Sep 2, 2016 01:06 AM
Every breath we take
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/inde...th-we-take
EXCERPT: [...] Jonathan Williams, an atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, whose research has taken him around the world, went to his local cinema in search of a story that wasn’t being shown on a screen. He was looking for a story told by the breath of a crowd. He chose the screening room of a cinema because it’s well contained. "It’s really just a box full of people," he says.
Breath contains valuable information, if one can figure out how to decode it. [...] Not every breath is identical: researchers have identified thousands of individual chemicals that fluctuate depending on where people are, what they’re doing, and how their bodies work. A VOC may be innocuous or harmful; natural or synthesized.
"The breath is basically garbage," says Joachim Pleil, an analytical chemist with the US Environmental Protection Agency at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, US, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Breath Research. "You breathe it out, you ignore it." A person’s breath may reveal truths they prefer to keep secret...
How Much More Can We Learn About the Universe?
http://m.nautil.us/issue/40/learning/how...e-universe
EXCERPT: [...] If our spacetime arose spontaneously—which, as I argued at length in my last book, "A Universe from Nothing," seems the most likely possibility—then it probably has zero total energy: The energy represented by matter is exactly offset by the energy represented by gravitational fields. Put simply, something can arise from nothing if the something amounts to nothing. Right now, the only universe that we can verify has zero total energy is a closed universe. Such a universe is finite yet unbounded. Just like you can move around the surface of a sphere forever without encountering any boundaries, the same may be true of our universe. If we look far enough in one direction, we would see the back of our heads.
In practice, we cannot do that, probably because our visible universe is only part of a much larger volume. The reason has to do with something called inflation. [...] If we consider the phrase “our universe” to refer to that region of space with which we once could have communicated or with which we one day may communicate, then inflation generally creates other universes beyond ours. Inflation may have been brief within our volume of space, but the rest of space expands exponentially forever, with isolated regions like ours occasionally decoupling from the expansion, just as isolated ice patches can form on the surface of fast-moving water when the temperature is below freezing. Each such universe had a beginning, pegged to the time when inflation ended within its spatial volume. In this case, the beginning of our universe may not have been the beginning of time itself—further reason to doubt whether the Big Bang represents an ultimate limit to our knowledge.
Depending on the processes that cause each universe to decouple from the background space, the laws of physics might be different in each one. We have come to call this collection of possible universes a “multiverse.” [...] If other universes are out there, they are separated from ours by huge distances and recede at super-light relative velocities, so we can never detect them directly. Is the multiverse then just metaphysics? Does verifying the possible existence of a multiverse thus represent a fundamental boundary to our knowledge? The answer is: not necessarily....
The Bridge From Nowhere: How is it possible to get something from nothing?
http://m.nautil.us/issue/40/learning/the...nowhere-rp
EXCERPT: The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.” So concluded William James in thinking about that most basic of riddles: how did something come from nothing? The question infuriates, James realized, because it demands an explanation while denying the very possibility of explanation. “From nothing to being there is no logical bridge,” he wrote.
In science, explanations are built of cause and effect. But if nothing is truly nothing, it lacks the power to cause. It’s not simply that we can’t find the right explanation—it’s that explanation itself fails in the face of nothing.
This failure hits us where it hurts. We are a narrative species. Our most basic understanding comes through stories, and how something came from nothing is the ultimate story, the primordial narrative, more fundamental than the hero’s journey or boy meets girl. Yet it is a story that undermines the notion of story. It is a narrative woven of self-destruction and paradox.
How could it not be? It stars Nothing—a word that is a paradox by its mere existence as a word. It’s a noun, a thing, and yet it is no thing. The minute we imagine it or speak its name, we spoil its emptiness with the stain of meaning. One has to wonder, then, is the problem with nothingness or is the problem with us? Is it cosmic or linguistic? Existential or psychological? Is this a paradox of physics or a paradox of thought?
Either way, here’s the thing to remember: The solution to a paradox lies in the question, never in the answer. Somewhere there must be a glitch, a flawed assumption, a mistaken identity. In so succinct a question as “how did something come from nothing?” there aren’t many places to hide. Perhaps that is why we return again and again to the same old ideas in new and improved guises, playing the trajectory of science like a fugue, or variations on a theme. With each pass, we try to lay another stepping stone in James’s elusive bridge....
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/inde...th-we-take
EXCERPT: [...] Jonathan Williams, an atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, whose research has taken him around the world, went to his local cinema in search of a story that wasn’t being shown on a screen. He was looking for a story told by the breath of a crowd. He chose the screening room of a cinema because it’s well contained. "It’s really just a box full of people," he says.
Breath contains valuable information, if one can figure out how to decode it. [...] Not every breath is identical: researchers have identified thousands of individual chemicals that fluctuate depending on where people are, what they’re doing, and how their bodies work. A VOC may be innocuous or harmful; natural or synthesized.
"The breath is basically garbage," says Joachim Pleil, an analytical chemist with the US Environmental Protection Agency at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, US, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Breath Research. "You breathe it out, you ignore it." A person’s breath may reveal truths they prefer to keep secret...
How Much More Can We Learn About the Universe?
http://m.nautil.us/issue/40/learning/how...e-universe
EXCERPT: [...] If our spacetime arose spontaneously—which, as I argued at length in my last book, "A Universe from Nothing," seems the most likely possibility—then it probably has zero total energy: The energy represented by matter is exactly offset by the energy represented by gravitational fields. Put simply, something can arise from nothing if the something amounts to nothing. Right now, the only universe that we can verify has zero total energy is a closed universe. Such a universe is finite yet unbounded. Just like you can move around the surface of a sphere forever without encountering any boundaries, the same may be true of our universe. If we look far enough in one direction, we would see the back of our heads.
In practice, we cannot do that, probably because our visible universe is only part of a much larger volume. The reason has to do with something called inflation. [...] If we consider the phrase “our universe” to refer to that region of space with which we once could have communicated or with which we one day may communicate, then inflation generally creates other universes beyond ours. Inflation may have been brief within our volume of space, but the rest of space expands exponentially forever, with isolated regions like ours occasionally decoupling from the expansion, just as isolated ice patches can form on the surface of fast-moving water when the temperature is below freezing. Each such universe had a beginning, pegged to the time when inflation ended within its spatial volume. In this case, the beginning of our universe may not have been the beginning of time itself—further reason to doubt whether the Big Bang represents an ultimate limit to our knowledge.
Depending on the processes that cause each universe to decouple from the background space, the laws of physics might be different in each one. We have come to call this collection of possible universes a “multiverse.” [...] If other universes are out there, they are separated from ours by huge distances and recede at super-light relative velocities, so we can never detect them directly. Is the multiverse then just metaphysics? Does verifying the possible existence of a multiverse thus represent a fundamental boundary to our knowledge? The answer is: not necessarily....
The Bridge From Nowhere: How is it possible to get something from nothing?
http://m.nautil.us/issue/40/learning/the...nowhere-rp
EXCERPT: The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.” So concluded William James in thinking about that most basic of riddles: how did something come from nothing? The question infuriates, James realized, because it demands an explanation while denying the very possibility of explanation. “From nothing to being there is no logical bridge,” he wrote.
In science, explanations are built of cause and effect. But if nothing is truly nothing, it lacks the power to cause. It’s not simply that we can’t find the right explanation—it’s that explanation itself fails in the face of nothing.
This failure hits us where it hurts. We are a narrative species. Our most basic understanding comes through stories, and how something came from nothing is the ultimate story, the primordial narrative, more fundamental than the hero’s journey or boy meets girl. Yet it is a story that undermines the notion of story. It is a narrative woven of self-destruction and paradox.
How could it not be? It stars Nothing—a word that is a paradox by its mere existence as a word. It’s a noun, a thing, and yet it is no thing. The minute we imagine it or speak its name, we spoil its emptiness with the stain of meaning. One has to wonder, then, is the problem with nothingness or is the problem with us? Is it cosmic or linguistic? Existential or psychological? Is this a paradox of physics or a paradox of thought?
Either way, here’s the thing to remember: The solution to a paradox lies in the question, never in the answer. Somewhere there must be a glitch, a flawed assumption, a mistaken identity. In so succinct a question as “how did something come from nothing?” there aren’t many places to hide. Perhaps that is why we return again and again to the same old ideas in new and improved guises, playing the trajectory of science like a fugue, or variations on a theme. With each pass, we try to lay another stepping stone in James’s elusive bridge....