What Happens After You Make a Wish?
Wishing or dreaming is actually not recommended. You see, when you wish in the physical universe you go out of the present moment, and your mind observes this. Your mind sees that you are dreaming about some future event or situation, and it puts you on automatic. When you place a wish into the universe there is invariably and immediately a form of resistance that comes against it. This resistance is called the physical universe. Some people call it real life.
In fact one guy who imagined a huge house in his own universe, had one got purchased in a very posh locality he was dying to live into. He was so surprised and excited to see his dream taking form in the physical universe, that he forget to have his girlfriend take a picture of him standing next to it!
The process of materializing what you desire and imagine starts with a thought. Every skyscraper that you see was once only an architect's plan. Even the world itself is said to have started as a thought of the Divine Creator. Everything material starts as a thought. What happens between the time that you form a thought and the time and place that it materializes?
There is the idea that thought creates reality. This is the basis of the Life Transformation Formula. In everyday life the evidence of this can be shown in the construction of a building for example. First it is planned out and then it is constructed. The plan, the idea, always comes first. At least that is the basic premise for this discussion.
If you agree with that (and hopefully you have experienced how a thought, or dream, or wish or plan that you had has come into reality) then you know what we are talking about. That is what Edgar Cayce the famous psychic means when he says "mind is the builder".
That is what Buddha means when he says, "we are what we think, and all that we are arises from our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. "
So if we think that we would like to have a million dollars in our bank account right now, then why doesn't that happen, instantly and without effort? If we get in the car and are afraid that we am going to have a terrible accident, why doesn't that happen every time?
Why do some thoughts make it all the way into reality, and some don't? Answer that question, and you will understand a great deal, and accomplish a lot.
For one thing it matters a lot where you put that thought once you launch it. Thoughts are things and if you throw them out in the physical universe without knowing what you are doing they do have influence, but it can be like trying to throw a ball through a brick wall. It just bounces back, or worse, it can come back distorted. Some people throw out their thoughts with such force and power but they still hit a brick wall, better known as "the real world".
So let's look at that. Some thoughts are repetitive. The person who continues to focus on putting a million dollars in the bank uses that thought to drive action. The thought of having a million dollars drives many actions, and births many supporting thoughts. The person will probably learn new skills. Can you see that there is a process that must unfold from the original thought? How do you hold a thought like that for so long? How do you make it all come true faster?
Holding the thought, repeating the thought; that is one of the forces that occurs between the original thought and the reality it creates in your life.
Many thoughts are held within the body programmed in from childhood experiences and so on. We don't even think about them consciously perhaps. Or they are so familiar that they don't seem like they are there.
Do you understand? It is important to hold the thought, yet it can be held effortlessly in the body if you program it in there. You need to know how to do this. It makes a big difference in the quality of life if you have some great ability to work with your thoughts.
Another thing that happens when a thought is formed, and held, is that some thoughts materialize and some don't. Many people who consciously pray, or wish or otherwise put forth thoughts say "thy will be done, not mine." or "for my highest good, and the good of all".
So there is the idea that nothing comes into creation without the Creators permission or without the permission of forces such as our higher beings that watch over us. This means that in order to get something to materialize, part of the process is to develop a relationship with the forces that are involved in allowing it or assisting it to materialize.
This can be very spiritual and very practical. In the example where the original thought is the plan for a building there are: permits that must be obtained; financing; many people to coordinate; equipment and materials to purchase, and so on.
So again, you can see the process in action.
When you program a thought properly it will guide you and your life to the most effective path with the least effort.
So, this write up is to help you enjoy the easiest and most elegant journey from thought to materialization. By holding the original thought, and remembering that thought, going back to that thought, re-working that thought, you will have much greater success than someone who forgets about the original thought or plan.
Secondly, the original thought re-assessed as time goes on and the process unfolds will provide great strength and guidance to any actions taken. A man looking for a huge house wants show up in the physical universe, so he has the opportunity to assess and develop his wish. He can change his mind or he can hold the thought. It's up to him. One thing that can happen is that all the actions that need to be taken will seem very clear if you keep the thought clear.
Would you like to know how to form a thought and hold it almost effortlessly until it comes true, no matter what?
Otherwise there is the risk of getting caught up in taking too many actions that are inefficient. It is amazing how much will come about simply from the power of the thought alone if you refrain from all but the best of actions that you feel compelled to follow.
All obstacles can be overcome by using this method of holding the original thought and letting it guide you on how to build it into the physical universe. There is a place that you can put your thoughts so that once they are there the force and power to help you in life is magnified tremendously. This is totally revealed in my e-book.
The place that you put those thoughts is called, "your own universe".
There is much more that may be involved in the materialization of each thought - many specific details. If there is something that you desire and imagine in your life, then we have to form the thought and follow it through to materialization. That is what needed to be done for a living!
Finally, when you do find that one of your thoughts has materialized notice that it has and try and trace the process backwards to the original thought or dream or wish or vision to see what happened along the way. Track your results. Count your blessings.
Forgive yourself or anyone involved for any mistakes or problems that happened along the way and be grateful for everything that worked out and the final successful result. Appreciate your self and everyone and everything involved for making it happen.
Counting your results helps greatly to prepare you better to make new thoughts and materialize them.
Dreams do come true. Sometimes you just need a little help to make them happen. Sometimes a lot of help!
This write up is for potently helping you experience in real life that your best dreams and wishes come true for you, by providing resources to help you to materialize what you desire
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
Some Unsolved Mysteries
Mysteries of the Universe
Even today, there are scientific phenomena that defy explanation. If history is anything to go by, resolving these anomalies could lead to a great leap forward, so what are the greatest mysteries, and what scientific revolutions might they bring?
1. The Missing Universe
Everything in the universe is either mass or energy, but there's not enough of either. Scientists think 96% of the cosmos is missing. They have come up with names for the missing stuff - "dark energy" and "dark matter" - but that doesn't really tell us anything about them. And it's not as if they're not important: dark energy is continually creating new swaths of space and time, while dark matter appears to be holding all the galaxies together. No wonder cosmologists are searching for clues to their whereabouts.
2. Life
We all think that we actually are more than a sack of molecules, but why? Next time when we see a tree, we must ask our self why a tree is alive when our wooden dining table is not. The phenomenon we call life is something that biologists have almost given up trying to define - instead they're investigating ways to make different combinations of molecules come alive. Bizarrely, the best hope is similar in chemical terms to laundry detergent.
3. Death
Here's the flip side: in biology, things eventually die, but there's no good explanation for it. There are hints that switching genes on and off controls ageing, but if our theory is right, those switches shouldn't have survived natural selection. Then there's the argument that an accumulation of faults does us in. However, there are plenty of whales and turtles who seem to age ridiculously slowly - if at all. Of course, if we can work out why, that could be great news for future humans (if not for the planet).
4. Sex
Charles Darwin might have fathered 10 children, but he couldn't understand why almost everything in biology uses sexual reproduction rather than asexual cloning - sex is a highly inefficient way to reproduce. We still don't know the answer. The suggestion that sex's gene shuffling makes us more able to deal with changing environments seems plausible, but the evidence is scarce. At the moment, sex only seems to exist to give males some role in life.
5. Free Will
If we want to keep our sanity, we must look away now. Neuroscientists are almost convinced that free will is an illusion. Their experiments show that our brains allow us to think we are controlling our bodies, but our movements begin before we make a conscious decision to move. Some researchers have already been approached to testify in court that the defendant is not to blame for anything they did. A scary legal future awaits the decision.
Even today, there are scientific phenomena that defy explanation. If history is anything to go by, resolving these anomalies could lead to a great leap forward, so what are the greatest mysteries, and what scientific revolutions might they bring?
1. The Missing Universe
Everything in the universe is either mass or energy, but there's not enough of either. Scientists think 96% of the cosmos is missing. They have come up with names for the missing stuff - "dark energy" and "dark matter" - but that doesn't really tell us anything about them. And it's not as if they're not important: dark energy is continually creating new swaths of space and time, while dark matter appears to be holding all the galaxies together. No wonder cosmologists are searching for clues to their whereabouts.
2. Life
We all think that we actually are more than a sack of molecules, but why? Next time when we see a tree, we must ask our self why a tree is alive when our wooden dining table is not. The phenomenon we call life is something that biologists have almost given up trying to define - instead they're investigating ways to make different combinations of molecules come alive. Bizarrely, the best hope is similar in chemical terms to laundry detergent.
3. Death
Here's the flip side: in biology, things eventually die, but there's no good explanation for it. There are hints that switching genes on and off controls ageing, but if our theory is right, those switches shouldn't have survived natural selection. Then there's the argument that an accumulation of faults does us in. However, there are plenty of whales and turtles who seem to age ridiculously slowly - if at all. Of course, if we can work out why, that could be great news for future humans (if not for the planet).
4. Sex
Charles Darwin might have fathered 10 children, but he couldn't understand why almost everything in biology uses sexual reproduction rather than asexual cloning - sex is a highly inefficient way to reproduce. We still don't know the answer. The suggestion that sex's gene shuffling makes us more able to deal with changing environments seems plausible, but the evidence is scarce. At the moment, sex only seems to exist to give males some role in life.
5. Free Will
If we want to keep our sanity, we must look away now. Neuroscientists are almost convinced that free will is an illusion. Their experiments show that our brains allow us to think we are controlling our bodies, but our movements begin before we make a conscious decision to move. Some researchers have already been approached to testify in court that the defendant is not to blame for anything they did. A scary legal future awaits the decision.
Instant Momentum
How to Instantly Gain Momentum and Keep It
We often talk about momentum and belief in our self... getting on a positive roll. Because if we believe that we can do something, we often miraculously get some otherworld ability to do it... even if we've never done it before. And if we fall down in our attempt, if we believe that the slip up was nothing more than a delay instead of a denial, then we'll get back up and keep going.
Sometimes, if the flame grows bright enough, even the very casual observer can notice a change in someone that switches from lack of belief to out and out passion for success.
If we're not sports fan, read the rest of this and ignore the sports references.
We discuss here an NBA playoff game years ago between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Philadelphia 76ers. The Bucks were up by 16 points! It was looking like it was going to be a blowout...
...But the 76ers never lost their belief. Their top scorer, Allen Iverson, was having possibly the worst scoring night of his life, but he was an animal on defense.
Their coach, Larry Brown, was imploring them to believe. Sure he talked X's and O's. I mean, they had to run plays. But he was jumping up and down on the court. Pleading with his team to keep up the pressure, to run down every loose ball, to make every pass as important as if it were the last one of the game.
Nothing but emotion. He knew they could do it...
...as long as they didn't lose their faith.
He knew that they were as good as Milwaukee. He didn't have to explain the basics of basketball. He knew his only job was to keep their heads in the game.
So did he get down on them when they made bad passes? Nope. He said, "C'mon. That's not like we. We can do this!"
They responded.
They started to believe. By the 4th quarter they had tied it up 63-63. The crowd was going crazy.
Momentum. It's nothing but emotion.
When things go right they tend to stay going right, don't they? But when things go wrong, the same rule applies, huh?
The interesting thing in the game was that as the emotion was exploding for the 76ers, the Bucks suddenly became doubters... missing shots, making bad passes, and worst of all, making stupid fouls out of anger. Their first half smiles turned into angry scowls. It was an incredible thing to watch. They had completely lost their belief in themselves.
It was an amazing display of momentum shift and a great example of how powerful a force it is in life.
Philadelphia responded to all those fouls the Bucks were making to hit 22 free throws in a row... and won 89-88.
A big lesson here is that we can have a lot of things going wrong and still get our outcome... if we don't give up.
Had the Bucks made just one more pass, or just one more basket, or if they had made just one less stupid foul out of frustration, they would have won.
When a salesperson is selling face to face every day, it was often at the last second, when he empties his mind and sees the fact he could think of why they should get his solution that they finally said, "Well, all right. We sure do believe that you can help us. So we'll do it."
It's at that point in salesperson’s life that he learns that I should never give up. Never, Never, Never Ever.
If we can only take today...And get our self to believe in our ability to do whatever it is we're doing a little faster, a little better, and with a little more enthusiasm, momentum will shift in our favor. Watch it work.
Soon WE'LL go from the scowl to the winning smile.
Success and happiness always starts between our own two ears. Don't wait. Begin right now and throw that smile on, and keep thinking all day, I can. I can. I can.
Every hour. "I can."
Eating lunch. "I can."
Before we pick up the phone. "I can."
...And we will.
We often talk about momentum and belief in our self... getting on a positive roll. Because if we believe that we can do something, we often miraculously get some otherworld ability to do it... even if we've never done it before. And if we fall down in our attempt, if we believe that the slip up was nothing more than a delay instead of a denial, then we'll get back up and keep going.
Sometimes, if the flame grows bright enough, even the very casual observer can notice a change in someone that switches from lack of belief to out and out passion for success.
If we're not sports fan, read the rest of this and ignore the sports references.
We discuss here an NBA playoff game years ago between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Philadelphia 76ers. The Bucks were up by 16 points! It was looking like it was going to be a blowout...
...But the 76ers never lost their belief. Their top scorer, Allen Iverson, was having possibly the worst scoring night of his life, but he was an animal on defense.
Their coach, Larry Brown, was imploring them to believe. Sure he talked X's and O's. I mean, they had to run plays. But he was jumping up and down on the court. Pleading with his team to keep up the pressure, to run down every loose ball, to make every pass as important as if it were the last one of the game.
Nothing but emotion. He knew they could do it...
...as long as they didn't lose their faith.
He knew that they were as good as Milwaukee. He didn't have to explain the basics of basketball. He knew his only job was to keep their heads in the game.
So did he get down on them when they made bad passes? Nope. He said, "C'mon. That's not like we. We can do this!"
They responded.
They started to believe. By the 4th quarter they had tied it up 63-63. The crowd was going crazy.
Momentum. It's nothing but emotion.
When things go right they tend to stay going right, don't they? But when things go wrong, the same rule applies, huh?
The interesting thing in the game was that as the emotion was exploding for the 76ers, the Bucks suddenly became doubters... missing shots, making bad passes, and worst of all, making stupid fouls out of anger. Their first half smiles turned into angry scowls. It was an incredible thing to watch. They had completely lost their belief in themselves.
It was an amazing display of momentum shift and a great example of how powerful a force it is in life.
Philadelphia responded to all those fouls the Bucks were making to hit 22 free throws in a row... and won 89-88.
A big lesson here is that we can have a lot of things going wrong and still get our outcome... if we don't give up.
Had the Bucks made just one more pass, or just one more basket, or if they had made just one less stupid foul out of frustration, they would have won.
When a salesperson is selling face to face every day, it was often at the last second, when he empties his mind and sees the fact he could think of why they should get his solution that they finally said, "Well, all right. We sure do believe that you can help us. So we'll do it."
It's at that point in salesperson’s life that he learns that I should never give up. Never, Never, Never Ever.
If we can only take today...And get our self to believe in our ability to do whatever it is we're doing a little faster, a little better, and with a little more enthusiasm, momentum will shift in our favor. Watch it work.
Soon WE'LL go from the scowl to the winning smile.
Success and happiness always starts between our own two ears. Don't wait. Begin right now and throw that smile on, and keep thinking all day, I can. I can. I can.
Every hour. "I can."
Eating lunch. "I can."
Before we pick up the phone. "I can."
...And we will.
Feeling Powerful
How to Feel Powerful Instantly
To start with, let's take stock of ourselves, shall we?
What do we have? Legs! I wouldn't take any amount of money for mine. How about you?
How about your arms? Would you sell them? Eyes! Would you take even a million dollars for them?
Well then certainly your brain. After all those times that you cursed it for forgetting something and called yourself a stupid you-know-what?
Would you take a million for it?
Don't think so.
Did you know that scientists and doctors have studied many thousands of people under hypnosis and have found that we have virtually perfect memories? People who have had electronic stimulation to parts of their brains have shown the same thing.
When stimulated, people have been literally "brought back" to days and moments in their lives and they remembered every thought, word, look, step, everything. Just as if they were in the moment again. Even after 50 years or more.
That's astonishing, isn't it?
But to get more out of it and yourself on a daily basis, you have to be in the right state of mind. Hypnosis is simply a state of alert relaxation. In that state, photographic memory can occur.
Let's make a commitment together. Let's commit to keeping a watchful eye on our states of mind. Every moment. How else can we possibly do the things that we want to do today and in our tomorrows?
If you say and think those woe-is-me thoughts every second of the day, you're going to get sub-par or no performance at all. You're absolutely killing your chances of success and happiness...
And with a magnificent brain like yours, that is a tragedy.
So write down on a 3x5 card two statements:
1- "What is great about right now?"
2- "What am I thankful for right now?"
Calm down... there's something. You just need to find it. Even if you're an extreme optimist, do this. Tomorrow might provide you with some challenges that you don't normally have and you need weapons, too.
What could be good/great? After we come up with our laundry list, look at each one and feel it. Is this a made-up list? A fake, a fraud! Well, let me ask you what all those disempowering worrying thoughts you've had over the years and decades that didn't amount to anything are? The truth, the way it really is.
Hey, the truth is what you believe it to be. And I contend that we should bend our beliefs towards what is USEFUL-not just the way something seems to be on the surface.
What could be great? What could you be grateful for?
Oh... nothing?
Keep this thought in mind, "And this too shall pass." Life goes on. And there's never a better time to practice leveling our moods than NOW. This is not a dress rehearsal. Today IS practice for tomorrow.
Let's go...
Instead of just reading, we should better start writing. Other than these following ideas you can have some other ideas of yours also.
Your physical health - tens of thousands didn't wake up today.
Your significant other - your soul mate
Your best friend - your confidant
Your boss - many don't even have a boss (or a job) to curse
Your co-workers/teammates - can't do it without them
Your children, parents - make up with them. If you don't, ultimately, you'll wish you did.
Cousins/Nieces/Nephews/In-laws
Your country - and the freedoms it provides to you
Your neighbors
Your favorite TV shows
Your pets
The habit you just gave up; the weight you just lost
Any other accomplishment - no matter how small
Your new car/house/clothes/furniture
Your education, degree
Your future prospects/next month/next year (imagining can help you feel good now)
Your new ‘do /weekly massage
Your chance to learn something right now and what it will mean to you in the future
Your chance to rise above the problem and how that will make you feel
All the people at the end of the phone who are waiting to serve your needs
You need to do it now...
The magic is in the doing.
Do you want to feel good today, but not be quickly able to get back here?
Nothing lasting will happen unless you get out the pencil, write it down and feel it.
And when you have a moment or a day when things aren't going well, remember that your state of mind DICTATES what you'll do next and the way you do it.
When you need to, just pull out your sheet of paper with all the things you can feel good about, and before you know it, you will feel better.
Maybe not great, but better IS going in the right direction... Isn't it?
And when you feel good, you are more likely to do well.
To start with, let's take stock of ourselves, shall we?
What do we have? Legs! I wouldn't take any amount of money for mine. How about you?
How about your arms? Would you sell them? Eyes! Would you take even a million dollars for them?
Well then certainly your brain. After all those times that you cursed it for forgetting something and called yourself a stupid you-know-what?
Would you take a million for it?
Don't think so.
Did you know that scientists and doctors have studied many thousands of people under hypnosis and have found that we have virtually perfect memories? People who have had electronic stimulation to parts of their brains have shown the same thing.
When stimulated, people have been literally "brought back" to days and moments in their lives and they remembered every thought, word, look, step, everything. Just as if they were in the moment again. Even after 50 years or more.
That's astonishing, isn't it?
But to get more out of it and yourself on a daily basis, you have to be in the right state of mind. Hypnosis is simply a state of alert relaxation. In that state, photographic memory can occur.
Let's make a commitment together. Let's commit to keeping a watchful eye on our states of mind. Every moment. How else can we possibly do the things that we want to do today and in our tomorrows?
If you say and think those woe-is-me thoughts every second of the day, you're going to get sub-par or no performance at all. You're absolutely killing your chances of success and happiness...
And with a magnificent brain like yours, that is a tragedy.
So write down on a 3x5 card two statements:
1- "What is great about right now?"
2- "What am I thankful for right now?"
Calm down... there's something. You just need to find it. Even if you're an extreme optimist, do this. Tomorrow might provide you with some challenges that you don't normally have and you need weapons, too.
What could be good/great? After we come up with our laundry list, look at each one and feel it. Is this a made-up list? A fake, a fraud! Well, let me ask you what all those disempowering worrying thoughts you've had over the years and decades that didn't amount to anything are? The truth, the way it really is.
Hey, the truth is what you believe it to be. And I contend that we should bend our beliefs towards what is USEFUL-not just the way something seems to be on the surface.
What could be great? What could you be grateful for?
Oh... nothing?
Keep this thought in mind, "And this too shall pass." Life goes on. And there's never a better time to practice leveling our moods than NOW. This is not a dress rehearsal. Today IS practice for tomorrow.
Let's go...
Instead of just reading, we should better start writing. Other than these following ideas you can have some other ideas of yours also.
Your physical health - tens of thousands didn't wake up today.
Your significant other - your soul mate
Your best friend - your confidant
Your boss - many don't even have a boss (or a job) to curse
Your co-workers/teammates - can't do it without them
Your children, parents - make up with them. If you don't, ultimately, you'll wish you did.
Cousins/Nieces/Nephews/In-laws
Your country - and the freedoms it provides to you
Your neighbors
Your favorite TV shows
Your pets
The habit you just gave up; the weight you just lost
Any other accomplishment - no matter how small
Your new car/house/clothes/furniture
Your education, degree
Your future prospects/next month/next year (imagining can help you feel good now)
Your new ‘do /weekly massage
Your chance to learn something right now and what it will mean to you in the future
Your chance to rise above the problem and how that will make you feel
All the people at the end of the phone who are waiting to serve your needs
You need to do it now...
The magic is in the doing.
Do you want to feel good today, but not be quickly able to get back here?
Nothing lasting will happen unless you get out the pencil, write it down and feel it.
And when you have a moment or a day when things aren't going well, remember that your state of mind DICTATES what you'll do next and the way you do it.
When you need to, just pull out your sheet of paper with all the things you can feel good about, and before you know it, you will feel better.
Maybe not great, but better IS going in the right direction... Isn't it?
And when you feel good, you are more likely to do well.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
How We Trust NonSence
Things That Do Not Make Sense
1. The Placebo Effect
DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The result was shocking. The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.
We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.
2. The Horizon Problem
OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.
We can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.
So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
“A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'”
3. Ultra-Energetic Cosmic Rays
FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.
As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.
Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?
One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.
Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.
Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 1020 electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we get that information, there's no telling how exotic the true explanation could be.
“One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong”.
4. Belfast Homeopathy Results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
5. Dark Matter
TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.
Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.
And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.
Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."
“If the results turn out to be real, the implications are profound. We may have to rewrite physics and chemistry”
6. Viking's Methane
JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.
Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14. So why not party? Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?
The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."
Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.
Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.
“Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane”.
7. Tetra Neutrons
FOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist. They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.
Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.
The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.
Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).
And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. "Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had any chance to expand," says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.
There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. "This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously," Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.
8. The Pioneer Anomaly
THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.
That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?
Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.
Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant (see "Not so constant constants", page 37). Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated."
Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077).
"An explanation will be found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hope it is due to new physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall." Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.
9. Dark Energy
IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."
One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.
10. The Kuiper Cliff
IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing.
Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.
The evidence for the existence of "Planet X" is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled 10th planet.
There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.
11. The Wow Signal
IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.
Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?
The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.
The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.
Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debate continues.
“It was either a powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation beaming out a signal”
12. Not-So-Constant Constants
IN 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were expecting.
If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.
But that's heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able to change. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of these really have changed?
No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.
Webb's are not the only results that suggest something is missing from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light's interaction with matter has changed.
The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).
There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out. Webb's group is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year.
"It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elements were produced early in the universe's history.
13. Cold Fusion
AFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.
With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.
That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.
The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.
“Cold fusion would make the world's energy problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is interested”
That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."
1. The Placebo Effect
DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.
This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The result was shocking. The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.
We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.
2. The Horizon Problem
OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28 billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion years old.
Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now.
This "horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation", for example.
We can solve the horizon problem by having the universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang, blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees. The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that happen.
So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly.
“A variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'”
3. Ultra-Energetic Cosmic Rays
FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles - mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery.
As cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe, such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum possible energy is 5 × 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin limit.
Over the past decade, however, the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111 particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what is going on?
One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit.
Physicists at the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000 square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.
Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts that events above 1020 electronvolts exist. There are sufficient examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what direction are they coming from? Until we get that information, there's no telling how exotic the true explanation could be.
“One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong”.
4. Belfast Homeopathy Results
MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.
In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.
So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.
5. Dark Matter
TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies to produce the observed spin.
Vera Rubin, an astronomer working at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain what this "dark matter" was.
And they still can't. Although researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly ignorant what that 90 per cent is.
Maybe we can't work out what dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be modified in order to correctly describe gravitational interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear particle."
“If the results turn out to be real, the implications are profound. We may have to rewrite physics and chemistry”
6. Viking's Methane
JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars.
Viking reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients, metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with carbon-14. So why not party? Because another instrument, designed to identify organic molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing. Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it?
The arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has contradicted it."
Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is highly suggestive of life.
Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral" molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other, non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule to the other, that would be the best indication yet of life on Mars.
“Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising them and then belching out radioactive methane”.
7. Tetra Neutrons
FOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France detected six particles that should not exist. They are called tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way that defies the laws of physics.
Francisco Miguel Marquès and colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together.
The team fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just have arrived in the same place at the same time by coincidence. But that's ridiculously improbable.
Not as improbable as tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons together, let alone four. Marquès and his team were so bemused by their result that they buried the data in a research paper that was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006).
And there are still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. "Maybe the universe would have collapsed before it had any chance to expand," says Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK.
There are, however, a couple of holes in this reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. "This could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors simultaneously," Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons: neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into play when neutrons gather en masse.
8. The Pioneer Anomaly
THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.
That's because something has been pulling - or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?
Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with other inexplicable phenomena.
Bruce Bassett of the University of Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure constant (see "Not so constant constants", page 37). Others have talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of which has been demonstrated."
Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077).
"An explanation will be found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hope it is due to new physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall." Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.
9. Dark Energy
IT IS one of the most famous, and most embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds. It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and so on will give us more clues."
One suggestion is that some property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open," Freese says.
10. The Kuiper Cliff
IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange. Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing.
Astronomers call this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems to be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna: this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept the area clean of debris.
The evidence for the existence of "Planet X" is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled 10th planet.
There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out there and have a look before we can say anything about the region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least. NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.
11. The Wow Signal
IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August 1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says.
Coming from the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz. This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets, usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused it?
The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away. If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter.
The fact that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the least.
Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned out to be interference," he says. The debate continues.
“It was either a powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation beaming out a signal”
12. Not-So-Constant Constants
IN 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were expecting.
If the observations are correct, the only vaguely reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the time the light passed through the clouds.
But that's heresy. Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able to change. Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of these really have changed?
No one in physics wanted to believe the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.
Webb's are not the only results that suggest something is missing from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something about light's interaction with matter has changed.
The ratio of certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical Review D, vol 69, p 121701).
There are gainsayers who still dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out. Webb's group is working on that now, and may be in a position to declare the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year.
"It's difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look at these new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal more about how the elements were produced early in the universe's history.
13. Cold Fusion
AFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than 200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous researchers have since pronounced themselves believers.
With controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence, it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion experiments.
That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.
The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular lattice, enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at room temperature is deemed impossible by every accepted scientific theory.
“Cold fusion would make the world's energy problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is interested”
That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC. Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Sleep for Health
How a Good Night's Sleep Can Make Us Grow
Sleep these days has become the most desired and precious asset as every one of us is loosing this asset fast for one reason or the other. We all have somehow and somewhere noticed that over the last several decades there has been a massive decline in the amount of sleep we get and the quality of it.
In New York City businesses are thriving that offer people a cubicle where they can go take a nap during their lunch hour!
Millions of people have resorted to popping pills (in U.S. only 42 million prescriptions were filled in 2005) and these folks are taking their chances with the nasty side effects in the pursuit of proper rest. These millions of people – does that include us? – are putting their health, quality of life and even the expected length of their life in serious jeopardy.
We probably don’t need a well-rested writer to tell us that sleep deprivation isn’t fun. But we may not realize exactly how much deeper this problem runs and how much more significant the impact is on our life.
How to Live a Longer, Healthier Life?
Four out of every ten Americans get less that seven hours of sleep per night and it’s taking a toll. It is known and said that “The link between sleep and health, and bad sleep and disease is becoming clearer and clearer”.
We appreciate the good doctor’s trusted advice, but do we really need scientific studies to tell us this? If we feel terrible from a lack of sleep, do we think that’s GOOD for our health? Is this just a plain common sense? Of course not.
In Readers Digest, a doctor has told “When people are sleep-deprived, there are higher levels of stress hormones in their bodies and an increase in inflammation, both of which can decrease immune function.”
While the amount of sleep people get has declined, the incidences of high blood pressure have increased. Here’s a fact: blood pressure and heart rate are typically lowest during sleep; people who get less sleep tend to have high blood pressure. All this tends to lead to increased risk of heart attack, diabetes, weight gain and a laundry list of other problems.
Plus, research also shows that a lack of sleep is seriously inhibiting our immune system which means we're more likely to get sick - and often.
Jane E. Brody has written:-
"No one questions the value of a good night's sleep. Whether we are biologically programmed to sleep 4 hours, 10 hours, or, like most people, 7 or 8 hours a night, failure to get the amount of sleep we need can impair learning and memory, problem-solving ability, safety, emotional stability, immune defenses, cardiovascular health and even body weight.
Sleep-deprived people tend to be irritable, impatient, moody, unable to cope well with stress and too tired to do the things they enjoy. Their appetite-controlling hormones are disrupted and may lead to overeating and weight gain. Resulting daytime sleepiness can impair work performance and result in accidents."
More than the Health Benefits We Want to Look & Feel Better!
People living with a lack of sleep experience more physical ailments, which include headaches, stomach problems, higher blood pressure, hormonal imbalances, abnormal metabolism, increased swelling and inflammation... we get that.
And, it’s no wonder we honestly look like hell, like death warmed over when we don’t get proper sleep.
One of the reasons points to growth hormones – they’re essential to keeping us looking great as we grow older. Growth hormones are rejuvenating and they help us with better muscle mass, better muscle tone and better skin. All that adds up to we looking sexy. We want to keep our growth hormones high and the best way to do that is sleep.
Very simply, when we don’t get proper sleep, we don’t look our best, we don’t feel our best, we don’t feel sexy and our relationship (and mental well-being) can suffer.
Human growth hormone are easy to nurture as we're going to get them in our life -- without any cutting, nipping, or real tucking necessary. A free asset in all of our bodies that can truly work wonders when we nourish and supports its functions. And all that starts and ends with a good night's sleep.
We normally forget about the Human Growth Hormone in our daily lives as we check off our To Dos and sacrifice sleep for seemingly getting more done. We resort to countless beauty products, fad diets, day spas, drugs, and over-the-counter lotions and potions."
So, till now who knew sleep was so vitally important to our sex life?
Who Else Wants to Be Happier and Less Stressed?
More than half of all adults surveyed by the National Sleep Foundation in 2005 said they experienced insomnia at least a few nights per week. Nearly half!
If we ever experienced insomnia, then this probably isn’t news: people with insomnia produce higher rates of stress hormones than others. This puts our body in a hyper-aroused state that can make it more difficult to unwind, relax and sleep.
We can already see where that vicious cycle goes; less sleep, more stress hormone, hyper aroused state, can’t sleep, more stress hormone, more hyper aroused, really can’t sleep . . . All this is going to make us mad.
If that’s not bad enough, this leads to depression for most people, they forget things they need to get done, they can’t focus, they become overwhelmed . . . all this is depressing, we don’t want to get out bed, answer the phone, deal with the kids, our boss, our spouse and that leads to more lost sleep.
How can anyone living like that possibly be happy?
We haven’t found the answer either. Don't bother trying.
Good sleep also leads to:
Building a better brain
Losing a few kilos
Faster healing
A healthier, stronger immune system
More energy
A sense of well-being
The ability to think more clearly and effectively
Increased level of patience
Fewer accidents in the workplace
So, it is better to invest in this asset as much as we can and enjoy the healthy, happy and satisfied lifestyle.
Sleep these days has become the most desired and precious asset as every one of us is loosing this asset fast for one reason or the other. We all have somehow and somewhere noticed that over the last several decades there has been a massive decline in the amount of sleep we get and the quality of it.
In New York City businesses are thriving that offer people a cubicle where they can go take a nap during their lunch hour!
Millions of people have resorted to popping pills (in U.S. only 42 million prescriptions were filled in 2005) and these folks are taking their chances with the nasty side effects in the pursuit of proper rest. These millions of people – does that include us? – are putting their health, quality of life and even the expected length of their life in serious jeopardy.
We probably don’t need a well-rested writer to tell us that sleep deprivation isn’t fun. But we may not realize exactly how much deeper this problem runs and how much more significant the impact is on our life.
How to Live a Longer, Healthier Life?
Four out of every ten Americans get less that seven hours of sleep per night and it’s taking a toll. It is known and said that “The link between sleep and health, and bad sleep and disease is becoming clearer and clearer”.
We appreciate the good doctor’s trusted advice, but do we really need scientific studies to tell us this? If we feel terrible from a lack of sleep, do we think that’s GOOD for our health? Is this just a plain common sense? Of course not.
In Readers Digest, a doctor has told “When people are sleep-deprived, there are higher levels of stress hormones in their bodies and an increase in inflammation, both of which can decrease immune function.”
While the amount of sleep people get has declined, the incidences of high blood pressure have increased. Here’s a fact: blood pressure and heart rate are typically lowest during sleep; people who get less sleep tend to have high blood pressure. All this tends to lead to increased risk of heart attack, diabetes, weight gain and a laundry list of other problems.
Plus, research also shows that a lack of sleep is seriously inhibiting our immune system which means we're more likely to get sick - and often.
Jane E. Brody has written:-
"No one questions the value of a good night's sleep. Whether we are biologically programmed to sleep 4 hours, 10 hours, or, like most people, 7 or 8 hours a night, failure to get the amount of sleep we need can impair learning and memory, problem-solving ability, safety, emotional stability, immune defenses, cardiovascular health and even body weight.
Sleep-deprived people tend to be irritable, impatient, moody, unable to cope well with stress and too tired to do the things they enjoy. Their appetite-controlling hormones are disrupted and may lead to overeating and weight gain. Resulting daytime sleepiness can impair work performance and result in accidents."
More than the Health Benefits We Want to Look & Feel Better!
People living with a lack of sleep experience more physical ailments, which include headaches, stomach problems, higher blood pressure, hormonal imbalances, abnormal metabolism, increased swelling and inflammation... we get that.
And, it’s no wonder we honestly look like hell, like death warmed over when we don’t get proper sleep.
One of the reasons points to growth hormones – they’re essential to keeping us looking great as we grow older. Growth hormones are rejuvenating and they help us with better muscle mass, better muscle tone and better skin. All that adds up to we looking sexy. We want to keep our growth hormones high and the best way to do that is sleep.
Very simply, when we don’t get proper sleep, we don’t look our best, we don’t feel our best, we don’t feel sexy and our relationship (and mental well-being) can suffer.
Human growth hormone are easy to nurture as we're going to get them in our life -- without any cutting, nipping, or real tucking necessary. A free asset in all of our bodies that can truly work wonders when we nourish and supports its functions. And all that starts and ends with a good night's sleep.
We normally forget about the Human Growth Hormone in our daily lives as we check off our To Dos and sacrifice sleep for seemingly getting more done. We resort to countless beauty products, fad diets, day spas, drugs, and over-the-counter lotions and potions."
So, till now who knew sleep was so vitally important to our sex life?
Who Else Wants to Be Happier and Less Stressed?
More than half of all adults surveyed by the National Sleep Foundation in 2005 said they experienced insomnia at least a few nights per week. Nearly half!
If we ever experienced insomnia, then this probably isn’t news: people with insomnia produce higher rates of stress hormones than others. This puts our body in a hyper-aroused state that can make it more difficult to unwind, relax and sleep.
We can already see where that vicious cycle goes; less sleep, more stress hormone, hyper aroused state, can’t sleep, more stress hormone, more hyper aroused, really can’t sleep . . . All this is going to make us mad.
If that’s not bad enough, this leads to depression for most people, they forget things they need to get done, they can’t focus, they become overwhelmed . . . all this is depressing, we don’t want to get out bed, answer the phone, deal with the kids, our boss, our spouse and that leads to more lost sleep.
How can anyone living like that possibly be happy?
We haven’t found the answer either. Don't bother trying.
Good sleep also leads to:
Building a better brain
Losing a few kilos
Faster healing
A healthier, stronger immune system
More energy
A sense of well-being
The ability to think more clearly and effectively
Increased level of patience
Fewer accidents in the workplace
So, it is better to invest in this asset as much as we can and enjoy the healthy, happy and satisfied lifestyle.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Introducing Myself To The Readers
Welcome To My Blog
Dear Friends I am going to put on my blog, in the times to come, some current hot topics of general interests ranging from Social, Cultural, Gayism, Prostitution, Legal, Self Help, Homos and Lesbians, Political, Cooking, Spiritual, Consumer Awareness, Films and of all sorts. I hope all will be interested in assessing my blog as it is going to work for the well being of the whole society at large.
Dear Friends I am going to put on my blog, in the times to come, some current hot topics of general interests ranging from Social, Cultural, Gayism, Prostitution, Legal, Self Help, Homos and Lesbians, Political, Cooking, Spiritual, Consumer Awareness, Films and of all sorts. I hope all will be interested in assessing my blog as it is going to work for the well being of the whole society at large.
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