Random Science News Thread

[peter]

The seventh row of the periodic table has been completed with the addition of four superheavy elements created in particle accelerators at different locations. As far as we know, the only other place we might find these elements would be inside a black hole and in our equipment they only last for milliseconds before decaying into smaller elements of greater stability and longevity. For the record, the elements have atomic numbers of 113, 115, 117 and 118 (what happens with 114 and 116 - guess they were made before or something). I love the periodic table: there is something so ......... Victorian about it, but it is still right up there with us. Surely the most beautifully ordered description of stuff to be found.

[Cord Hurn]

Cool to know, peter! Hopefully these discoveries will actually be useful for something someday.

[peter]

Agreed! Not sure what the rationale behind such experiment's is, but I'd bet it costs a shed load of cash to hire a particle accelerator, bash some atoms together at ultra high speed and then hope something new results, so there probably is something behind it.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

These sorts of experiments are designed to provide experimental proof for something which has already been "proven" on a chalkboard somewhere. "We know that if we do x and y and z that h and k should happen so we need to purchase operating time on the collider so that can beam these particles into those particles".

[peter]

Any idea Hashi, what causes there to be this upper limit of just over 100 [or is it 90] above which nuclear stability is near about impossible. Must be something to do with the strong and weak nuclear forces I'd guess.....a level above which [say] the work required to keep x number of positively charged particles in close proximity is outweighed by the cumulative repelant force tending to push them apart. I'd also hazard a guess that irrespective of where you are in the Universe [excepting the inside of a black hole], this upper limit would be the same.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Check this link to the article on radioactive decay, scroll down a little, and check the chart showing radioactive elements compared to the line n = z (number of protons = number of neutrons). Heavier elements have many more neutrons than protons so past a certain point the electromagnetic force compelling the protons to push away from each other overpowers the strong force keeping the nucleus together. (technically, there aren't "neutrons" and "protons" in the nucleus, only neutrons, pi+ muons, and pi- muons....but we don't need to get into that much detail). Decay has everything to do with the laws of physics wanting to bring the nucleus to a lower energy state. Thus, your assessment of keeping the particles inside the nucleus in correct.

Inside a black hole the atoms would have pulled apart by gravity into individual component particles and almost completely converted to energy.

[peter]

Is matter annihilated into nonexistence within a black hole or simply collapsed into a infinite singularity (has to be the latter, or the black hole would not exist doesn't it)? Thanks for the link Hashi - I'll whip over and have a read. I hadn't realised a nucleus could support more than one or two additional neutrons (resulting in the one or two isotopes we used to encounter in chemistry those many moons ago ).

[Hashi Lebwohl]

The force of gravity near a black hole becomes intense enough to break molecular bonds; at that point matter becomes "disintegrated" into its component atoms and all the heat being released in the accretion disk is sufficient to strip electrons, leaving the nuclei bare much like the plasma found inside stars. Eventually, the gravitic intensity and heat is sufficient to cause the nucleus itself to break apart, releasing even more energy. Ultimately, even those particles are subsequently broken down into subatomic particles and photons before they fall past the event horizon, at which point things get weird.

Clearly, since matter cannot be created or destroyed falling into a singularity doesn't destroy the matter, only make it change forms--radically--before being emitted back out via one of those higher dimensions we have (there are 11 of them, if you recall, and we can perceive only 4 of them). It is impossible to determine where that "door" leads since time and space don't work in the higher dimensions like we experience them here.

[peter]

Gosh, I need to bone up on all this.

(Point of note from the link: I'd always thought lambda was the symbol for 'half-life', but the article gives it as that for the decay constant. Perhaps someone should tell Valve. )

[Hashi Lebwohl]

There are only so many Greek letters so they wind up being used for all sorts of things.

[I'm Murrin]

It's just that the Half-Life logo uses the wrong symbol, probably because it looks better than a lowercase t with a subscript 1/2.

[Avatar]

Wouldn't the decay constant determine the half life of something?

--A

[I'm Murrin]

It does, yes.

[Avatar]

So at least not entirely unrelated.

--A

[peter]

Caltech (I think) are speculating there may be a ninth planet way out beyond the orbit of Pluto on the basis of observations of other objects in or passing through the solar system. They estimate the mass of this proposed addition to our family to be a good ten times that of Earth, so it would not be one of these 'is it/isn't it' objects, but a full on big sister. He cool is that!

[Cord Hurn]

Caltech (I think) are speculating there may be a ninth planet way out beyond the orbit of Pluto on the basis of observations of other objects in or passing through the solar system. They estimate the mass of this proposed addition to our family to be a good ten times that of Earth, so it would not be one of these 'is it/isn't it' objects, but a full on big sister. He cool is that!

It's really cool indeed, Peter, and I hope we hear more about this in the coming weeks. It's a pretty big discovery, if the specualtioin turns out correct!

www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/new-e ... smsnnews11

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I saw the article and I think it is laughably ironic. Pluto gets discovered back in the 1930s and--holy cow--we have a ninth planet which becomes as established scientific fact...until some wet blankets decided to ruin everyone's ride by kicking poor Pluto into the corner. Now, though, we have found a new ninth planet....only....we haven't really found it. The math says that it should be there and so these researchers are falling all over themselves saying, in essence, "we found the new ninth planet" without having actually found it. In other words, Pluto exists but is not a planet while these findings are not a planet and yet it is being hailed as one.

Get your act together, astronomers. I don't care what they say, I still consider Pluto to be a planet. Until this thing gets spotted in some photographs, I am not going to say it isn't there but "pics or it didn't happen".

[peter]

Has a significant milestone just been passed in the development of AI? Last week a program named AlpaGo triumphed over the reigning world champion 'Go' player with a resounding winning score of four games to one. No big deal, one might say - except that this triumph was predicted to be decades in the future, and more significantly, requires a totally different approach - more intuitive [or you could say human-like] - than the corresponding defeat of Kasparov by Deep Blue all those years ago. Where chess programs have all the moves programed in to them and then calculate the best strategy to follow, AlphaGo had 30,000,000 moves made by earlier human players programed in and then played against itself millions of times utilising deep-learning networks, and each time learning from it's own mistakes and recalibrating it's playing tecnique. Chillingly perhaps, in some peoples eyes at least, even the programers were suprised at it's sucess - and this implys at least a degree of 'loss of controll' - and were unable to account for what it had done. The Deep Learning programs will have massive impact on the development of the tech of the near future [think driverless cars and household robots] but it really does mark the point where we have to sit back, take a breath, and think exactly how far and how fast we are willing to let this area of advancement proceed.

[Avatar]

Yes, it's a significant milestone for AI. I posted about the first AlphaGo victories against a regional champion in the Go thread in the sports forum. (And a link here in the AI thread.)

Lee Sedol (the world champion) only won 1 out of the 5 games. I watched the last game live and although it was won by only 2.5 points, that's all you need.

Thanks to Google's machine learning algorithms, this milestone has been achieved at least 10 years faster than anybody thought possible.

I had sorta hoped they wouldn't manage to be honest. Call it vanity perhaps. But I suppose it was inevitable. And this accomplishment has, for decades been considered a critical one in the development of AI.

--A

[peter]

Sorry for replicating your post Av - I had a scan in the Loresraat and was surprised no one seemed to have posted on the development ............ but I've always been rubbish at tracking down topics - apologies Do you are any of the article's concerns about the ceeding of control to such deep learning algorithms or is it just knee-jerk doom-saying?