John Michell, Gravity and Black Holes

Newton shows that the gravitational attraction of an object is proportional to its mass.

If light is affected by gravity, a massive enough object will have such a strong gravitational field that no light will be able to escape it.

Einstein explains gravity as a distortion of space-time, meaning that massless light is affected by gravity.

The velocity of light will appear to diminish.

In a 1783 letter to Henry Cavendish at the Royal Society, British polymath John Michell set out his thoughts on the effect of gravity. The letter was rediscovered in the 1970s and found to contain a remarkable description of black holes. Newton’s law of gravity states that an object’s gravitational pull increases with its mass. Michell considered what might happen to light if it is affected by gravity. He wrote: “If the semidiameter of a sphere of the same density with the sun were to exceed the sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height toward it would have acquired at its surface a greater velocity than that of light, & consequently, supposing light to be attracted by the same force… all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it.” In 1796, French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace came up with a similar idea in his Exposition du Système du Monde.

Source: The Science Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (2014) by DK Publishing.

The world’s largest experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor is up and running

From Pop Sci.com (Dec. 4, 2023):

Japan and the European Union have officially inaugurated testing at the world’s largest experimental nuclear fusion plant. Located roughly 85 miles north of Tokyo, the six-story, JT-60SA “tokamak” facility heats plasma to 200 million degrees Celsius (around 360 million Fahrenheit) within its circular, magnetically insulated reactor. Although JT-60SA first powered up during a test run back in October, the partner governments’ December 1 announcement marks the official start of operations at the world’s biggest fusion center, reaffirming a “long-standing cooperation in the field of fusion energy.”

The tokamak—an acronym of the Russian-language designation of “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”—has led researchers’ push towards achieving the “Holy Grail” of sustainable green energy production for decades. Often described as a large hollow donut, a tokamak is filled with gaseous hydrogen fuel that is then spun at immense high speeds using powerful magnetic coil encasements. When all goes as planned, intense force ionizes atoms to form helium plasma, much like how the sun produces its energy.

Speaking at the inauguration event, EU energy commissioner Kadri Simson referred to the JT-60SA as “the most advanced tokamak in the world,” representing “a milestone for fusion history.”

“Fusion has the potential to become a key component for energy mix in the second half of this century,” she continued.

But even if such a revolutionary milestone is crossed, it likely won’t be at JT-60SA. Along with its still-in-construction sibling, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in Europe, the projects are intended solely to demonstrate scalable fusion’s feasibility. Current hopes estimate ITER’s operational start for sometime in 2025, although the undertaking has been fraught with financial, logistical, and construction issues since its groundbreaking back in 2011.

Experts alongside Simson believe creating sustainable nuclear fusion would mark a revolutionary moment that could ensure an emissionless, renewable energy future. Making the power source a feasible reality, however, is fraught with technological and economic hurdles. Researchers have chased this goal for a long time: The world’s first experimental tokamak was built back in 1958 by the USSR.

While researchers can now generate fusion energy at multiple facilities around the world, it is usually at a net loss. By advancing the technology further at facilities like JT-60SA, however, industry experts think that it is only a matter of time until fusion reactors regularly achieve net energy production gains.

In the meantime, another possible road to fusion energy is making its own promising gains. Earlier this year, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Northern California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved a net energy gain for the second time using what’s the inertial confinement fusion method. In this process, a high-powered laser is split into 192 beams that then hit a capsule containing a pellet of tritium and deuterium. The resultant X-rays generate pressure and temperatures that then initiate fusion.

No matter which process—be it tokamak reactors or ICF lasers—a successful nuclear fusion facility could play a major role in finally shifting humanity away from fossil fuels. [source]

America should be trying this. But the Left is too obsessed with wind turbines and solar energy. Fusion energy is much cleaner and safer than fission energy.

UChicago scientists discover way to make quantum states last 10,000 times longer

From UCChicago.edu (Aug. 13, 2020):

If we can harness it, quantum technology promises fantastic new possibilities. But first, scientists need to coax quantum systems to stay yoked for longer than a few millionths of a second.

A team of scientists at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering announced the discovery of a simple modification that allows quantum systems to stay operational—or “coherent”—10,000 times longer than before. Though the scientists tested their technique on a particular class of quantum systems called solid-state qubits, they think it should be applicable to many other kinds of quantum systems and could thus revolutionize quantum communication, computing and sensing.

The study was published Aug. 13 in Science.

“This breakthrough lays the groundwork for exciting new avenues of research in quantum science,” said study lead author David Awschalom, the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering, senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange. “The broad applicability of this discovery, coupled with a remarkably simple implementation, allows this robust coherence to impact many aspects of quantum engineering. It enables new research opportunities previously thought impractical.”

Down at the level of atoms, the world operates according to the rules of quantum mechanics—very different from what we see around us in our daily lives. These different rules could translate into technology like virtually unhackable networks or extremely powerful computers; the U.S. Department of Energy released a blueprint for the future quantum internet in an event at UChicago on July 23. But fundamental engineering challenges remain: Quantum states need an extremely quiet, stable space to operate, as they are easily disturbed by background noise coming from vibrations, temperature changes or stray electromagnetic fields.

Thus, scientists try to find ways to keep the system coherent as long as possible. One common approach is physically isolating the system from the noisy surroundings, but this can be unwieldy and complex. Another technique involves making all of the materials as pure as possible, which can be costly. The scientists at UChicago took a different tack.

“With this approach, we don’t try to eliminate noise in the surroundings; instead, we “trick” the system into thinking it doesn’t experience the noise,” said postdoctoral researcher Kevin Miao, the first author of the paper.

In tandem with the usual electromagnetic pulses used to control quantum systems, the team applied an additional continuous alternating magnetic field. By precisely tuning this field, the scientists could rapidly rotate the electron spins and allow the system to “tune out” the rest of the noise.

……

“This approach creates a pathway to scalability,” said Awschalom. “It should make storing quantum information in electron spin practical. Extended storage times will enable more complex operations in quantum computers and allow quantum information transmitted from spin-based devices to travel longer distances in networks.” [read more]

You’ve probably never heard of terahertz waves, but they could change your life

 From PopSci.com (Mar. 22, 2022):

There’s a gap on the electromagnetic spectrum where engineers can not tread.

The spectrum covers everything from radio waves and microwaves, to the light that reaches our eyes, to X-rays and gamma rays. And humans have mastered the art of sending and receiving almost all of them.

There is an exception, however. Between the beams of visible light and the blips of radio static, there lies a dead zone where our technology isn’t effective. It’s called the terahertz gap. For decades now, no one’s succeeded in building a consumer device that can transmit terahertz waves.

“There’s a laundry list of potential applications,” says Qing Hu, an electrical engineer at MIT.

But some researchers are slowly making progress. If they stick the landing, they might open up a whole new suite of technologies, like the successor to Wi-Fi or a smarter detection system for skin cancer.

The mystery of the terahertz

Look at the terahertz gap as a borderland. On the left side, there are microwaves and longer radio waves. On the right side lies the infrared spectrum. (Some scientists even call the terahertz gap “far infrared.”) Our eyes can’t see infrared, but as far as our technologies are concerned, it’s just like light.

Radio waves are crucial for communication, especially between electronic devices, making them universal in today’s electronics. Light powers the optical fibers that underpin the internet. These realms of technology typically feed off different wavelengths, and uneasily coexist in the modern world.

But both realms struggle to go far into the terahertz neutral zone. Standard electronic components, like silicon chips, can’t go about their business quickly enough to make terahertz waves. Light-producing technologies like lasers, which are right at home in infrared, don’t work with terahertz waves either. Even worse, terahertz waves don’t last long in the Earth’s atmosphere: Water vapor in the air tends to absorb them after only a few dozen feet.

There are a few terahertz wavelengths that can squeeze through the water vapor. Astronomers have built telescopes that capture those bands, which are especially good for seeing interstellar dust. For best use, those telescopes need to be stationed in the planet’s highest and driest places, like Chile’s Atacama Desert, or outside the atmosphere altogether in space.

The rest of the terahertz gap is shrouded in mist. Researchers like Hu are trying to fix this, but it isn’t easy. [read more]

Mystery Object Blurs Line between Neutron Stars and Black Holes

 From Scientific American.com (June 30, 2020):

For more than a decade astrophysicists have wondered why nature appears to show an odd restraint in the way it slays stars. In life, they range from pip-squeaks to behemoths. Small ones simply burn out and fade away, but something more curious happens to the jumbo-size variety. When such a star dies, its great bulk causes its innards to implode as a core-collapse supernova. The process sparks a cataclysmic explosion and compresses some of the remains into astrophysical exotica—often a neutron star or, for the very heaviest suns, a black hole. Yet a pronounced rift appears to divide the weight classes of these two types of massive stellar corpses. Although astronomers have spotted neutron stars weighing up to around two solar masses and black holes as light as five, middleweight cadavers have gone entirely missing—until now.

In June 2020 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration announced the first conclusive detection of a stellar remnant falling into the so-called mass gap between neutron stars and black holes. After months of calculations, researchers at LIGO and the Virgo gravitational-wave detector in Italy concluded that such waves rippling through Earth in August 2019—an event dubbed GW190814 that was initially classified as a black hole consuming a neutron star—actually came from a 23-solar-mass black hole swallowing a mysterious 2.6-solar-mass object. Whether the smaller body is the heaviest known neutron star or the lightest known black hole—or a truly exotic beast, such as a star made of particles distinct from those of normal stars—its existence suggests that the theories describing the most extreme stellar fates need updating.

“I would rank this as definitely the most exciting announcement we’ve seen from LIGO since the original binary black hole discovery and then the first detection of a neutron star collision,” says Duncan Brown, a gravitational-wave astronomer at Syracuse University, who was not involved in the research. “We’re probing a new piece of astrophysical understanding of the universe.”

The new finding hints that the cosmos may enjoy a wider freedom in how it disposes of stars than researchers had supposed. Whether that leeway means atomic building blocks have enough brawn to support more monstrous neutron stars or that supernovae can forge tinier black holes, LIGO’s detection shrinks the gulf between those two most plausible scenarios.

“The idea of a mass gap as a true gap with nothing in it, I think, is getting progressively destroyed,” says Philippe Landry, a LIGO member at California State University, Fullerton. “This is going to be one nail in the coffin.”

From a fundamental physics perspective, the line separating neutron stars from black holes is razor-thin. If you toss an apple onto a neutron star at the limit of what its constituent neutrons can bear, it will abruptly collapse into a black hole. The heftiest known neutron star weighs 2.14 times the mass of our sun. And nuclear theorists suspect the objects can grow somewhat heavier, with the most optimistic models putting the complete breakdown of matter at 2.5 solar masses. Based on such theories, the LIGO collaboration calculated that the chance of the lighter partner in GW190814 being a neutron star is less than 3 percent. A neutron star that heavy, Landry says, would be a “complete game changer.” [read more]

Antimatter Is Both a Particle and a Wave, New Experiment Confirms

From Live Science.com (May 8, 2019):

Antimatter isn't just made of antiparticles, it's also made of waves. Now we know that this holds true even at the level of a single antimatter particle.

Physicists have known for a long time that just about everything — light and other forms of energy, but also every atom in your body — exists as both particles and waves, a concept known as particle-wave duality. That's been shown again and again in experiments. But antimatter particles, which are identical to their matter partners, except for their opposite charge and spin, are much more difficult to experiment with. These twins of matter flit into existence fleetingly, usually in massive particle accelerators.

But now, physicists have shown at the level of a single positron — an antimatter twin of the electron — that antimatter, too, is made of both particles and waves.

To show that positrons are also waves, the physicists performed a more complicated version of the famous "double-slit experiment," which in 1927 first showed that electrons — a form of matter — are both particles and waves.

In the original double-slit experiment, scientists fired a stream of electrons through a sheet with two slits on it, with a a detector on the other side. If the electrons had been only particles, they would have formed a pattern of two bright lines on the detector. But they acted like waves, so they "diffracted" like light, forming a spread-out pattern of many alternating brighter and dimmer lines. (When two waves overlap but are shifted relative to each other, the peaks and valleys of the waves cancel out or add up, creating a distinctive pattern known as interference. These types of experiments are known as interferometry.)

In 1976, physicists figured out how to demonstrate the same effect with one electron at a time, proving that even single electrons are waves that can "interfere" with each other.

Physicists have since shown that when you bounce positrons off a reflective surface, they behave like waves. But until now, they had never performed a double-slit experiment showing that individual positrons had a wave nature. Doing that sort of experiment offers physicists opportunities to study the behavior of antimatter at a level that's deeper than ever before.

For this paper, published May 3 in the journal Science Advances, a team of Italian and Swiss physicists figured out how to generate a low-energy beam of positrons that could be used to perform the first antimatter version of the double-slit experiment. When the physicists directed the positrons through a more complex series of multiple slits, the positrons landed on the detector in a pattern you'd expect from waves, not individual particles.

"Our observation ... proves [the positron's] quantum-mechanical origin and thus the wave nature of the positrons," Paola Scampoli, a physicist at the Politecnico of Milano and co-author of the paper, said in a statement.

This work, the authors wrote, opens the door to a new kind of "interferometry" experiment. Next, they hope to answer questions about the wave nature of more complex exotic matter, and use those results to probe the nature of gravity at very small scales. [source]

It makes sense that anti-matter follows the laws of quantum physics. Why not? Anti-matter is a particle too. But it is nice to scientifically prove that conjecture too.

A student's physics project could make quantum computers twice as reliable

From Live Science.com (Apr. 22, 2021):

A student's tweak in quantum computing code could double its ability to catch errors, piquing the interest of Amazon's quantum computing program.

The new code could be used to build quantum computers that live up to the promises of lightning-fast processing time and the ability to solve more complex problems than traditional computers could handle. So far, only two computers have reached "quantum supremacy," or the ability to complete a quantum calculation faster than the fastest supercomputer. But neither of those computers used error correction codes that will be necessary to scale up quantum computing for widespread, reliable use, the researchers on the new study said.

Regular computing depends on "bits," which are like switches that can toggle between the "on" or "off" position. The position of the bits encodes information. Quantum computing adds a layer of complexity by taking advantage of the fact that at very, very small scales, physical properties get weird: Qubits, the quantum versions of bits, can be both on and off at the same time, a state called superposition. Qubits can also become entangled, meaning that even though they're not physically in contact, the state of one impacts the state of the other. What this means is that quantum computers can encode information in more complex ways by storing information in these weird quantum states. Qubits can be made of multiple different kinds of quantum particles, and information can be encoded across a network of qubits so that damage to a single qubit won't destroy the information.

Prone to error

There's a catch, however. Qubits are sensitive to environmental disruption, and so they're prone to error. These errors limit the efficiency of quantum computing, which is one reason the field is still in its infancy, study lead author Pablo Bonilla Ataides, an undergraduate student at the University of Sydney, said in a statement. Bonilla led development of the new code as part of his second-year physics project. Google, IBM and other academic and industry groups are working to build quantum computers, but they're experimental thus far.

"We're really just working out how to put the pieces of quantum computers together in such a way that if they go wrong —— and they are going to go wrong —— the quantum computer will still work out in the end," said Benjamin Brown, a study co-author and quantum physicist at the University of Sydney.

Bonilla and Brown, along with their colleagues, figured out a coding tweak to correct the errors that make quantum computers unreliable. The change involves a specialized code that corrects errors that are known to be more common that other types, Brown told Live Science.

In a classical, non-quantum computer, bits encode information with a series of 0s and 1s. The only type of error that can occur in this system is a "bit flip" error, in which a 1 turns into a 0 or vice versa. These errors are quite rare in traditional computing.

Bit flip errors occur in quantum computing, too. But because qubits are more complex than traditional bits, they can also have more complex errors. Another common type of error in quantum computing is the dephasing error. In this case, the value of the information switches from positive to negative or vice versa. Sticking with 0s and 1s (though quantum systems aren't actually binary like traditional computers), this would be like a positive 1 flipping to a negative 1. These errors can happen for lots of different physical reasons, Brown said. Qubits might change their angular momentum, or spin. They might become disentangled with one another, or inadvertently entangle with the outside world. Whatever the cause, the result is a loss of information.

"If some of the bits start flipping from the state you're supposed to be in to a different one, it's going to give you the wrong answers in the end, and it's not going to be much use," Brown said.

Fixing quantum mistakes

The new code doubles the error suppression compared with the previous error correction code, Bonilla said in the statement. The researchers achieved this in a surprisingly simple way: They simply rotated the coordinates on every other qubit in the system. If each qubit were a sphere, and each piece of information encoded in the qubit were a point on that sphere, the code would rotate half the spheres so that down was defined as up and up was defined as down. This structure protects the information from dephasing errors while also maintaining protection from bit flip errors.

The researchers are now collaborating with scientists at Yale University and Amazon Web Services who are developing qubits that work well with this type of code, Brown said.

"We're hoping to push it forward to really help build a quantum computer," he said.

The researchers described their new study April 12 in the journal Nature Communications. [source]

James Clerk Maxwell: Cultivating the Mind of Christ

From Breakpoint.org (Jan. 4, 2023):

To be Christian, especially in this confusing cultural moment, requires the intentional cultivation of our minds. An exemplary model of someone who took this calling seriously is James Clerk Maxwell.

The only two physicists most people could name, if at all, are Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. However, they should know James Clerk Maxwell, whose work was foundational for many of the most important discoveries of 20th-century physics.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1831, Maxwell entered the University of Edinburgh at age 16. When he didn’t find his studies all that demanding, he dedicated his spare time to self-constructed chemical, electric, and magnetic devices, especially with polarized prisms and gelatins. This work led to two scientific papers which he completed at age 18.

In 1850, Maxwell went to the University of Cambridge. While there, he underwent an evangelical conversion. He remained an evangelical Presbyterian for the rest of his life, eventually becoming an elder in the Church of Scotland.

He graduated from Trinity College in 1854 as one of the top two mathematicians. Although he was made a Fellow of Trinity in 1855, he instead accepted a professorship at Marischal College in Aberdeen. While there, he won the Adams Prize from King’s College Cambridge for demonstrating that Saturn’s rings could be neither solids nor liquids, but rather made of smaller particles that orbited Saturn independently. In the 1980s the spacecraft Voyager confirmed the theory in a flyby of Saturn. At the time he wrote the paper, it was considered the finest example of an application of mathematics to physics in history.

In 1860, Maxwell took a position at King’s College London, before moving on to Cambridge in 1871. Soon, Maxwell’s work changed the field of physics. For example, he showed that light was a form of electromagnetic radiation and worked out key concepts describing electromagnetic behavior. That work was later simplified into four partial differential equations that paved the way for Einstein’s theory of special relativity. He also produced the first light-fast color photograph (in 1861), and he proposed a system for defining physical quantities, which today is known as dimensional analysis.

Maxwell’s faith was very important to his understanding of science and put him at odds with most of his contemporaries. The dominant philosophy of the day among scientists was positivism, which taught that the only foundation for knowledge was empirical observation and logical and mathematical analyses of those observations. This means that intuition, introspection, revelation, and tradition are not valid ways of finding truth. Therefore, the authority of the Bible must be rejected, along with claims to miracles and divine interventions of any sort.

Maxwell, however, rejected positivism as both reductionistic and presumptuous. He believed firmly in the Scriptures and had a decidedly mystical streak to his Christian life that he rarely discussed. To Maxwell, science was a profoundly religious endeavor. Among the daily prayers he repeated was this one:

Teach us to study the work of Thy hands that we may subdue the earth to our uses, and strengthen our reason for Thy service; and so rescue Thy blessed Word, that we may believe on Him whom Thou hast sent to give us the knowledge of salvation and the remission of our sins.

Maxwell understood science as an expression of the cultural mandate from Genesis 1 and its connection to the Gospel. In 1875, he said,

I think that men of science as well as other men need to learn from Christ, and I think that Christians whose minds are scientific are bound to study science that this view of the glory of God may be as extensive as their being is capable of. 

Maxwell died at age 48 of stomach cancer. Despite a short life, physicists classify his work along with Einstein and Newton. In advancing our knowledge about God’s world, Maxwell understood that he was performing the work of the kingdom of Heaven, with an expectation that it would lead people to glorify God and fulfill His purposes for the world. [source]

How a US lab created energy with fusion—again

From Pop Sci.com (Aug. 13, 2023):

About eight months ago, scientists at a US-government-funded lab replicated the process that powers stars—nuclear fusion—and created more energy than they put in. Now, physicists and engineers at the same facility, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Northern California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, appear to have successfully created an energy-gaining fusion experiment for the second time.

NIF’s latest achievement is a step closer—the second step down a very long road—to a dream of fusion providing the world with clean, abundant energy. There is a long way to go before a fusion power plant opens in your city. But scientists are optimistic.

“It indicates that the scientists at [NIF] and their collaborators understand what happened back in December well enough that they have been able to make it happen again,” says John Pasley, a fusion scientist at York University in the UK who wasn’t part of this experiment.

NIF declined to comment, noting that the facility’s scientists had not yet formally presented their results. Until that happens, there’s a lot we won’t know about the specifics of the experiment, which took place on July 30.

There are multiple ways of achieving fusion, and NIF works with one, called inertial confinement fusion (ICF). In NIF’s setup, a high-powered laser beam splits into 192 smaller beams, showering a capsule that scientists call a hohlraum. Inside the hohlraum’s walls, this barrage spawns X-rays that crash into the capsule’s filling: a pellet of deuterium and tritium, super-squeezing it at temperatures and pressures more intense than the sun’s, initiating fusion.

The goal of all this work is to pass the break-even point and create more energy than the laser puts in: an achievement that fusion scientists call gain. In December’s experiment, 2.05 megajoules of laser beams elicited 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy. We won’t know for sure until NIF releases its data, but unnamed sources told the Financial Times that this second success created even greater gain. [read more]

Nice! Hopefully, the lab can scale up the fusion.

Leibniz: A Remarkable Thinker Guided by God’s Authority

From Breakpoint.org (Nov. 14, 2022):

Today, November 14, marks the 306th anniversary of the death of Gottfried von Leibniz, a German polymath, committed Lutheran, and one of the most wide-ranging intellects in all of history.

Leibniz was a child prodigy. At 13, he composed 300 hexameters of Latin verse in one morning for an event at school. In 1661, at 14, he enrolled in the University of Leipzig, completing a bachelor’s and master’s degree by 17. The following year, he earned a bachelor of law degree, and a doctorate in philosophy the year after that. When, that same year, the university turned him down for a doctorate in law, likely because of his youth, he left Leipzig for the University of Altdorf, presented his dissertation, and was granted a license to practice law. This was before he turned twenty.

Despite a busy legal and diplomatic career, Leibniz remained active in scholarly pursuits. Like many intellectuals of his time, Leibniz was engaged with Enlightenment thought and active in a variety of fields. As a thinker, he stands out for not only grasping the depths of contemporary philosophy but also contributing to them, all while remaining dependent on the authority of Scripture and the Church.

Leibniz is best remembered as one of the discoverers of calculus, along with Isaac Newton. The two developed this mathematical field independently. Though Newton more often receives the greater credit for his famous work, Principia Mathematica, it’s Leibniz’s notations that their successors have often found to be most precise.

Leibniz anticipated Einstein by arguing that space, time, and motion were relative. In fact, Einstein referred to himself as a Leibnizian and argued that Leibniz’s views would have won out over Newton’s had the technology of the day been more advanced.

Speaking of technology, Leibniz dreamed up a primitive computer that used marbles, punch cards, and binary numbers to make advanced calculations. He further described a machine that could, theoretically, do integral and differential calculus. In all these ways, he anticipated modern computers and even helped lay the foundation for their development.

Leibniz is also well known for his work in philosophy, particularly in relation to theology. He argued that since both reason and faith are gifts of God, the two fields, if properly understood, could not be contradictory.

Leibniz also argued for what came to be called “Optimism,” the idea that any flaw of our world must also exist in others. Quite unfairly, the French philosopher Voltaire misrepresented this idea in his famous book, Candide, as though it meant that everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. This is just close enough to Leibniz’s argument to sound plausible while at the same time being totally misleading about his philosophy.

Close to Leibniz’s heart was the reconciliation of Lutherans and Catholics. He had been born just two years before the end of the Thirty Years’ War, which was fought between Catholics and Protestants, primarily in Germany. Though a devout Lutheran, he held a deep appreciation of Catholic thought, and partly due to work toward reconciliation, he won the respect of high-level Catholics. He was even offered the prestigious position of curator of the Vatican library. To take it, Leibniz would have had to convert to Catholicism, and he didn’t want to “send a message” that Catholicism was better.

Leibniz’s work is so far reaching it is impossible to fully summarize in a brief commentary. In addition to his work in philosophy and theology, politics, law, history, and philology, he laid the foundation for modern analytic and linguistic philosophy and logic. He also anticipated developments in probability theory, computer science, geology, biology and medicine, linguistics, and psychology. The various elements within what was an incredible range of work were integrated together by his Christian faith, anchored in his belief in the Trinitarian Christian God. [source]

Interesting. Leibniz is definitely a polymath. His primitive computer is interesting.

Faraday Recognized an Authority Greater Than Science

From Breakpoint.org (Oct. 3, 2022):

Michael Faraday was born in in 1791 in London to a local blacksmith and a housemaid. Despite these humble beginnings, Faraday is remembered among the most respected scientists in history, pioneering the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.

Without Faraday, “there would be no modern economy.” At least that is what Andy Kessler claimed recently in The Wall Street Journal.

In 1820, (Faraday) noted that electricity applied to a loop of wire could get a magnet to move through it, an insight that produced the electric motor found in every fan, vacuum cleaner, washing machine and electric car. Faraday then turned his own thinking inside out. In 1831, he invented the dynamo, an inverse motor.… By running electricity down a long wire to an electromagnetic relay switch, you can ring a bell. This innovation became the telegraph, telephone and today’s wireless devices, which are all based on Faraday’s induction.

That resume alone makes Faraday well worth remembering. But, as Kessler pointed out, his example also matters in an age when so many use “science” with a capital “S” as an unquestionable authority, even beyond its natural purview. The oft-repeated phrases “scientists say” or “the science is settled” are usually intended to inspire hushed awe and to silence dissent, on everything from economics and government policy to gender ideology and climate change.

Faraday might have laughed at that way of employing “the science.” While the scientific enterprise points to the logic and order God has woven into the cosmos, people are often guilty of bias and irrationality. “I could trust a fact and always cross-question an assertion,” he wrote to Swiss physicist Auguste-Arthur de la Rive.

When two well-known scientists of his day engaged in a dispute, Faraday wrote a friend, “These polemics of the scientific world are very unfortunate; they form the great stain to which the beautiful edifice of scientific truth is subject. Are they inevitable? They surely cannot belong to science itself, but to something in our fallen natures.”

These twin beliefs, in both the knowability of the created order and the human tendency to leap to conclusions, helped Faraday become a meticulous researcher in the lab and something of a non-conformist in religion. He belonged to a small denomination known as the Sandemanian Church, which was skeptical of traditions. The empirically minded Faraday argued that a Christian could have “no assurance beyond what the Word could give him.”

MIT professor of nuclear science Ian Hutchinson described Faraday this way: ​​“One might speculate that his lifelong religious nonconformity lent a certain color to his psychological makeup that enabled him to comfortably champion unorthodox scientific positions.” In fact, his theories about the lines of magnetic force were initially met with skepticism, only to become a foundation of modern physics.

In all of this, Faraday is an example of how Christians can balance the constructive purposes of science with an accurate understanding of scientific authority. Today’s shorthand too easily shortchanges debate and politicizes issues where the jury should still be out. In fact, the idea that science can never be questioned is a betrayal of science itself. Some of humanity’s greatest discoveries began by bucking conventional wisdom and allowing the evidence to lead elsewhere. “Science,” after all, never “says” anything. Only scientists do, offering hypotheses as a way of stewarding the data science provides.

Part of the abuse of the term science stems from a lack of authority other than science. Faraday’s reverence for Scripture came from recognizing its moral and spiritual authority. In the absence of external authorities, many look to “the science” to fill a role it simply cannot. So, the authority passes to scientists, who claim both an objectivity and a purview they do not have.

As Hutchinson put it, writing about Faraday and his near-contemporary James Clerk Maxwell, “These men’s insights into physics were made possible by their religious commitments. For them, the coherence of nature resulted from its origin in the mind of its Creator.”

That’s a basis for the role and purpose of science that’s well worth recovering. [source]

A Physicist’s Explanation of Why the Soul May Exist

From The Epoch Times.com (May 4, 2022):

Henry P. Stapp is a theoretical physicist at the University of California–Berkeley who worked with some of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He does not seek to prove that the soul exists, but he does say that the existence of the soul fits within the laws of physics.

It is not true to say belief in the soul is unscientific, according to Stapp. Here the word “soul” refers to a personality independent of the brain or the rest of the human body that can survive beyond death.  In his paper, “Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory With Personality Survival,” he wrote: “Strong doubts about personality survival based solely on the belief that postmortem survival is incompatible with the laws of physics are unfounded.”

He works with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—more or less the interpretation used by some of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Even Bohr and Heisenberg had some disagreements on how quantum mechanics works, and understandings of the theory since that time have also been diverse. Stapp’s paper on the Copenhagen interpretation has been influential. It was written in the 1970s and Heisenberg wrote an appendix for it.

Stapp noted of his own concepts: “There has been no hint in my previous descriptions (or conception) of this orthodox quantum mechanics of any notion of personality survival.”

Why Quantum Theory Could Hint at Life After Death

Stapp explains that the founders of quantum theory required scientists to essentially cut the world into two parts. Above the cut, classical mathematics could describe the physical processes empirically experienced. Below the cut, quantum mathematics describes a realm “which does not entail complete physical determinism.”

Of this realm below the cut, Stapp wrote: “One generally finds that the evolved state of the system below the cut cannot be matched to any conceivable classical description of the properties visible to observers.”

So how do scientists observe the invisible? They choose particular properties of the quantum system and set up apparatus to view their effects on the physical processes “above the cut.”

The key is the experimenter’s choice. When working with the quantum system, the observer’s choice has been shown to physically impact what manifests and can be observed above the cut.

Stapp cited Bohr’s analogy for this interaction between a scientist and his experiment results: “[It’s like] a blind man with a cane: when the cane is held loosely, the boundary between the person and the external world is the divide between hand and cane; but when held tightly the cane becomes part of the probing self: the person feels that he himself extends to the tip of the cane.”

The physical and mental are connected in a dynamic way. In terms of the relationship between mind and brain, it seems the observer can hold in place a chosen brain activity that would otherwise be fleeting. This is a choice similar to the choice a scientist makes when deciding which properties of the quantum system to study.

The quantum explanation of how the mind and brain can be separate or different, yet connected by the laws of physics “is a welcome revelation,” wrote Stapp. “It solves a problem that has plagued both science and philosophy for centuries—the imagined science-mandated need either to equate mind with brain, or to make the brain dynamically independent of the mind.”

Stapp said it is not contrary to the laws of physics that the personality of a dead person may attach itself to a living person, as in the case of so-called spirit possession. It wouldn’t require any basic change in orthodox theory, though it would “require a relaxing of the idea that physical and mental events occur only when paired together.”

Classical physical theory can only evade the problem, and classical physicists can only work to discredit intuition as a product of human confusion, said Stapp. Science should instead, he said, recognize “the physical effects of consciousness as a physical problem that needs to be answered in dynamical terms.”

How This Understanding Affects the Moral Fabric of Society

Furthermore, it is imperative for maintaining human morality to consider people as more than just machines of flesh and blood.

In another paper, titled “Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics,” Stapp wrote:  “It has become now widely appreciated that assimilation by the general public of this ’scientific' view, according to which each human being is basically a mechanical robot, is likely to have a significant and corrosive impact on the moral fabric of society.”

He wrote of the “growing tendency of people to exonerate themselves by arguing that it is not ‘I’ who is at fault, but some mechanical process within: ’my genes made me do it‘; or ’my high blood-sugar content made me do it.’ Recall the infamous ‘Twinkie Defense’ that got Dan White off with five years for murdering San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.” [source]

Quantum Theory Is Mind-Boggling

From Breakpoint.org (April 13, 2022):

Quantum theory boggles the mind.

As science journalist John Horgan writes, quantum theory is “science’s most precise, powerful theory of reality. It has predicted countless experiments, spawned countless applications. The trouble is physicists and philosophers disagree over what it means, that is, what it says about how the world works.”

At the core of the disagreement is what matter consists of at the quantum, or the smallest, level. At that size, matter’s properties change when we try to observe it, even—amazingly—because we try to observe it. That’s led to over a century of frustrated efforts to understand exactly what the fundamental “stuff” of reality is. It’s not that these tiny things aren’t real; it’s that we can’t figure out what they’re like.

At the same time, quantum theory has proven explanatory power.

A theological parallel is the Trinity. We can’t comprehend exactly how the Godhead functions, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.

As C.S. Lewis wrote back in 1952, if Christianity is true, it would be “at least as difficult as modern physics.”

And, we could add, just as rational. [source]

Powerful ‘Machine Scientists’ Distill the Laws of Physics From Raw Data

From Quanta Magazine.org (May 10, 2022):

In 2017, Roger Guimerà and Marta Sales-Pardo discovered a cause of cell division, the process driving the growth of living beings. But they couldn’t immediately reveal how they learned the answer. The researchers hadn’t spotted the crucial pattern in their data themselves. Rather, an unpublished invention of theirs — a digital assistant they called the “machine scientist” — had handed it to them. When writing up the result, Guimerà recalls thinking, “We can’t just say we fed it to an algorithm and this is the answer. No reviewer is going to accept that.”

The duo, who are partners in life as well as research, had teamed up with the biophysicist Xavier Trepat of the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, a former classmate, to identify which factors might trigger cell division. Many biologists believed that division ensues when a cell simply exceeds a certain size, but Trepat suspected there was more to the story. His group specialized in deciphering the nanoscale imprints that herds of cells leave on a soft surface as they jostle for position. Trepat’s team had amassed an exhaustive data set chronicling shapes, forces, and a dozen other cellular characteristics. But testing all the ways these attributes might influence cell division would have taken a lifetime.

Instead, they collaborated with Guimerà and Sales-Pardo to feed the data to the machine scientist. Within minutes it returned a concise equation that predicted when a cell would divide 10 times more accurately than an equation that used only a cell’s size or any other single characteristic. What matters, according to the machine scientist, is the size multiplied by how hard a cell is getting squeezed by its neighbors — a quantity that has units of energy.

“It was able to pick up something that we were not,” said Trepat, who, along with Guimerà, is a member of ICREA, the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies.

Because the researchers hadn’t yet published anything about the machine scientist, they did a second analysis to cover its tracks. They manually tested hundreds of pairs of variables, “irrespective of … their physical or biological meaning,” as they would later write. By design, this recovered the machine scientist’s answer, which they reported in 2018 in Nature Cell Biology.

Four years later, this awkward situation is quickly becoming an accepted method of scientific discovery. Sales-Pardo and Guimerà are among a handful of researchers developing the latest generation of tools capable of a process known as symbolic regression.

Symbolic regression algorithms are distinct from deep neural networks, the famous artificial intelligence algorithms that may take in thousands of pixels, let them percolate through a labyrinth of millions of nodes, and output the word “dog” through opaque mechanisms. Symbolic regression similarly identifies relationships in complicated data sets, but it reports the findings in a format human researchers can understand: a short equation. These algorithms resemble supercharged versions of Excel’s curve-fitting function, except they look not just for lines or parabolas to fit a set of data points, but billions of formulas of all sorts. In this way, the machine scientist could give the humans insight into why cells divide, whereas a neural network could only predict when they do.

Researchers have tinkered with such machine scientists for decades, carefully coaxing them into rediscovering textbook laws of nature from crisp data sets arranged to make the patterns pop out. But in recent years the algorithms have grown mature enough to ferret out undiscovered relationships in real data — from how turbulence affects the atmosphere to how dark matter clusters. “No doubt about it,” said Hod Lipson, a roboticist at Columbia University who jump-started the study of symbolic regression 13 years ago. “The whole field is moving forward.” [read more]

This supermassive black hole sucks big time

From PopSci.com (April 26):

Black holes remain among the most enigmatic objects in the universe, but the past few years have seen astronomers develop techniques to directly image these powerful vacuums. And they keep getting better at it.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, the international team that took the first picture of a black hole in 2017, followed up that work with observations highlighting the black hole’s magnetic field. And just this month, another team of astronomers created an AI-sharpened version of the same image.

Now a new study published today in the journal Nature describes how images of that black hole, named after its galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), has a much larger circle of debris around it than the 2017 observations would suggest.

Though long hypothesized to exist in theory, for many decades astronomers could only find indirect evidence of black holes in the sky. For instance, they would look for signs of the immense gravity of a black hole influencing other objects, such as when stars follow especially tight or fast orbits that imply the presence of another massive, but invisible partner.

But that all changed in 2017, when the EHT’s global network of radio telescopes captured the first visible evidence of a black hole, the supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy 57 million light-years away from Earth. When the image was released in 2019, the orange ring of fire around a central black void drew comparisons to “The Eye of Sauron” from Lord of the Rings.

EHT would go on to directly image Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, releasing another image of a fiery orange doughnut around a black center in May 2022.

Such supermassive black holes, which are often billions of times more massive than our sun—M87 is estimated to be 6.5 billion times bigger and Sagittarius A*  4 million times bigger—are thought to exist at the centers of most galaxies. The intense gravity of all that mass pulls on any gas, dust, and other excess material that comes too close, accelerating it to incredible speeds as it falls toward the lip of the black hole, known as the event horizon.

Like water circling a drain, the falling material spirals and is condensed into a flat ring known as an accretion disk. But unlike water around a drain, the incredible speed and pressures in the accretion disk heat the inflating material to the point where it emits powerful X-ray radiation. The disk propels jets of radiation and gas out and away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light. 

The EHT team already figured that M87 produced forcible jets. But the second set of results show that the ring-like structure of collapsing material around the black hole is 50 percent larger than they originally estimated.

“This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is, relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole,” Kazunori Akiyama, an MIT Haystack Observatory research scientist and EHT collaboration member, said in a statement. “Now we can start to address questions such as how particles are accelerated and heated, and many other mysteries around the black hole, more deeply.”

The new observations were made in 2018 using the Global Millimeter VLBI Array, a network of a dozen radio telescopes running east to west across Europe and the US. To get the resolution necessary for more accurate measurements, however, the researchers also included observatories in the North and South: the Greenland Telescope along with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array, which consists of 66 radio telescopes in the Chilean high desert.

“Having these two telescopes [as part of] the global array resulted in a boost in angular resolution by a factor of four in the north-south direction,” Lynn Matthews, an EHT collaboration member at the MIT Haystack Observatory, said in a media statement. “This greatly improves the level of detail we can see. And in this case, a consequence was a dramatic leap in our understanding of the physics operating near the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy.”

The more recent study focused on radio waves around 3 millimeters long, as opposed to 1.3 millimeters like the original 2017 one. That may have brought the larger, more distant ring structure into focus in a way the 2017 observations could not.

“That longer wavelength is usually associated with lower energies of the emitting electrons,” says Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who was not involved with the new study. “It’s possible that you get brighter emission at longer wavelengths farther out from the black hole.”

Going forward, astronomers plan to observe the black hole at other wavelengths to highlight different parts and layers of its structure, and better understand how such cosmic behemoths form at the hearts of galaxies and contribute to galactic evolution.

Just how supermassive black holes generate jets is “not a well-understood process,” Loeb says. “This is the first time we have observations of what may be the base of the jet. It can be used by theoretical physicists to model how the M87 jet is being launched.”

He adds that he would like to see future observations capture the sequence of events in the accretion disk. That is, to essentially make a movie out of what’s happening at M87.

“There might be a hotspot that we can track that is moving either around or moving towards the jet,” Loeb says, which in turn, could explain how a beast like a black hole gets fed. [source]

Other articles about black holes:

• The Black Hole at the Center of the Galaxy Is Forging a Strange New Kind of Star
• Our galaxy's supermassive black hole is closer to Earth than we thought
• Thousands of Earthlike 'blanets' might circle the Milky Way's central black hole
• 8 ways we know that black holes really do exist
• Can energy be sucked out of a black hole?
• What would happen if a black hole fell into a wormhole?
• Lab-grown black hole analog behaves just like Stephen Hawking said it would
• Are some black holes wormholes in disguise? Gamma-ray blasts may shed clues.
• Black holes could be dark stars with 'Planck hearts'
• Black holes warp the universe into a grotesque hall of mirrors
• 28 'cocooned' black holes found hiding in plain sight
• Mysterious force destroys monster black hole's ring of plasma
• Largest black hole collision ever detected
• Black holes so big we don't know how they form could be hiding in the universe
• Supermassive Black Holes May Form From Dark Matter, Study Suggests
• A supermassive black hole is speeding through space, and astronomers don't know why
• Scientists Discover Unprecedented ‘Runaway’ Black Hole
• Astronomers Spy a Giant Runaway Black Hole’s Starry Wake
• Supermassive black holes could host giant, swirling gas 'tsunamis'
• Supermassive black hole devours a star, blasts its remains at Earth
• Astronomers capture largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed
• 'Ultramassive' black hole discovered by Durham astronomers
• Dangerous 'naked' black holes could be hiding in the universe
• Black holes could become massive particle accelerators
• Astronomers find the fastest spinning black hole to date
• Scientists spot earliest-known supermassive black hole 'storm'
• Scientists catch 1st glimpse of a black hole swallowing a neutron star
• Most complete map of black holes captured by German X-ray space telescope
• Astronomers see back of a black hole for first time, proving Albert Einstein was right
• Powerful X-ray burst from black hole ripples through galactic dust in new NASA image
• Astronomers announce discovery of black hole, the closest to Earth ever discovered
• First Evidence that Black Holes are the Source of Dark Energy

Three Scientific Discoveries that Call for a God Hypothesis

From Breakpoint.org:

In the book River Out of Eden, Oxford biologist and atheist superstar Richard Dawkins famously wrote:

“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

Dawkins and other “new atheists” have long insisted that science has excluded the possibility of a creator or has, at least, rendered it unnecessary. Turns out this belief may be scientifically out of date. According to a new book, the biggest discoveries of the last century challenge a materialistic worldview and call science back to its theistic roots.

Cambridge-educated philosopher of science Stephen Meyer wrote two books, Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt, that both argue against materialist accounts of biology. His latest book, The Return of the God Hypothesis, makes an even more ambitious claim.

Three key twentieth century discoveries, argues Meyer, challenge materialist assumptions and point, not just to an intelligent designer, but to a transcendent God. He recently joined my colleague Shane Morris on the Upstream podcast to talk about the book.

Not only were most of the founders of modern science devout Christians, the scientific method itself emerged from assumptions found only in a Christian worldview, such as the intelligibility of nature and the need to constantly test our fallen intuitions against the facts. Tracing science from its theistic beginnings, Meyer shows how it gradually lost its way and became tethered to materialism.

Famed scientists like Laplace, Hume, and Darwin came to believe that the “God hypothesis” was no longer necessary to explain the natural world, that the universe required no cause beyond itself. Given the opportunity and enough time, living things could arise and evolve on their own. Since the conditions for life were simple and the universe had existed from eternity, here we are.

These assumptions went largely unchallenged until the twentieth century. However, breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, and biology began to undermine materialism.  For example, telescopes began to challenge the proponents (Einstein being one) of a steady-state universe. More and more evidence mounted that the universe was, in fact, not eternal, as many scientists had long assumed. If instead the universe came into being at some point in time, it must have had a cause outside of itself, To be clear, there must be a cause outside of space, time, matter, and energy.

Another discovery was how finely tuned the universe is. The very laws that govern the cosmos, such as gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces, and the cosmological constant, are precisely calibrated in such a way that makes life possible. There’s not a compelling way to explain this “Goldilocks universe,” one “just right” that could have been otherwise, within a naturalistic worldview. As English astronomer and former atheist Fred Hoyle put it, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics…” [read more]

‘Time To Stop This Farce’: Rand Paul To Introduce Bill Lifting Federal Airplane Mask Mandate

From Daily Wire.com (July 8):

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is planning to introduce legislation to revoke a federal mask mandate for travelers on airplanes.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has continued to mandate that all travelers wear masks on airplanes with limited exceptions as many state governments have rolled back COVID-19 restrictions. The current TSA mandate is in place until at least September 13.

“When the Senate returns to session, I will be introducing an immediate repeal of the mask mandate on planes. Enough! Time to stop this farce and let people travel in peace!” Paul tweeted on Thursday.

Paul has needled public health experts and the Biden administration for months over health restrictions put in place over COVID-19. Paul has argued against requiring masks for anyone who is vaccinated or who has already contracted and recovered from COVID-19.

In March, Paul grilled National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci over his use of masks despite being vaccinated. At the time, Fauci had been acting in accordance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC later retracted their guidance and said that vaccinated people do not need to wear face masks. [read more]

Good for him! Masks (other than possibly the N95 mask) don’t stop viruses just like a chain-link fence won’t stop a gnat. Viruses are microscopic. If you watch the ads for masks they don’t even say they stop viruses. Just that they are comfortable like a hat or some piece of clothing.

Other mask articles:

• When It Comes To Masks, Physics Will Always Trump Politics
• Unmasking Masks
• Your mask may be giving you COVID eyes
• Get ready for your worst common cold ever, thanks to lockdowns and months of masking
• The Top Reason I Hate Masks Is They Force Me To Live By Lies
• Emails Show Biden’s CDC Caved To Teachers Union Pressure To Mask Students

Physics and Free Will

From Break Point.org:

When Christians use the term “free will,” it’s often in discussions about divine sovereignty and predestination. Whether we choose God or God chooses us has been at the center of theological debate for centuries. On the other hand, when the term “free will” is used by evolutionary biologists, the debate is over whether choice itself is real, whether it is an illusion produced by our brains.

Materialists have long insisted, because they kind of have to, that human actions and decisions are determined, not free. In other words, we think we make real choices as humans, but we don’t. Our choices are really the inevitable outcomes of a whole chain of material causes that go back, like falling dominoes, to the Big Bang.

This idea is called “determinism.” If true, a scientist with perfect knowledge of all of the conditions from the beginning of the universe could, like a cosmic weatherman, predict everything that would ever happen.

Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, who runs a popular blog called “Why Evolution Is True,” has long held this view. As he puts it, “our choices and behaviors are the result of the laws of physics…” Given our chemistry, the arrangement of atoms in our brains, and outside forces acting on us, we cannot help doing what we do.

Obviously, determinism does quite a number on issues like meaning and moral responsibility, among other things.

Determinism is an unavoidable conclusion if you start with the assumption that the world is only a place of natural causes and processes. However, if you start with the evidence, it’s another matter altogether.

For example, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor points out at “Mind Matters” that quantum physics suggests we do not live in a deterministic universe. As early as the mid-60’s, physicists had devised experiments that strongly pointed to the fact that nature does not determine every event beforehand. Quantum events, such as those that put a certain spin on an electron, are not the result of “hidden variables” at the subatomic level. In fact, we don’t know what determines them! [read more]

Physicists could do the 'impossible': Create and destroy magnetic fields from afar

From Live Science.com (Nov. 24):

Scientists have figured out a way to create and cancel magnetic fields from afar.

The method involves running electric current through a special arrangement of wires to create a magnetic field that looks as if it came from another source. This illusion has real applications: Imagine a cancer drug that could be delivered directly to a tumor deep in the body by capsules made of magnetic nanoparticles. It's not possible to stick a magnet in the tumor to guide the nanoparticles on their journey, but if you could create a magnetic field from outside the body that centered right on that tumor, you could deliver the drug without an invasive procedure.

The strength of a magnetic field decreases with distance from the magnet, and a theorem proven in 1842, Earnshaw's Theorem, says that it's not possible to create a spot of maximum magnetic field strength in empty space.

"If you cannot have a magnetic field maxima in empty space, it means you cannot create the field of a magnetic source remotely, without placing an actual [magnetic] source at the target location," said Rosa Mach-Batlle, a physicist at the Istituto Italiano Di Tecnologia Center for Biomolecular Nanotechnologies in Italy who led the new research. [read more]

Could also be used as a weapon of some sort.

Rapid COVID-19 Test Using Nanoparticle Technology Developed: Results In 10 Minutes!

From Study Finds.org (June 8):

BALTIMORE — Ever since the coronavirus pandemic took hold of the country, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have been trying to engineer nanoparticles that can serve as a diagnostic tool for detecting the presence of COVID-19. Not only does it appear they’ve succeed, but in the process they’ve created a test that can yield results in just ten minutes.

In recent years, bioengineers have sought ways to use nanoparticles for all sorts of medical purposes. Nanoparticles are extraordinarily tiny materials that can perform whatever function they were engineered to do. They are commonly used in medicine as a way to deliver drugs to a person or to detect specific markers in a biological sample.

Last week the researchers announced that they have developed a test that uses plasmonic gold nanoparticles and changes colors in the presence of COVID-19. The great news about this test is that it can detect the virus in as quickly as ten minutes.

“Based on our preliminary results, we believe this promising new test may detect RNA material from the virus as early as the first day of infection. Additional studies are needed, however, to confirm whether this is indeed the case,” says lead author Dipanjan Pan, PhD, a professor of diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine and pediatrics at the school, in a university release.

All a patient needs to do is provide a nasal swab or saliva sample, and the nanoparticles do the rest of the work. The gold nanoparticles check to see if there is a specific protein present in the biological sample. The protein it looks for is unique to the coronavirus, and acts as a binding site for the nanoparticles. If the nanoparticles detect the presence of this protein then they turn the color of the liquid they are placed in from purple to blue. [read more]

Nice.