Science Article: 2011

As a result of divided nationalities throughout human history, the present generations experience in effect of cultural adaptation still the individualization of becoming a member of another nation even though there is only one human race. The young movement towards uniting humanity and finding our way into a peaceful paradise do not dominate the human civilizations. There is, however a reasonable way to see these past forces of separation and the future unification in the timelines of the cultural continuum.

Two of the key factors that expand the sense of historic time outside of them being realistic are the a priori awareness of history and the extent of human lifetime. We see in the reference point of our own brief lives that we think that such a small phase in history as one thousand years is great. But through simple adding up we see that in modern life expectancy it is only ten lifetimes.

I want you now to consider this. As you have already existed for a while, how rapidly did the past twenty years in your life lead to this moment of time? This is a sight we as sentient but mortal beings do not like to visit too often, but it enables us to see the time in terms generations. Then, how rapidly do our lives go to the amount of fifty years? When we now add this sense of time into mathematics, we see that fifty years is only twenty times less than a thousand years is.

In sight of cultural continuum and the forms our civilizations have taken in that a brief time period, what a difference can we seen in the development of humanity. We have been dressed differently, the behavior they manifested is more than quirky to conduct in our generations, and the Second World War created six years of rigid horrors whose traumatic inherited properties are still shaping the humanity's future.

So we can now ask ourselves, how rapidly does the course of the future descend into such dark periods in the causal continuance of humanity? How many times the chain of events in the causal continuance has led the humanity to continue the war that has been waged here for as long as there is history? This effect can be seen when the cultural continuum is combined with causal continuance. The nature of cause and effect dictates that wars do not appear out of nothingness. They are escalation points in the causal continuation of the world's events. When a certain combination of actions is accumulated in a mass, the escalation causes the emergence of a war or terrorism. All inside the same humanity, divided by cultures and countless of different agendas mortals see as their own life.

After the escalation point and the resulting war, by altering the world view and by creating diplomatic agreements in the contradicting leaders who are waging war against each other, with the cost of the lives of the members of the culture who otherwise live their daily lives, magically the course towards peace emerges. By changing knowledge that guides the course of the future, the reality of peace begins to unfold from the potential forms of the future.

Evolution by Natural Selection

The theory of Natural Selection is the belief that individuals within a species survive and thrive according to positive and beneficial traits. The more productive and advantageous qualities an individual has, the better their chances are to survive and propagate within a species. The entities without profitable traits or negative ones will eventually die out. This is the basics of Natural Selection by Survival of the Fittest.

Darwinism

Where trouble crops up is when the foundation of Natural Selection morphs into Darwinism. When Charles Darwin wrote his books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man he tried to explicitly leave out a Divine Hand and explain evolution strictly with Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest. He completely disregarded the possibility of design.

Morality

The biggest problem with the no Creator hypothesis is the question of morality. It's obvious humans possess a morality; therefore it needs to be explained. Darwin argued that morality was only a product of survival of the fittest. He postulated that it was nothing more than the positive behaviors of sociability. Being social was a good thing for humans to have, helping in the survival of the race. As time passes on, the social behaviors for protection and mating become more enhanced and intricate turning into what we now see as morality.

However, believing morality is nothing more than random selection and a merciless survival of the strong leads to some troubling conclusions. If this idea were true, you would have to be ready to rate the inferiority or superiority of races and individuals. Obviously this would lead to condoning and excusing slavery and eugenics. The weak, handi-capped and supposed inferior should be eliminated because they would bring down and hamper the forward progress of the strongest and smartest.

All Reasonable Arguments

To anyone with simple observation skills and a common intelligence it is obvious that this is not how the human race operates. The question of evolution and the origin of life is a hotly debated topic to this day. Although you might not know it by the popular culture, many people and scientists disagree on Darwin's version of Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest. Reasonable arguments should be included and debated for an honest investigation into the questions around evolution and the origin of life. Evolution by Natural Selection should not be defined by Darwinism, and Intelligent Design should be considered as part of the investigation.

Are you tired of being reticent or timid about discussing current events or history? To improve your knowledge and critical thinking at your own pace and speed visit Homestudyresources.org. This is the site I visit and personally use to learn new subjects in a wide variety of subjects. The best professors with significant input from customers, the resulting products are the #1 learning tools available anywhere. Never again fear joining the conversation, your opinion is valid so express it!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Albert_Joseph

Thursday, 14 April 2011

How to Create a Multiverse

The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one.

Erwin Schrodinger, founder of the wave equation

The current rage in cosmology is the multiverse, the supposition that our universe is just one of an endless number of other universes, all of which happen to be hidden from view. The multiverse concept, which blurs the distinction between science fiction and science fact, is the subject of books written by many leading scientists, including Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow's The Grand Design, John Gribbin's In Search of the Multiverse, and Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality. So although the multiverse is indeed other-worldly, it is starting to enter the scientific mainstream.

This would be a mistake because the multiverse not only defies common sense, it also turns quantum theory - upon which it is based - on its head.

Quantum Theory

A key experimental outcome of quantum theory is that the world we see is not made of indestructible tiny particles, or little billiard balls existing independently of consciousness. Rather, in the place of hard particles we instead find a mathematical equation. As Nobel prize-winning scientist, Robert Laughlin, writes in this book, A Different Universe, "Quantum-mechanical matter consists of waves of nothing.... The entire Newtonian idea of a position and velocity characterizing an object is incorrect and must be supplanted by something we call a wave function, an abstraction modeled on the slight pressure variations it the air that occur when sound passes." Bruce Rosenbloom and Fred Kuttner write in Quantum Enigma, that "[i]In some real sense, the wave function of an object is the object. In quantum theory no atoms exists in addition to the wave function." Werner Heisenberg, the founder of the uncertainty principle and one of the architects of quantum theory, put it this way, "[T]he smallest units of mater are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structure or -in Plato's sense -Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics."

These excerpts illustrate the problem at hand. Quantum theory is based upon a mathematical equation that works exceptionally well in explaining the motion of particles in the physical world. But no one knows why the equations work, or what lies behind the wave equation.

In formulating the uncertainty principle, Heisenberg imagined a thought experiment where one tries to locate the exact velocity and position of an elementary particle, such as an electron. It will take at least one photon of light to "see" this particle. But this photon, in the quantum world, will interfere with the electron, leading to uncertainty in knowing both the exact velocity and momentum of the electron. It turns out that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the wave equation draw the same picture of the inner world of matter. At the bottom of reality we find not particles but only wave functions and probabilities. But it is with this quantum uncertainty that scientists find a way to make the multiverse.

Two Circles

One way to illustrate how quantum uncertainty leads to the multiverse is to draw two circles next to each other on a piece of paper, separated by a vertical line. Let's call the circle on your left, the mind, and the circle on the right, the objective world. Or, even more basically, we can call the left circle the "inner" and the right circle, the "outer." The vertical line represents a barrier between mind and world, or the inner and the outer. Modern science is based upon the assumption that a real, objective world exists independently of mind, like the two separate circles. Modern science also assumes that an impenetrable barrier exists between the mind and the objective world. For a source here we can quote from a paper Albert Einstein wrote with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?, where the authors state, "Any serious consideration of a physical theory must take into account the distinction between the objective reality, which is independent of any theory, and the physical concepts with which the theory operates." The task of science, in Einstein's model, is to align a mental theory with events in the outside, objective world.

But here's the big question: is the quantum uncertainty or the wave function in the left circle, the right circle, or somewhere in between? Does the objective world consist of bundles of wave equations waiting to be collapsed into discrete particles when observed? Is quantum uncertainty a feature of the objective world or an indication of our lack of knowledge - or our mistaken impressions - about that world?

Even Hawking and Mlodinow are starting to doubt whether the two circles are really separated. In The Grand Design, they comment that in light of quantum theory, "do we really have reason to believe that an objective reality exists?" In different words, is there a free-standing material world of Einstein's dreams, sitting out there detached from the mind, or is there a connection between theory and the world?

Interestingly, however, at the same time these and other leading scientists are starting to question the assumption of an objective world, many of them are using quantum theory to build an endless number of new universes in the objective world.

Quantum Jitters

Let's have Hawking and Mlodinow explain how this all works:

It is not obvious, but it turns out that with regard to [Heisenberg's uncertainty principle], the value of a field and its rate of change play the same role as the position and velocity of a particle. That is, the more accurately one is determined, the less accurately the other can be. An important consequence of that is that there is no such thing as empty space meaning that both the value of a field and its rate of change are exactly zero.... Since the uncertainty principle does not allow for values of both the field and the rate of change to be exact, space is never empty, called the vacuum, but the state is subject to what are call quantum jitters, or vacuum fluctuations-particles and fields quivering in and out of existence.

Out of these quantum jitters, the authors say, the universe emerged. Because the uncertainty principle holds that we can never have exact knowledge of either a particle's location or energy state, we can never "know" an energy state is zero, nothing. Therefore, instead of nothing, there is a chance there is something there. Somehow, through a device the advocates of this viewpoint do not elaborate upon, this something turned into a universe.

What's going on here may not be readily apparent, but Hawking and Mlodinow are shifting back and forth between the circles, or between theory and the objective world. Heisenberg derived his uncertainty principle from a thought experiment. He imagined what would occur if one tried to see one electron with one photon. From this thought experiment, physicists conclude that even if electrons did really exist we would never be able to locate one with certainty. When scientists run the experiments they find that what they imagined were particles do not act like particles but follow the probabilistic rules of the wave function.

But the uncertainty is a mental state, in the left circle. For Hawking and others to suggest that this mental (or left circle) uncertainty causes there to be a "quantum fluctuation" in the right circle contradicts science's objective world model. To begin with, it breaches the very barrier that modern science has erected between the mind and the objective world. Modern science is based upon the notion that the physical world -for example, a tree - sits there by itself like a model posing for a painting. Thoughts and theories are not supposed to physically affect the physical world, which is why science ridicules paranormal events such as psychokinesis. If thoughts cannot affect the physical world and if "reality" is independent of theory, then how can Heisenberg's uncertainty principle create an objective world?

From Quantum Fluctuations to the Multiverse

Making matters much worse, however, modern scientists are now using these quantum fluctuations to create an infinity of new universes. This is the main theme of Hawking's and Mlodinow's The Grand Design. The authors apply Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to the creation of the universe and conclude that there was not one quantum fluctuation in the beginning of it all, but an endless number in a sea of quantum bubbles. They write, "Quantum fluctuations lead to the creation of tiny universes out of nothing. A few of these reach a critical size, then expand in an inflationary manner, forming galaxies, stars, and in at least one case, beings like us."

Hawking and Mlodinow have thus taken a theoretical uncertainty in the mind of a physicist and then used this uncertainty to conclude that because empty space cannot really be empty as a matter of theory (left circle) there must in fact be an infinity of real universes out there in the objective world (the right circle).

In today's science magazines this is called scientific reasoning, but it may also be described as the height of hubris. Instead of using the uncertainty principle as a limit on what we can know about the nature of the objective world these scientists use the principle to create a near-infinity of new, objective worlds. They assume that the objective world, the right circle, is obeying the laws of quantum theory before an observer stepped into the picture to formulate the theory

If scientists are bold enough to demand that trillions of universes arise from a scientific theory, then they'd might as well just say that the Mind itself created the world. Then they'd be on to something.

There is only one circle.

Philip Mereton is a practicing lawyer with a philosophy degree whose mission is to expose the fallacies in our current materialistic worldview and to advance a more rational -- and promising -- outlook. His first book, The Heaven at the End of Science - An Argument for a New Worldview of Hope, began as a college essay in 1974. The theme is the same: idealism (the world is really a dream) better explains the world than materialism (the world is a decaying machine). His website and blog appear at http://www.heavenattheendofscience.com/

Mr. Mereton asks all viewers who have doubts over the truth of the Big Bang, the origin of life from a primordial swamp, humankind's descent from bacteria, or the death of God (among many other doubtful findings of modern science), to join the revolution against scientific materialism. The revolution begins with a question: is materialism correct? Is there a better way to explain the world we live in? After all, if the world is really a dream, it'd be to our advantage to learn and understand that fact now so that we can learn how to master the dream, and thus our own lives, rather than manipulate particles in materialism's grand machine. So what can you do? Visit the website; read books that question materialism; raise your hand in class and question science teachers; be kind. Under the tenets of science, the truth will remain standing after all the questioning and experimentation ends. But we must start first start the debate. Join in.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Philip_Mereton

Geothermal Energy: What's So Great About It?

Geothermal energy is the heat, which is generated from the outer layer of the earth. The products, steam and the hot water are both valuable resources, which can be practically used for generating electricity. These resources are renewable and the heat and the energy is constantly produced, therefore can be utilized for various purposes. There are many benefits of using geothermal energy and one of them is to use this energy for heating large structures.

Interestingly, the thermal power plants do not require fuel. The hot water produced is readily available from the earth reservoir, which gives a constant supply. Environmentally, this is a very effective source of power, as it does not involve any kind of pollution. The power generating plants are high technology techniques, whereas the geothermal technology is much simpler and needs minimum area. The electricity can be produced without contaminating the environment.

The hot water reservoirs can be used by drilling the wells into them, and the supply of this source is uninterrupted and useful for generating the electricity. This type of power is very useful for the remote areas, where the power can be supplied constantly using this technology. The steam produced is used to power the generators and the turbines. One of the major advantages is the cost, which is quite low as compared to running other plants, as the equipment required can be fabricated in house.

The power is generated by using the concept of heating cold water using the internal heat of the earth.This results in producing steam, because of the presence of high temperatures inside the earth. This steam rises back to the surface and can be utilized for performing various activities.

There are several benefits, which include the economic and environmental prospects. The clean power is one of them, as it does not require any fossil fuels to run. Economically, the running of these plants is not very expensive and the governments offer tax benefits to encourage its use. Many opportunities in the development area are created.

The various types of sources available include solar, wind, hydroelectric etc. But the clean source is the geothermal which can be utilized for various activities related to agriculture such as growing flowers. This source is even used for raising fishes.

For long time, the burning fossil fuels like coal have been used to generate power, but the concept is changing towards renewable source. The advantage of geothermal energy include its constant availability, which can be utilized in various forms.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Discrete-Event Simulation: An Overview

The operation of a system in discrete event simulation is based on sequence of events that are in order. An event occurring at a given time marks a change of state in the system. An instance like this can be depicted by an elevator scenario. If an elevator is modeled the prime event maybe pressing level 6 button which results in a change of the state i.e. the press triggers the lift to start moving, unless you want to play with people's mind and let the pseudo code trigger the lift to open its door.

A simpler event simulator is an interaction between the customer of a bank and the teller. In such an example we have random variables that need to be inputted in the system i.e. customer-interarrival time and the teller service time (when idle and when being accessed). The events here are the customer queue and the tellers themselves. The change of state is the number of customers in the queue (from 0 to infinity) and the teller status - either working or idle.

A discrete event simulation has different components which include the clock; it keeps track of the current model time, under instantaneous events the clock will hop to the next event as the simulation progresses. A list of events; their will basically be a queue of events that will require their time to be simulated. These events will be categorized as pending events organized as priority queue regardless of their order. But what will happen when the events listed are scheduled dynamically as the simulation proceeds? This can be better explained by our bank example, let's say the customer queue was empty and the teller was idle, then another event consisting of customer- departure will have to be created to occur at a time t+s, s being a number spawned from the service-time distribution.

Another important component is a random-number generator which is basically accomplished by pseudorandom number generator. This generator is a necessity particularly if the systems need a rerun to produce other random numbers.

A typical example of a discreet event simulation system is the OMNET++ which is a C++ based discrete event simulation package which was developed with the aim of simulating computer distributed systems. OMNET++ is an open source package that was engineered to fit in research and education modeling, this is because it was made under a powerful platform that includes a perfect user interface which enables the user to visualize every modeling he undertakes, it also offers easy traceability and debuggability of the models.

Since its inception in September 1997, it has seen a greater appreciation by many institution that are in need of discrete event simulation system such as optical network simulation, hardware simulation, queuing system and also the ATM. A typical adopted application was the developments of a complete TCP/IP model by the University of Karlsruhe. This was particular enumerated to manage remote simulations on flock workstations and research on parallel execution by use of the Statistical Synchronization Method approach.

Problem Solutions in Fluid Mechanics III

This is the last of three articles devoted to fluids. This article covers two applications of Bernoulli's equation. The first application combines this principle with the condition that describes how pressure varies with height in a static column of fluid. The second solves a physics problem by combining Bernoulli's equation with the equation of continuity.

I do have to use some unusual notation: (1) Most variables are represented by capital letters with lower case letters used as subscripts. For example "initial (i) time (T) would be written Ti. (2) Powers are designated by ^. For example, initial time squared would be written Ti^2, and "ten to the fifth" would be written 10^5.

Problem. A boy blows across the left side of a tube shaped like a U. The tube is about 50% to 75% filled with water (Pw = 1000 kg/m^3). If the left column of the water is 1.5 cm above the right one, what is the speed of the air leaving the boy's lips? Assume the density of the air is Pa = 1.20 kg/m^3.

Analysis. First, we'll apply Bernoulli's equation to determine the pressure difference between the left (o) and right (r) tops of the tube. Since the tops of the tubes are open, this is the same as the pressure difference between the tops of the left and right water columns. Let's assume the speed of the air blowing across the top of the left column is Vo. The air at the top of the right column is stagnant so Vr = 0. The tops of the two sides of the tube are at the same height, so Yo = Yr. We now have with Bernoulli's equation

..............................................Bernoulli's Equation

......................Po + Pa(Vo^2)/2 + PaGYo = Pr + Pa(Vr^2)/2 + PaGYr.

Since Yo = Yr and Vr = 0, this equation reduces to

..........................................Pr - Po = Pa(Vo^2)/2.

The tube is open at both ends, so the pressure at the tops of both sides is the same as the pressure at the tops of both water columns. For the pressure variation of the static water column, we have

.....................................Pressure Variation with Height

.................................................Pr = Po + PwGH

so..............................................Pr - Po = PwGH.

Comparing the two expressions for the pressure difference, we have

........................................PwGH = Pa(Vo^2)/2,

and..............................Vo = SQRT(2PwGH/Pa).

With the known values for Pw and Pa along with H = 0.015 m, we find with this last equation that

...............................................Vo = 15.7 m/s.

Problem. This is a standard problem in basic physics. A small opening (o) develops in a water tower at a point a distance H below the surface (s) of the water. The cross-sectional areas of the opening and of the water column are Ao and As, respectively. What is the speed Vo of the stream of water that leaves the opening?

Analysis. We have with the equation of continuity

.....................................................Equation of Continuity

..............................................................AsVs = AoVo

so...........................................................Vs = AoVo/As.

Since Ao << As, Vs is very small; consequently, we'll assume that Vs = 0. Because the top of the water in the tank and the hole in the side are open to the atmosphere, Ps = Po = Patm. Using Pw for the mass density of water, we now have with Bernoulli's equation

..................................................Bernoulli's Equation

....................Ps + Pw(Vs^2)/2 + PwGYs = Po + Pw(Vo^2)/2 + PwGYo

..............................Patm + 0 + PwGYs = Patm + Pw(Vo^2)/2 + PwGYo

so...............................Vo = Sqrt(2G(Ys - Yo)) = SQRT(2GH),

because........................................H = Ys - Yo.

This is the same speed that a stone would acquire when falling a distance H.

I have just presented two more examples of what, I believe, all teachers should do when presenting physics problem solutions to their students. When you start every important part of a problem solution with a statement of the appropriate fundamental principle, the students are much more likely to understand that solution. This method also teaches students an approach they can use advantageously throughout all of their academic and professional careers.

Dr William Moebs is a retired physics professor, who taught at two Universities: Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne and Loyola Marymount University. You can see hundreds of examples illustrating how he emphasizes fundamental principles by consulting PHYSICS HELP.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=William_Moebs

Tuesday, 12 April 2011

UFOs: The Observational Reality Supporting Extraterrestrial Visitations

First I'd better define exactly what I mean by a UFO. To me, a bona-fide UFO is any UFO that remains a UFO after comprehensive investigation and analysis by qualified experts have failed to identify the object as any known natural or man-made phenomena. The tag 'unidentified' means that the conclusion was that it couldn't have even been a possible or probable natural or man-made phenomena, but what exactly it was remains totally 'unidentified' and probably forever unidentifiable. Observational evidence is suggestive that these bona fide UFOs could be extraterrestrial visitations - the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH).

But wait, I hear screams of protest!

One could ague and come to a conclusion that while it is probable aliens would stumble over our humble abode in the cosmos, it's very improbable that it would happen within our lifetime; with the last couple of generations. It's vastly more probable a visitation would have happened in ancient times, prehistoric times, maybe millions if not billions of years ago. While there's something to be said for that, there is the counter argument that having visited once, the 'tourist attraction' we call Earth would become ongoing.

There's more than one sci-fi story published that plots alien scientists charting our newly formed solar system, surveyed Earth of course, about four billions of years ago, left some rubbish behind, and thus spawned the origin of terrestrial life!

Fast forward several billions of years and our alien scientists or explorers (biologists this time) picked up a trilobite or two for their interstellar zoo or museum collection. And I'd bet even aliens might have been fascinated with the dinosaurs! Perhaps in our hypothetical interstellar zoo, terrestrial dinosaurs continue to strut their stuff, having suffered a pre-historical UFO abduction!

Alas, the odds any physical evidence of such vastly ancient prehistoric visitations or surveys or expeditions would be so rare, eroded away or deeply buried, that such musings will probably forever remain just wild speculations. All witnesses are extinct now!

But moving from millions of prehistoric years ago to more recent prehistoric eras, up through and including ancient history, say within the last 100,000 years, then we might start getting some more concrete pictorial evidence (cave art) or other archaeological, anthropological or mythological evidence - which of course brings us to the topic of 'ancient astronauts'. All I'll say on that is that most of the popular literature on the subject is bovine fertilizer or pure balderdash. But I'm not going to be so rash as to go on record as saying all of it is.

There's a song by country-pop singer Shania Twain that goes something like "That don't impress me much". Specifically, when watching 'ancient astronaut' documentaries, or even reading the popular literature, I've never been impressed by the monuments argument that aliens either built them or helped humans to build them - monuments like Stonehenge or the pyramids (Egyptian or Mesoamerican) or the statutes on Easter Island. That's selling human abilities short. I'm also not impressed with so called ancient technologies - thousands of year old batteries for example that look about as alien as a Model T Ford.

What does impress me are various highly anomalous and alien in appearance historical art works - pictures, cave art, paintings, sculptures, etchings, some of massive size like the Nazca line drawings in Peru so obviously designed to be viewed from a high altitude. Also of interest is mythology and comparative mythology that might be suggestive of 'ancient astronauts'. These are legitimate and worthy areas for scholarly study, given the importance of the subject.

So, why the sudden surge in UFO activity in recent generations - 1947 to date? Well, maybe there hasn't been - a surge that is.

Contrast that with the period 1847 - 1910; or 1747 - 1810. Look at relevant factors like population levels and distribution; the sorts of terrestrial technology that could be misconstrued as alien spacecraft; the technology that can detect UFOs; communication factors; and social factors.

Relative to those eras, the modern UFO era has a far greater population base; the more people, the more sightings. The modern UFO era, unlike previous eras, has airships and aircraft and artificial satellites and flares and searchlights and all that jazz which can generate sightings. The modern UFO era has cameras (still and motion picture) and radar and other technologies that are subject to electromagnetic effects that help to document UFO activity today that couldn't have been documented 10 or 200 years ago. The modern UFO era, relative to 100 or 200 years prior, has way more communications - books, magazines, radio, TV, other mass media like newspapers, the Internet, films, and so on. If some UFOs are alien craft, the great unwashed is far more cognisant of it than our counterparts living 100 or 200 years ago. Lastly, 100 years ago, even more so 200 years ago, there wasn't the sort of outdoor nightlife activity we have today. After dark, you went to sleep; up at the crack of dawn. Yet UFOs are more readily detectable at night. It's easier to spot a bright light against a dark sky - but only if your outside.

For all those reasons, it might be the case that UFO activity hasn't really changed over historical periods. Then again, maybe it has.

Now if it ultimately turns out that 100% of UFOs have zilch to do with extraterrestrial intelligence; that there never has been ancient astronauts; that no alien picnickers left behind their garbage billions of years ago; that we never were on the receiving end of a cosmic Johnny Appleseed - if Planet Earth is not in any cosmic database, then maybe we are the proverbial be-all-and-end-all. We are the first intelligence to arise in the Universe - the first, maybe the only. However, that assumption runs counter to the Copernican Principle or the Principle of Mediocrity that in the overall cosmic scheme of things, we are just the average run-of-the-mill. So, let's not start off violating these cherished cosmological principles, rather go back to the assumption that some UFOs actually reinforce those principles.

Of course it is not sufficient enough for visiting aliens and their interstellar craft (UFOs if you will) to theoretically exist - there's got to be some kind of actual evidence - and it exists in spades.

There exists a phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"'. I've seen that in numerous books, and I understand it originates from the late and great Carl Sagan. Were Dr. Sagan alive today I'd take the comments to him, but seeing as how he's no longer available.

Claims require evidence. That's not in dispute. However, the word 'extraordinary' is in the mind of the beholder. What might be an extraordinary claim to you might not be an extraordinary claim to me, and vice versa. Murder is a more extraordinary crime than jaywalking, yet the same evidence (say a security camera film) will convict in both cases. You don't need twice the amount of evidence in a murder trial vis-?-vis being convicted of jaywalking. So, claims, of any kind, require enough evidence to convince anyone with an open mind - no more; no less.

If I, one of the great unwashed, were to make a claim that the double slit experiment provides evidence for the existence of parallel universes, or that a positron was actually nothing more than an electron going backwards in time, that would be extraordinary. If a professional scientist, a physicist, were to make the same claims, it's not extraordinary presumably because physicists know what they are talking about. Yet it's the same set of claims. They can't be both extraordinary and ordinary at the same time!

Many of the greatest and now accepted parts of science started out as an extraordinary claim - like quantum mechanics or relativity theory or the fact that the Earth goes around the Sun. But did these claims really need extraordinary (like double the experimental) evidence vis-?-vis other claims that are now equally parts of the accepted science we find in the textbooks? For open-minded people, especially scientists, such claims probably did not require extraordinary evidence.

Few scientists now dispute the (initially extraordinary) claim of the reality of ball lightning, yet not only is it far rarer than UFO sightings, it has less of a theoretical underpinning than the proposal that some UFOs have an extraterrestrial intelligence behind them. Ball lightning hasn't been put under a laboratory microscope any more than UFOs have. There are lots of parallels between ball lightning and UFOs for the sociologists of science to ponder. Yet one has credibility, one doesn't. Why? It makes relatively little sense.

It is said, and there is truth in this, that science and scientists do not have the time and resources to investigate every claim ever made about the natural world. There must be some ways and means of distinguishing reasonable from unreasonable (i.e. - extraordinary) claims. While I don't have an easy answer to that - though I'll give one immediately below - I'll just initially observe that there's been a lot of seemingly reasonable claims that are now only footnotes in the history of science, and a fair few unreasonable claims that are now part of the bedrock on which our sciences, technology and civilization rests.

However, instead of ordinary vs. extraordinary distinctions, I'd suggest important vs. relatively unimportant claims. Lots of claims, whether proven or unproven, aren't going to set the world on fire. Others have the potential to make for paradigm shifts in our understanding of the world and the cosmos. The equation UFOs = evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence is such an example. The claim needs to be investigated, yet not requiring massive more investigations than any other sort of scientific puzzle would require.

So, we desire evidence for the extraterrestrial nature of UFOs, not extraordinary evidence.

Skeptics would argue that the burden of proof that extraterrestrials are behind (at least some of) the UFO phenomena lies with the believers - those who claim such is the case. And that's true. But there's another side to that coin. Skeptics need to look at what evidence is presented and not have a mind-in-a-closet attitude.

What's the general evidence for UFOs? Well, you have multi-tens of thousands of sightings, probably six figures worth by now, many multi-witness sightings, more than a few independent multi-witness sightings; sightings by people used to outdoors aerial phenomena (like pilots), films and photographs that have defied the best experts to explain them in conventional terms, radar returns, physical traces, physiological effects on biological tissues, including humans, often more than one of these categories applies. You have a global phenomena, where countries from Australia, the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, France, Russia, Mexico, etc. have devoted considerable resources to finding answers to what some see as a 'silly season' with a high 'giggle' factor. That makes little logical sense - the 'giggle' factor, not the official investigations. There are neither psychological, sociological or cultural reasons to explain the origin of UFOs in general, nor specific UFO reports. It's all evidence, and grist for the mill. The crux of the matter is not lack of evidence; it is how that evidence is interpreted. So take the bona-fide UFO residue. Now what is this residue and what happens if you apply Occam's Razor to it? Well, maybe bona-fide UFOs are just ghosts, or angels, or the work of the devil, or some nation's secret weapons, or craft from an advanced civilization that inhabits our hollow Earth! Or, maybe the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) is the most plausible. I think Occam's Razor would err on the side of the ETH.

There must be something suggestive within the evidence to point in the ETH direction, and nearly from the very beginning of the modern UFO phenomena (June 1947). The idea or association didn't just pop out of the ether for no reason

The trouble with UFOs is that they won't stand still! You can't put them under a microscope, poke and prod them, or study and measure them at your leisure like you can most phenomena. You can't predict in advance where and when and for how long they will appear.

Anyone who poo-poos the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs, "it can't be therefore it isn't", clearly hasn't actually studied the subject, read the literature, studied official government investigations and reports, done personal field investigations and interviewed witnesses. Out of all the hundreds of thousands of sightings, worldwide, over all these decades, all it takes is one (smoking gun) case to validate the extraterrestrial hypothesis. Is there anyone out there who can say for 100% certainty that at least one case isn't the real deal?

Now I don't want anyone to tell me that the University of Colorado UFO investigation on behalf of the USAF, the Condon Report, closed the book on the subject - not unless you have real the entire report and not just the introductory / summary first chapter. There is no similarity between the questions the actual report raises and the conclusions reached and given in that first chapter. Few people have taken the time to separate the wheat from the chaff in the Condon Report. The first chapter is the chaff; the bulk of the report contains the wheat. So, read the entire report - do so, and then talk to me!

Every major country has had, or does have, either an official UFO investigations programme, or at least investigates reports of UFOs - six decades after the 'fad' began! Australia, Canada, France, England, Belgium, the USA, etc., etc. all have or have had UFO investigation programs. So, conclusion number one is that senior officials took, and many still take, the phenomena quite seriously. FOI requests have shown serious interest in the UFO area by not only the USAF, but by the FBI and CIA as well, continuing even after the USAF supposedly got out of the UFO investigations area, as a result of the above cited Condon (University of Colorado) study. It's not just the great unwashed, low IQ, blue-collar population who are interested.

In contrast, have you ever heard of, or are you aware of, government bodies investigating Bigfoot sightings, or ghosts, or spoon bending, or the Bermuda Triangle (in general - specific incidents are of course investigated by relevant safety maritime and/or aviation and/or military authorities), or the Ouija board or astrology? You probably have not, because these concepts aren't taken seriously, and the public would be outraged if their tax dollars were so used.

As an aside, I find it interesting that the American Congress has often voted against publicly funding SETI (legit science if there ever was). To this day SETI is mainly funded by private individuals and institutions. However, the American Congress has never voted down, cut, or denied funds to the USAF to investigate UFOs. That's interesting. I'm not aware of any American congressman or senator ever arguing or voting against official government funding spent investigating UFOs - how very, very interesting. Are you aware of any? What's also interesting is that Freedom of Information (FOI) requests have revealed that both the FBI and the CIA have had an intense interest in the subject, despite pre-FOI denials of any interest. So, that's a lot of top level interest in a silly-season subject with a high 'giggle' factor. Read into it what you will.

Each and every UFO investigation has yielded up a reasonable percentage of cases that despite the best scientific and/or military scrutiny remain unknown as to what the ultimate cause was. That is not in dispute.

Unknown cases include not only independent multiple witness testimony, but physical evidence - photographs, motion pictures, radar returns, electromagnetic effects, physiological and psychological effects and physical ground traces. That is not is dispute. You'll find documentation in the official government investigations and reports.

There are professional scientists, senior military officials*, senior government officials, and a host of other people in responsible positions who have witnessed UFOs (airline and military pilots; astronauts, police officers, etc.) who have either spoken out as pro-UFO or a minimum state that this is a legitimate phenomenon. That is not in dispute - it is on the public record.

What we need is a/the smoking gun. Not quite THE smoking gun, but one of many, may highly unexplained UFO cases, is the events surrounding Frederick Valentich on 21 October 1978. It's more a case of where there's smoke, there's smoke, but smoke there certainly is, and lots of it.

In a nutshell, on the evening of that date, Mr. Valentich piloted a private plane from Melbourne, intended destination, King Island in Bass Strait. He took off only to shortly thereafter radio in that there was this UFO hovering over him. The UFO was spotted by several independent witnesses. While radioing his observations, all contact ceased; all communications abruptly ended. Mr. Valentich, plane and all, vanished without trace. An extensive air and sea search failed to find any sign of Mr. Valentich, or his plane. No oil slick, no floating wreckage, no body - nothing, zip, bugger-all. No trace has ever been found of pilot or plane - not then, not since, not ever. The weather had been perfect for night flying.

One obvious explanation was that Mr. Valentich staged his own disappearance, although friends and family could offer no reason why he would do so. Of course many people voluntarily disappear themselves for various reasons; many eventually are found, are caught or reappear voluntarily. But keep in mind; it wasn't just Mr. Valentich who disappeared. One entire aircraft vanished as well, never to be seen again. Surely if Mr. Valentich wanted to 'drop out', there were easier and less conspicuous ways of doing so. If he had deliberately gone walkabout, in these decades since of security cameras and computer facial software recognition technology, it would be hard to remain an unknown walkabout in any populated area.

Was suicide a motive? Again, no wreckage or body was ever found, and who would go to all the bother of reporting a non-existent UFO overhead - a non-existent UFO that happened to be independently reported by others.

And what of the plane since no wreckage was ever found floating on the surface of Bass Strait; washed up on beaches, or found on the ocean bottom - Bass Strait isn't that deep.
It's a mystery, and while it doesn't prove aliens nicked off with Mr. Valentich and plane, there's not that much wriggle room. Now multiply this sort of unexplained case by the thousands worldwide, and you do have the ETH as a plausible hypothesis.

Interestingly, despite my asking for a copy of the Valentich 'accident' case report in an official capacity related to my employment at the time, the Department of Transport (Air Safety Investigations Branch) refused. To this day, to the best of my knowledge, that report has never been publicly released.

Those who have investigated UFOs with maximum time, energy and resources are of course those from government agencies, representing the government. Therein lays a problem. No government is ever going to admit - assuming an extraterrestrial intelligence behind UFOs - that is doesn't have full control over its airspace. No government is ever going to admit it is near powerless against possible invaders, including a hypothetical extraterrestrial one. Any government that has insights into the artificial (extraterrestrial) nature of UFOs technology is certainly not going to share that information with other governments, however allied, far less their great unwashed Joe Doe public.

Now skeptics will argue that some countries with official UFO investigations programs have shut them down (or at last that's the official line). There are two possible reasons for that, assuming everything is on the up and up. The obvious one, to sceptics, is that there's nothing to the subject - time, money, manpower, resources have been wasted and it's time to bail out and cut the losses. The quite less obvious one is that we now know what we needed to know and therefore there's no point in carrying on. That means either a secret admission that we're helpless no matter what, so no point, or there's been a conclusion that UFOs pose no threat, so again no particular point in carrying out more studies. In fact, if you example the reasons governments (American and British immediately come to mind) have given for getting out of the UFO business is that phrase - 'no threat' - UFOs, whatever they are, or aren't, pose 'no threat' Note that there's never a definitive statement that absolutely no UFO has represent extraterrestrial intelligence technology, that aliens aren't here, it's always that UFOs pose 'no threat' and therefore we've got better things to do - like dealing with things that are threatening! That 'no threat' phrase might represent a possibility that the powers-that-be know more than they're telling - 'no threat' means different things to those in the know vis-?-vis the great unwashed who might not be quite as convinced if they knew what the powers-that-be knew. That's a good reason for not confiding in the great unwashed!

UFOs pose 'no threat'. That's the real justification for bailing out. And while such statements usually have an additional proviso that no evidence of extraterrestrial activity has been uncovered, the government can not claim there's no aliens about - absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Specifically, it's difficult to draw the conclusion that no UFO sightings can be attributed to extraterrestrial activity with all investigations leave behind a statistically significant residue of unknowns; unsolved UFO sightings. I'm not talking here about cases 'solved' within categories of possible this, or probable that, or even insufficient data, but totally unknown, as in we haven't a bloody clue in (or out) of this world as to what the sighting actually was even though we had apparently sufficient data to suss it all out. It's a case of your guess is as good as mine. Now if the sum total of all unknowns were countable on the fingers of one hand that result might be dismissible. However, the unknowns usually account for about 7% or thereabouts of officially investigated cases; cases investigated by government officials, usually the military, aided with civilian scientific expertise as required. In the case of the Condon Committee University of Colorado UFO study, if memory serves, reading the entire text reveals an unknowns rate of about 30%, but then they did select the best of the best of the previous unsolved cases to try their luck against.

The unknown cases residue provides an interesting challenge to science and scientists - those with an open mind anyway. There's a scientific wealth of gold in them thar hills to be research and mined. There's nothing less than the possible proof of the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life at stake.

This wouldn't be complete without reference to Roswell. I don't wish to say too much about the Roswell, N.M. case (July 1947), other than to point out that the then US Army Air Force admitted publicly, in the media, in newspapers, on radio, that they had captured one of those mysterious (and only recently sighted - the modern UFO era was just weeks old) flying discs. No amount of back-pedalling can alter that now historical fact. It's on the record. Look it up yourself!

I'm in a bit of a quandary about which UFO era is the best for mining. Ordinarily I'd say the earlier the better in that contamination is limited or reduced. Thus, the first (or close to the first) visual sighting or the first (or near first) physical trace case or the first (or second or third) this or that. Alas, that means going back to say the first five to ten years of the modern era - 1947-1957. Witnesses and associated evidence has been diminished over the interval between then and now, even if original documentation still exists. Latter eras are better, but recent cases have a greater chance of having been influenced by what has come before. All else being equal, I'd mine those first ten years, but that's me.

Do I have the smoking gun? No, otherwise I'd be booking my flight to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize! Does the smoking gun exist in the raw unknowns' data? I don't know, but it doesn't hurt for it to be combed through again.

So, why aren't scientists jumping at the chance to prove the ETH? Why no serious academic study of the phenomena. I mean there's probably a Nobel Prize at stake, just waiting for that scientist, or team of scientists, to boldly go and prove the ETH. Well, it's basically because the entire subject of alien visitations, whether UFOs or ancient astronauts, have been hijacked by extreme elements - the lunatic fringe. Thus, the field has achieved a high 'giggle' or 'silly season' reputation. Newly minted academics, looking to establish themselves as bona-fide serious scientists, ingrain themselves with their peers (who largely control promotions, funding, etc.). That means, they tackle serious topics - not 'giggle' factor and 'silly season' topics, unless they want their careers nipped in the proverbial bud. And so, in public at least, you tend to get attitudes along the lines of 'everybody knows that it's nonsense', 'it can't be, therefore it isn't' or 'don't confuse me with facts, my superior's mind is made up therefore my mind is made up'. And so it's a vicious circle. Only serious scientific study will remove the 'silly season', 'giggle' factor; but the 'silly season', 'giggle factor' prevents serious scientific study.

Anyway, there are two sides to this situation! All the government secrecy - and secrecy has well and truly been documented - could come unstuck, could be immediately negated, if an extraterrestrial UFO lands in Central Park (or equivalent). So, why doesn't said extraterrestrials so land with a 'take me to your leader'?

Firstly, there is obvious danger in interpreting / comprehending / understanding an alien mind-set or psychology or behaviour. I mean intelligent human mind-sets / psychology / behaviour is hardly a rigorous science. If what makes us tick is problematical, what hope do we have understanding, even up to an equal degree, intelligent aliens?

All of which brings me to possible motives for an alien race(s) to come calling and stick around. There's thousands of sci-fi stories, films, TV shows, even academic texts dealing with this. Perhaps one or more of the following makes sense.

Firstly, we have tourism. That's quite comprehensible to us.

Secondly, and most likely IMHO, we have a scientific (experimentation, observation, curiosity, specimen gathering, etc.) rational.

Thirdly, and probably most common in the sci-fi literature, Earth is 'target earth' for proposes of colonization, war, invasion. They want our resources, even if not our women!

There's the possible motive central to diplomatic and foreign relations. They want us to come join their interstellar federation.

Fifthly, maybe it's something we haven't yet thought of - or can't think of, alien psychology being totally outside our realm of comprehension.

So, in conclusion, where is everybody? IMHO, 'They're heeeere.'

And, I think we're property!

*For example, USAF Major-General John A. Samford, at a Pentagon press conference in late July 1952 made the statement with respect to the then recent Washington D.C. UFO flap that these sightings were by "credible observers of relatively incredible things". It's on the public record.

There Is Power in Wind

By Kevin Fry

Kevin Fry
Level: Platinum

Kevin J. Fry has been on the Internet and doing programming since 1995. He stared out in a small home town computer store, repairing, upgrading, ...

Everyday in our lives we use a precious resource. The moment we turn the T.V. on, our laptop or computer, we switch on light, we are consuming energy. Admit it; in every move we make, energy is always consumed. We are exposed in all forms of energy sources, renewable or non-renewable in nature. Natural gas, coal, solar and water are the usual power producing resources that we know. However, in the light of increasing cost of producing and delivering energy to all consumers, be it residential, commercial or industrial, one must try to consider finding an alternative source. That is where wind power comes in.

People may find it hard to believe how an invisible source can produce the power that we need. We don't see it but we can feel it blowing and caressing all things that it touches. And since it doesn't have a form or shape, we cannot touch and see it. Capturing wind seems impossible if we view it in that angle. In the early days, people were already using this ready energy source in propelling their ships and sailboats. The wind pushes the sails on the direction of the wind causing the ship or boat to move. In other instances, they use the force of blowing wind in pumping water from wells to their farms. A machine is installed to scoop water from the well and as the wind pushes the machine it spins to release the water to the irrigation system of the farm. Going more technical, we begin to understand how one simple wind turbine can bring great change. Here is how it works. The atmosphere is composed of millions and millions of air particles. They move freely in the atmosphere going to and from any direction depending on the pressure of the wind. When the sun heats up these air particles, they move up since hot air is lighter than cold air. And since it goes up, cold air moves in to fill the space left by the hot air. The movement of the cold air coming in is the wind. Wind movement pushes things on its path transferring its energy to any surface it touches. Wind movement can be captured using a wind turbine. The power of the wind moves the blade causing it to rotate and transfer its energy. That is how wind power is encapsulated. The rest is a series of activities in the generator turning the wind energy into consumable power for our use.

Exploring this possibility does not totally take us out of the commercial energy consumption list. It simply gives us the alternative to use a cheaper, cleaner, no emission of harmful greenhouse gas and efficient energy. This is to support our energy usage and help save our non-renewable resources from being totally depleted. There is indeed power in the wind. With the promotion energy-saving devices and campaigns, it is best to also do our part. The resource available is bigger than what is currently developed. Wind power has a steady and free supply. All we have to do is find the right technology to tap the energy it produces.

This article has been viewed 43 time(s).
Article Submitted On: March 02, 2011

Monday, 11 April 2011

Facts About Charles Darwin

By Albert Joseph

Albert Joseph
Level: Platinum

Profesional freelance writer currently living in Wyoming enjoying the fishing and the mountains. Lived overseas for ten years but now in Wyoming for fifteen years ...

Charles Darwin is a fascinating figure in history, few people have had as an enormous effect on mankind. The following are a few facts about this interesting man and his life.

Charles Darwin was born Feb.12, 1809, the same day as Abraham Lincoln. He died April 19, 1882, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.He married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood (of the Wedgwood china family).Charles and Emma had ten children. Three of his children died from illness. Two died while they were babies and one when she was ten years old. This last death of his ten-year old daughter Anne, was extremely hard on Darwin.His Theory of Evolution was not an original idea. Called "Transmutation" by others, it had been discussed and published by his Grandfather Erasmus and a French scientist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, as well as others.Went to medical school, but it didn't agree with him and he left early. He next started Theology school but left for his famous voyage on the H.M.S Beagle before completing his studies. Traveling around South America and Australia he gathered numerous samples of life which he kept and cataloged. Much of his findings were sent back to England and he was a famous man by the time he returned.His famous voyage on the H.M.S Beagle was just shy of five years and he was constantly sea-sick.While known by the public mainly for his book on Natural Selection; On the Origin of Species, he actually wrote another book on the same topic called The Descent of Man. Both books discussed his theories on Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest. The first concentrated on animals and the second on humans.Darwin's theories on evolution came to be known as Darwinism and used Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest as the sole reason for evolution, explicitly denying a Creator.

Darwin himself was a loving husband and father who doted on his children. He was also a strong abolitionist. Unfortunately, if you take his views on evolution to their logical conclusion they give support and credence to racism and eugenics.

Regrettably, many evil people (Hitler, Marx and Margaret Sanger) did take his theories seriously, and used them with inhuman and deadly results. To this day the origin of life and evolution is a hotly debated topic and Darwin is usually in the midst of it.

This article has been viewed 42 time(s).
Article Submitted On: February 21, 2011

Oz, Onza and Converting Ounces to Grams

The Need to Change

Conversion or translation of a value to one concept to the other is very crucial. Like in temperature, a unit of Celsius is not equivalent to a unit of Fahrenheit. If they are the same, then logically speaking, using a lot of terms to the same concept or equivalent may add more confusion than understanding. In a laboratory, if the formulae say these are the right measurements, the statement simply and strictly means the right measurements. Following the right measurements of mixing or combining compounds and elements is tantamount to maintaining safety. Compromising the right measurement may result to unwanted accidents and mishaps as well. In a hospital, the recuperation process of patients involves giving them the ideal or the right dosage or amount of medicines. Again, taking this procedure haphazardly will also definitely place the healing process and the lives of these patients into jeopardy.

The Conversion of Ounce to Grams

There are a lot of ounce to grams conversion calculators over the internet. All the individuals have to do is to place the number and in a click of a button, the answer will appear instantly. If there is no available computer or internet connection around, individuals do not have a choice but to do some conversions manually instead. A sixteen ounce measurement is equals to 453.592 in grams, while a 425.243 gram amount is equivalent to fifteen ounces. 396.893 grams is identical with fourteen ounces. Thirteen ounces means 368.544 grams. A 340.194-gram in weight is also taken as twelve ounces. Eleven ounces indicates 311.845 grams as well. 283.495 grams has the same content as with ten ounces. A nine-ounce content has a 255.164 grams. An ounce is actually 28.35 grams. For further conversions or measurements, individuals should refer to some manuals or they can simple do some research over the internet.

Taking it Straight: On the Concept of Ounce

'Oz' is the common and accepted abbreviation for the unit ounce. This said ellipsis came from an ancient Italian term 'onza'. This 'onza' is contemporarily spelled and received as 'oncia'. However, digging deeper into history, etymologically speaking, ounce was taken from the Latin word 'uncia'. The word 'uncial' means a part of twelve. This concept of ounce was also connected to 'libra' which is an accepted measurement as a Roman pound. Thus a Roman pound or a libra is also tantamount to twelve 'unciae' or ounces. Since ounce is considered as a unit of measurement in the English System; though they may not be directly connected, an inch is also a part of twelve in a foot.

Sunday, 10 April 2011

One Man Ushered In the 20th Century Holding Over 700 Patents, His Greatest Invention Never Realized

Who was the greatest inventor of the 19th Century? Many historians of science and technology would say, without a doubt, it would be the Serbian/American scientist Nikola Tesla, although conventional history books tell us a different story entirely.

In 1884, Tesla arrived in New York with a working knowledge of a dozen languages, a book of poetry, four cents, and an introduction to Thomas Edison. The Edison introduction provided Tesla with a job, but he left to set up his own business after only a year with Edison.

When he arrived in New York City, there was already public electricity in some of the major cities in the United States. It was with his patented invention of the AC Generator, manufactured by Westinghouse, that allowed electricity to flow to every town and village; every home, office and factory.

Along with his major contribution to the design of AC motors, generators and transformers, Tesla also worked in many branches of science and technology, from electric lighting to X-rays, robotics and radio. Throughout his life, Tesla maintained that it was he, not Marconi, who was the true inventor of wireless transmission. He even took it to the court system. At first, the U.S. Courts rejected his claim to priority. It was not until five months after his death, on June 21, 1943, that the Supreme Court ruled that Tesla had anticipated all other contenders with his fundamental radio patents.

Those and other of his inventions, including fluorescent lighting, are used in the everyday lives of billions of homes and businesses. These are some of the more mundane creations. Others remain highly controversial, such as his creation of universal energy, and more recently dubbed the Tesla generator by DIY enthusiasts... "We are on the threshold of a gigantic revolution, based on the wireless transmission of power", Tesla wrote in the 1930s. "We will be enabled to illuminate the whole sky at night... eventually we will flash power in virtually unlimited amounts to (other) planets."

The trick, he thought, was to use the air of the upper atmosphere to transmit energy. Power would be beamed to a terminal in the upper atmosphere, and then transmitted to receivers on the ground or in the air. The risks, however, could potentially be high. As he wrote in 1899, "So strangely do such powerful discharges behave that I have often experienced a fear that the atmosphere might be ignited."

Tesla wanted to build a tower on the East Coast to transmit radio messages, then, ultimately, power across the Atlantic. Initial work at Wardenclyffe provided a terrific light show seen from miles around, but Tesla's financial situation was such that the tower was never completed.

Despite his reputation as a visionary genius, Tesla's refusal to compromise his ideas resulted in a steady decline of his money. His future-thinking ideas commanded front-page headlines, but with successive wars and the Great Depression, his dreams were never seen to fruition.

Tesla died alone in 1943, with many of his secretive papers though lost, until recently when a group of scientist and researchers filed a request through the Freedom of Information Act. Not only did the scientists rediscover a technology Nikola Tesla had pioneered, but they revived it with an infusion of today's technology that will allow anyone to learn how to build a Tesla generator, regardless of their technical skills. And because of today's technology, anyone with the interest in becoming totally green and energy independent can do so, with nothing more than parts they can buy at their local electronics store.

One thing we know for sure. Nikola Tesla was truly a man with dreams far beyond those of his time.

Whether your curious about the most amazing minds of the American Pioneers of Industry, or your a DIY Enthusiast, the controversy and conspiracy theories surrounding Tesla Generator will capture your imagination. In his third year of electronics engineering, Jonathon was tasked to a class project where he learned how to build a Tesla generator. From then on he was hooked on anything Tesla.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jonathon_Buckley

Solar Panels, People and Environmental Destruction

Observing Hollywood, we could sense that many films were made with regards to environment. Some of it may not tackle about nature in the whole film but there are themes and scenes that we could relate to environmental issues. I do not know when this trend started but I am sure that a lot has been produced already. And I am also sure that a lot more will be produced in the future. Maybe you are wondering why or maybe you don't care at all.

But certainly, many people are concerned with the current situation of the earth. Included here are the movie makers, politicians, scientists and even the ordinary people. With ordinary people I am pertaining to those who are not holding government positions or doing things that will be recognized in the world as efforts on how to save the earth. That is why technological advances like a solar panel have been promoted in different countries.

Each of the above mentioned people who have concern for the environment or at least feel the threat of a destroyed earth thinks that something has to be made. Different films, fictional and documentaries alike, are being produced everywhere to help in information dissemination. One public figure of United States toured a documentary about this issue. It may be common for some fictional films to show the end of the world in different ways. It may be through a great flood, alien invasion and many more. In the end, humans are the reason why the world will end.

There is a film showing that an alien was sent here to salvage all species available at our planet. Earth is gifted with a rich biodiversity. They have studied our ecology and came to a conclusion that humans are going to destroy the earth in the future. Because of this, they will annihilate the humans - sacrifice the human species to save all the rest. That is why I am one of those who wanted to use solar panel to at least alleviate the nature's destruction.

I do not know if aliens really exist. I guess the film makers just wanted to raise an issue and show it to the wider population of the world. Humans made many inventions in the past and these very inventions are the reason for the continuous damage of our environment. The good thing is there are also those scientists who invented ways to help preserve our planet and invented the solar panel. With solar panel, we will be able to use the sunlight for electricity.

As a result, we would be using renewable energy instead of the damaging effects to the atmosphere of fuels. Leaders of different countries are also airing their concern and formulated protocols on how to decrease the carbon emission. And as ordinary citizens, we could make use of solar panel to help save mother earth in our own simple ways.

This article is about "Solar Panels, People and Environmental Destruction" and was written by Mark Anthony Dalton. He writes for various companies throughout the UK. This article was written on behalf of Enviko Solar Panel Installers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mark_A_Dalton

Saturday, 9 April 2011

The Missed Opportunity of Physics in the Twentieth Century

In the 1920s and 1930s, when the two branches of modern physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, began to be generally known, there were still well-regarded physicists who represented a traditional philosophical idealism. Sir Arthur Eddington not only thought that a belief in God was consistent with scientific pursuits, but he reflected these ideas in his work in physics. In 1928, he published a book, The Nature of the Physical World, in which he stated that "The stuff of the world is mind stuff.......The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds...... The mind-stuff is not spread out in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it. But we must presume that in some other way or aspect it can be differentiated into parts. Only here and there does it rise to the level of consciousness, but from such islands proceeds all knowledge. Besides the direct knowledge contained in each self-knowing unit, there is inferential knowledge. The latter includes our knowledge of the physical world...It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of a mental character."

Sir James Jeans, who spent many years feuding with Eddington over cosmological questions, nevertheless represented a similar philosophy. In the Mysterious Universe", published in 1930, he expressed these views very plainly. "Today, there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality." By 'non-mechanical' did he mean simply that Newtonian determinism was being replaced by the probabilities of quantum mechanics? His meaning becomes clear when he goes on to say, "Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter." He was referring to the non-material reality of 'mind'.

In a newspaper interview in London he said that he inclined "to the idealistic theory that consciousness is fundamental and that the universe is derivative from consciousness, not consciousness from the material universe."

In "The Universe Around Us", published in 1929, Jeans describes the universe as a "finite picture whose dimensions are a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time, the protons and electrons are the streaks of paint which define the picture against its space-time background. Traveling as far back in time as we can brings us not to the creation of the picture but to its edge: the creation of the picture lies as much outside the picture as the artist is outside the canvas. On this view, discussing the creation of the universe in terms of time and space is like trying to discover the artist and the action of painting by going to the edge of the canvas. This brings us very near to those philosophical systems which regard the universe as a thought in the mind of the Creator, thereby reducing all discussion of material creation to futility."

The kind of thinking that is involved here is illustrated clearly by an encounter between Eddington and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who was then studying at Cambridge and whose mathematical theories led to later work on black holes. Eddington rejected Chandrasekhar's purely mathematical derivations completely, believing that this approach was far too abstract to have any relevance to the actual physical world.

How many people were there then in physics who thought like that? Perhaps Jeans exaggerated a little when he spoke of a near unanimity of views leading to such a non-material reality, but there must have been a substantial number of scientists who generally agreed with him and Eddington. What happened to all these philosophical idealists in physics? The short answer is, of course, World War II. By the end of the 1930's, physicists were divided into two camps, one working for the Allies (what Hitler called "Jewish science", because of people like Einstein, Teller and Oppenheimer) and the other working for the Fascists (headed by Heisenberg). Idealism was forgotten in the desperate drive to develop the atom bomb before the other side managed the trick. Physics was taken over by the state and, as soon as the Nazis were defeated, the same policies were used against the Soviet scare. By the time all these political imperatives were over, physics emerged as a very different science.

For one thing, quantum mechanics was now recognized as the definitive mathematical framework for all physics. Arthur Eddington had been the great explainer and popularizer of relativity, which then was regarded without question as the greatest advance in the science since Galileo and Newton. In the later twentieth century however, quantum theory moved to the forefront of theory and research. The changes it brought to our view of the world are so deep and far-reaching that they cannot even remotely be summarized in this short article. The purpose here is the narrow one of tracing the concepts of reality in physics as they developed over this period of transition.

The physicists who represented Idealist views in the 1930s were well aware of all the developments in relativity and quantum theory which had led to the enormous changes to classical Newtonian physics earlier in the twentieth century. The solid reality of physical objects, unquestioned during the reign of Newton, had evaporated when it was discovered that the atom was not the final, indivisible matter particle. Subatomic particles did not behave at all like ordinary matter and their behavior could not be explained by classical mechanics. Scientific determinism, the philosophy of cause-and-effect causality, had to be abandoned. The new reality of nature was based on new quantum concepts that included probability and the particle-wave duality of matter.

By the 1930s, all these dramatic developments in physics were already well advanced and the Idealist physicists did not quarrel with any of these new ideas. Where they differed sharply from mainstream thought was in their views on 'mind' as the origin of matter. Clearly, mind was not an abstraction for them, it was a reality. In fact, they thought that the purely abstract mathematical approach to theoretical physics was, in some ways, too abstruse for an understanding of what was going on, especially if the mathematics dealt with more dimensions, say, than our senses were capable of perceiving. This mind reality, for Eddington, was the "substratum" behind the physical manifestations of matter within nature, which rose only 'here and there' to the level of consciousness. These 'islands' then represented visible nature, from which our consciousness could infer knowledge through our senses.

Clearly, there were two levels of reality involved in this type of thinking. One was our conscious knowledge of nature, which needed our sense perception. In platonic terms, this kind of reality was called subjective because it required our presence and participation. Plato thought the kind of knowledge that could be obtained from such a study of nature was of a very inferior kind, fleeting, transitory and derivative. The other kind of reality was the one that did not rise to the level of consciousness, the substratum behind the physical appearances. This kind of reality did not require our presence and our sense perceptions were not suitable for investigating these origins behind the appearances. Plato called this kind of reality objective: it represented the whole truth and reality of the creation, the only real knowledge that was not transitory. For Plato and for the Idealist physicists it was the reality of the "mind", that is the mind of the Creator.

As already mentioned, this kind of thinking did not survive the atom and hydrogen bombs. The purely mathematical, abstract approach, which Eddington found so unappealing in the work of Chandrasekhar, now reigned supreme. However, this approach, which led to the development of both relativity and quantum theory, has now reached some speculations which require only a slight nudge to demonstrate the need for the two kinds of reality referred to here.

Take for instance Murray Gell-Mann, one of the titans of contemporary physics, who among many other accomplishments discovered the particle which he then named the quark. Together with an associate, James Hartle, he has been working for some years now on something called 'quantum decoherence'. Quantum mathematics describes multiple universes of multiple possibilities and symmetries. Physicists like Hugh Everett, as long ago as the 1950s, argued that these must all exist as realities. However, when we make an observation, we get only one result, not a cloud of multiple quantum possibilities. According to Gell-Mann/Hartle, these multiple realities of the quantum fog condense into various chains of events, each chain approximately observing the cause-and-effect rules of classical physics. This means that people perceive the world as classical and predictable, rather than quantum and probabilistic, because they occupy a realm where predictable patterns have decohered from the coherent cloud of quantum possibilities. Each such chain of events would constitute a 'consistent history'.

For Gell-Mann, the decohered consistent history that we inhabit is the world of nature, which contains the visible physical phenomena whose behavior is very adequately explained by classical physics. These bodies are made up of particles and the wave-particle duality which, in theory, includes both large and small matter manifestations is not a practical factor in visible nature. The wave part of matter is important only when matter is of the size of particles. The waveform is not directly perceivable, so particles can be considered as the only constituents of visible matter. However, on the particle level, the waveform of matter is very important and, when the particles cross the diving line between our decohered world and the cohered quantum cloud beyond it, they seem to change into the waveform. This can be seen when matter crosses this dividing line from the other direction and the waveform instantly appears to 'collapse' into the particle form on being observed or measured.

How 'real' then are these particles that exhibit this wave-particle duality, which appears to collapse into the latter form on simple observation? Here is what Werner Heisenberg, another titan of physics in the twentieth century, had to say about particles (he was the author of the iconic Uncertainty Principle in the 1920s and later of the 'matrix mechanics' mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, based on particles, as against the 'wave mechanics' formulation, invented by Erwin Schr?dinger). "In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, the phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than of things or facts."

Here it is clear what Heisenberg meant by 'reality': it was the reality of the 'phenomena in daily life'. Yet he did not say that the "world of potentialities or possibilities' was nothing. Is it really too much of a stretch to equate Heisenberg's world of potentialities or possibilities with Gell-Mann's cohered quantum fog of possibilities, as the origin behind all appearances in nature? Here, then, we have the two realities referred to: one is the subjective reality of nature and the other the objective reality of the origins and potentialities that exist (and really exist!) behind the visible phenomena.

Quantum mechanics, up to now, does not recognize any reality but that of the physical world. We, the observers, mankind, are intimately connected to this world (as we have seen) through our sense perceptions and even our observations and experiments. We have not even begun to cover the overwhelming victories which quantum mechanics has won over the proponents of a separately existing, natural world of reality, with its own history, completely independent of man. This is how most of us still perceive the world today. Even Einstein, one of the founders of quantum theory, insisted on this independent nature. This is how Steven Weinberg, yet another great one of physics, still sees the world, in spite of all evidence against it from quantum mechanics. Here is how he puts it, in a review of Stephen Hawking's latest book:"Like most people, I think there is something real out there, entirely independent of us and our models, as the earth is independent of its maps. But this is because I can't help believing in an objective reality, not because I have good arguments for it."

Steven Weinberg's use of the phrase "objective reality" is most telling. He uses the correct, traditional, platonic meaning for "objective" as referring to a reality that is completely separate from, and independent of, the observer and his senses or consciousness. This is exactly how Galileo defined his "primary qualities" of matter and motion: in his opinion, these were the only 'qualities' of nature that could appear to us objectively, that is without requiring our presence or senses. He therefore called them "objectively real" in the old, platonic sense. As Galileo overlooked the fact that the sense of sight was still involved in registering these two qualities, he was mistaken in calling them objective and, in fact, physics today has completely ignored Galileo's reasoning: quantum mechanics sees the human consciousness and all senses (especially that of sight!) intimately entwined with the reality of the world around us - the only reality it recognizes. This view, however, leaves many other questions unanswered. One glaring one is what does quantum mechanics have to say about the world before the (very necessary but very recent) appearance of man? It is only if you regard the world as objectively real and completely independent of man that you can speculate about the early eons of our planet and assume that the world appeared then as it does now to our senses, when we appear to have given it the only reality that quantum mechanics recognizes.

There are other, most eminent physicists, who have stated that quantum mechanics, while correct in all its predictions, is not complete. Einstein thought it missed certain aspects of physical reality, which he called "hidden variables", which would (when found) confirm his conviction that the world was independently real From the other side of the great debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr on just this question of reality, John Bell thought also that the story of quantum mechanics was incomplete and that physics must continue to probe into its meaning - and John Bell was the person whose iconic mathematical work led to the actual experiments that established the correctness of quantum mechanics over the objections posed by Einstein. There is also Richard Feynman, who worked on the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and understood the subject as well as anyone. He summed up the present state of knowledge very clearly: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

This disconnect between scientists and the science they are working on reflects the distance that has opened up between the acquisition of knowledge (which nobody doubts) and the corresponding understanding, which is lagging. This state of affairs was already foreseen by Heisenberg in the early 1930s, when he had this to say to the Saxon Academy of Science: "Almost every scientific advance is bought at the cost of renunciation, almost every gain in knowledge sacrifices important standpoints in established modes of thought. As facts and knowledge accumulate, the claim of the scientist to an understanding of the world in a certain sense diminishes."

During the long reign of Newtonian physics, the great increase in knowledge achieved during that period was always accompanied by a corresponding increase in our understanding of how nature works. Heisenberg's remarks, therefore, cannot be taken to mean that modern physics has discovered a previously hidden law that an increase in knowledge inevitably means a decrease in understanding. All this simply means that quantum mechanics, for all its stunning successes is, as Einstein and other suspected, incomplete. For instance, it has not yet considered the possibility of needing two realities to explain the world: one the subjective reality of the physical world of nature and the other the objective reality of the realm of multiple universes and the quantum fog of potentialities and possibilities. That these two realities might be the necessary framework for physics to operate in, so that the science can be internally consistent, is something that was foreseen many years ago by the Idealist philosopher-physicists who were active in the 1920s and 1930s.

This brings us squarely to the missed opportunity in physics, which is the subject of this article and which needed this background explanation to bring it into focus. The objective reality of the non-material realm of the mind, which the Idealist physicists concentrated on, refers of course to the mind of the Creator. The concept of such a realm would be readily accepted by non-scientific religious thinkers, for whom God is a reality. Science and faith would thus have come together in the mental realm of the mind, without either side having to give up any of its positions to accommodate the other. The gap that Galileo opened between faith and the traditional philosophy associated with it on the one hand and science (especially physics) on the other would thus have been closed over eighty years ago if Idealism had been allowed to go on flourishing within physics after the 1930s. As a result, many problems that currently occupy modern physics might have been looked at very differently, such as the multi-dimensional string theory

When it first became evident that relativity was incompatible with quantum theory, Alfred North Whitehead made the following suggestion: "If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations." Today, his worst fears seem to be realized. All kinds of theories (some very bizarre) abound while experimental verification lags. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva has not even been able to verify the existence of the Higgs boson yet, which was expected to be one of its very first successes, let alone some sign that string theory mathematics might have a basis in our world. Whitehead's idea was evidently that philosophy was needed to unify the various incompatibilities encountered in physics and provide a framework within which the science can operate. However unfashionable they have become, that is what the Idealist scientists of the early part of the twentieth century tried to do. Perhaps their ideas deserve another hearing.

Werner Thurau was born in December 1927, in Havana, Cuba. In 1929, his family returned to his father's native Germany. He spent the entire 1930s in Berlin, but came to England in 1939 and was then further educated in that country, ending with an engineering degree from London University. His further career took him all over the world on technical projects, moving first to Mexico and then to the United States, where he lives now. At school in England, he was exposed early in life to the world of ideas. Some of his teachers were friends of C.S. Lewis and Lewis's Oxford group, the Inklings, and his father was a philosophical bookworm. Werner combined this background with a lifelong interest in physics, especially modern physics after it breached the atomic barrier. This interest extended to Galileo, the founder of our age, and what made him so different from others of his time, as well as to the effect physics has had on other related sciences He came to see that the latest developments in physics bring in subjects not normally associated with a book on that science, such as consciousness, reality concepts and even ethics. Modern quantum mechanics especially views these subjects as vital to today's theory in many ways, and this opens up the possibilities of reaching out to religion also.

For more information, please go to: http://galileoshadow.com/ or go directly to: Galileo's Shadow on amazon.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Werner_Thurau

Hop On The "Green" Bandwagon And Earn An Environmental Degree!

Going green has become the popular phrase of our generation, and is considered to be politically correct. At last we are slowly realizing how our actions can affect the environment around us, and the importance of ecosystems. It is necessary to understand that a degree in environmental science has interdisciplinary characteristics in that it covers a broad variety of specialty subjects within this field.

Do you find yourself wanting to learn more about what we need to do in order for future generations to enjoy the planet as we have? Would you like to have a career that includes researching and developing new theories with possible solutions to improve the environment? Did you know that you can earn a degree in this area online from well respected learning institutions?

It can be overwhelming when you first look at what a degree in this area entails. Just to mention a few of the topics of study possible are groundwater contamination, conservation, waste management, air pollution and the quality of water. What can be often very confusing is that environmental sciences and ecology are not the same thing even though they can have common characteristics.

Ecology studies the relationship between the population and its affect on the environment. Many students decide to obtain a double major which can include a degree in management, public policy, or even landscape architecture. There are other areas that can be used if this is your educational goal.

Many veterans of environmental studies have the opinion that this degree is partially earned through basic field work, making an online degree questionable; however, many online programs include some form of internship that is located in a lab or outdoors which provide earned credits towards the chosen degree.

The Bachelor's degree is a good place to start a career in environmental science, but many job opportunities require a Master's degree which can also be earned through an online curriculum. The undergraduate will learn to understand environmental issues, analyze problems that are encountered with ways to solve them using basic research techniques.

Due to the complexity and challenging field of environmental science which can change or adjust in a moment's notice, job hunting means that you need to be flexible with your expectations. Employment could be in environmental planning, green investment planning, or even corporate management. It all depends upon what is occurring at that time and what is being added or excluded within this field. Public policy and opinions also have a great influence in forcing industries to hire consulting firms the help them adapt to new guidelines.

With the improvement of regulations and laws being passed through legislation, the need for individuals with degrees in environmental science that can help private corporations be in compliance will steadily increase, making this field a great career choice. Furthermore, having the option to enroll into an online program in order to obtain an online environmental degree through taking online courses presents a very attractive alternative to choose instead of enrolling into a traditional regular campus setting. The future is upon us, so going green is the best course of action!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Natasha_Bright

Natasha Bright - EzineArticles Expert Author

Friday, 8 April 2011

Electronic Snap Circuits and Training Children

The book of Proverbs tells parents to train up their children in the way that they should go so when they become old enough to make choices and decisions in their own lives, they will not be able to get away from the things that they have been taught. Training children is not just leaving it to what they see or hear in school. As parents, you can aid your kids using tools that will effectively enhance their critical thinking skills. It doesn't have to be painstakingly done. You can accomplish it even in the comforts of your own homes, plus, you too can have fun while your children learn to explore and think outside the box.

Imagine talking about solar and hydrogen energies to your kids. It would be difficult for them to grasp the idea of these energies being used to develop new technologies and better ways of doing things without any aid. Kids are more hands-on aside from being visual and audio learners. They learn better through application. It's called application learning. And that's the idea behind electronic snap circuits. It provides a creative way of learning for kids. Learning doesn't have to be confined or limited to only one setting, and it doesn't have to be boring. Kids love to play. It's something that they know how to do and are good at. With the use of electronic snap circuits, you don't need to take the fun out of learning.

Electronic snap circuits offer a unique approach in order for kids to answer some of life's most curious questions. There are a variety of electronic kits available with all of them having different number of experiments per kit. You can select the type of kit you want based on the number of experiments you want to have. Bear in mind that these experiments are absolutely safe and friendly for kids to do. It can also promote bonding between you and your children by doing projects together. These projects can help a child explore the world of electronics. It can help them find out if an electric shock can be produced by friction, if it is true that vibrations caused by a simple interruption in an electrical circuit can produce sounds, or how we download and burn music into a magnetic medium such as CDs through a digitized media and then stored. See, it's fun right? It could also be a way or a medium for your child to realize his passion for electronics and who knows, your child may be the next Nobel Prize winner!

Doing projects with your kid can also be a form of bonding between the two of you. It's a fun after school activity that can be done safely in the comforts of your own home. It allows your child to come up with projects, plan and organize necessary materials, and it could even lead to a passion for electronics that can definitely be a useful career for him someday. You never know, your child could be the next Nobel Prize winner.