Science

Simon DeDeo is a theoretical physicist and very smart guy, who started out as a cosmologist and has made the transition to complexity theorist at the Santa Fe Institute. (He’s not smart because he made that transition, it just so happens that both statements are true.)

This summer he gave a series of three lectures at SFI’s Complex Systems Summer School, on the general topics of Emergence and Complexity. These are big ideas, and obviously one cannot say everything interesting there is to say about them in three lectures, but Simon manages to cover a lot of extremely important and fascinating topics such as coarse-graining, renormalization, computation, and effective theories. Worth a listen!

Last year we brought the bad news that NASA had pulled back from the LISA project, an ambitious proposal to build a gravitational wave detector in space. The science reach of LISA would be amazing, teaching us a great deal about black holes, general relativity, and cosmology.

Fortunately, the European Space Agency did not give up on the idea, and has kept it in the queue of possibilities without actually saying they will do it. They began to design a somewhat down-scaled mission, now dubbed NGO for “New Gravitational wave Observatory.” (Hey, nobody said NASA had a monopoly on dopey acronyms.) NGO was put into the hopper along with two other proposals as part of a selection process to decide on the ESA’s next large-scale mission, dubbed L1 (“L” for “large”), as part of the Cosmic Vision program. It lost out to JUICE, a mission to Jupiter’s moons with admittedly a much cooler acronym as well as some very good science behind it.

But if there is an L1, that implies that someday there might be an L2, and NGO is still in the running to be Europe’s next big mission in astrophysics from space. …

New Life for Gravitational Waves in Space?Read More »

Phd Comics, channeling physicists Daniel Whiteson and Jonathan Feng, explains how the LHC isn’t anywhere near done yet. Now that the Higgs(like) boson has been found, we’ll be looking for all sorts of other things, such as extra dimensions of space.

At the Francis Crick Memorial Conference in Cambridge last month, a collection of internationally recognized experts on consciousness took an unusual step, as science conferences go: they issued a declaration (pdf). The subject was whether or not non-human animals could be considered “conscious.” (See discussion by Octopus Chronicles, Christof Koch, io9.) The spirit of the declaration was in the direction of saying “pretty much, yeah,” although they tried to stick to what could be scientifically discussed. Here’s the upshot of the declaration:

The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.

Even the experts don’t necessarily agree on a definition of “consciousness,” so the declaration doesn’t come right out and say “animals are conscious.” But the authors basically agree that the mental supervenes on the physical, so whatever consciousness may be, it must have some neurological substrate — some parts of the brain that do the work. The point they’re making is, whatever those parts are, some animals have them too.

I don’t have a well-thought-out position on this, at least as far as the big-picture consequences are concerned. …

Animal ConsciousnessRead More »

Via the endlessly enjoyable It’s Okay to Be Smart, here’s a gif image that zooms in by about three orders of magnitude. (Not sure of the original source.) We start by looking at an amphipod, a tiny shrimplike critter about a millimeter across. For some reason (vanity?) it’s decorated by an even tinier diatom, a bit of algae that is common in phytoplankton. From there we zoom in on a yet-tinier bacterium, just chilling out near the middle of the diatom.

Human beings have about ten times as many bacterial cells inside them as “human” cells. The bacteria are the passengers, we’re just the bus.

LIGO, the gravitational-wave observatory, is currently on ice. After running successfully (although without actually detecting any gravitational waves) through 2007, it got a mini-upgrade and ran as Enhanced LIGO in 2009 and 2010. But in October 2010 it shut off, and the original detectors were disassembled. Not because anything was wrong, but because of a long-anticipated upgrade to Advanced LIGO, a substantially more sensitive observatory.

Those upgrades are still going on, with the new detectors scheduled to come online in 2014. Advanced LIGO should provide more than a tenfold improvement in sensitivity, which allows the search for gravitational waves to pass an important threshold: with LIGO, it would have been possible but quite fortunate to actually detect gravitational waves from predicted astrophysical sources. With Advanced LIGO, it will be a surprise if we don’t detect them.

Clara Moskowitz has nice update on MSNBC.com. She quotes Kip Thorne as predicting that our first definite direct detection of gravitational waves will come in between 2014 and 2017 — within five years. Start your betting markets! Traditionally, looking at the skies in a new way (radio waves, cosmic rays, X-rays, gamma rays, neutrinos…) has always taught us something new and exciting. I’d be surprised if gravitational waves aren’t equally surprising.