Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, author of the mind-bending 2006 book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, has a new book out. Knocking on Heaven's Door sounds like an entertaining way to knock you right out of your existing reality tunnel. Smithsonian interviewed Randall:

There are a lot of bizarre ideas here, from string theory to a "brane" of extra dimensions right next to our own. Why should we regard these ideas as more than fanciful constructs?

I'm certainly not asking anyone to take on faith any of the ideas that I present. That's part of the point of the book: science proceeds, and we systematically end up with new ideas and explanations, going from the human scales we're very familiar with to scales that are so remote it's hard to have intuition about them. Science is a self-correcting process, too, something that I expect will happen with the recent announcement of neutrinos that may move faster than the speed of light.

Can you describe the essence of your idea about extra dimensions? There could be more to the universe than the three dimensions we are familiar with. They are hidden from us in some way, perhaps because they're tiny or warped. But even if they're invisible, they could affect what we actually observe in the universe. There are lots of things we cannot see with the naked eye that turn out to be based in reality.

Extra dimensions could be relevant to one of the questions we're trying to answer at the (Large Hadron Collider): how particles get their mass, and why they have the masses that they do, which are far smaller than physicists would expect them to be. So our idea is there's an extra dimension that's so warped, the masses would be big in one place and small in another. In other words, gravity could be weaker in one place and stronger in another. If so, it could be a natural explanation both for why particles masses are what they are, and why gravity is so much weaker than the other elementary forces we observe.

This extra dimension could be separated from ours by a million trillion trillionth of a centimeter. Is this a parallel yet inaccessible universe?

It interacts with our dimensions only via gravity. And gravity is extremely weak. An elementary particle at ordinary energies exerts negligible gravitational force. But at the LHC, if this idea is right, we would see evidence of this extra dimension. Particles could carry momentum into the extra dimension, and that could actually be observable.

"Opening Strange Portals in Physics"

Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World (Amazon)

Light Created from Nothing of the Day: A team of scientists at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology has created light out of “nothingness” by converting virtual light particles into real ones, according to a paper published in Nature.

The process involved vibrating a mirror-like electrical surface at near-light speed, which caught the virtual particles and reflected them back as light.

According to Nature, these results don’t violate the first law of thermodynamics, because it takes more energy to move the mirror than the process generates in the form of light.

[dvice]

Neutrinos Faster Than Light of the Day: Back in September, scientists at CERN claimed to have found that certain subatomic particles can move faster than the speed of light.

When the scientific community lost its collective mind due to these findings, CERN was pressured into re-doing the experiment, but with some changes that many felt would account for the initial results.

They recently performed the new experiment, which showed the same results, while ruling out a potential source of error in the measurements.

In the original experiment, beams of neutrinos were fired from CERN to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy, which is 450 miles away. The neutrinos appeared to arrive sixty billionths of a second earlier than they should have.

In the new experiment, the length of the beams that were sent were greatly reduced, thus removing the task of having to determine the shape and duration of the beam, allowing researchers to focus solely on when the particles arrived. The results still appeared to be the same.

CERN isn’t finished trying to rule out all possible sources of error, including something as simple as making sure that the clocks at both laboratories  are perfectly synchronized.

If it turns out the results are not flawed, the findings could show that it’s possible to send information back in time.

Many still feel that these findings are the result of some sort of experimental error, but just in case, I’m gonna start stocking up on dinosaur hunting gear.

Via The Guardian and geeks.thedailywh.at

If there’s an awards ceremony for material of the year, you might expect graphene would sweep it for 2011. But researchers at a Californian lab are making a late bid with what they are billing as the world’s lightest material.

The as-yet unnamed material has a density of 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimetre, which is said to be around a hundred time lighter than Styrofoam.

Perhaps surprisingly the material is primarily made of nickel. The key is that this is arranged in a series of tiny hollow tubes with the walls being just 100 nanonmeters thick. As a result, 99.99% of the material’s volume is simply air.

The production of the material involves creating a framework and coating it with nickel plating, then removing the framework.

HRL Laboratories, which made the material, says its structure gives it some other unusual qualities for a metal. It can be compressed by up to 50 percent to then regain its original shape perfectly. It’s also got an uncharacteristically high ability to absorb energy.

Dr Bill Carter, who manages the HRL department responsible for the work, likened the concept to the designs of the Eiffel Tower and Golden Gate Bridge, which are relatively light given their scale.

The project was carried out with the assistance of the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Irvine. The material was developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (America’s geekiest government department) with the idea that it could be used for battery electrodes or for shock and vibration damping.

At around 4.30pm on 26 March 2011, I was in the luxury department store Fortnum & Mason on Picadilly in London. I was perusing the chocolate section, chatting amiably to staff and admiring ornate truffles. It would have been an unremarkable Saturday in central London if I hadn't been there as part of an occupation. Conversations with the staff would have been ordinary if one of them hadn't been joking that he wished he was "outside rioting". The protest itself may have even been forgettable if protesters hadn't been lied to by the police, marched outside, kettled, arrested, detained, denied access to a solicitor and charged with aggravated trespass. Headlines might not have been made if those arrests had not been conflated with unrelated violent protest, and described by Theresa May as "sending a message to those who carry out violence".

The Fortnum & Mason trial, from its very beginning, has been a catalogue of lies, errors, farce and injustice. It is now well-documented that Chief Inspector Claire Clarke described the protesters as "non-violent" and "sensible", while guaranteeing they would be let go. A freedom of information request confirms that the police were communicating with the government about UK Uncut, though what was said has been withheld. We now know that the police began their day on 26 March, not by pledging to keep the peace, but by vowing to draw "a line in the sand" between peaceful protest and criminal trespass.

In such a fatuous, unjust trial, it is perversely fitting that an illogical, transparently wrong verdict was reached. The trial's conclusion rounds off the shambolic and rank way in which the entire episode has unfolded. There is simply no evidence that the 10 convicted protesters were intent on intimidating customers. In fact, one Fortum & Mason diner told the Independent that UK Uncut was "the perfect accompaniment to my tea and scones". When I was in the shop, I remember watching, amused, as customers continued obliviously to browse the shelves. As you would imagine in such a setting, the protest was quintessentially British: nobody made a scene...

Patient: Wayne, Bruce

DOB: 2/16/1971

Occupation: Industrialist

Insurance: Self-pay

Emergency Contact: Dick Grayson, XXX-269-9637 

Interval History:  Patient was seen for his last annual physical approximately one year ago.  Since that time he has had numerous visits for acute illnesses or injuries, generally accompanied either by his companion Mr. Grayson or Alfred, a senior member of his household staff.  These recent maladies appear to be in keeping with the pattern that has emerged over the past several years, in which significant medical problems are associated with odd or incongruous explanations.  Most recently, patient was seen for numerous areas of lower extremity cutaneous blistering, erythema and thickening, consistent with moderate to severe frostbite.  Patient had reportedly gotten lost while camping in the mountains, but could not account for how he had sustained these injuries in mid-August.

Past Medical History:  As stated, patient has a somewhat lengthy and complicated medical history, best summarized by system –

Orthopedic:  By far the greatest contributor to patient’s ongoing morbidity are his multiple and seemingly ceaseless musculoskeletal injuries.  The most significant of these was sustained several years ago, when he was rushed to GCGH with several fractures of his lumbar vertebrae, reportedly after falling while rappelling.   Skeletal series obtained at that time revealed numerous (>20) areas of orthopedic injury in various states of healing, which could not be fully explained by recent fall, including areas of all extremities and many ribs; confirmatory bone scan similarly showed many areas of increased uptake.  Patient’s robust stature is not consistent with osteogenesis imperfecta, and skin biopsy was negative for abnormal collagen and P3H1 or CRTAP genetic defects.  Malignancy was suspected, but eventually ruled out following oncology consultation.  Patient explained most of these (and most subsequent) injuries as being the result of membership in a private and apparently quite intense mixed martial arts club.  Patient has denied being the victim of domestic abuse by Mr. Grayson following indirect and direct questioning on numerous occasions.