Neutrinos- Massive After All

Italian speaks of the 'small neutral one'. And the recent discovery that neutrinos have mass comes as a revelation for particle physics; they are particles produced by trillions of times over by our sun, play a subtle role in continental drift and are released vigorously by dying stars through supernovae. Pauli first proposed them in the 30s to account for energy conservation in beta decay (whereby a neutron becomes a proton and simultaneously emits an electron), he suggested they have a spin of ħ/2. Then in the 50s, Goldhaber computed the negative helicity of the neutrino (its spin along the direction of motion), also called 'handedness' by the electron capture of europium 152 when it decays into a neutrino and samarium 152, which emits a gamma ray. Firing both the neutrino and gamma ray adjacent to one another reveals the left handedness of the neutrino (as a conservation of angular momentum). In accordance with special relativity, an onlooker moving at luminal speed can overtake a massive neutrino and observe it spinning in the opposite direction; but since right-handed neutrinos were never detected, it was inferred that they were massless. Or so it seemed...Particles gain mass by interacting with the Higgs boson, and quantum field theory teaches that seemingly 'vacuous' nature of the vacuum is in fact teeming with Higgs bosons and when a particle interacts with the Higgs (a spinless, scalar field), it changes its handedness (Lorentz invariance). Popular science writers like to describe the Higgs field as a sort of ''molasses' which slows particles to endow them with mass but such is a flawed analogy, in fact fields don't slow particles and the quantum vacuum has no 'stickiness'. Naturally, its obvious to think that the known left-handed neutrinos can interact with the Higgs and become massive and right-handed; but again, since no right handed neutrinos have been detected, it was again inferred that neutrinos are massless. But recent developments from neutrino oscillations (whereby electron, muon and tau neutrinos convert into each other as they travel) from Japan's Super-K observatory attests to the fact that neutrinos do have mass. Since particles may behave like waves, oscillating neutrinos are a mixture of the three neutrino waves (or flavours) which can only oscillate if the component waves combine and form 'beats' in the waveform, such beats are the outcome of mass; thus if we can see neutrinos oscillating (which we do), then they have mass. But the standard model runs into trouble if it tries to accomodate massive neutrinos, so a means of renormalising the theory is necessary; enter the Dirac and Majorana neutrinos. The Dirac neutrino posits the reason why right handed neutrinos are so elusive is because their interaction is so weak by about 30 orders of magnitude, another similar idea comes from string theory where right handed neutrinos are stuck in extra compactified dimensions. But Majorana neutrinos require a lack of differentiation between antimatter and matter (neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same thing); thus don't rely on weak interactions to expound mass. Going back to the onlooker travelling at light speed, what if a right handed antineutrino is observed? Then neutrinos can acquire mass via a 'see-saw mechanism': when a left-handed neutrino interacts with a Higgs, it is granted mass M and becomes a right-handed neutrino (which violates the law of energy conservation), however due to the Uncertainty principle ∆t~h/Mc2 such a quantum state can last for a period ∆t; subsequently becoming a left-handed neutrino again by interacting with the Higgs once more. This has a lot of implications for big bang cosmology, especially the leptogenesis and the conservation of lepton number to create the lepton asymmetry; as the early universe cooled down, massive right handed neutrinos ceased to transform into light left-handed ones and thus, since Majorana neutrinos are both matter and antiparticles simultaneously, they decayed into right- handed antineutrinos and left-handed neutrinos along with Higgs bosons.

Sex- A Gene's Eye View

Speaking of the birds and bees, sex is ubiquitous. But what remains elusive is why that is the case; why it persists as a 'popular' means of reproduction and an engine of evolutionary change. The standard Darwinian picture is that reproduction results in more progeny that the environment can sustain, intraspecific diversity is abundant, resulting in the 'struggle for existence'. Verily, descent with inherited modification results and speciation follows, creating new reproductively isolated yet interbreeding populations (species). The phylogenetic prevalence of sexual reproduction demands an explanation; what evolutionary advantages does sex offer over asexual breeding? Taking a gene's eye view, the concepts of accumulated mutation, genetic drift and negative epistasis should be taken into account; but superficially, the disadvantages and costs of sex seem easier to recognise and fathom than the actual evolutionary benefits. Maynard Smith illustrated the so called 'two-fold cost' of sex; whereby in organisms that reproduce sexually, males simply contribute genes to the progeny but a mutation causing females to breed asexually will ultimately triumph as its prevalence doubles at each and every generation. Secondly, the whole point of sex is the union of male and female gametes which might be ecologically taxing if population densities are low, distinct from asexual organisms that don't encounter such a burden. Progeny arising from sexual reproduction often become troubled by recombinational loads, whereby mutually adapted genes become separated via recombination, resulting in a decline of overall fitness. So what are the benefits of sex? In brief, the evolutionary advantages are both direct and indirect and their recognition is made complicated by sexual selection and anisogamy (variation in sizes of male and female gametes). Nevertheless, the filamentous fungus Emericella nidulans demonstrates slower decline in fitness relative to its asexual counterparts when its progeny are exposed to rates of accumulated mutation, such is an example of a 'selectional arena', whereby strict selection against offspring that carry lethal mutations is maintained. Volvox carteri, a multicellular green alga, may be induced into sexual reproduction via increasing the levels of reative oxygen species (ROS), which may hint a relationship between free radicals and the early origin of sex in eukaryotic life forms. Indirect advantages of sex seem to reinforce the reaction to directional selection, where there is linear phenotypic change; the Fisher-Muller hypothesis holds that sexual recombination accelerates the ability of a species of adapt by stringing together beneficial mutations from different origins, sex also protects against 'mutational meltdown' (in which asexual life forms may accumulate irreparable deleterious mutations) via background selection by separating deleterious alles from beneficial mutations. This so called 'Muller's ratchet' is also observed in segmented bacteriophages in lowering and alleviating the load of deleterious alles. Negative epistasis caused by sexual recombination may contribute greatly to the architecture and intricacy of the genome: such is a decline in the fitness of two entangled alleles which paves the way for future removal of potential hosts for deleterious mutations from the population and deploys a sexual advantage.

Cambrian Explosion- A Missing Link?

Missing link? What do you mean 'missing'? The alleged dilemma of Darwin's doubt is no more and yet another creationist fallacy has been placed back on the shelf of incredulity. Indeed the Cambrian 'explosion' seemed like the 'poofing' of all animal phyla into being at once, in an instant and too rapid for evolution to pose an intelligible explanation. Yet as we sequence genomes and excavate fossils, we unlock the vaults of life's palaeontological history and uncover an phylogeny of forms that fall into a nested hierarchy. Darwin proposed that the Precambrian hosted a spawning range of organisms and the time between the genesis of the earth to the threshold of the Cambrian must have been enormous to account for such diversity. Central to understanding what happened to ignite the Cambrian is the notion of deep time, earth is around 4.6 BYA (billion years old), which in turn is divided into two major supereons, the Precambrian (4.6 BYA to 550 MYA) and the Phanerozoic (550 MYA-onwards). The older and former of the two, is divided into the Archean (4.6 to 2.5 BYA) and the Proterozoic (2.5 BYA to end of Precambrian). The former of the two, the Phanerozoic, really encompasses much of the recent history of the earth and is split into the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and the Cenozoic (now). Furthermore, we know how ancient the antiquity of life on earth is, the slight anomaly between 13C to 12C allows us to push the clock back to 3.75 BYA where the first photosynthetic organisms reigned, while 3.5 BYA we see the emergence of stomolobites and bacteria and 1.4 BYA we see the first eukaryotic cells appear. The supposed incompleteness of the Precambrian fossil record has been overthrown by recent developments, the Edicardian fauna of Australia date back to about 590 MYA and comprised of soft-bodied life forms; while the hard bodied Tommotian fauna of Russia date back to the beginning of the Cambrian. But the infamous Burgess Shale seem to emerge immediately after the inception of the Cambrian era and are most likely related to modern snails, worms and clams; however like many Cambrian era lineages, they underwent extinction much like the trilobites at the end of the Paleozoic as well as the dinosaurs and ammonites at the end of the Mesozoic. The main reasons of the apparent fossil rarity and 'incompleteness' include the relatively geologically active era of the Hadean and the successive eras, which would have lead to the destruction of Precambrian fossils and rocks. Secondly, the characteristically soft-bodied species of the Cambrian fossilise rather poorly relative to Post-Cambrian life forms with shells and bones, this results in the recent discovery of turbellians; giving the illusion that they have no precursors. But such an 'explosion' was by no means as explosive as many would envisage, it was geologically instantaneous (taking place across a span of 15 or so million years). Among the explanations of what went on during the Cambrian include the ecological notion of adaptive radiation, whereby if a species occupies a niche or habitat which exposes it to little or no competition, it develops phenotypic novelties to exploit the environment. Gould proposed in Wonderful Life, that a 'cooling off period' of stabilisation punctuates the relatively rapid period of evolutionary change, which may explain why the Burgess Shale did not make it to today. Moreover, raised levels of atmospheric oxygen may have served as 'rocket fuel' to primitive life while the 'Snowball earth' scenario posits that new niche creation may be viable. But among the best explanations of the Cambrian explosion is the arsenal of the Hox family of genes that evolved from the paraHox cluster; recent studies suggest the origin of the bilaterian genetic morphology may extend as far back as the Edicardian, giving enough time for successive gene duplications to produce an adaptive radiation and hence a Cambrian explosion. Boom!

Human Evolution- Our Ancestors' Tale

We are human, the fifth ape. For it was Darwin's dangerous idea of descent with modification that has forever changed the story of our story. Since the dawn of our species, creation myths the world over have so elegantly and poetically tried to convey the narrative: the tears of the Eye of Ra was the progenitor to the first humans as the Egyptians believed, while the Indians maintained that we are the product of the mating of heaven and earth as well as the Mayans who held that our origins was the product of gold and the flesh of god. The Judaeo-Christian account of Adam and Eve in Genesis is one of many such allegories but our true ancestor's tale is much more moving. Our evolutionary past is beautiful, we should be proud of where we come from and anticipate what we may become. The story of us begins around 65 million calendar years ago, with the explosive radiation  of the arboreal Archonta, insectivorous mammals that gave rise to Chiroptera (bats), Scandentia (treeschrews) and the primates. The primates had two evolutionary advantages namely fingers and toes to grasp food and use tools as well as binocular vision; while early primates fed on insects, they developed smoothened square molars to supersede their triangular precursors to consume plants. Then 25 million years later, the family tree was bisected into the anthropoids (your monkeys, apes and humans) and prosimians (the modern tarsiers, lemurs and lorises); the New World monkeys are the direct descendants of some anthropoids that resided in South America while the ones that stayed in Africa become two additional branches: the Old World monkeys and the hominoids which bifurcated into the apes and humans. Mind you we are cousins of modern gorillas, orang-utans, gibbons and closer cousins of chimpanzees, the African apes evolved more recently and we evolved may anatomical differences. Bipedalism or walking upright on two legs is an evolutionary hallmark we take for granted, our foramen magnum shifted under the skull while the nuchal region became smaller. Our ribcage developed an barrel morphology (a contrast to the inverted funnel shape of other apes), the vertebral column gained a forward curvature, the pelvis broadened and a shorter distance between the hip joint and the sacroiliac emerged. The hallux or big toe lost its ability to oppose while our thumbs are opposed enabling us to grasp and the brain's lunate sulcus shifted backwards. It's tempting to think of the lineage to modern homo sapiens as very linear but the 'march of progress' theme isn't really a true account; human evolution entailed several parallel lineages and it's a challenge for palaeontologists to discern ancestral branches from dead-ends. Next we see the emergence of the australopithecines in Africa about 3 million years ago, specimens such as A. Africanus, A. Afarensis and A. Robustus were relatively small but heavy boned. Then Homo habilis, found by the Leakeys and then Homo erectus (continually we see the development of a bigger and bigger brain) as seen in the Java and Peking man specimens; the Neanderthals were displaced by the emergence of the Cro-Magnons and human races differentiated soon after. There is a problem however with the classification of human races, when you compare characters like blood type, genetic variation fails to correspond or even correlate to visually perceived skin colour. Moreover, such a genetic diversity would demand a ridiculously high rate of mutation to be accounted for by an initial single human couple, we don't see an 'Adam and Eve' in any bottlenecks of reduced populations: there was simply no first person.

Time- A Traveller's Guide

This moment is priceless. Or is it? You feel as if it began out in the future, suddenly became the present and will soon be dismissed into the past. But what if our common sense was less sensible than we ever envisaged? What if our deep down, fundamental intuitions about the fabric of reality were somehow flawed? Time is no exception. Throughout human inquiry, it seems to have lost its flair and panache as a measure of all things causal; Newton liken time to an undeviating arrow, a master clock, but it was Boltzmann who proved that the laws of motion work just as well in reverse and the discrimination between past and future is nothing more than the result of a thermodynamic asymmetry (we remember the past because of its state of low entropy). Einstein comes along and crushes the notion of absolute simultaneity, showing that two observers traveling at different velocities have disagreement regarding where and when events take place despite being unanimous to the space-time coordinates. He then smashes the Newtonian idea of synchronised time, noting that gravity can distort it and the universe cannot governed under a single chronological parameter. The fall of time as an illustrious entity is furthered with a final blow to our common sense of its 'flow'; the present moment or 'now' seems to move in the future direction and our consciousness seems to leap from one moment to the sequential one. But this is silly! (Let's try a thought experiment). Imagine a dart fired into the air, we like to think of time as a line with the motion of the dart captured in a set of successive snippets or photographs stretching out from past to future. Now we circle an arbitrary point as the 'present moment'. But hang on. This is deceptive as it shows the present as stationary and popping into being at a particular instant and disappearing soon after. Our common sense tells is us the present moment is moving into the 'open' future, so lets we circle all the photos of the dart's motion to satisfy this condition. Now the motion of the dart is better envisioned but the flow of time becomes an illusion, there is no objective present moment except a subjective one. Circling all the photos of the dart's motion reveals that we don't really experience time passing; we just conjure variations between present realisations and present memories of past realisations and to give the illusion that time flows or that the present moment moves via time. So there is no moment that is privileged to be more 'now' than any other moment just like no position is privileged to be more 'here' than others as David Deutsch put it. But the possibility of time travel emerges, one that was once been reserved for the likes of H.G. Wells and Back to the Future, with plutonium fueled Deloreans and Star-Trek warp drives dominating the silver screen. However, we are all time travelers at a lowly rate of one second per second (still not satisfied?). You could travel into the future by boarding a space-craft, traveling near the speed of light to a distant galaxy, slowing, and then turning back and traveling near the speed of light to earth. But what about going to the past? General relativity allows paths in space-time where proper time reverses or loops back upon itself into the past, such closed time-like curves (CTCs) may be the ultimate candidate. But other solutions like Godel's rotating fluid universe (if you walk along the direction of rotation you would end up back where you started but backwards in time), Gott's cosmic strings (topological defects caused by phase transitions in early universe) and Kerr's worm holes stand out as equally probable. In fact, certain anomalies such as the grandfather and information paradoxes have forced some to propose a protected chronology postulate. However when we combine quantum teleportation with post-selection, we get a CTC with the ability to choose what types of states may be teleported and by extension, preventing a particle or person from preventing their existence from the word go in principle just as Novikov's self-consistency condition avoids paradoxes by making their probability zero.

Gravity- Taking a Quantum Leap

Gravity. It's what makes the tides come in and out, what makes the sun go up and down. Yet it's nothing more than matter telling space how to curve and space telling matter how to move; a universal force arising from a universal dialogue. But among the holy grails of modern physics, the challenge of marrying quantum mechanics (QM) with general relativity (GR) is proving just as quirky as placing square pegs in round holes. One where loops, strings and twistors go head to head to unearth gravity at the quantum regime; where our current picture of space-time may potentially transfigure and where theory of everything may eventually, finally catch up. Let's start at the start. Once upon a time Newton looked at space as a sort of stage or fixed background on which  matter moves, then Einstein showed in GR that gravity necessitated explanation in terms of a field that then emerged as the 'fixed background' that Newton proposed; the acceleration in F=ma became a part of a field entity and not an absolute view of space. Einstein had checkmated the Newtonian view, there is no background space-time. From then on, it becomes easy to see how QM views the gravitational field in terms of a discrete, grainy and granular framework where the 4D continuum is broken (a sort of 'fields over fields' and not on background space). The unfavorable encounter with ultraviolet divergences in quantum field theory has seduced many to the idea that strings are the thing to better unite QM with GR, assuming the extravagance of extra compactified dimensions, super-symmetry and even proton decay; but string theory ain't the only game in town. When we consider Faraday's own field concept as a variable in Yang-Mills theory, they become excited fluctuations of the quantum field and form closed loops when there are no charges; they are probably also excitations of the gravitational field. Here loop quantum gravity (LQG) comes to the rescue as a background independent format with no need of unification and super-partners for particles;  the loops cross over at nodes forming spin networks, with each node constituting a monomer of space, hence Newton's picture is substituted with spinfoam (the histories of the spin networks). Space becomes the spin network and the space-time becomes the spinfoam, where the histories of points, nodes and lines are surfaces or faces become connected; it's an approach very similar to Feynman's formalism of summing over histories, here we sum over the possible geometries and get rid of the divergences into infinities caused by perturbative quantum field theory. The loops are space per se and a state of space is therefore defined by a network of intersecting loops. Another road to quantum gravity is one championed by Penrose, the so called twistor: initially we thought of spinors at the lego bricks of discrete space-time as they distinguish between different spins, indirectly implying they can generate their own spaces. But an entity was needed to combine the notion of spin with linear momentum, in other words it must be an entity moving and rotating along with quantum and relativistic properties, hence the twistor. Penrose combined the concepts of rays of light and complex numbers to create a 'twistor space' as an analogue to space-time, like the spinfoam in LQG, a Riemann sphere represents all the possible histories of light rays. Here the sequences of events don't vary and fluctuate as one would expect from the quantum scale but instead the timing and location of events change in twistor space. As for real-world applications and tests of such theoretical frameworks, we can expect breaches of Lorentz invariance (different wavelengths of light travelling at varied velocities), a possible elimination of the initial singularity (as attempted by the Hartle-Hawking proposal), explanation of the inflationary era of the early universe, insight into black hole temperature and entropy in addition to greater insight as to what what the planck scale really looks like.

Antimatter- Something Rather than Nothing

Like skis and skates, stuff came in pairs. Pairs that annihilated one another, shared mass but differed in charge and spin. It's the Jekyll and Hyde personality of particles that corresponds to the existence of matter and antimatter; Dirac envisaged a sea of negative energy levels, each filled with a pair of electrons of opposing spin with the positron appearing as a 'hole' in the sea as a state with a positive charge and energy. While Feynman and Stueckelberg likened negative energy particles moving backward in time to positive energy antiparticles moving forward in time. But the ultimate question remains the origin of the asymmetry of matter, and why unlike a world filled with antiparticles or emptiness, we are made of matter anyways; why there is something rather than nothing. Let's look back at the early universe, before primordial nucleosynthesis and into baryogenesis; the making of baryons and antibaryons. Sakharov noted three conditions necessary for the production of the baryon asymmetry namely; the violation of baryon number, violation of C and CP symmetry and a withdrawal from thermal equilibrium. Electroweak theory, the synthesis of the electromagnetic and weak interactions, incorporates gauge symmetries useful to explaining the matter asymmetry and fulfilling the Sakharov prerequisites; just like a hot iron ferromagnet with a series of randomly spinning electrons exhibiting rotational symmetry which may be broken and magnetised when cooled and aligning the spins, the weak symmetry breaks giving W and Z bosons mass via the Higgs field and preserves the electroweak symmetry keeping photons massless. So during the early epochs, the universe must have cooled down to a critical temperature like the ferromagnet, causing the electroweak phase transition out of thermal equilibrium to form like bubbles in boiling water, breaking the symmetry. At first sight, the electroweak interaction also  seems to apparently conserve the baryon number but this may be violated in the current phase of broken symmetry via quantum tunneling but during the early universe, a barrier to fluctuation was not present and the baryon number was permitted to vary freely. But how can electroweak theory account for the differences between matter and antimatter? Like a roulette wheel likely to land in a spot of equal probability, a tilted wheel is biased toward a particular symmetry breaking much like the violation of charge conjugation (C) and parity (CP). Charge conjugation ensures the interchanging between particles and antiparticles while parity preserves spin but reverses direction; so here the CP symmetry can counteract particle production with antiparticles leading to annihilation, but how did a bit more matter than antimatter end up being made? The electromagnetic and strong interactions have C and P symmetries but the weak force violates it through the beta minus decay of kaons, thus the quark components of baryons should also be able to violate it through weak interactions and break the symmetry. Now that we've fulfilled the prerequisites via electroweak theory, it can be speculated that the initial early universe was full of a symmetric phase but as the phase transition broke the symmetry, bubbles formed and baryon number was violated out of thermal equilibrium; it may be further hypothesised that as the bubbles spread cross the universe via a plasma of particles  and antiparticles, quarks were sealed in the bubbles, leaving their baryon number unscathed  whereas the antiquarks were annihilated creating the asymmetry. However, the traditional Kobashi-Maskawa CP violation may prove inefficient as all quarks other than the 'top' are remarkably light compared the W boson; necessitating a new type of symmetry violation that will allow the weak interaction to manipulate the charge and flavour of all six quarks indiscriminate of their masses. A saga to be continued...

Topology- From Euler to Poincaré

Turning a sphere inside out is one easy task. Simply poke a hole in it and yank it through. Or is it? Can it be done without poking a hole? And with a material that can bend, stretch and pass through itself? Enter topology; where doughnuts meet coffee mugs and where pretzels become nontrivial trefoils. It's way of looking at space with a sense of 'sameness' and connectivity, where even gravity is reduced to curvature on a trampoline. Indeed topology is the product of the cross fertilization of graph and knot theory, in 1736 Euler established the impossibility of the circuit round the seven bridges of Königsberg; by envisaging each plot of land as a vertex connected by lines, it became clear that an even number of edges was needed to cross each bridge once and fulfill the problem. But since the vertices all had odd numbers of edges, it was out of the question. More imaginary was the discovery of the Möbius strip, a surface with a single edge and a single side. Such a surface emerges via twisting a strip so that one side is reversed and formed into a closed loop, this introduced the notion of a non-orientable plane that confuses the sense of 'inside' and 'outside'. Attaching two Möbius strips together results in a Klein bottle, a closed surface lacking a defined boundary and may also be formed abstractly by gluing the remaining edges of a cylinder in opposite directions to make a torus. But to achieve this is everyday Euclidean space, the surface would have to go through itself to situate the edges. More intriguing was the Poincaré conjecture posited in 1904 and the topology of the sphere; simply put, the simplest object which is closed in any number of given dimensions. Any closed 3D manifold where a loop may be contracted to a single point is a 3D sphere, whereas loops on a torus fail to contract to a single point. But the central issue at large remained whether a closed 3D manifold could exist independent of the sphere but by considering Thurston's geometrisation theorem, where 8 types of manifolds could be sewn to form other 3D surfaces and Ricci flow, whereby irregular and lopsided spaces can be turned into uniform ones, the concept of a non-spherical closed manifold could be ruled out. Algebraic topology also introduces the idea of a vector bundle, considering spaces and structures described above a surface as opposed to within it; by designating a vector space to each point, followed by a fibre, a vector field is produced. Suppose a series of vectors lying tangent on a sphere, at least a single point will remain with a vector value of zero is inevitable making a hairy torus easily combable whereas a hairy ball will produce a crown at each pole. Moreover, at even the simplest topologies; the concept of homeomorphism forms a continuous transformation function between the torus and the coffee mug, both objects are said to be homotopic just as the 2D sphere and the horned sphere can be converted into one another without tearing or incising. Homotopy may also be applied when fine spaces or holes cannot be accounted by via homology or by examining features of the topological space that lack a boundary and are not boundaries in themselves.

Dark Matter- A Standard Model of Cosmology

We lie off-centre in the disk that is our Milky Way. A crowd of a hundred thousand million stars, accompanied by globular clusters embedded in a galactic halo kilo-parsecs across. We are part of the local group, a community of galaxies with our closest neighbor, the Canis Major Dwarf and our twin, Andromeda. And while a GPS won't get you far in an increasingly homogeneous and isotropic universe, we are only beginning to peel back the layers of the cosmic onion. We see it's expansion via the receding of galaxies, the meandering of supernovae through standard candles and their speeds by their red-shift. But an anomaly remains on how to account for the accelerated expansion in conjunction with attractive gravity. Dark matter is the 'stuff' of the universe that pulls things together via its attractive gravity and boasts thirty percent of it. It's dark, bleak and invisible but when you consider the cluster dynamics of galaxies for instance, there seems to be more mass determined by velocity rather than what can be accounted by with observation. Gravitational lensing also hints it's existence where the curvature of space-time near a mass deflects light and distorts images of background galaxy clusters. We can rest assured that non-baryonic WIMPS, weakly interacting massive particles, are the ideal candidates for exotic dark matter species as opposed to baryonic MACHOS or massive compact halo objects. There may even be no dark matter but rather modified Newtonian mechanics on an intergalactic scale, rogue planets, black holes or even mass challenged dwarf stars. On the flip side, dark energy pushes things apart, exhibits a repulsive gravity and brags seventy percent of the cosmos. An all pervading fluid as envisioned by the Friedman-Robertson-Walker models will be a source of positive pressure at every single point and would drive deceleration of expansion, however dark energy exerts negative pressure to accelerate expansion as inferred from CMB anisotropies. Think of the Casimir effect, when two closely partitioned metallic plates in a vacuum attract each other, arising from the influence that the plates exhibit on the space between them and the effective negative pressure produced. Indeed Einstein's 'greatest blunder' may be a contender for dark energy; matter and energy under the cosmological constant will not be impaired by expansion but would remain uniform and release negative pressure. Moreover, the energy of the quantum vacuum may be another contender; given that vacuum energy is intrinsic to the vacuum, it won't be diluted by expansion and would exert the required negative pressure. Finally, cosmology is topped off with inflation; the hot big bang model presents two unique limitations: the flatness and horizon problems. Stated simply, the universe is essentially flat with a curvature parameter k of 0, the CMB is the same temperature in all directions and Grand Unified Theories predict an abundance of relic magnetic monopoles. Inflationary cosmology tells the tale 10^-36 seconds after the bang where the scale factor of the universe inflated exponentially, solving the problems by smoothing out any rough edges and separating regions with the same temperature across large distances and diluting any relic particles. The source of cosmic energy for such an initial singularity may be resolved via t=0, given that the total energy of the universe is 0 as the gravitational field has a negative quantity; thus cancelling out. And the universe is largely a 'nothing' for 'nothing' phenomenon, we are merely a speck in her finite yet unbound being.

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Morphic Resonance- The Presence of the Past

They are the organising fields of self-organising systems. The habitual blueprints of pattern and form and the inherent collective memory strung across space and time. Morphic resonance remains a hypothesis of formative causation, one where the field concept is extended upon the biological realm and presents an evolutionary account of instincts and behaviors. One where the laws of nature become manifestations of acquired habits, where developing embryos become products of an architectural, morphogenetic plan and one where flocks of birds and schools of fish orient themselves in a seamless fashion via morphic fields. Just as a bar magnet can be split into infinitely many smaller magnets, each with their respective north and south poles; the holistic rather than mechanistic nature of living systems, especially in their developmental stages is reminiscent of the field. Matter is not fundamental to such fields but rather conversely fields are fundamental to matter.Take the embryonic development of species from flat and nematode worms to dragon flies and newts; terminating the growth of one half of the embryo will allow the other half to grow independent of it as if a mechanism beyond bilateral gene expression and modulation is vested. Willow tree cuttings and amputated newts grow readily as if a morphology in the form of a field, where nested hierarchies of holons centered on lower level systems govern their self-organising behavior. Morphic resonance is the inference from similar patterns of form acting on subsequent patterns of activity, a kind of collective unconscious comparable to that proposed by Jung. If rats in San Francisco learn a new trick then rats in London should learn such a trick more readily and with ease; similarly, the synthesis of a new crystalline compound more often yields easier crystallisation rates in the future. Such phenomena may be deduced from the presence of the past, a sort of collective-rat memory, a morphic field rather than coincidence or fragments travelling on the beards of migrant chemists. Homoeotic mutations in Drosophila fruit flies produces extra wings in the place of halteres, such a tuning into the morphic field of the fly revisits the heresy of heredity whereby acquired traits may have the potential to be inherited. Indeed the anthropocentric notion of physical laws or constants are somewhat outrun by the idea of habits, verily human laws evolve and change with time and so could the laws of nature arise via habitual means of non-local reinforcement of similarity and natural selection. Similarly, the same means by which a magnetic field stretches beyond the horizon of a magnet and the gravitational field of the sun reaches out to keep the planets in orbit; the extended mind reaches out beyond the vicinity of the physical brain, a morphic field between minds and thoughts. But in the long run, the ascent of alternative hypotheses rather than merely mechanistic truisms spells a resonance of morphic proportions.

Ethology- Monkey See Monkey Do

Like kamikaze fighters, the worker bees swing into action to protect the sacred hive and its colonists; but like cowards, the emperor penguins stand on the edge of the water before diving, fearing the predatory seals. Meanwhile, the copulating female praying mantises eat the heads of their male partners; earning both a meal some transient satisfaction. And while the animal kingdom blooms with elegance and symmetry, there remains the finer corners and corridors of animal behaviour; tales of altruism and selfishness, deception and cooperation and epics of courtship and play. For unlike the behaviourist, with his laboratory of habitation, the ethologist is at the crux of the self-organising societies of the birds and bees. Consider instinct with its appetitive and consummated stages, a cocktail of environmental cues and temporary satisfaction; in this regard, the leopard frog orients itself to catch a fly using a the fixed-action-pattern of the flick of the tongue. And Lorenz's greylag goose fixes and orients itself in rolling its egg round its nest, remove the egg and it she will resume the tucking beak movements but cease the side-to-side manoeuvres that kept the egg straight. Such genetically centred, innate patterns of instinctive behaviour, born and bred via natural selection forms a treasury of parables and allegories that the ethologist enquires. But even the most rudimentary acts of play by juvenile polar bears, young red foxes or even female moose and their young has been subject to anthropomorphic interpretations, yet is a form of learning posing as a social function with a consummated goal such as food and pleasure. Likewise we observe the contrasting faces of selfishness and altruism; for if the selfish genes deploy the paradoxical yet altruistic behaviour as seen in cooperative fishing by cormorants and pelicans as well as the defensive herding by muskoxen and yaks around vulnerable females, than we must revamp the paradigm that both are mutually exclusive. Indeed courtship and the reproductive behaviours of animals is worth noting, where persuasion and strategy influenced by the sexual dimorphism is driven the maximise the reproductive success of the species. And as we converge on the incessant courtship of albatrosses, with their 'sky-calling' and 'bill-clappering'; as well as the glamorous dance of the peacock, we see a common convergence. Aggression and the clash for territorial 'real estate' demonstrates the sheer extent that troops of chimpanzees, packs of hyenas and especially Male sea elephants resort to; in order that the combatant instills his brawn, leaving the weaker to retreat. And above all, the learning and conditioning of species played out by the synergy and interplay of their environment with their appetitive or consumated behaviours hints the intersection between ethology and behaviorism. Simply reconcile the habituation of a reef fish with its neighbors, the unconditioned response invoking a conditioned behavior in Pavlov's dogs or even Skinner's rats. There's a definite correlate between animal behavior and some respective adaptations; take Kramer's orientation cage as a final example, where navigation by birds is made contingent by learned patterns of migration as revealed by subjecting birds to an artificial light-dark schedule and following their migratory patterns. And indeed such patterns are reminiscent of the order and symmetry that is in nature per se; for if animal behavior becomes intelligible via ethology than we are one among many.

Quantum Field Theory- A Matrix of Symmetries

It's a matrix of symmetries spun round a sum over histories. An extrapolation of the law of conservation of weirdness upon particles upon fields with infinite degrees of freedom. For like the weather, with its fields of temperature and wind and like the orchestra, with fields of soft passages and abrupt chords; it presents a grand region of quantised influence. Quantum field theory persists as the most matured form of quantum mechanics; a regime of particles, groups and symmetries; a field formulation that has a value at every point in space and solutions that are nothing short of baffling. Its appeal to symmetries as an 'invariance under a specified group of transformations' means that some operation can be executed on a quantum system leaving it indiscernible from its starting state. For instance the standard model; which can be geometrically quantised in terms of fiber bundles and lie groups, has individual fibres or figures attached at every point in space-time each relating to a different type of particle. The resulting symmetry groups are U(1), consisting of circles at every spacetime point for electromagnetism, SU(2) for the weak interaction, SU(3) for the strong force and potentially Spin(1,3) for gravity. Some basic formalisms are QED; the field theory of electromagnetic vacuum perturbation along with QCD; the field theory of the strong force mediated by gluons upon quarks. QCD allows quarks to share confinement, colour charge and encounter asymptotic freedom at high energies (a paradoxical phenomenon that causes weaker attaction between quarks as distance increases). QED is quite distinct given its single charge and a less energetic response of photons to electric charge compared to the trinity of colour charges for quarks and the vigorous response of gluons to each other, making the prospects for a photon lightsaber bleak! Moreover, the precise calculation of the Lamb shift (a tiny spliting in energy values between the 2s and 2p states of the hydrogen atom) and the anomaly of the electron's magnetic dipole moment (the value of a particle that determines the force that it may release upon electric currents and the torque that a magnetic field will exert on it) are among the most accurate of predictions in quantum field theory. If you picture an electron dipped in a magnetic field, it's intrinsic spin gives it a magnetic moment producing an energy of interaction which is dependant on the angle between the direction of the imposed magnetic field and the electron's own magnetic field. Aligning the two fields will produce a low energy, opposing them will produce a high energy and at intermediary angles the energy level will differ between these values. So accurate these calculations are that in fact some common sense notions breakdown such as 'nothing'. Nothing becomes the lowest energy state of a physical theory, Maxwell's equations may describe the electric field in the classical sense but if we reduce its total energy to 0, it disappears and a vacuum is all that remains. The quantum field theory description however reveals a sea of fluctuations due to the uncertainty principle, a quantum 'vacuum' where virtual and anti-particles transiently pop in and out of existence from nothing from the instability of empty space. Such a redefinition provides the basis for explaining quantum phase transitions such as superconductivity expounded by the BCS theory. The idea that Cooper pairs or twins of electrons act distinctly from 'singlets' governed by the exclusion principle, they act in a way that resembles bosons, condensing into the same energy level leading to the inhibition of the collision reactions that cause resistance; thus causing a infinite flow of current. And above all, the magic of spontaneous symmetry breaking is an phenomenon worth mentioning whereby small, infinitesimal changes influencing a quantum system cause a sort of exhange between order and chaos resulting in a compromise. Basically like a pencil balanced on its tip which has symmetry in that it looks indistinguishable from its starting state if rotated along a vertical axis (an overall symmetry of the gravtitational field); but its instability causes the breaking of the symmetry and the pencil to collapse into an asymmetric horizontal state. Or like a Mexican sombrero?