The 4% Universe

The 4% Universe: Dark matter, dark energy and the race to discover the rest of reality by Richard Panek

Times, 12 February 2011

For Galileo seeing was believing. When in 1609 he learnt of the Dutch invention of the telescope, he quickly constructed his own. With no reason to think there was anything to find, he searched the night sky and found that there was far more to the universe than meets the naked eye. He saw that the Moon had mountains, the Sun had spots and he observed the phases of Venus. With the discovery of Jupiter’s moons, Galileo found hard evidence that not all heavenly bodies revolved around the Earth. In March 1610 he published, The Starry Messenger, his report of what he had seen. All 500 copies were sold within a week.

Four centuries later Galileo’s successors know that they cannot see, even using their dazzlingly variety of modern telescopes, an astonishing 96 percent of the universe. The tiny fraction that is visible to their fine-tuned instruments is the stuff that we and all the countless planets, stars and galaxies are made from. Get rid of us and of everything else we’ve ever thought of as the universe, and very little would change. ‘We’re just a bit of pollution,’ one cosmologist says. We maybe irrelevant, but the rest of reality has been dubbed ‘dark’ and for the American science writer Richard Panek it ‘could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender’. For this is not ‘dark’ as in distant or invisible, but ‘dark’ as in unknown - for now at least.

Yet what is known is that almost a quarter of what can’t be seen is something called dark matter. Although its very nature is a mystery, its presence is discernible through its gravitational effect on the movement of galaxies. Without dark matter the astronomical data doesn’t make sense.

From a derelict iron mine in Minnesota to mountaintop observatories, at a pace that would shame many a thriller writer, Panek tells the story of the quest to unlock the secrets of dark matter and the particles that make it up. These weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, have proven so elusive that the possibility that two were detected in November 2009 caused great excitement.

Dark matter is less than half the tale Panek wants to tell. For three quarters of the unknown universe consists of an even stranger substance called dark energy. Its existence was inferred, once again, from the circumstantial evidence gathered by astronomers measuring what could be seen. They didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to remind them that after eliminating the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth.

In the late 1990s two rival teams set out to collect data on distant supernovae in an attempt to determine the rate at which the universe was expanding. It was assumed that the pull of gravity would act as a break on the pace of expansion. To their disbelief they found that space-time was being pushed apart faster than ever before. Something was overwhelming the force of gravity to drive the expansion. Dark energy was winning the cosmic tug-of-war.

With a future Nobel prize at stake, disputes and arguments over who did what and when were inevitable. Parek provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of science in the raw as alliances are forged and friendships strained. There is a new universe to explore and the latest experiments reveal it is 13.75 billion years old and made up of 72.8 per cent dark energy, 22.7 per cent dark matter and 4.5 per cent ordinary matter. These numbers are ‘an exquisitely precise accounting of the depths of our ignorance,’ says Panek. ‘It’s 1610 all over again.’

Culture Under The Microscope

Culture Under The Microscope
The Visceral Exhibition @ The Science Gallery, Dublin.

Independent, 10 February 2011



What is Life? It's a question that the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger tackled in three famous lectures given at Trinity College, Dublin. The first, on 5 February 1943, was heard by an audience that included the entire Irish cabinet led by Éamon de Valera.

Schrödinger is remembered today for making vivid the weirdness of the quantum world with his famous cat-in-the-box thought experiment. Schrödinger's cat is neither dead nor alive but exists in a superposition of states until we open it and look. Yet when his Trinity College lectures were published they became influential in persuading many young physicists that Schrödinger's methods might solve some of the problems in the developing field of molecular biology. James Watson and Francis Crick cited the book as a key inspiration for the research that led them to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA.

"Schrödinger with his mythical 'semi-living' cat, could be described as a pioneer of BioArt," says Dr Michael John Gorman, the director of Dublin's Science Gallery, which is also located in Trinity College. His tongue is firmly in his cheek as he accompanies 40 people on the short walk from his gallery to the Schrödinger Theatre, to discuss what life is. This is one of the many activities surrounding the gallery's latest exhibition, Visceral: The Living Art Experiment.

"BioArt" was a term coined in 1997 as a number of artists abandoned paints and brush in favour of cells, fragments of DNA, proteins and living tissue. Visceral, a month-long exhibition uses new technologies, tissue and neural engineering to explore the question "what is life?" People may be put off by some of the 15 works, some of which use human tissue as book covers or retinal cells to project film. Gorman admits there is something a little queasy about creating artworks from living tissue. "The very idea of tissue-engineering becoming an art form makes us squirm," he says. However, Visceral is all about provoking the sort of instinctive gut reaction that Gorman hopes will gets visitors asking questions about the ethical implications of manipulating living material and what we mean by "living".

The exhibition's curator, Oron Catts, believes that the "logic that drives things like nanotechnology, synthetic biology and even things like neuroengineering needs to be scrutinised and explored by people other than just scientists and engineers". It was one of the reason that Catts helped to set up SymbioticA, an artistic lab dedicated to a hands-on engagement with the life sciences based at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

"Our interest is in life," says Catts, "not only art or science." Yet the exhibition demonstrates the depth of the potential of interactions between art and science. For Gorman, nothing illustrates this better than Silent Barrage, the largest work on show. The product of a collaboration between Neurotica, a group of five artists, and Dr Steve Potter of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, its a cutting edge piece of neural engineering. It consists of an array of robotic poles hooked up to neurons from the brains of rats in Potter's lab.

The array responds to the way visitors move through it and sends signals back to the neurons. These neurons then fire, making the robotic poles shudder up and down. Depending on the amount of audience activity, the neurons can undergo what is called a "barrage" – when they start firing in a chaotic fashion. This is exactly what happens during an epileptic seizure. With epilepsy affecting over 450000 people in the UK alone, it is hoped by the scientists involved that the data collected might lead to a better understanding of the process by which cells are calmed and seizures mitigated. And its not the only exhibit that promises something scientifically tangible.

The battlefield of Kathy High's Blood Wars is a Petri dish with the combatants being the white blood cells drawn from two different people. After a few hours slugging it out, one set of platelets will have destroyed the other. The "winner" of each cellular battle goes on to fight another participant. The concept may sound sinister to some with concerns about eugenics, but it is in an ingenious attempt to engage in the age-old debates surrounding traits inherited through blood.

Catts says that cell lines create a form of immortality since they can live beyond the life of the donor. I'm reminded of the story told by Rebecca Skloot in her bestselling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Known to scientists as HeLa, Lacks died in 1951 but her cancer cells were taken without her knowledge and became one of the most important tools in medicine. The Vision Splendid, a work by Alicia King consists of two sealed glass jars, connected by tubes that contain nutrients and cultured human tissue. The cells were those of an unknown African-American girl aged 13. You're left wondering who owns the stuff our bodies are made of. If that worries you, then Catts offers a way to ease your troubles.

The Semi-Living Worry Dolls by Catts and Ionat Zurr are a modern version of the famous Guatemalan worry dolls constructed out of degradable polymer on which cells are grown in micro-gravity conditions. You can whisper your troubles to them through a microphone as they eventually replace the polymer completely, transforming the piece from fabric to tissue.

With the Irish general election rescheduled for the closing date of Visceral on 25 February, there's a rumour going around that the Silent Barrage installation may be able to predict the outcome – if political candidates are willing to present themselves to the cultured rat neurons in person.

Unnatural

Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People by Philip Ball

Guardian, 5 February 2011

The award of the Nobel Prize, when it came in October 2010, was long overdue. By then there was more than three decades' worth of growing evidence to back up the claim of two British men. Around 4 million people, none older than 33, were living proof of their pioneering work in developing the technique of in vitro fertilisation (IVF). Sadly for the gynaecologist and surgeon Dr Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988, the Nobel isn't awarded posthumously. Therefore the sole recipient was the physiologist Professor Robert Edwards who at 85 was too ill to travel to Stockholm to collect the prize in person.

Since the birth of Louise Brown on 25 July 1978, IVF has helped and offered hope to some of the 10% of all couples worldwide who suffer from infertility. Yet the birth of the "first test tube baby" at Oldham General hospital outraged many for being the product of an unnatural interference by scientists in the creation of a human being. Repeatedly having to fend off charges that he was playing God, Edwards once complained that the early public response to IVF was conditioned by "fantasies of horror and disaster, and visions of white-coated, heartless men, breeding and rearing embryos in the laboratory to bring forth Frankenstein genetic monsters".

Philip Ball, who in Critical Mass explored how one thing leads to another, points out in his latest book, Unnatural, that traditionally the "natural" end of sex is procreation since the latter requires the former. However, religious objections to IVF, Ball argues, invoke this reasoning in reverse: the natural beginning of procreation is sex – not sex in terms of sperm meets egg, but in the anatomical sense. Hence, Ball's interest in exploring what lies beyond the "this bit goes in here" method. The result is a fascinating and impressive cultural history of anthropoeia – the centuries of myths and tales about the artificial creation of people.

Ball explores what these fables reveal about contemporary views on life, humanity and technology as modern science has turned the fantasy of making people into reality. From the homunculus of the medieval alchemists and the clay golem of Jewish legend to Frankenstein's monster and the babies in jars of Huxley's Brave New World, Ball ranges far and wide to show that the idea that making life is either hubristic or "unnatural" is a relatively recent one.

Until the Enlightenment, it was widely assumed that it was possible to make lower forms of life. For example, a process called bougonia in which bees were created using the carcasses of dead oxen was once accepted as fact. It was only in the 19th century that "spontaneous generation", the belief that life could spring forth from inanimate matter without the need for seeds, eggs or parents, was finally discredited. If there were any doubts about such practices, explains Ball, then they were about the quality and character of "artificial life" – was it inferior, equivalent, or better than "natural" life?

The ultimate "unnatural" act is the artificial creation of humans, since it challenges the conviction that we are God's chosen. Yet Ball makes a persuasive case when he suggests that the response of the medieval mind to the idea of artificial human life was very different from the horror it now typically engenders. This indicates that feelings of revulsion about these "unnatural" creations are not inevitable.

The prefix "un" was only attached to acts that were deemed reprehensible because they were contra naturam, against nature. However, people in the middle ages saw nothing intrinsically wrong in creating human and other forms of life. The problem for them was rather, as the 12th-century Muslim scholar Averroes said, that organisms made by art were like alchemist's gold, a kind of fake. In short, any "unnatural" creation lacked a soul.

Doubts about the possibility of an artificial person having a soul are still with us, though given a modern spin. The fabricated being is denied genuine humanity. He or she is thought to be soulless: lacking in love, warmth and human feeling. This same failing is now imputed to human clones – 21st-century reincarnations of Frankenstein's monster, as the very term carries connotations of spiritual vacancy. A skilled practitioner of the book-length essay, Ball can also be wonderfully succinct: "'Soul' has become a kind of watermark of humanity, a defence against the awful thought that we could be manufactured."

Debates about the pros and cons of human embryo research, cloning and the like require a focus on issues that are rooted in the particularities of our time and culture. Ball's thoughtful book is a reminder that as we try and deal with how to enable and assist people into being, we need to understand and then conquer our fears surrounding the very idea of making people.

Incoming!

ET Rock

Incoming!:or, Why we should stop worrying and learn to love the meteorite by Ted Nield

New Scientist, 21 January 2011

From AD 218 to 222 the Roman empire worshipped a meteorite. This bizarre episode ended when the transsexual priest-emperor Elagabalus was hacked to bits and hurled into the Tiber. This is just one of the many stories Ted Nield skilfully weaves into his entertaining history of meteorites.

In July 2010, two spectators at a cricket match in Sussex in the south of England witnessed an extremely rare meteor strike. The rock, 12 centimetres long, broke in two when it hit the ground with a piece ricocheting into the chest of one man. Luckily he was unharmed. Nield reckons the "global risk of death by extraterrestrial impact to be a negligible 1 in 720,000". Meteorites pose little threat, but says Nield, "we humans have transplanted into meteorites the geological aliens, the heart of our own times, as we searched them for signs of times to come".

The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III

The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple universes, mutual assured destruction, and the meltdown of a nuclear family by Peter Byrne

It’s a sobering fact that the world we live in would be a very different place but for the discovery of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Yet for the next sixty years most physicists accepted that the theory denied the existence of reality at the atomic and sub-atomic level. This strange state of affairs led the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Murray Gell-Mann to describe quantum mechanics as ‘that mysterious, confusing discipline which none of us really understands but which we know how to use’. And use it we have, for without it there would be no computers, mobile phones, televisions and numerous other everyday gadgets.

Gell-Mann blamed the celebrated Danish physicist Niels Bohr, accusing him of having ‘brain-washed a whole generation of physicists into believing that the problem had been solved’. The problem being the vexed one that lies at the heart of quantum mechanics – what does the theory tells us about the nature of reality.

Albert Einstein and Bohr spent nearly thirty years locked in a debate over this question. Bohr believed he had the answer. There simply was no objective reality, but only ‘an abstract quantum mechanical description’. For Bohr, Schrödinger’s famous mythical cat trapped in a box with a vial of poison was neither dead nor alive but in a ghostly mixture of quantum states that ranged from being totally dead to completely alive and every conceivable combination in between until the box was opened. It was the act of observation/measurement, i.e. opening the box, that decided the fate of the cat. Einstein thought this was absurd. He believed that the cat was simply either dead or alive and to find out which all one had to do was look in the box.

Hugh Everett III was a twenty-four student at Princeton University when Einstein died in April 1955. By then Bohr’s so-called Copenhagen interpretation had become quantum orthodoxy that few were prepared to challenge. However, Everett did exactly that in his PhD thesis when he demonstrated it was theoretically possible to treat each and every possible outcome of a quantum experiment as actually existing in an alternative parallel reality. According to Everett this meant that the moment the box containing Schrödinger’s cat was opened the universe split in two, one in which the cat was dead and another in which it was still alive and kicking.

H.G. Wells wrote one of the first stories about parallel universes. In his 1922 Men Like Gods there exists an alternate world with ‘no parliament, no politics, no private wealth, no business competition, no police, no prison’. The Utopians who inhibit this world had shared our bloody past until history inexplicably branched. Everett was an avid reader of science fiction and believed that his theory was the simplest explanation of quantum mechanics, but accepting it was ‘a matter of taste’. Bohr and his inner circle rejected Everett’s heretical ‘many worlds’ as unpalatable and it was ignored.

Instead of pursuing an academic career and fighting for his idea, Everest joined the Pentagon in the late 1950s to apply game theory to strategic nuclear war planning. At the time the Pentagon was busy analyzing the cost-benefits of global and limited nuclear wars and calculating nuclear blast and fallout kill ratios. Appropriately for a man whose favourite film was Dr Strangelove, Everett helped bring the world perilously close to the brink of nuclear destruction. His work was instrumental in the development of the no-win scenario of mutual assured destruction (MAD) that defined the Cold War as it became the strategic posture of both the Americans and the Soviets. Peter Byrne in this vivid and thoroughly researched portrayal of a quintessential cold war techno-warrior found no evidence that Everett ever had the slightest doubt about effectively playing God with all life on Earth.

Byrne does an admirable job of weaving together quantum mechanics, nuclear war games and the disintegration of a dysfunctional family in this tale of a talented scientist, but morally compromised man. In pursuing what mattered to him, Everett was indifferent to the feeling of others and cared little what harm is actions caused those closest to him – one of his two children committed suicide. His achievements in physics and for the military were matched by his shortcomings as a husband and father.

Everett, who died of a heart attack aged fifty-one in 1982, did not live to see his many worlds interpretation taken seriously by physicists as they struggled to explain the mystery of how the universe came into being. A poll conducted just over a decade ago revealed that only four out of ninety physicists voted for Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation, but thirty favoured the modern version of Everett’s many worlds. ‘There is no question that there is an unseen world,’ Woody Allen once said. ‘The problem is how far is it from mid-town and how late is it open’.

Chasing The Sun

The sun shines on a solar quest

Chasing The Sun: The epic story of the star that gave us life by Richard Cohen

Independent, 3 December 2010

A Chinese-made portable solar-powered lamp and charger was the final object chosen by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, in his A History of the World in 100 Objects. It was a choice that few would have predicted, but once its solar panel captures and stores the energy of eight hours of sunshine, this 21st-century lamp converts it into 100 hours of light to be used whenever and wherever needed. "The power of the Sun seems a good place to end this global history," said MacGregor, "because solar energy is a dream of the future that echoes the oldest and most universal of human myths, that of the life-giving Sun."

Richard Cohen has produced an encyclopaedia of a book that could almost serve as a companion to MacGregor's landmark series – an alternative history of the world told through humanity's relationship with a single object.

He begins with the myth of the Sun as the god Inti, of the tribes of Peru and northern Chile, who descended into the ocean every evening, swam back to the east, then reappeared, refreshed by his bath. The Hopi of Arizona claim that they made the Sun by throwing up a buckskin shield along with a fox's coat and a parrot's tail, to make the colours of sunrise and sunset.

"The Sun is 32,000 light years from the centre of its galaxy of a hundred billion stars, which it orbits at about 155 miles a second, taking about 200 million years to complete a revolution," reports Cohen. The Sun has been active for 4.6 billion years and a single particle of light, a photon, from its core takes 150,000 years to reach space. Every second, about five million metric tonnes of mass are converted into nuclear energy: equivalent to the detonation of 90,000 million one-megaton hydrogen bombs. The numbers are mind-boggling, but this constant blast of nuclear reactions pushes energy to the surface, releasing it as light and heat.

The Earth receives more of this energy in just 45 minutes than its inhabitants consume in a year. About 35 per cent is reflected back into space by clouds and the atmosphere absorbs another 19 per cent. This still leaves 12,000 times as much energy as used by all man-made devices.

Effectively harnessing the Sun is not just a modern ambition. The Greeks in the third century BC used "burning mirrors" to focus sunlight on enemy warships. Archimedes, so legend has it, deployed such mirrors in 212BC to defend Syracuse from a blockading Roman fleet by burning the enemy's sails.The Romans were the first to build greenhouses. In the sixth century, the Emperor Justinian passed a law protecting public and domestic sunrooms from the erection of buildings that obstructed light; a 1,000 years later, Leonardo da Vinci proposed using a giant mirror as a commercial source of heat.

Like some latter-day Victorian species hunter who travels the globe collecting new specimens, Cohen spent eight years chasing the Sun across 18 countries and six continents. He began with a climb to the top of Mount Fuji to watch the sunrise on the summer solstice and ended in a sunset viewed from a boat on the Ganges at Varanasi.

Among other trips, Cohen recounts seeing an eclipse on the Antarctic ice. He visits the Arctic city of Tromso in Norway, which for ten weeks each year receives virtually no sunlight (a period the locals call "the dark times"), to investigate how we react to the loss of light.

Among Cohen's treasure-trove of solar miscellanea is the "sunspot cycle" in modern economics, the story of sundials and calendars from Julius Caesar to Pope Gregory VII, the introduction of daylight saving time in 1916 as a wartime economic measure, and a brief history of navigation and cartography. He shows how the Babylonians were the first to record the Sun's movements in detail, while the Greeks went further, inquiring into its size, shape, and distance from the Earth.

Occasionally Cohen's passion for all things solar gets the better of him, as when he suggests that the lingams of Hindu temple domes are "purposely imitated in the design of nuclear-reactor cones, the latest tribute to the Sun's potency". Yet he can be forgiven, as we learn how artists from the Renaissance to Hockney have depicted the Sun, or of Shakespeare's enthusiasm for suntans. We see why Galileo recorded his discovery of sunspots in code, why Matisse rushed out of his dying wife's bedroom, why Wagner hated the Sun and Mozart loved it.

All things come to an end, and Cohen devotes a chapter to the death of the Sun. As I read it I remembered the first part of a poem by Francis William Bourdillon:

The night has a thousand eyes,
And the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies
With the dying of the sun.

Species Seekers

A Breed of their own

The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth by Richard Conniff

Financial Times, 20-21 November 2010

‘Our perfect naturalist,’ wrote the English clergyman, naturalist and novelist Charles Kingsley in 1855, “should be strong in body; able to haul a dredge, climb a rock, turn a boulder, walk all day … he should know how to swim for his life, to pull an oar, sail a boat, and ride the first horse which comes to hand; and, finally, he should be a thoroughly good shot, and a skilful fisherman; and, if he go far abroad, be able on occasion to fight for his life.’

Amid the tales of adventure and hardship vividly told by the American science writer Richard Conniff in this marvelous book, most of those naturalists who made it their mission to travel the globe in of search glory and new species were far from perfect. But as he captures the mania for collecting and cataloguing the natural world in the 18th and 19th centuries, Conniff shows that these daredevil amateurs played an invaluable ‘part in building a great and permanent body of knowledge’.

What does it mean to discover a species? Surely local people had known most of these species for many years before they were ‘discovered’. Discovery, explains Conniff, isn’t just a matter of being the first person to lay eyes on an animal, plant or insect. You must recognize that there’s something different about it and explain in print just how and why it’s different. That requires some scheme of classification.

At the beginning of the 18th century, naturalists knew only a few thousand species, and sometimes could not even distinguish plants from animals. That changed in 1735 when the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus published his system for identifying and classifying species.

Armed with the Linnaean system, guns, nets, collecting boxes and an almost missionary sense of purpose, species seekers went everywhere, from the Namib Desert to the Great Barrier Reef, and brought back creatures that even the authors of medieval bestiaries could hardly have imagined.

Naturalists were often caught up in the business of conquest and colonization, using natural history to advance their own careers and to remake the world on European lines. Yet many of us are alive today, for instance, because naturalists identified obscure species that later turned out to cause malaria, yellow fever, typhus and other epidemic diseases.

Modern species seekers still aim to catalogue every species on Earth, even though the tally is nearing 2m, and new ones are found daily. In 2003, the eminent American zoologist E. O. Wilson proposed the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based project with a page for every species within 25 years. But as Wilson acknowledged at the time, ‘the truth is that we do not know how many species of organisms exist on Earth even to the nearest order of magnitude.’ He thought the final count would be about 10m. Others believe it could be 50m or even 100m - numbers that Conniff’s heroes and fools could not have imagined. We still live in the great age of discovery and this is the story of how it began.

Sleights of Mind

A fascinating look at a new branch of cognitive research: "neuromagic"

Sleights of Mind: What the neuroscience of magic reveals about our everyday deceptions by Stephen L Macnik, Susana Martinez-Conde and Sandra Blakeslee

New Scientist, 20 November 2010

MAGIC, it mystifies and captivates us. We shake our heads in disbelief as coins are conjured out of thin air, as cards are mysteriously summoned from a pack, and as the magician's assistant vanishes before our eyes. Of course, there is no such thing as "magic", so how does magic work? It's a question that neuroscientists like Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde are trying to answer. In the process they have conjured up a new branch of cognitive research called neuromagic.

From misdirection and the magical practice of "forcing", to mirror neurons and synaptic plasticity, Sleights of Mind is a spellbinding mix of magic and science. The authors invite us to sip this heady potion as they show us how understanding the myriad ways in which the brain is deceived by magic may solve some of the mysteries surrounding how it works.

“Magic tricks fool us because humans have hard-wired processes of attention and awareness that are hackable,” say the authors. Magicians use your mind’s intrinsic properties against you. In a magical feat of their own, the authors persuaded magicians such as James Randi and Teller from the Las Vegas headline act Penn and Teller to deconstruct tricks so that Macknik and Martinez-Conde could later attempt to reconstruct what is going on inside your head “as you are suckered”.

Magic, say the neuroscientists, could reveal how the brain functions in everyday situations such as shopping. However, it is a stretch to believe, as the authors do, that if you’ve bought an expensive item that you never intended to buy, then you were probably a victim of the “illusion of choice”, a technique magicians use to rob their dupes of genuine choice.

The magician toys with us when he appears to put a coin into his right hand, closes it, waves his left over it, and then opens the right. The coin, which we feel must still be there, has “vanished”. He makes us experience the impossible by disrupting the expected relationship between a cause and its effect.

What we see, hear, and feel is based on what we expect to see, hear and feel due to our experiences and memories. When these expectations are violated the brain takes more time to process data or our attention focuses on the violation. Success or failure for the magician relies on his skill in diverting our attention away from the method and towards the magical effect.

Great magicians, through countless hours of practice, manipulate our attention, memory and causal inferences using a bewildering combination of visual, auditory and tactile methods. The greatest magic show on earth, though, is the one happening in your brain.

Neutrino

Ghost Particle

Neutrino by Frank Close

New Scientist, 6 November 2010

For a moment in the late 1920s, Niels Bohr considered the unthinkable: abandoning the notion of conservation of energy. He wasn't calling for its wholesale rejection, only that it be disregarded whenever a neutron decayed into a proton and an electron, as some energy appeared to go missing along the way.

Wolfgang Pauli, who was wont to damn poor ideas as "not even wrong", came up with a solution he called "a terrible thing" - an unknown particle to account for the missing energy. Since it had to be electrically neutral with little or no mass, it was called the neutrino, the "little neutral one".

In this short and informative book, Frank Close recalls those who had the ingenuity and patience to catch and understand this elusive particle that barely interacts with other matter. Their successors are hunting neutrinos left over from the big bang, and no one knows what story these relics will tell.

Did You See The Gorilla?

Tehelka, 6 November 2010
Click the page to read the article.