LHC linking park

The Large Hadron Collider comes online on the 10^th and there is little else that is the topic of conversation at any place where there are more than two physicists. Higgs or no Higgs? That is the first thing we will know. And supposedly a whole lot more.

As with all else in the world, LHC has been associated with theories that tell you that the world will end when we turn the machine on. You can find out about these concerns from the horse’s mouth here. And I also came across this refutation/explanation by Sunil Mukhi (via).

If you wanted to know more about the LHC, you could try this. Or at 8pm on the history channel tomorrow there is a show on the LHC that I must have received 10 emails telling me to watch. The host of the show talks about it over at Cosmic Variance.

Or, you could watch this video I found recently…LHC rap…pretty cool I thought it was…

On the Torus

What is it ?
In layman’s terms the inner tube of a tire or if you prefer, a doughnut or a vadai. Technically, it is the surface of revolution of a circle about a coplanar axis outside itself (to put that in context, a sphere is a surface of revolution of a circle about one of its diameters, i.e., a coplanar axis through its center).

Why am I talking about it?
I always thought that a torus is a strange object, almost like a mobius strip or something. Mathematically it is a weird compact manifold. And so I imagined that a torus is as likely to occur in nature as a cube. But then, I found out today that certain dumbbell shaped surfactants self assemble into nanoscale tori [1]! Further digging and googling told me something I should have known, that people who make Carbon nanotubes have actually seen Carbon nanorings that form at the same time, that are essentially tori.

What does this mean?
So, the above facts tell us that self assembly can lead to tori. If it is easy to form and stays stable, then more likely than not, we will find it in nature. And indeed we do. They call it (rather unimaginatively) the torovirus.

Goes to show that one has to modify and augment one’s intuition with each new fact learnt!

[1] A Primer on self assembly of surfactants available here.

Dark Energy again

A short while ago I said a little something about dark energy over at the SC blog. Today I discovered this at the hubblesite. I did not like it too much, but it has more info than my post did on some aspects, but less info on others. Further reading available here as well. Also, Cosmic Variance has something to say on the presentation here.

The second law

A while back, I had written this post on irreversibility. But I was just talking text book thermodynamics and stat mech. Here, Sean Carroll is putting the arrow of time in a cosmological perspective. Do check it out. Also, while you are at it, stop by SC and read my post on elastomers and tell me what you think.

Theory of Everything?

First I saw this. Then, I went to the physics archive, the democratic forum where anyone can post and found this. I printed it, skimmed it and formed a minimal impression (to the effect that it is a good idea but ways to go before it can be a theory of everything). But, I am not well versed in the relevant jargon, so I need to spend some time and talk to people who are well versed (and that is the advantage of being in a physics department, all kind of help is just a stroll down the corridor away!) before I can tell you about it. But, in the mean time do go and check out this post, and scroll through the comment thread, we have Garret Lisi in there trying to explain this stuff himself.

PS: The pretty picture is the polytope with E8 symmetry, the group that has that nice property that the fuss is all about. I know, I know, I just put it in because it is pretty :)

Never thought of it…

““Fairness" is often described in terms of equality of outcomes. But in a game, the “fairest” rules are often those that make the ablest players mostly likely to win, instead of those that distribute wins most evenly among players.

Even outside of games, a wide range of otherwise puzzling common intuitions about fairness can be understood if the fundamental "game" of life is seen as wooing, i.e., attracting mates by showing that you have fit genes. The fairest social institutions are then those in which success correlates as much as possible with genetic fitness.

For example, it can seem fair that the most attractive witty athletic folks get more mates and money, but seem unfair that the rich can buy better education for their children. Makeup can seem fair, while breast implants seem unfair.”

Totally cool essay…some of the logic as applied to policy implications I am unable to buy just yet, but still…

Link [via]

Linking park on Evolution

I have been on a spree of reading on Evolution and Intelligent design and so on to keep me entertained during my recent travels. I am sharing some of them with you in case you missed reading them. First up, 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense, a Scientific American article by John Rennie, my respect for whom dropped several notches after reading this, which came off more as rant than reasoning. Next, the rebuttal by the ID crowd over at Apologetic press. Boy! They are verbose. I am yet to complete reading this one. While you are at it also check out the book Singularities, by Christian de Duve. I am yet to make up my mind about some of the things he says in the book. Also, as an aside, there is this wonderful article in PNAS this month, called “Darwin’s greatest discovery: Design without designer”, beautifully juxtaposing Darwin with Copernicus. I fell in love with that analogy that never occurred to me before. As always, all this “foraging for information” was so I can condense this whole “Evolution vs ID” in my reductionist no-frills language. But it needs some more simmering before that can happen. So, my own thoughts on all of this stuff follow later.