A new, heavy version of a proton discovered at CERN

 In my classes, we do think in terms of protons and neutrons being composed of smaller particles, called quarks. Specifically, protons are two ups and one down, and neutrons are one up and two downs. 

The new particle that's been observed and measured is called a Xi baryon (baryons are particles composed of three quarks), and is two charm quarks and one down. This has a +1 charge like a proton, and is four times more massive. This was done at the CERN lab, which is in Europe between France and Switzerland. 

Goes to show that there are always new discoveries waiting to be made, even with theories like the Standard Model that's been around since the late 1960s. Cool! 

 In my classes, over the past two weeks, the topic of other life in the universe became a topic everyone is interested in. Students asked for my opinion, and I don't hesitate in telling them that for me, and most serious scientists I know in all fields, I would be shocked if there WASN'T simple life all over the place throughout this universe! I'm talking bacterial or single-cell type life. Now, 'intelligent' - or I use the term 'complex' - life, like us or animals or plants, that is a different story that I don't think anyone has a good grasp of. This is because complex life requires hundreds of millions of years for evolution to do its thing, and that then requires very long periods of time of relative stability, which does not happen for most stars and planets, so that will be a much more challenging thing to wrap our heads around. 

But bacterial type life? We estimated there could be some hundred billion trillion planets in the observable universe! And already many exoplanets have been observed in 'Goldilock's zones where there can be liquid water and other chemicals necessary for life (as we know it). The ingredients for life are all over the place when astronomers look, including water everywhere and even amino acids floating around! If there is any level of environmental and planetary stability for relatively short periods of time, simple life would have a chance to naturally evolve from basic organic chemistry. 

Below is a snippet I found about the first potential evidence suggesting there could be other life on exoplanets: 

James Webb Space Telescope has just delivered the strongest hint yet of alien life! Scientists studying the distant exoplanet K2-18 b (about 120 light-years away in the constellation Leo) have detected methane, carbon dioxide, and a possible trace of dimethyl sulfide (DMS)—a molecule that, on Earth, is produced almost exclusively by living organisms such as marine plankton.

K2-18 b sits comfortably in the habitable zone of its star and may be a vast ocean-covered “Hycean world,” a type of planet scientists believe could host microbial life beneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere. The discovery was made by analyzing the planet’s atmosphere as starlight passed through it during a transit, allowing researchers to identify its chemical fingerprints.

While scientists stress that this is not yet definitive proof of life, the presence of these molecules together makes K2-18 b one of the most compelling candidates ever found for extraterrestrial biology. Future observations by the James Webb Space Telescope will attempt to confirm whether the dimethyl sulfide signal is real and determine if biological processes could truly be responsible.

If confirmed, this discovery could mark the first real evidence that life exists beyond Earth, a finding that would forever change our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

                                         From viewspace.org. 

Progress with long-standing problem with Quantum Mechanics

 How small is small? How large is large? Since Quantum Mechanics was developed in the 1920s, this has been one of THE questions we've had - where is the boundary between being able to treat the world with classical, Newtonian mechanics, or treating the world with QM? 

It appears that over the last 20 years, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Wojciech Zurek, has developed a theory using first principles of QM to show how many-atom objects and systems naturally yield the 'classical', everyday properties we measure. It has to do with the fact that any quantum object, such as an atom, naturally becomes 'entangled' with all other physical entities it interacts with. It is this mass entanglement process where the properties we observe behave as a continuum rather than as quantized values. 

Read the article here, if you wish. If you are a student, I have a copy of Zurek's recently published book about quantum decoherence and his theory of Quantum Darwinism. It's pretty technical, but have a look if you want! 

120 years later, we're still learning about Special Relativity!

 In class, we get into length contraction when it comes to Einstein's special theory of relativity. When objects move, their lengths shorten up by some amount in the direction of motion. This is a well-known conclusion from relativity. It is also really challenging to try and measure this at everyday speeds, because the length contraction is so tiny; not until a substantial fraction of the speed of light will it become more measurable. 

However, it turns out that what we would actually see is surprising and different from just a meter stick being a little shorter. We would see the stick, as a stationary observer with the stick flying past us really fast, rotate by some amount! This has to do with the behavior and tiny time differences of photons coming from the stick and reaching our sensors; it was calculated by two scientists about 20 years ago, and is called the Terrell-Penrose Effect. 

Now, with crazy-fast electronics and video technologies, this has actually been observed, and the real relativistic prediction confirmed, in the lab! This is a good Scientific American article, with some visuals, as to what it looks like for real! Very cool! 

Writing in the Age of AI - still need the wisdom of Socrates and Plato

 Why did Socrates not write anything down? What we know about Socrates and his thinking was written mostly by his student, Plato. 

Socrates and Plato understood that the best way to go after truth was through conversation and questioning; hence the Socratic method. Conversation allows us to question, pose possible answers, find contradictions and flaws in our thinking, critically and rigorously dive ever deeper into a topic, and so on, all is real time. Conversation provides a the best, most efficient and rigorous way to critically think through hard problems, and hopefully dig some nuggets of truth out of the problem. 

Writing is different, and not as efficient or effective. Certainly it takes longer. As we read something, we naturally (and hopefully) develop any number of questions, and needs for clarifications, and 'what if' scenarios. Reading something is open to interpretation, since we are unable to ask the author and get feedback; in so many ways, we need to try and read the mind of the author, and this requires assumptions and guesswork. The process of learning, and then questioning, and then refining our views and answers, may or may not fully happen if it is all through writing. 

Now we have AI. What would Socrates and Plato think about this? This article is interesting and provides some thoughts about it. I agree with the author of the piece that there is good and bad, depending on how we use the AI in writing. It can certainly write a student assignment or a paper we publish on websites or try to submit to other publications, and we do not have to do the heavy lifting thinking. That is NOT how we should be using AI. However, what the great philosophers would likely appreciate about AI is that it can be your debating 'partner'. You can have a conversation with an AI and do the equivalent of, or at least a good approximation, the Socratic method, where we can have a back and forth of questioning with the AI to better and more rigorously develop our thoughts. That type of use is not so different than having a human partner to debate and critically think with, and this makes AI a very useful tool in writing. 

Here are the 'Big 3' Greek philosophers that help create Western thought. Some 2500 years later, we still can use their thoughts and wisdom.

              From https://sidiropoulos.medium.com/socrates-plato-aristotle-2939c66b161f.