The Zincan Slate

The scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory may have created a small black hole at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The collider smashes two heavy gold ions together at relativistic speeds to detect their constitute quarks and gluons. The researchers believe that they’ve detected a black hole, because a collision created a fireball that is absorbing energy and it may be emitting it back as hawking radiation.

There was some controversy several years ago that this same collider might create a black hole. A handful of scientists argued that the creation of these black holes could potentially lead to devastating consequences. This created enough public pressure to launch a scientific inquiry. The panel concluded that the gravitational forces at that scale would not be the dominant force, so there was no danger of a runaway black hole. If our universe was that unstable, then the high energy cosmic rays that collide with our earth everyday would cause the same effect.

I hope that they are right. If I see the horizon condensing to a point, at least I’ll know what happened. Who knows, maybe that’s why don’t see any signs of intergalactic civilizations.

My copy of Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe arrived in the mail last Wednesday. The first thing that I noticed about this book is its size; it’s 1099 pages long, divided into thirty-four chapters. Most popular science books shy away from showing the math behind the theories. Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time, “Someone told me that each equation that I included in the book would half the sales.” Penrose defied his publisher’s warning and included equations in his book, a lot of them. The first sixteen chapters of the book are a math primer for the rest of the text.

I bought this book because I had read Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and I wanted more. It was a good book, but it was written conceptually. Metaphors can only take you so far. There were many parts of The Elegant Universe where I was left knowing that the theories presented couldn’t be seen outside the mathematical perspective.

Chapter one has already provided me with a satisfying paradigm shift. Several years ago I was reading a mathematics book that had a section describing mathematics and its connection to reality. The author described mathematics as a tool made by man and that no mathematical concept was real except for the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4…). One can’t have ½ or 1.56745 of something. If you cut something in half, then it becomes two objects. If you combine objects into a group they are now seen as one.

Penrose allowed me to see the reality of mathematics in a different way. He presents mathematics as more than just a tool, but as something that exists in a world congruent to the material world. The Pythagorean theorem (a^2+b^2=c^2) was discovered during the time of the ancient Egyptians. If this mathematical relationship was only a tool created by man, then it didn’t come into existence until man first wrote it down. This is absurd because we know that someone could have discovered this relationship even earlier, because it holds true independent of its time of discovery. He describes this “world” as the Platonic Mathematical World. It is timeless and without space. Dimensionless, but it is nevertheless real.

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make good use of it! If you do not, I shall repent it in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it! - John Adams

I picked up this week’s issue of the Economist at Barnes and Noble last night. There’s an article in it about detecting nuclear material on the ground. Nuclear defense is difficult because the weapons are small. They can easily be whisked across the sky by strategic or tactical missiles. It’s also very easy to keep a nuclear weapon hidden in a car, plane, or boat. A two hundred pound nuclear weapon could easily fit in the trunk of a car.

The busy scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico built a machine that will make land detection far easier. This device emits muons. Muons travel in a straight path through most materials, such as metals, but they’ll scatter if they encounter a heavy atomic nucleus, such as uranium or plutonium. A change in their path can easily be detected because Muons strip electrons away from air molecules. This results in the generation of an electric signal that can be sensed by an array of drift tubes that are positioned opposite the emitter.

In practice the government could set up these detectors along our border crossings and check each vehicle that crosses into the United States. It sounds expensive, but it may be worth it. According to the Economist, our missile defense research has cost $130 billion so far and doesn’t work yet. The muon emission system would cost $1 billion to deploy and would likely work as planed. Which method of delivery do you think that on-a-budget terrorists would choose: missile or car?

Destiny is not a matter of chance—
It is a matter of choice.
It is not a thing to be waited for—
It is a thing to be achieved.
— William Jennings Bryan