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So Bill Gates Has This Idea for a History Class …

By Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times, September 5th, 2014

By Andrew Ross Sorkin,
New York Times,
September 5th, 2014

http://nyti.ms/1rctllb

Our History In Eighteen Minutes

TED talk by David Christian, who coined the name “Big History”

TED talk by David Christian, who coined the name “Big History”

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history?language=en

The Case For “Big History” by David Christian (1991)

A 1991 article on where Big History comes from.

A 1991 article on where Big History comes from.

http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/jwh/jwh022p223.pdf

Our History In Two Minutes by pignmar41 –

Birth-life-death Our history in two minutes

Birth-life-death
Our history in two minutes

http://www.snotr.com/video/9884/Our_history_in_2_minutes

Collaborative physics: String theory finds a bench mate – The exotic theory of everything could shed light on the behaviour of real materials, thanks to an unexpected mathematical connection with condensed-matter physics – Zeeya Merali

“On one side,” says Jan Zaanen, “you have this refined, almost other-worldly intellectual — the perfectionist obsessed with detail, barely interested in earthly pleasures. On the other, you have the loud, boisterous, sometimes aggressive, business-savvy character who knows how to get his hands dirty.”

It might almost be a description of the misfit roommates known on stage, screen and television as The Odd Couple. But Zaanen, a condensed-matter physicist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, is actually describing the pairing of two groups of scientists: string theorists, who spend their days pursuing a rarefied, highly mathematical ‘theory of everything’, and his own colleagues — a considerably more grounded bunch who prefer to focus on how real-world materials behave in the laboratory.

The scientists trying to bridge these disciplines are motivated by the discovery of a startling coincidence: suitably interpreted, the equations of string theory can be a powerful tool for analysing some exotic states of matter, ranging from super-hot balls of quarks and gluons to ultracold atoms. The past year alone has seen at least four international workshops designed to stimulate collaborations across the disciplinary divide, including one hosted by Zaanen in Leiden.

Sceptics still question whether this strange alliance will actually lead to new insights, or whether it is just a marriage of convenience. String theory does hint at the existence of many new states of matter, for example. But those predictions will be difficult to verify, and decisive experimental tests are only now in the planning stages.

For the time being, the advantage to both partners is clear. String theory, long criticized for having lost touch with reality, gets experimental credibility. And condensed-matter physics, never the media darling that string theory has been, gets a new mathematical tool — and a chance to bask in new-found glamour.

The match-making began a dozen years ago with the reunion of Dam Thanh Son and Andrei Starinets, who had been undergraduates and dorm-mates at Moscow State University in the 1980s. The friends had lost touch with each other when they left Russia after the fall of communism in 1991. But in 1999, Son got a job at Columbia University in New York City, and heard that Starinets was doing a PhD in string theory just a few kilometres away at New York University. So Son went to pay Starinets a visit.

Collaboration was the farthest thing from his mind. String theory is mathematically rich and has an undeniable aesthetic appeal. But it is all about what physics might be like at scales of 10−35 metres — the idea being that seemingly point-like elementary particles such as quarks and electrons will actually turn out to be tiny, vibrating threads of energy when viewed at such scales. But these strings would be about 20 orders of magnitude smaller than a proton, putting the theory hopelessly beyond the reach of any direct experimental test. Son’s speciality, by contrast, was firmly rooted in experiment: he was trying to understand the properties of quark–gluon plasmas, the short-lived, super-hot fireballs that form when heavy nuclei such as gold are smashed together in accelerators. All this stringy stuff seemed utterly alien.

Except that, when Son saw the string-theory calculations that Starinets had been working on with fellow PhD student Giuseppe Policastro, he recognized the equations as the same ones he had been using to analyse the plasma.

Son immediately had to know what was going on, and Starinets began to explain. Starinets and Policastro had been working on an idea proposed in 1997 by Juan Maldacena, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Maldacena, now at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, had realized that string theory predicts a mathematical equivalence between two hypothetical universes, one of which would be similar to our own. It would have the same three dimensions of space and one dimension of time, for example, and be filled with much the same types of elementary particle, which would, in turn, obey familiar-looking (to physicists) quantum-field equations. But it would not contain strings — or gravity.

The other universe would be the opposite: it would contain both strings and gravity — indeed, the gravity could get strong enough to form black holes — but no elementary particles. It would also have an additional dimension of space.

Maldacena’s insight was simple, if audacious: take any process involving particles and fields in the first universe, he said, and it could equally well be described as a process involving gravity, black holes and strings in the second universe — and vice versa1. The equations might look very different. But the fundamental physics would be exactly the same.

That was why Son was seeing quark–gluon equations in a string-theory calculation, Starinets explained: they were the three-dimensional equivalent of the gravitational fields that he and Policastro had been studying in the four-dimensional universe.

Marriage of convenience

All this jumping back and forth between universes was weird even by string-theory standards (and even weirder for non-string theorists, as Maldacena had showed that the mapping worked not just between three and four dimensions of space, but also between four and five, five and six and so on). But as Son and Starinets talked, they began to see that Maldacena’s mapping might be a powerful problem-solving strategy. They could start with a messy set of quantum-field calculations in our real, three-dimensional world — the quark–gluon plasma equations, say — then map those into the four-dimensional world, in which the equations tend to be much easier to solve. Then they could map the results back to the three-dimensional world and read off the answer.

It worked. “We turned the calculation on its head to give us a prediction for the value of the shear viscosity of a plasma,” says Son, referring to a key parameter of the quark–gluon fireball2. “A friend of mine in nuclear physics joked that ours was the first useful paper to come out of string theory,” he says.

In 2008, the team’s predictions were confirmed3 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. “These were strong quantitative results, and they still stand today as the best results achieved by the programme to relate string theory to experiment,” says Steve Gubser, a string theorist at Princeton University, and one of the early champions of applying the principle to real-world problems.

The team’s success also caught the attention of Subir Sachdev, a condensed-matter theorist at Harvard. Just as Son had seen a plasma reflected back at him in Starinets’ equations, Sachdev saw quantum critical-phase transitions — the changes of state that occur in materials when they near absolute zero, when quantum-mechanical effects begin to dominate. “They were using different words,” he says, “but it was the same physics.”

Sachdev hoped that Maldacena’s idea could provide him and his fellow theorists with some much-needed help in exploring this chilly realm. Over the decades, experimentalists had discovered a long list of exotic, quantum-dominated states — including superconductors that allow current to flow without resistance; superfluids that have no viscosity and can creep up the walls of beakers; Bose–Einstein condensates made up of atoms moving in step like a single ‘super atom’; and ‘strange’ metals that behave in ways subtly different from ordinary metals. But physicists still have no way to predict what will turn up in the lab next. “We can’t even answer the fundamental question of how many phases of matter exist,” says Sean Hartnoll, a string theorist at Stanford University in California.

Sachdev’s first efforts to apply Maldacena’s idea to laboratory materials had resulted in two papers he co-authored in 2007, one with Son and his colleagues4, and another with a team that included Hartnoll5. Since then, Sachdev and his collaborators have built up a recipe for mapping the conductivity of strange metals into the properties of black holes in the string theorists’ four-dimensional universe — a strategy that string theorist John McGreevy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge6 and others are also pursuing. These groups get answers that broadly reproduce the peculiar low-temperature behaviour of the metals. They have also mapped the behaviour of four-dimensional black holes in string theory to the conditions at which many materials will change phase into states other than the familiar solid, liquid and gas7. “We now have a whole new hammer for attacking the problems I have been working on for 20 years,” says Sachdev.

Sachdev’s involvement, in turn, has helped to ignite the interest of other condensed-matter physicists. “A lot of us got into this field because of the force of Subir’s personality and his reputation — we realized that if he was taking this seriously, maybe we should too,” says Andrew Green, a condensed-matter physicist at the University of St Andrews, UK, who co-organized a workshop on the correspondence at Imperial College London in January.

The condensed-matter results also got the string theorists excited — eventually. The field had been generally unenthusiastic about following up on the quark–gluon plasma calculations, says Clifford Johnson, a string theorist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. And at least part of the reason, he suspects, was a bias against sullying string theory’s purity. “There was a snobbery among some towards what was termed ‘mere applications’,” he says.

But in 2006, string theory took a public battering in two popular books: Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia, and The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Both books excoriated the theory’s isolation from experiment.

“It’s hard to say whether the interest in condensed-matter applications is a direct response to those books because that’s really a psychological question,” says Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. “But certainly string theorists started to long for some connection to reality.”

The condensed-matter partnership seemed perfect for that. If nothing else, it promised to make a virtue out of string theory’s embarrassment of riches — the roughly 10500 solutions to its basic equations, each of which describes a possible universe with its own size, shape, dimensionality and physical laws. Through Maldacena’s idea, says string theorist Jerome Gauntlett at Imperial College London, “each solution can be expressed in the countless materials yet to be discovered”.

The rewards are mutual, says Zaanen. “If I talk about superconductors and black holes in a colloquium, folk are attracted to it like bees to honey,” he says. “It’s now bringing young blood to condensed-matter physics, as their first choice.”

The flurry of workshops promoting the partnership have been very productive, agrees Polchinski. He co-organized a meeting at the Kavli Institute last year that sparked seven new collaborations, and he is running another from August through November of this year. “It is unique to try to actively make two groups of physicists collaborate so quickly — I haven’t personally seen any other similar drive over the course of my career,” says Gauntlett, who co-organized the London workshop.

Just as with the fictional odd couple, however, this partnership still has plenty of friction. Everyone agrees, for example, that condensed-matter physicists are much more hesitant about pairing up than their string-theory counterparts. “I have been remarkably unsuccessful at getting condensed-matter physicists to let string theorists speak at their big meetings,” says Zaanen. “They fear that they will need to learn string theory to talk to them. It’s as though I am asking them to have coffee with aliens.”

Polchinski admits that the condensed-matter sceptics have a point. “I don’t think that string theorists have yet come up with anything that condensed-matter theorists don’t already know,” he says. The quantitative results tend to be re-derivations of answers that condensed-matter theorists had already calculated using more mundane methods.

To make matters worse, some of the testable predictions from string theory look a tad bizarre from the condensed-matter viewpoint. For example, the calculations suggest that when some crystalline materials are cooled towards absolute zero, they will end up in one of many lowest-energy ground states. But that violates the third law of thermodynamics, which insists that these materials should have just one ground state. “That’s the gorilla in the room that should be keeping people awake at night,” says Gubser.

To win over sceptics, theorists are busily searching for testable predictions that will lead to killer evidence that the collaborations are worthwhile. Gauntlett’s group, and others, are hunting for black-hole configurations in the string-theory universe that map to undiscovered phase transitions8. The trick is to figure out which materials might exhibit those transitions. “Right now that involves going round asking, ‘have you seen something like this?’,” says Gauntlett. “But the hope is that as techniques advance, experimenters will be able to engineer materials with the properties we predict.”

Sachdev is applying string theory to an existing challenge: calculating how conductance should change with temperature as ultracold atoms transition from a superfluid state to an insulating one7. He thinks that it should be possible to test his predictions in the next couple of years.

Even if the programme is successful, there are limits to how much the relationship can benefit either partner. String theory can offer a handbook of properties to look for, and predictions for how they should change in experiments, says Green. But it will never be able to provide a theory of how these properties emerge from the behaviour of electrons. Similarly, experimental verification of string theory’s predictions about condensed matter will not prove that strings themselves are an accurate description of reality.

But perhaps, Green argues, the connection to materials will show that people have fundamentally misunderstood what string theory is. “Maybe string theory is not a unique theory of reality, but something deeper — a set of mathematical principles that can be used to relate all physical theories,” says Green. “Maybe string theory is the new calculus.”

Zeeya Merali is a freelance writer based in London.

String Theory Co-Founder: Sub-Atomic Particles Are Evidence the Universe Was Created – By Barbara Hollingsworth – June 17, 2016 – 3:56 PM EDT

(CNSNews.com) — Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at the City College of New York (CUNY) and co-founder of String Field Theory, says theoretical particles known as “primitive semi-radius tachyons” are physical evidence that the universe was created by a higher intelligence.

After analyzing the behavior of these sub-atomic particles – which can move faster than the speed of light and have the ability to “unstick” space and matter – using technology created in 2005, Kaku concluded that the universe is a “Matrix” governed by laws and principles that could only have been designed by an intelligent being.

“I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. Believe me, everything that we call chance today won’t make sense anymore,” Kaku said, according to an article published in the Geophilosophical Association of Anthropological and Cultural Studies.

“To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance.”

“The final solution resolution could be that God is a mathematician,” Kaku, author of The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, said in a 2013 Big Think video posted on YouTube.

“The mind of God, we believe, is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace.”

String Theory “revolutionized” mathematics and physics by demonstrating a “super symmetry” in the universe. Kaku said it also explains gaps in the Big Bang theory.

“First of all, the Big Bang wasn’t very big. Second of all, there was no bang. Third, Big Bang Theory doesn’t tell you what banged, when it banged, how it banged. It just said it did bang. So the Big Bang theory in some sense is a total misnomer,” the well-known physicist said in 2015.

“We need a theory that goes before the Big Bang, and that’s String Theory. String Theory says that perhaps two universes collided to create our universe, or maybe our universe is butted from another universe leaving an umbilical cord….

“Some people believe that maybe, just maybe, we have detected evidence of that umbilical cord.”

Scientists find a practical test for string theory – January 6, 2014

(Phys.org) —Scientists at Towson University in Towson, Maryland, have identified a practical, yet overlooked, test of string theory based on the motions of planets, moons and asteroids, reminiscent of Galileo’s famed test of gravity by dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa.

String theory is infamous as an eloquent theoretical framework to understand all forces in the universe —- a so-called “theory of everything” —- that can’t be tested with current instrumentation because the energy level and size scale to see the effects of string theory are too extreme.

Yet inspired by Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, Towson University scientists say that precise measurements of the positions of solar-system bodies could reveal very slight discrepancies in what is predicted by the theory of general relativity and the equivalence principle, or establish new upper limits for measuring the effects of string theory.

The Towson-based team presents its finding today, January 6, 2014, between 10 a.m. and 11:30 a.m., at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in Washington, D.C. The work also appears in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

String theory hopes to provide a bridge between two well-tested yet incompatible theories that describe all known physics: Einstein’s general relativity, our reigning theory of gravity; and the standard model of particle physics, or quantum field theory, which explains all the forces other than gravity.

String theory posits that all matter and energy in the universe is composed of one-dimensional strings. These strings are thought to be a quintillion times smaller than the already infinitesimal hydrogen atom and thus too minute to detect indirectly. Similarly, finding signs of strings in a particle accelerator would require millions of times more energy than what has been needed to identify the famous Higgs boson.

“Scientists have joked about how string theory is promising…and always will be promising, for the lack of being able to test it,” said Dr. James Overduin of the Department of Physics, Astronomy and Geosciences at Towson University, first author on the paper. “What we have identified is a straightforward method to detect cracks in general relativity that could be explained by string theory, with almost no strings attached.”

Overduin and his group —- including Towson University undergraduate research students Jack Mitcham and Zoey Warecki —- expanded on a concept proposed by Galileo and Newton to explain gravity.

Fable has it that Galileo dropped two balls of different weights from the Tower of Pisa to demonstrate how they would hit the ground at the same time. Years later Newton realized that the same experiment is being performed by Mother Nature all the time in space, where the moons and planets of the solar system fall continuously toward each other as they orbit around their common centers of mass. Newton used telescope observations to conclude that Jupiter and its Galilean moons fall with the same acceleration toward the Sun.

The same test could be used for string theory, Overduin said. The gravitational field couples to all forms of matter and energy with precisely the same strength, an observation that led Einstein to his theory of general relativity and is now enshrined in physics as the equivalence principle. String theory predicts violations of the equivalence principle because it involves new fields which couple differently to objects of different composition, causing them to accelerate differently, even in the same gravitational field.

Building on work done by Kenneth Nordtvedt and others beginning in the 1970s, Overduin and his collaborators consider three possible signatures of equivalence principle violation in the solar system: departures from Kepler’s Third Law of planetary motion; drift of the stable Lagrange points; and orbital polarization (also known as the Nordtvedt effect), whereby the distance between two bodies like the Earth and Moon oscillates due to differences in acceleration toward a third body like the Sun.

To date, there is no evidence for any of these effects. Indeed, the standard astronomical ephemeris assumes the validity of Kepler’s Third Law in deriving such fundamental quantities as the length of the Astronomical Unit. But all observations in science involve some degree of experimental uncertainty. The approach of Overduin’s team is to use these experimental uncertainties themselves to obtain upper limits on possible violations of the equivalence principle by the planets, moons and Trojan asteroids in the solar system.

“The Saturnian satellites Tethys and Dione make a particularly fascinating test case,” said Warecki, who is presenting this work at Session 109 at the AAS meeting today. “Tethys is made almost entirely of ice, while Dione possesses a significantly rocky core. And both have Trojan companions.”

“The limits obtained in this way are not as sensitive as those from dedicated torsion-balance or laser-ranging tests,” said Mitcham. “But they are uniquely valuable as potential tests of string theory nonetheless because they cover a much wider range of test-body materials.”

Moreover, in an era of increasingly big-budget science, they come at comparatively little cost, said Overduin.

Energy, Matter, Inflation, Eternal Inflation and Multiverses

(Andrei Linde) eternal inflation and the multiverse.
https://darkmatterdarkenergy.com/2015/12/06/eternal-inflation-and-the-multiverse/

Multiverse Controversy Heats Up over Gravitational Waves – By Clara Moskowitz on March 31, 2014
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/multiverse-controversy-inflation-gravitational-waves/

Some physicists think they can explain why the universe first formed. If they are right, our entire cosmos may have sprung out of nothing at all – By Robert Adler –
6 November 2014
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141106-why-does-anything-exist-at-all

The Case for Parallel Universes –
Why the multiverse, crazy as it sounds, is a solid scientific idea
By Alexander Vilenkin, Max Tegmark on July 19, 2011
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/multiverse-the-case-for-parallel-universe/

What Came Before the Big Bang?
Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin believes the Big Bang wasn’t a one-off event, but merely one of a series of big bangs creating an endless number of bubble universes – By Steve Nadis – Thursday, October 10, 2013
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/september/13-starting-point

A BALLOON PRODUCING BALLOONS, PRODUCING BALLOONS: A BIG FRACTAL
A Conversation with Andrei Linde [8.24.12]
https://www.edge.org/conversation/andrei_linde-a-balloon-producing-balloons-producing-balloonsa-big-fractal

Scientists find first evidence that many universes exist
December 17, 2010 by Lisa Zyga
http://m.phys.org/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-universes.html

Cause And Effect, The Perfect Vacuum & Absolute Nothing

In the Beginning before the Big Bang | Michio Kaku | Dr Param Singh
http://mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/btbb/beginning-big-bang-nothing/

The Physics of Nothing, The Philosophy of Everything – Ethan Siegel (August 16th 2011)
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/08/16/the-physics-of-nothing-the-phi/

Something from Nothing? A Vacuum Can Yield Flashes of Light
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/something-from-nothing-vacuum-can-yield-flashes-of-light/

Physicists Confirm Power of Nothing, Measuring Force of Universal Flux
By MALCOLM W. BROWNE
Published: January 21, 1997
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/21/science/physicists-confirm-power-of-nothing-measuring-force-of-universal-flux.html?pagewanted=all

The Bridge From Nowhere
How is it possible to get something from nothing?
BY AMANDA GEFTER
http://m.nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/the-bridge-from-nowhere

EVERYTHING FROM NOTHING
Posted on January 4, 2013 by James Keen
http://www.isciencemag.co.uk/blog/everything-from-nothing/

“Gravity Doesn’t Exist” – Is This Fundamental Phenomenon Of The Universe An Illusion
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/11/gravity-doesnt-exist-is-gravity-an-illusion.html

Saint Augustine, Albert Einstein & The Augustinian Era

New York Times – Dennis Overbye
“Before the Big Bang, There Was . . . What?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/22/science/before-the-big-bang-there-was-what.html?pagewanted=all

Scientific American – Gabriele Veneziano
“The Myth of the Beginning of Time”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-beginning-of-time-2006-02/?print=true

Discover Magazine – Adam Frank
“3 Theories That Might Blow Up the Big Bang”
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/apr/25-3-theories-that-might-blow-up-the-big-bang

Arguing for the Existence of God in the Age of Quantum Indeterminacy
Author: Evan Cockshaw
Quodlibet Journal: Volume 3 Number 1, Winter 2001
http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/cockshaw-quantum.shtml

What Came Before The Big Bang?
By Paul Davies
http://boingboing.net/2014/05/20/what-came-before-the-big-bang.html

Wonder and Knowledge
http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/297809/4445061/1255571558447/2009-09-30-Wonder.pdf?token=iRuSBqZY70tQX6lAMWFTLkxwSr0%3D

Has Physics Made Philosophy and Religion Obsolete?
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/
“A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing” [Book]
http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/145162445X