Shapely on Cepheid variables, conducted at the Mount Wilson Observatory, in 1916.) Since astronomers could detect no expansion of stars or nebulas in the entire cosmos known to them, they assumed that the universe was static.
The Birth of the Cosmological Constant
To force his equations—which theoretically predicted the expansion of the universe—to remain still, Einstein invented the cosmological constant, λ. He multiplied the metric tensor in his equation, g, by the cosmological constant, leading to a term λg, which adjusted his metric tensor acting on space-time. This mathematical trick assured him that his equations would yield a universe that was prevented from expanding or contracting.
Unbeknownst to Einstein, at exactly the time he published his paper on the cosmological equations, across the world in California, the new 100-inch Hooker telescope was being fit in its place at the Mount Wilson Observatory. Within a little over a decade, Edwin Hubble, aided by Vesto Slipher and Milton Humason, would use this, the most powerful telescope on Earth, to study the redshift of distant galaxies and conclude from it definitively that our universe is expanding.
Einstein heard about these results, and in the early 1930s, he traveled to California and met with Hubble. At the Mount Wilson Observatory he saw the massive data set on distant galaxies that had led to “Hubble’s law” describing the expansion of the universe and got angry at himself: had he not forced his equations to stay static with that cosmological-constant invention of his, he could have theoretically predicted Hubble’s findings! That would have been worth a second Nobel Prize for him (he deserved a few more, anyway)—in the same way, for example, that the CERN scientists’ 2012 experimental discovery of the Higgs boson recently won Peter Higgs the Nobel in 2013. In disgust, Einstein exclaimed after his Mount Wilson visit: “If there is no quasi-static world, then away with the cosmological term!” and never considered the cosmological constant again. Or so we thought until recently.
Dark Energy: Lambda Returns
When a genius such as Einstein makes a mistake, it tends to be a “good mistake.” (I am indebted to the mathematician Goro Shimura for this expression.) It can’t simply go away—there is too much thought that has gone into it. So, like a phoenix, Einstein’s cosmological constant made a remarkable comeback, very unexpectedly, in 1998.
That year, two groups of astronomers made an announcement that rocked the world of science. The “Supernova Cosmology Project,” based in California and headed by Saul Perlmutter, and the “High-Z SN Search” group at Harvard-Smithsonian and Australia, announced their results of the shifts of distant galaxies leading to a conclusion that nobody had expected: The universe, rather than slowing its expansion since the Big Bang, is actually accelerating its expansion!
And it turns out that the best theoretical way to explain the accelerating universe is to revive Einstein’s discarded lambda. The cosmological constant (acting differently from how it was designed, as a force stopping the expansion) is the best explanation we have for the mysterious “dark energy” seen to permeate space and push the universe ever outward at an accelerating rate. To most physicists today, lambda, cosmological constant, and dark energy are closely synonymous. But unfortunately Einstein was not there to witness the reversal of his “greatest blunder,” having died in 1955.
And it has been widely assumed that he died without ever reconsidering the cosmological constant. Until now.
Einstein’s Lost Manuscript
The Irish physicist Cormac O’Raifeartaigh was perusing documents at the Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in late 2013 when he discovered a handwritten manuscript by Einstein that scholars had never looked at carefully before. The paper, called “Zum kosmologischen Problem” (“About the Cosmological Problem”), had been erroneously filed as a draft of another paper, which Einstein published in 1931 in the annals of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. But it was not. It seems that even with Einstein, old notions die hard: This paper was his stubborn attempt to resurrect the cosmological constant he had vowed never to use again.
In a paper just filed on the electronic physics repository ArXiv, O’Raifeartaigh and colleagues show that in the early 1930s (the assumed date is 1931, but this is uncertain), Einstein was still trying to return to his 1917 analysis of a universe with a cosmological constant. Einstein wrote (the authors’ translation from the German):
“This difficulty [the inconsistency of the laws of gravity with a finite mean density of matter] also arises in the general theory of relativity. However, I have shown that this can be overcome through the introduction of the so-called “λ–term” to the field equations… I showed that these equations can be satisfied by a spherical space of constant radius over time, in which matter has a density ρ that is constant over space and time.”
But he was now aware of Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe:
“On the other hand, Hubbel’s [sic**] exceedingly important investigations have shown that the extragalactic nebulae have the following two properties 1) Within the bounds of observational accuracy they are uniformly distributed in space 2) They possess a Doppler effect proportional to their distance” (Quoted in O’Raifeartaigh, et al., 2014, p. 4)
And so Einstein proposed a revision of his model, still with a cosmological constant, but now the constant was responsible for the creation of new matter as the universe expanded (because Einstein believed that in an expanding universe, the overall density of matter had to still stay constant):
“In what follows, I would like to draw attention to a solution to equation (1) that can account for Hubbel’s facts, and in which the density is constant over time.” And: “If one considers a physically bounded volume, particles of matter will be continually leaving it. For the density to remain constant, new particles of matter must be continually formed in the volume from space.”
Einstein achieves this property by the use of his old cosmological constant, λ:
“The conservation law is preserved in that by setting the λ-term, space itself is not empty of energy; as is well-known its validity is guaranteed by equations (1).” (Quoted in O’Raifeartaigh, et al., 2014, p. 7.)
So Einstein keeps on using his discarded lambda—despite the fact that he invented it for a non-expanding universe. If the universe expands as Hubble showed, Einstein seems to be saying, then I still need my lambda—now to keep the universe from becoming less dense as it expands in volume.
Almost two decades later, a similar “steady state” universe would be proposed by Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi, and Tommy Gold, in papers published in 1949. But these models of the universe are not supported by modern theories. In fact, a tenet of modern cosmology is that as the universe will expand a great deal (after an unimaginably long period of time), it will become very thinly populated, rather than dense, with stray photons and electrons zipping alone through immense expanses of emptiness, all stars having by then died and disappeared.
Views of the Cosmos, Old and New
As for why Einstein was so intent on maintaining the use of his discarded lambda, the constant represents the energy of empty space—a powerful notion—and Einstein in this paper wanted to use this energy to create new particles as time goes on.
Today we view the same energy of the vacuum as the reason for the acceleration of the universe’s expansion. Einstein presciently understood that the energy of the vacuum, unleashed by his cosmological constant, was too important to let die.
Einstein was far from the only person to wonder about the universe and whether it has always existed or was born at some point in the past and would die at a future time. This question has been pondered by people ever since the dawn of civilization. The origin and ultimate fate of the universe are highly interlinked with its overall geometry—the actual shape of the space-time manifold. In a closed geometry, the universe was born and will someday recollapse on itself. In an open geometry, it was born and will expand forever, and the same happens in a flat (Euclidean) geometry. Based on modern theories supported by satellite observations of the microwave background radiation in space, space-time is nearly perfectly Euclidean, meaning that the universe was born in a Big Bang and will expand forever, becoming less dense with time. Eventually, matter may decay into few kinds of elementary particles and photons, the distances among them growing to infinity.
Cosmology in Context
Between 1917 and 1929—the year Hubble and his colleagues discovered the expansion of the universe, implying the possibility of a beginning for the cosmos—Einstein and most scientists held that the universe was “simply there” with no beginning or end. But it’s interesting to note that creation myths across cultures tell the opposite story. Traditions of Chinese, Indian, pre-Colombian, and African cultures, as well as the biblical book of Genesis, all describe (clearly in allegorical terms) a distinct beginning to the universe—whether it’s the “creation in six days” of Genesis or the “Cosmic Egg” of the ancient Indian text the Rig Veda.
This is an interesting example of scientists being dead wrong (for a time) and primitive ancient observers having an essentially correct intuition about nature. And with the present explosion of models of the universe and sometimes outrageous “scientific speculations” about its origin and future, some commentators are clearly overstating what science has done. One recent example is the book by the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe From Nothing, which claims that science has shown that the universe somehow sprang out of sheer nothingness.***
A century ago, Einstein’s powerful field equations of gravitation showed the way forward. His uncanny intuition about the universe prevailed despite temporary reversals, and his decades-old insights are now at the cutting edge of modern physics and cosmology, helping us shed light on the greatest mysteries of all: the nature of matter, gravity, time, space, and the mysterious dark energy pushing it all outwards.
Benjamin Radford, Life’s Little Mysteries Contributor
Date: 09 November 2011 Time: 11:31 AM ET
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Every night, amateur ghost-hunting groups across the country head out into abandoned warehouses, old buildings and cemeteries to look for ghosts. They often bring along electronic equipment that they believe helps them locate ghostly energy.
Despite years of efforts by ghost hunters on TV and in real life, we still do not havegood proof that ghosts are real. Many ghost hunters believe that strong support for the existence of ghosts can be found in modern physics. Specifically, that Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of all time, offered a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts.
A recent Google search turned up nearly 8 million results suggesting a link between ghosts and Einstein’s work covering the conservation of energy. This assertion is repeated by many top experts in the field. For example, ghost researcher John Kachuba, in his book “Ghosthunters” (2007, New Page Books), writes, “Einstein proved that all the energy of the universe is constant and that it can neither be created nor destroyed. … So what happens to that energy when we die? If it cannot be destroyed, it must then, according to Dr. Einstein, be transformed into another form of energy. What is that new energy? … Could we call that new creation a ghost?”
This idea shows up — and is presented as evidence for ghosts — on virtually all ghost-themed websites as well. For example, a group called Tri County Paranormal states, “Albert Einstein said that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change from one form to another. When we are alive, we have electrical energy in our bodies. … What happens to the electricity that was in our body, causing our heart to beat and making our breathing possible? There is no easy answer to that.” [6 Paranormal Videos Debunked]
In fact, the answer is very simple, and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms’ energy goes after death: into theenvironment. When a human dies, the energy stored in his or her body is released in the form of heat, and transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if we are left unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb us. If we are cremated, the energy in our bodies is released in the form of heat and light.
When we eat dead plants and animals, we are consuming their energy and converting it for our own use. Food is metabolized when digested, and chemical reactions release the energy the animal needs to live, move, reproduce, etc. That energy does not exist in the form of a glowing, ghostly ball of electromagnetic energy, but rather in the form of heat and chemical energy.
Many ghost hunters say they can detect the electric fields created by ghosts. And while it’s true that the metabolic processes of humans and other organisms actually do generate very low-level electrical currents, these are no longer generated once the organism dies. Because the source of the energy stops, the electrical current stops — just as a light bulb turns off when you switch off the electricity running to it.
Most of the “energy” that any dead person leaves behind takes years to re-enter the environment in the form of food; the rest dissipates shortly after death, and is not in a form that can be detected years later with popular ghost-hunting devices like electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors. Ghost hunters who repeat the claim that Einstein’s theories provide a sound basis for ghosts reveal less about ghosts than they do about their poor understanding of basic science. Ghosts may indeed exist, but neither Einstein nor his laws of physics suggests that ghosts are real.
Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and author of “Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries.” His website is www.BenjaminRadford.com.
CERN: Light Speed May Have Been Exceeded By Subatomic Particle
FRANK JORDANS and SETH BORENSTEIN 09/22/11 09:19 PM ET
GENEVA — One of the very pillars of physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity – that nothing can go faster than the speed of light – was rocked Thursday by new findings from one of the world’s foremost laboratories.
European researchers said they clocked an oddball type of subatomic particle called a neutrino going faster than the 186,282 miles per second that has long been considered the cosmic speed limit.
The claim was met with skepticism, with one outside physicist calling it the equivalent of saying you have a flying carpet. In fact, the researchers themselves are not ready to proclaim a discovery and are asking other physicists to independently try to verify their findings.
“The feeling that most people have is this can’t be right, this can’t be real,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which provided the particle accelerator that sent neutrinos on their breakneck 454-mile trip underground from Geneva to Italy.
Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen according to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity – the one made famous by the equation E equals mc2. But no one is rushing out to rewrite the science books just yet.
It is “a revolutionary discovery if confirmed,” said Indiana University theoretical physicist Alan Kostelecky, who has worked on this concept for a quarter of a century.
Stephen Parke, who is head theoretician at the Fermilab near Chicago and was not part of the research, said: “It’s a shock. It’s going to cause us problems, no doubt about that – if it’s true.”
Even if these results are confirmed, they won’t change at all the way we live or the way the world works. After all, these particles have presumably been speed demons for billions of years. But the finding will fundamentally alter our understanding of how the universe operates, physicists said.
Einstein’s special relativity theory, which says that energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, underlies “pretty much everything in modern physics,” said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. “It has worked perfectly up until now.”
Gravity Breakthrough: Springing into a Gravitational Revolution
By Roland Michel Tremblay
Roland Michel Tremblay is a French Canadian author, poet, scriptwriter, development producer and science-fiction consultant. See his website here:http://www.themarginal.com/
Gravity is one of the most familiar everyday phenomena, yet it has mystified scientists and laymen for centuries. Even today, although the current official position on gravity is a continual “space-time warping” around objects – a claim from Einstein’s General Relativity theory, it is also still widely considered an endless attracting force emanating from objects, as claimed in Newton’s gravitational theory. Setting aside the troubling implications of two different physical descriptions of gravity in our science for the moment, it turns out that the behavior of a simple spring may hold the final answer to this age-old mystery.
Consider what happens when a loosely coiled spring is stretched apart from both ends while laying on a tabletop, as shown below in the left-hand frame. The opposing forces spread equally across the spring, causing an equal coil spacing across the spring, which also occurs whether either force pulls fully from the very end or is divided to pull directly on each coil:
However, with only a single continual pulling force on one end, shown on the right, the coils stretch more at the leading end as they strain to continually accelerate the ongoing resisting inertia of the rest of the spring. In this case, there is successively less stretch toward the trailing end as there is successively less trailing-coil mass to cause inertial drag.
This deceptively simple experiment has enormous implications for both Newton’s gravitational force and Einstein’s ‘warped space-time’ theory of gravity – and for understanding the true physical nature of gravity itself. The first important point is that it highlights a widely overlooked but critical error surrounding Einstein’s famous “space elevator” thought experiment, which forms the foundation of hisPrinciple of Equivalence and his later associated General Relativity theory of gravity.
