Friday, April 11, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Aerogel
Aerogel has been around for decades. It's the lightest substance ever created, being 99% air. It's strong, light, translucent and is excellent for sound-proofing. But the really exciting thing about aerogel is that it insulates 37 times better than fiberglass. Using aerogel as insulation in walls, ceilings, and (as it's transparent) even between double-pained windows, could drastically reduce the amount of energy used in heating and cooling. Unfortunately, aerogel isn't easy to make. In fact, it costs about $1,300 per pound to produce. But a Malaysian researcer at the Universiti Teknologi, Dr Halimaton Hamdan, has led a team of researchers who have created a way to produce aerogel that will be 80% cheaper.
What's more, the new aerogel is produced from rice husks, a discarded agricultural product. As you might expect, Malaysia has plenty of rice husks, so they're pretty excited about the possibility of turning them into something valuable. As such, the government has given Hamdan a $65 M grant to help develop a technique for the large-scale production of the new aerogels.
Hamdan's breakthrough was at first accidental. She wanted to do research on silica, but was having a hard time finding the raw material. One night, she saw a television program on the difficulty of disposing of rice husks. And rice husks, it turns out, are 20% silica. After eight years of work, Hamdan finally found a cheap way to produce pure silica from rice husks. And once the silica is acquired, making the aerogel is a cinch.
If Dr Hamdan and her colleagues are able to use that $65 M to scale up production of this material, we should soon be seeing it everywhere. If that happens, the energy savings would be incredible. As a bonus; the production of Maerogel (short for Malaysian Aerogel) would also make use of an abundant natural waste product.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Building Blocks of the Universe
Ever wonder what the universe is made of?
Your first answer probably goes to things such as atoms and photons and maybe even the undiscovered Higgs boson particle. But what the hell are THOSE things made of? Everything is made of something else, right?
So where does the trail end? (If this question seems familiar, it’s because I wrote about it in my book God’s Debris.)
I think if you could answer that question, even at a high conceptual level, you would have the answer to whether God exists, or whether we are a hologram programmed by someone else, or if all of this is just lucky random combinations.
If you keep drilling down to find out what the smallest things are made of, would you eventually find just one thing that everything is made of, guided by some sort of universal rules of physics? That’s my guess, but only a guess. It feels right.
In a longer post I could explain that such rules of physics would qualify as God. Those rules plus the basic particles eventually created the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Koran and the rest of the universe as we know it, while working in undeniably mysterious ways. If that isn’t the definition of God, what is?
I know some of you will say, “People wrote the Bible.” But that view would be based on the superstition of free will. The “stuff” of the universe and the rules of physics wrote all of our books. People were just an interim step we happened to label.
I can’t imagine that the universe is made of things that are made of other things and so on to infinity. That seems absurd. If it turned out to be true, I would favor the theory that we are a hologram and our creators programmed the truth of our nature to be forever beyond our grasp. I don’t get to that conclusion by logic. I feel this way because if I wrote the program myself, it’s the sort of thing I would do. The hypothetical programmers are presumably like us in some ways, so they might think the way we do. Therefore, if it looks like someone is yanking your chain, maybe someone is. Maybe someone like you, only real.
I’m watching the construction of the Large Hadron Collider with interest. If it works, we’d possibly unlock the secrets of the universe. If we really are a hologram, look for the collider to get stopped by legal action or an earthquake before the truth of our nature is revealed. Either that or the particles they discover will spell “hello.”
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/04/building-blocks.html
'God Particle' Expected to Be Found Soon
GENEVA (AP) -- The father of a theoretical subatomic particle dubbed "the God particle" says he's almost sure it will be confirmed in the next year in a race between powerful research equipment in the United States and Europe.
British physicist Peter Higgs, who more than 40 years ago postulated the existence of the particle in the makeup of the atom, said is visit to a new accelerator in Geneva last weekend encouraged him that the Higgs boson will soon be seen.
The $2 billion Large Hadron Collider, under construction since 2003, is expected to start operating by June at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (known as CERN).
It likely will take several months before the hundreds of scientists from around the world are ready to start smashing together protons to study their composition.
Higgs said Monday the particle may already have been created at the rival Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, where the Tevatron is currently the world's most powerful particle accelerator.
"The Tevatron has plenty of energy to do it," Higgs said. "It's just the difficulty of analyzing the data which prevents you from knowing quickly what's hiding in the data."
The massive new CERN collider, which has been installed in a 17-mile circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border, will be more powerful still and will be better able to show what particles are created in the collisions of beams of protons traveling at the speed of light.
The new Geneva collider will re-create the rapidly changing conditions in the universe a split second after the Big Bang. It will be the closest that scientists have come to the event that they theorize was the beginning of the universe. They hope the new equipment will enable them to study particles and forces yet unobserved.
But Fermilab still has time to be first if it can show that it has discovered the Higgs boson, Higgs said.
Nobel laureate Leon Lederman has dubbed the theoretical boson "the God particle" because its discovery could unify understanding of particle physics and help humans "know the mind of God."
Higgs told reporters he is hoping to receive confirmation of his theory by the time he turns 80 in May 2009.
If not, he added, "I'll just have to ask my GP to keep me alive a bit longer," referring to his general practitioner, not the God particle, a term he does not embrace because he fears it might offend some people.
Higgs predicted the existence of the boson while working at the University of Edinburgh to explain how atoms - and the objects they make up - have weight.
Without the particle, the basic physics theory - the "standard model" - lacks a crucial element, because it fails to explain how other subatomic particles - such as quarks and electrons - have mass.
The Higgs theory is that the bosons create a field through which the other particles pass.
The particles that encounter difficulty going through the field as though they are passing through molasses pick up more inertia, and mass. Those that pass through more easily are lighter.
Higgs said he would be "very, very puzzled" if the particle is never found because he cannot image what else could explain how particles get mass.
Higgs said initial reaction to his ideas in the early 1960s was skeptical.
"My colleagues thought I was a bit of an idiot," he said, noting that his initial paper explaining how his theory worked was rejected by an editor at CERN.
He said a colleague spent the summer at CERN right after he did his work on the theory.
"He came back and said, 'At CERN they didn't see that what you were talking about had much to do with particle physics.'
"I then added on some additional paragraphs and sent it off across the Atlantic to Physical Review Letters, who accepted it. The mention of what became known as the Higgs boson was part of the extra which was added on."
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/G/GOD_PARTICLE?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-04-08-07-37-56
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