Category Archives: MONITOR Nexus

>O2 MONITOR >> Are we the Center Of The Universe?

Posted on by o2task

>

We Are The Center Of The Universe

Roll Over Copernicus! It Turns Out We Are The Center Of The Universe

 
by Adam Frank
Astronomers observing the center of the Milky Way from the European Southern Observatory in Chile fire a laser into the heavens. The Laser Guide Star (LGS) is used as a reference to correct the blurring effect of the atmosphere on images.

Yuri Beletsky/ESO
Astronomers observing the center of the Milky Way from the European Southern Observatory in Chile fire a laser into the heavens. The Laser Guide Star (LGS) is used as a reference to correct the blurring effect of the atmosphere on images.

For the last 500 years humanity has suffered one humiliation after another at the hands of the cosmos.
First Copernicus showed us that the Earth was not the center of the solar system. Then we found out that the sun was not in a special position within the galaxy. The galaxy, we then discovered, was not special either, but one of an uncountable number in an infinite universe. Now some physicists tell us that the universe may not be unique but may exist as part of a vast, infinite multiverse. All this Copernican overturning is enough to give a species a severe set of self-esteem issues.
Worse, it’s enough to make us wonder what place and what meaning in the cosmos we are meant to inhabit.
Well today, my friends, I am here to tell you that Copernicus, or at least a reflexive Copernicanism, is wrong.


  I am just about to press SEND on the final version of my new book, called The End of the Beginning: Cosmology Culture and Time at the Twilight of the Big Bang. It’s a cultural history of cosmic time and a cosmic history of cultural time. I’ve spent the last two years tracing the path of humanity’s cosmological imagination and, after giving the issue A LOT of cogitation, I think we’re ready to ready roll Copernicus over and tell the cosmos the news.
We are, it turns out, the center of the universe and it’s anything but meaningless.
For this claim to be true there is no need to insert your favorite, or most hated, religion. There is no need to demand a deity exist or posit that it fine-tuned the cosmos to give us a warm, safe, cozy home. To see our vital, central role in the cosmos you need only look out from your own perspective and understand that is all you, or anyone else, will ever get.
Because it’s all about perspective.
We like to believe we can study the Universe (with a capital ‘U’) as a thing in itself. But in truth what we actually get are universes (with a lower case ‘u’). We only ever get glorious but partial views of the ever-greater “whole.” Science, in this perspective, is not a means to a “final theory” but is, instead, our most extraordinary means of continuing a never-ending dialogue with the world. That dialogue, formed through science and art and all forms of culture make us co-creators of the universes we inhabit and they are always suffused with meaning
There is the old story of a group of blind philosophers studying an elephant. One feels the tail and declares an elephant is like a snake. Another feels the ear and declares the elephant is like a palm frond. A third feels the foot and declares the elephant is like a tree. The relationship between the universe in-and-of-itself and the universe each culture, each instantiation of science, invents for itself is much like that between the philosophers and their elephant.
Perhaps it is time to see the universe as an infinite elephant or, better yet, as a diamond with infinite facets. Different facets come into view as culture and science change. We gain a deeper understanding even as the universe in-and-of-itself remains ultimately larger than all our accounts.
In the end, it is our dialogue with the universe that matters most. Acknowledging the intertwined evolution of culture and cosmic vision does not diminish the power of science; it allows us to see more clearly our role as participants in the universe.
To put it bluntly, we can never be taken out of the narrative of creation. We are always, in some partial but essential way, its co-creators. In taking this perspective we make the most radical step of all. We begin to move away from a reflexive Copernicanism that made human being irrelevant in the cosmos and recognize that there is vital place for us. It’s a life at the center of the universes we manifest through the creative act of being human, creating culture and practicing science.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>O2 MONITOR >> Is this the "Holy Grail" you seek? > The Dancing Universe

Posted on by o2task

>

Cover of "The Dancing Universe: From Crea...

The Dancing Universe: Chasing The Big Three Origins

There is no better place to illustrate where science and religion intersect than when we ponder the “Three Origins”: that of the universe, that of life and that of mind.

 

Is this the “Holy Grail” you seek? 
Unfortunately, no. 
The Grails we seek are metaphors for the understanding of life, the universe and everything (apologies to the late Douglas Adams).

Hundreds of creation myths from all corners of the world have, over the past few millennia, tried to provide some explanation to these three mysteries. In The Dancing Universe, I explored some of the common threads in these myths and how they intersect with ideas in science, in particular in cosmology.


We seem to have a deeply ingrained need to understand where we come from, and know that our origins are enmeshed with the origin of the cosmos itself: since we are thinking chunks of stardust, to understand where we came from we need to understand where stars came from, how dust got assembled into living matter, and how living matter became thinking matter.
Creation myths are pre-scientific attempts to come up with explanations of the natural world, which assume the existence of supernatural powers capable of performing what appear to be impossible deeds. Much of the perceived conflict between science and religion is due to the tension between these very different explanatory modes and the belief that these deeds are impossible and hence require the aid of entities that defy the laws of nature.
Can the three origins be explained by natural mechanisms, without the interference of supernatural entities? If they could, religions that rely on deities that exist beyond the laws of Nature would have to undergo a deep revision.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that understanding the three origins would eliminate our spiritual connection with nature and with each other. On the contrary, our understanding of the world should only strengthen our spirituality. The belief that explanations of the natural world remove us from it has no foundation. Rationality and spirituality are complementary aspects of our humanity.
If we are to look for common ground in the scientific and religious modes of understanding, it is in the fascination we all share with the mystery of creation. Religious or unreligious, we ask the same questions.
  Science has come a long way toward elucidating many of the mechanisms behind all three origins. In the past 400 years we have learned a great deal about the universe, about life and about the mind. These are very exciting times, when progress along all three questions is happening very fast. But we should also add that we still don’t know how to answer any of them. This should not be seen as a defeat, but as an ongoing challenge.
Science thrives on open questions.
Modern cosmology has shown that the universe had a very hot infancy, and that it has been expanding and cooling for the past 13.7 billion years. Astronomers have found incontrovertible evidence supporting the big bang model, in the form of a widespread radiation that permeates space, a relic of the cosmic hot and dense past. We can confidently reconstruct the cosmic history from about a second after the “bang” onward, not too bad.
We have revealed life’s genetic code and how inherited traits trickle down from generation to generation. We can go backwards and identify our last common ancestor as being a single celled organism that roamed the primitive oceans billions of years ago. But, as with the cosmos, we still can’t go all the way back to the origin. In fact, the very notion that we can understand exactly how life originated on Earth may be faulty; unless we can provide conclusive evidence that there is only one possible pathway for nonliving matter to self-organize into living matter, we may never know what happened here; we may have to be content with a plausible mechanism, reproducible in the laboratory.
Even less can be said about the brain, this remarkable assembly of some 100 billion neurons that creates our sense of who we are and constructs what we call our sense of reality. However, we now can map the seats of many different areas of brain activity, using magnetic resonance imaging and PET scans. We can see that neurons in different parts of the brain seem to act in tandem, firing in resonating patterns as if playing in an orchestra without a conductor. But brain sciences are the youngest of the three and present some formidable and wonderful challenges. Given the current pace of discovery, within the next few decades we will know much more.
How far down can we go in understanding the three questions is material for future posts. Hidden here are questions on the nature of knowledge and the limits of what we can know. But to deny our progress is a terrible mistake. In fact, open questions should be presented as the reason why we need more scientists, why a child should be interested in becoming a scientist. So many mysteries so little time.
The three origins hang up there as the Holy Grails of science.
What matters is what we find on the way.

“Sweeping through twenty-five centuries, Gleiser examines 
how mankind’s discovery of the connections between mythology, 
philosophy, and science brought about new cosmological insights.”—Natural History

Available again, with a new preface, a physicist’s “exceptionally clear summary 
of 2,500 years of science and a fascinating account of the ways in which it often 
does intersect with spiritual beliefs” –Kirkus Reviews

Marcelo Gleiser refutes the notion that science and spirituality are irreconcilable. 
In The Dancing Universe, he traces mystical, philosophical, and scientific ideas 
about the cosmos through the past twenty-five centuries, from the ancient creation myths 
of numerous cultures to contemporary theories about an ever-expanding universe. 

He also explores the lives and ideas of history’s greatest scientists, including 
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. 
By exploring how scientists have unlocked the secrets of gravity, matter, time, and space, 
Gleiser offers fresh perspective on the debate between science and faith.

Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS

Awards/Recognition:
Winner of Brazil’s Jabuti Award for the best nonfiction book of the year.


MARCELO GLEISER is Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is also the author of The Prophet and the Astronomer: A Scientific Journey to the End of Time (2002).
Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>O2 MONITOR >> Mind-Blowing Supernovas

Posted on by o2task

>

Blowing Up Stars: A 50 Year Old Question Goes Down?

 
by Adam Frank
The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a massive star.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Gehrz (University of Minnesota)
 
The Crab Nebula is the shattered remnant of a massive star that ended its life in a supernova explosion.

There are some critical, crossroads problems in science that just refuse to go away. They linger like ghosts haunting researchers for decades and eluding all attempts at resolution. Entire careers are spent searching for an answer and sometime entire lifetimes go by without that answer found. But every so often one of those vexing problems on which so much depends falls to human effort and ingenuity.
Today may be one of those days.


Supernova, the apocalyptic explosions of massive stars, are the brightest most energetic events in the Cosmos second only to the Big Bang which birthed the Universe itself. Visible from across the Universe Supernovae result from the self-immolation of stars. More than fireworks supernova matter acting as nuclear forges that create many of the heavy elements on which life depends. But living at the heart of these beasts is a mystery that 50 years and untold effort has been unable to solve. Until perhaps today.
When a massive star (more than eight times the sun mass) reaches the end of its life it runs out of nuclear fuel. With no visible means of support against its own titanic gravity, the star comes crashing down on itself squeezing tremendous amounts of mass into an ever smaller space. In less than seconds, a kind of nuclear alchemy occurs in the compressed center. A giant hyperdense core (a proto-neutron star) forms like a hard rubber ball that can only be squeezed so far. The dense core resists further compression. As the outer layers of the star that are still freefalling inwards slam into this nuclear brick wall a rebounding shock wave forms that blows the star apart.
At least that was the story.
The problem was the story never really worked. For 50 years, astronomers have been trying to find some variation on this theory –- the story –- that could make a massive dying star blow up. The added rotation, included the effects of ghostly particles called neutrinos, thought about jets and magnetic fields forming at the ultra dense core. Some of these ideas almost work, or work in some cases. But when explored in detail, they never produced a convincing, universal mechanism for creating the supernova that we know exist. It was a great and grand puzzle. Now, perhaps, the puzzle has been solved.
Jason Nordaus is a post-doctoral student working with Professor Adam Burrows at Princeton University. In a paper that has just appeared today, Nordhaus may have found the key to nature’s most extreme fireworks. Now you will have to excuse me for being a bit proud as Nordhaus got his PhD in our theory group at University of Rochester and we love our graduates going on to do great work with other scientists. If this result holds up it will be very important for astronomy. More importantly the answer Nordhaus found goes beyond science and directly touches our beloved Cosmos & Culture theme.
Using very high performance computers Nordaus ran simulations of exploding stars that focused on one key piece of physics. Squeezing matter produces lots of particles called neutrinos. The absorption of these neutrinos near the shock wave had already been suggested as a way to power it up and blow the star to bits.
What mattered for Nordaus was the ability to simulate the explosions — in detail — in 3-D. Lacking the computational power many previous studies were forced perform simulations in lower dimensions. That means imagining the star to be highly symmetric limiting the ability for neutrinos to deposit their energy in the gas and blow the star up. By tracking the full lumpy, bumpy, 3-D behavior of the collapsing star and the neutrinos Nordau’s found he could consistently get his model stars to explode.
The answer to this 50-year-old mystery turned out to be “nothing more” than our inability to explore detailed physics in its detailed 3-D behavior. That is where the link between Cosmos and Culture emerges.
Nordhuas’ result was simulation at the “Peta”scale frontier. PetaBytes means a million, billion bytes. PetaFlops means a million billion computations a second. That is the edge computational science is now crossing. With it comes our first real shot at virtual reality. Things are going change at Petascale domains in everything from video games to immersive computing (you don’t drive your car, your car drives you for example).
As we cross this frontier in machine power we can expect explosions in a lot more than model stars.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

Posted on by o2task

>

Welcome to GBN O2HUB! This Global Business Network Hub is designed to INFORM & ENTERTAIN | GLOBAL ISSUES |CURRENT ECONOMY & FINANCE AFFAIRS| HUMANITIES | ART | MUSIC | SCIENCE | HEALTH & WELLBEING | CULTURE | ENVIRONMENT | O2 > Boost your Personal & Organizational Performance > Explore ‘EXCEL MINDSET’ Best Practice BUSINESS MANAGEMENT insights of GSMI – STRATEGY DYNAMICS Systems Thinking Solutions & Tools – MONITOR Nexus Global Business Consulting Network Diagnostics & Directives – IDC Knowledge Transfer Networks Research & BOSTON BUSINESS SCHOOL of MANAGEMENT Executive Education (Excel Mindset 2020 Vision Series) for BOOSTING your LEADERSHIP OXYGEN in critical topics: > Strategy Dynamics > Organizational Change, Streamlining & Transformation > Executive Decision Making > Performance Management > Risk Management > Leadership & Alignment > Business Intelligence & Analytics

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!

>BOOST O2 >> The Way to Smarter Internet searching (Tips)

Posted on by o2task

>

10 tips for smarter, more efficient Internet searching

By Alan Norton
 These days, everyone is expected to be up to speed on Internet search techniques. But there are still a few tricks that some users — and even savvy searchers — may not be aware of.

Did you hate memorizing seemingly insignificant facts for tests at school?
No photographic memory?
Good news! Life is now an open-book exam — assuming you have a computer, browser, and Internet access. If you know how to use a good search engine, you don’t have to stuff your mind with facts that are useful only when playing Jeopardy! and Trivial Pursuit.
Chances are, you aren’t the first person to run across the problem you are experiencing. Chances are also good that an answer is awaiting your discovery on the Internet — you just have to remove the irrelevant pages and the unhelpful/incorrect results to find that needle in the haystack.
Google has been fanatical about speed. There is little doubt that it has built an incredibly fast and thorough search engine. Unfortunately, the human element of the Internet search equation is often overlooked.
These 10 tips are designed to improve that human element and better your Internet search skills. (Note: All examples below refer to the Google search engine.)



1: Use unique, specific terms

It is simply amazing how many Web pages are returned when performing a search. You might guess that the terms blue dolphin are relatively specialized. A Google search of those terms returned 2,440,000 results! To reduce the number of pages returned, use unique terms that are specific to the subject you are researching.

2: Use the minus operator (-) to narrow the search

How many times have you searched for a term and had the search engine return something totally unexpected? Terms with multiple meanings can return a lot of unwanted results. The rarely used but powerful minus operator, equivalent to a Boolean NOT, can remove many unwanted results. For example, when searching for the insect caterpillar, references to the company Caterpillar, Inc. will also be returned. Use Caterpillar -Inc to exclude references to the company or Caterpillar -Inc -Cat to further refine the search.

3: Use quotation marks for exact phrases

I often remember parts of phrases I have seen on a Web page or part of a quotation I want to track down. Using quotation marks around a phrase will return only those exact words in that order. It’s one of the best ways to limit the pages returned. Example: “Be nice to nerds”.Of course, you must have the phrase exactly right — and if your memory is as good as mine, that can be problematic.

4: Don’t use common words and punctuation

Common terms like a and the are called stop words and are usually ignored. Punctuation is also typically ignored. But there are exceptions. Common words and punctuation marks should be used when searching for a specific phrase inside quotes. There are cases when common words like the are significant. For instance, Raven and The Raven return entirely different results.

5: Capitalization

Most search engines do not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase, even within quotation marks. The following are all equivalent:

  • technology
  • Technology
  • TECHNOLOGY
  • “technology”
  • “Technology”

6: Drop the suffixes

It’s usually best to enter the base word so that you don’t exclude relevant pages. For example, bird and not birds, walk and not walked. One exception is if you are looking for sites that focus on the act of walking, enter the whole term walking.

7: Maximize AutoComplete

Ordering search terms from general to specific in the search box will display helpful results in a drop-down list and is the most efficient way to use AutoComplete. Selecting the appropriate item as it appears will save time typing. You have several choices for how the AutoComplete feature works: Use Google AutoComplete. The standard Google start page will display a drop-down list of suggestions supplied by the Google search engine. This option can be a handy way to discover similar, related searches. For example, typing in Tucson fast will not only bring up the suggestion Tucson fast food but also Tucson fast food coupons.
Use browser AutoComplete. Use this Google start page to disable the Google AutoComplete feature and display a list of your previous searches in a drop-down box. I find this particularly useful when I’ve made dozens of searches in the past for a particular item. The browser’s AutoComplete feature must be turned on for this option to work. Click one of these links for instructions detailing how to turn AutoComplete on or off in I.E. and Firefox.
Examples:

  • Visual Basic statement case
  • Visual Basic statement for
  • Visual Basic call

8: Customize your searches

There are several other less well known ways to limit the number of results returned and reduce your search time:

  • The plus operator (+): As mentioned above, stop words are typically ignored by the search engine. The plus operator tells the search engine to include those words in the result set. Example: tall +and short will return results that include the word and.
  • The tide operator (~): Include a tilde in front of a word to return results that include synonyms. The tilde operator does not work well for all terms and sometimes not at all. A search for ~CSS includes the synonym style and returns fashion related style pages –not exactly what someone searching for CSS wants. Examples: ~HTML to get results for HTML with synonyms; ~HTML -HTML to get synonyms only for HTML.
  • The wildcard operator (*): Google calls it the fill in the blank operator. For example, amusement * will return pages with amusement and any other term(s) the Google search engine deems relevant. You can’t use wildcards for parts of words. So for example, amusement p* is invalid.
  • The OR operator (OR) or (|): Use this operator to return results with either of two terms. For example happy joy will return pages with both happy and joy, while happy | joy will return pages with either happy or joy.
  • Numeric ranges: You can refine searches that use numeric terms by returning a specific range, but you must supply the unit of measurement. Examples: Windows XP 2003..2005, PC $700 $800.
  • Site search: Many Web sites have their own site search feature, but you may find that Google site search will return more pages. When doing research, it’s best to go directly to the source, and site search is a great way to do that. Example: site:www.intel.com rapid storage technology.
  • Related sites: For example, related:www.youtube.com can be used to find sites similar to YouTube.
  • Change your preferences: Search preferences can be set globally by clicking on the gear icon in the upper-right corner and selecting Search Settings. I like to change the Number Of Results option to 100 to reduce total search time.
  • Forums-only search: Under the Google logo on the left side of the search result page, click More | Discussions or go to Google Groups. Forums are great places to look for solutions to technical problems.
  • Advanced searches: Click the Advanced Search button by the search box on the Google start or results page to refine your search by date, country, amount, language, or other criteria.
  • Wonder Wheel: The Google Wonder Wheel can visually assist you as you refine your search from general to specific. Here’s how to use this tool:
  1. Click on More Search Tools | Wonder Wheel in the lower-left section of the screen (Figure A) to load the Wonder Wheel page.
  2. Click on dbms tutorial (Figure B).

Figure A

Figure B

As you can see in Figure C, Google now displays two wheels showing the DBMS and dbms tutorial Wonder Wheels, with the results for dbms tutorial on the right side of the page. You can continue drilling down the tree to further narrow your search. Click the Close button at the top of the results to remove the Wonder Wheel(s).

Figure C

9: Use browser history

Many times, I will be researching an item and scanning through dozens of pages when I suddenly remember something I had originally dismissed as being irrelevant. How do you quickly go back to that Web site? You can try to remember the exact words used for the search and then scan the results for the right site, but there is an easier way. If you can remember the general date and time of the search you can look through the browser history to find the Web page.

10: Set a time limit — then change tactics

Sometimes, you never can find what you are looking for. Start an internal clock, and when a certain amount of time has elapsed without results, stop beating your head against the wall. It’s time to try something else:

  • Use a different search engine, like Yahoo!, Bing, Startpage, or Lycos.
  • Ask a peer.
  • Call support.
  • Ask a question in the appropriate forum.
  • Use search experts who can find the answer for you.

The bottom line

A tool is only as useful as the typing fingers wielding it. Remember that old acronym GIGO, garbage in, garbage out? Search engines will try to place the most relevant results at the top of the list, but if your search terms are too broad or ambiguous, the results will not be helpful. It is your responsibility to learn how to make your searches both fast and effective.
The Internet is the great equalizer for those who know how to use it efficiently. Anyone can now easily find facts using a search engine instead of dredging them from the gray matter dungeon — assuming they know a few basic tricks. Never underestimate the power of a skilled search expert.

This article is also available as a PDF download.
 Get IT Tips, news, and reviews delivered directly to your inbox by subscribing to TechRepublic’s free newsletters.
Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta
ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS >>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST >>> ENJOY IT!