The moment our universe came into existence fits one part of the definition of a miracle very well, as does the appearance of the imbalance between matter and antimatter.
Mike Albrow
Prominent among physics’ many mysteries is dark matter — strictly speaking invisible matter — but the name stuck. The evidence is overwhelming that there is about five times more mass in the universe than we can see in the stars, planets, gas and dust.
On Sept. 1, 1859, the English amateur astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson noticed an extremely bright spot on the sun, now called a flare. That night the sky lit up with brilliant auroras over much of the world: northern lights as far south as Cuba and southern lights as far north as Santiago. In the U.S. it was bright enough to read a newspaper at midnight, the whole sky eerily glowing with beautiful changing colors.
The top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle, as small as an electron but 340,000 times more massive! We don’t know how small those particles are, only that they are smaller than 1/1000th the size of a proton which itself is 1/100,000th the size of the smallest atom, hydrogen. Millionths, billionths, … soon we’re talking small numbers!
“What’s done cannot be undone.” Look to Shakespeare for a great quote. He had Lady Macbeth murmur these simple but profound words to herself. Who does not wish they had done something differently? But the past is past. A broken teacup will not put itself back together. A dissolved sugar cube will not reassemble itself.
January’s column was about snowflakes; this is about an ice cube, but a huge one called – wait for it – IceCube. Each side is 1 kilometer, 1,000 meters, so the volume is one billion cubic meters, and it weighs a billion tons. Scientists wanted a massive block of clear ice to detect mysterious neutrinos coming from far away in the universe. These particles interact with matter so rarely that 99.9999% pass right through that block leaving no trace. But one in a million hits a quark, much smaller than a proton, creating a shower of new particles, which make flashes of light in the ice.
As I write this in mid-December there is no snow here – probably a trend – but people around me are singing “Let it Snow” and dreaming of a white Christmas. Snow is wonderful stuff, considering that it is “just” frozen water, but when you examine snowflakes you see beautiful crystalline forms usually with six-fold symmetry, and each one looks different.
One night in 1939, Professor Pierre Auger’s daughter asked him, “Papa, what are you doing?” In French, of course. “I’m studying the sparkles on the roof,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye. He had discovered that very energetic subatomic particles coming from outer space, cosmic rays, smash into atoms in the upper atmosphere making huge showers of particles that reach the ground.
Lithium is in the news. The 2019 Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to three scientists for transforming our lives and helping to save our climate. Our three Nobel laureates invented ways of making batteries using lithium, with metal and later with compounds.
That title is another way of saying: “There’s no such thing as an empty box.” Let’s try to make one with a “thought experiment.” Einstein did these; they do not have to be practical, just imaginable. He came up with the theory of relativity when thinking about overtaking a light beam.