(Fermi Lab) scientist Don Lincoln describes the nature of the Higgs boson. Several large experimental groups are hot on the trail of this elusive subatomic particle ,which is thought to explain the origins of particle mass.
Katy Perry "sold her soul" (traded in her ideals for material success) after a strict Christian upbringing. Her words are dubbed out of context.
(CIRvideos) New life is breathed into one of the oldest criminal enterprises -- the trafficking of humans into sexual slavery. Thousands of Eastern European women have been sold into prostitution. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova investigates this rarely documented journey at priceofsex.org.
(Huffington Post) Tons of radioactive garbage coming to US from Japanese tsunami
Why are we here? It remains one of the most perplexing unexplained mysteries of the universe. But particle physicists are gaining more confidence in a result from an atom smashing experiment that could be a step toward providing an answer: We exist because the universe is full of matter and not the opposite, so-called antimatter. When the Big Bang occurred, equal parts of both should have been created and immediately annihilated each other, leaving nothing leftover to build the stars, planets, and us. More
During insight meditation the body becomes transparent and particles become visible in the mind door (Buddhist-images.co.uk) Why do "we" exist? (Buddhism answers) Dharmachari Seven (Wisdom Quarterly) Of course, ultimately speaking, we do not. That is what it means to say all conditioned things are impersonal (not self, anatta). What are "conditioned things"? They are the constituents of being, of clinging, of the delusion that things are self, permanent, or able to bring lasting satisfaction. It should be more obvious that there is a self. But what is the nature of that self?
Self, soul, ego, personality, "I" all refer to five functionally integrated components -- the physical and the psychological. The physical or material components of the self are the four characteristics of matter (called the Great Elements, mahabhuta). They further break down to what is called derived materiality* that make the sense organs, which are just configurations of the Four Great Elements. All of this is referred to as one group labelled "form."
The other Five Aggregatesfeel closer -- sensations, perceptions, mental formations (such as volition), and consciousness. They cling to the illusion of a "self" independent of them, in possession of them, controlling them. The self originates dependent on them. The illusion of our actual existence arises dependently originated on the aggregation of these five groups of factors. That is the self (soul, atta, atman, I, me, mine)! But what is the nature of the self? Looked at closely -- in a particle physics lab (in the case of form and kalapas) or in a meditation hall after emerging from the four absorptions (in the case of consciousness and cittas) -- it becomes perfectly clear that they are:
impersonal (not subject to control, following their own nature, not able to be clung to, dependent on karma, not self, not me, not mine, devoid of an owner and in that sense "empty").
It is completely incorrect to say we are "nothing." What we call a "self" is composed of many things. However, as with all "things," the composite is not what it seems.
Under the penetrating analysis of meditation (for purifying concentration and analytical insight, jhana and vipassana), even form is revealed. In Buddhist physics, form is seen as kalapas ("particles of perception") as explained in the Abhidharma. In Buddhist psychology, the aggregates of self-awareness are called cittas (mind moments, processes, consciousnesses, which make the most sense to me as being comparable to neuronal impulses, bearing in mind that there are neurons in the heart and throughout the gut as well as the spine, nerves innervating the body, and concentrating in the brainstem and cavity of the skull but in no way limited to the skull).
Why? What is impelling the process, what causes the "self" to re-arise after passing away? Karma. This is not a guess. It is revealed by the insight-meditation practice of Dependent Origination, tracing back this life through the chain of causation, which the mind discovers is not in this life. It is not the same self -- which is passing away all the time -- but a self dependent past causes and present conditions.
Meditation (virtue, concentration, insight) is the key to realization.
Moral of the Story All of this is directly, personally verifiable. We don't own a large hadron collider; yet, it is possible for the mind to be collected and intensified (through optimal-concentration, samma-samadhi) to discern kalapas. None of this is to be taken on faith. None of this is dogma. It is all experiential. And this is sure: If one does not make the effort to realize the Truth (not "learn" it or "believe" but realize it for oneself), whatever the Truth is, one will not become enlightened or liberated from ignorance and illusion. Without liberation, disappointment is certain (not eventually but in every moment).
Is it a coincidence that science suddenly came around on the possibility of time travel? CERN retarted the L.H.C. in 2009 (newtech.aurum3.com).
(Physorg.com) If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider -- the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year -- could be the first machine capable causing matter to travel backwards in time.
“Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.”
One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.
According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.
“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”
Large Hadron Collider cutaway graphic (science.howstuffworks.com)
Unsticking the “brane” The test of the researchers’ theory will be whether the physicists monitoring the collider begin seeing Higgs singlet particles and their decay products spontaneously appearing. If they do, Weiler and Ho believe that they will have been produced by particles that travel back in time to appear before the collisions that produced them.
Weiler and Ho’s theory is based on M-theory, a “theory of everything.” A small cadre of theoretical physicists have developed M-theory to the point that it can accommodate the properties of all the known subatomic particles and forces, including gravity, but it requires 10 or 11 dimensions instead of our familiar four. This has led to the suggestion that our universe may be like a four-dimensional membrane or “brane” floating in a multi-dimensional space-time called the “bulk.”
According to this view, the basic building blocks of our universe are permanently stuck to the brane and so cannot travel in other dimensions. There are some exceptions, however. Some argue that gravity, for example, is weaker than other fundamental forces because it diffuses into other dimensions. Another possible exception is the proposed Higgs singlet, which responds to gravity but not to any of the other basic forces. More>>
UFOs and Nuclear Sites [just happen to coincide] UFO researcher Robert Hastings discussed declassified documents, as well as witness testimony that confirms UFO incursions at nuclear weapons sites, weapons laboratories, and bomb test sites. UFO activity accelerated after WWII, around the time that the testing and deploying of nuclear weapons began in America. Initially, the premise was that the unidentified craft were Soviet devices, though Hastings became convinced “we’re dealing with multiple races from multiple worlds.” He said he’s had contact with over 100 military employees who knew of UFO activity that occurred when they worked at various facilities between 1964 and 1996.
God, also known as Yahweh, had a wife named Asherah, according to a British theologian.
Amulets, figurines, inscriptions, and ancient texts, including the Bible, reveal Asherah's once prominent standing.
Asherah's connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.
God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshiped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar. In 1967, Raphael Patai was the first historian to mention that the ancient Israelites worshiped both Yahweh and Asherah.
God's consort, Goddess of the Sea, mother of Baal, this Asherah figurine was discovered in Nahariyeh, Israel. King Mannasseh introduced Israel to her worship (2 Kings 21). The Hebrew word is often translated as "groves" in KJV (abu.nb.ca).
The theory has gained new prominence due to the research of Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who began her work at Oxford and is now a senior lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter. Information presented in Stavrakopoulou's books, lectures and journal papers has become the basis of a three-part documentary series, now airing in Europe, where she discusses the Yahweh-Asherah connection.
"You might know him as Yahweh, Allah, or God. But on this fact, Jews, Muslims, and Christians, the people of the great Abrahamic religions, are agreed: There is only one of Him," writes Stavrakopoulou in a statement released to the British media. "He is a solitary figure, a single, universal creator, not one God among many... or so we like to believe."
"After years of research specializing in the history and religion of Israel, however, I have come to a colorful and what could seem, to some, uncomfortable conclusion that God had a wife," she added.
Abrahamic religions violently turned on their Goddess (northernway.org)
Stavrakopoulou bases her theory on ancient texts, amulets, and figurines unearthed primarily in the ancient Canaanite coastal city called Ugarit, now modern-day Syria. All of these artifacts reveal that Asherah was a powerful fertility goddess.
Asherah's connection to Yahweh, according to Stavrakopoulou, is spelled out in both the Bible and an 8th century B.C. inscription on pottery found in the Sinai desert at a site called Kuntillet Ajrud.
"The inscription is a petition for a blessing," she shares. "Crucially, the inscription asks for a blessing from 'Yahweh and his Asherah.' Here was evidence that presented Yahweh and Asherah as a divine pair. And now a handful of similar inscriptions have since been found, all of which help to strengthen the case that the God of the Bible once had a wife."
Also significant, Stavrakopoulou believes, "is the Bible's admission that the goddess Asherah was worshiped in Yahweh's Temple in Jerusalem. In the Book of Kings, we're told that a statue of Asherah was housed in the temple and that female temple personnel wove ritual textiles for her." More>>
Illustration of the God particle, Higgs boson (dailygalaxy.com)
(TOI) Has the Holy Grail of physics finally been found? The internet is abuzz with rumors that the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, US, has found the Higgs boson — nicknamed the "God particle" — after Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist at the University of Padua in Italy wrote in his blog that there has been talk coming out of the Illinois laboratory that the Higgs has been discovered.
The Higgs boson, believed to give all other particles in the universe their mass, is called the "God particle," because scientists believe finding it — or even proving that it exists — can help explain how the universe came into being.
In ‘‘Rumors about a light Higgs,’’ a post on Science20.com, Dorigo says: ‘‘It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result.’’ More>>
US scientists create cloth that can listen (AFP) This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase power dressing. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a cloth that can hear and emit noise. The team, led by MIT professor Yoel Fink, has reached "a new milestone on the path to functional fibers..." MIT said in a statement.
The "Science of Resilience" (NYT) Is the loss of language and culture connected to the extinction of plant and animal species in a globalized “epidemic of sameness”? Welcome to the “science of resilience” — an interdisciplinary study of the value of diversity in complex systems. In Seed magazine, Maywa Montenegro and Terry Glavin report on a growing effort to study the feedback loops of “linguistic, cultural, and biological extinction.”
Asteroid pictures: Battered world found in Lutetia National Geographic) Asteroid 21 Lutetia is exposed, craters and all, in a picture captured Saturday by the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft. Rosetta's close encounter with Lutetia revealed a battered world—a possible remnant from the birth of our solar system, astronomers say. To snap the above image, Rosetta swooped about 1,965 miles (3,162 kilometers) above Lutetia's surface. The image is the highest-resolution photo taken of the space rock, located more than 270 million miles (440 million kilometers) away from Earth, between Mars and Jupiter. (Watch a video of Rosetta's flyby.) More>>
Instead of meditating on the Four Elements (introduced below) and seeing for themselves, scientists have built a machine so we can all have a look. It's clumsy, but it's empirical. And it's much easier than the search for kalapas.
GENEVA -- A blip heard around the world: a blink of the computer screen and physicists everywhere (except perhaps Illinois) were celebrating. This blip was literally of cosmic proportions, representing a new tool to probe the birth of the universe.
The world's largest atom smasher passed its first test yesterday as physicists said their tool is almost ready to reveal how the tiniest particles [in Buddhist terms kalapasor hadrons] were first created after the "Big Bang," which is the theory that a massive explosion formed the elements, stars, planets, and everything else we see.
Rivals and friends in pajamas turned out at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, to watch the event via a special satellite connection. Joining in from around the world were other physicists — many of whom may one day work on the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC, pictured).
Tension mounted in the control rooms at CERN as scien-tists huddled around computer screens and fired protons through the 17-mile tunnel of the collider under-ground along the Swiss-French border. Then they celebrated. "The first technical challenge has been met," said a jubilant Robert Aymar, director-general of CERN, and went on:
"What you have just seen is the result of 20 years of effort. It all went like clockwork. Now it's for the physicists to show us what they can do. They are ready to go for discoveries...Man has always shown he wants to know where he comes from and where he will go, where the universe comes from and where it will go. So here we're looking at essential questions for mankind."
The CERN experiments could reveal more about various forms of matter including the theoretical "God particle" (Higgs-boson). And maybe next science will tackle the ocean's growing plastic waste problem.
Smaller colliders have been used for decades to study the makeup of the atom. Scientists once thought protons and neutrons were the smallest components of an atom's nucleus, but experiments have shown that protons and neutrons are made of quarks and gluons and that there are other forces and particles.
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists look at a computer screen during the switch on operation of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the Cern's press center near Geneva. Particle physicists were jubilant on Wednesday after the long-awaited startup of a mega-machine designed to expose secrets of the cosmos passed its first tests with flying colors (AFP/Pool/Fabrice Coffrini).
The LHC project was organized by 20 European member nations. It has attracted researchers from 80 nations. Some 1,200 of those researchers are from the US, an observer country and contributor. India, Japan, Canada, and Russia are also observers and major contributors.
The Eightfold Way: a classification of subatomic particles known as hadrons into groups on the basis of their symmetrical properties, the number of members of each group being 1, 8 (most frequently), 10, or 27.
The system was proposed in 1961 by the American physicistMurray Gell-Mann and the Israeli physicist Yuval Neʾeman. It is based on the mathematical symmetry group SU(3); however, the name of the system was suggested by analogy with the Eightfold Path of Buddhism because of the centrality of the number eight. One of the early triumphs of the Eightfold Way was the prediction of the existence of a heavy subatomic particle required to complete one of the groups.
The particle, called omega-minus, was discovered in 1964. That same year, Gell-Mann set forth the concept of quarks as the physical basis for the classification system, thereby establishing the foundation for the modern quark model of hadrons. See also quark.
The real meaning of Anicca is that "impermanence" or "decay" is the inherent nature of every-thing that exists in the universe — whether animate or inanimate.
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Kalapa, artist's conception
The Buddha taught that everything that exists at the material level is composed of kalapas. Kalapas are material units very much smaller than atoms, which die out immediately after they come into being. Each kalapa is a mass formed of the eight basic constituents of matter — the solid, liquid, calorific, and oscillatory, together with color, smell, taste, and nutriment. The first four are called primary qualities and are predominant in a kalapa. The other four are subsidiaries, dependent upon and springing from the former.
BUILDING BLOCKS
A kalapa is the minutest particle on the physical plane — still beyond the range of science today. It is only when the eight basic material constituents unite together that the kalapa is formed. In other words, the momentary collocation of these eight basic elements of behavior makes a human just for that moment, which in Buddhism is known as a kalapa. The life-span of a kalapa is termed a "moment," and a trillion such moments are said to elapse in the wink of an eye.
Kalapas are in a state of constant change, a perpetual flux. To the observer during insight meditation (vipassana) they can be felt as a stream of energy.
Moreover, according to Pa Auk Sayadaw (and many who have trained under him to directly experience kalapas such as Rasmussen & Snyder), it is possible to literally see and know kalapas and their constituents, that is, their four elemental and four subsidiary qualities. The Sayadaw is alive and teaching worldwide (currently in Barre, Massachusetts). But Buddhist physics goes further, pointing out aspects of matter directly relating to the human experience.
"Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form" is a famous expression from the discourse on the core of wisdom, or penetrative knowledge, that has "gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond" (Heart Sutra). It enters the realm of Buddhism's Higher Teaching (Abhidharma), which was exploring physics long before the Greeks (themselves influenced by Buddhism and other Indian philosophies) ever thought to search for the "atom" (kalapa = building block of matter).
There are underived elements, namely, the four primary qualities of matter (dhatu). And there are 24 derived (upada) or secondary phenomena. These will make very little sense to modern students of Western physics. But they suggest that what we see on a relative or conventional level is designed into the subatomic or most minute aspects of materiality. These derived/subsidiary qualities (such as taste or color, which we presume to be macro-level only) are already seen occurring at a micro or constituent level. This is what a meditator sees and directly knows. It is experiential rather than theoretical (the theory is merely recorded in the ancient texts and confirmed by practitioners). Buddhism itself, therefore, is more concerned with the successful practice of directly knowing and seeing than with any textbook discussion of the universe.
SPACE
Space (akasa-dhatu), interestingly, is also a derived quality of the material world. (There are two kinds, limited and boundless or finite and infinite). Limited space is the derived aspect of form already mentioned. "The space element has the characteristic of delimiting matter. Its function is to indicate the boundaries of matter....its manifestation consists of being untouched [by the Four Elements]... Its proximate cause is the matter delimited" (Path of Purification XIV,63).
Space (ajatakasa or anantakasa), more interestingly, that is unlimited, unentangled, unobstructed -- empty or hyperspace -- is the object of the First Immaterial Meditation (jhana). It corresponds to an actual, literal plane of existence called the Sphere of Boundless Space. [See WQ for the "31 Planes of Existence"]. Whether this actually exists in the universe is a matter of debate: The German scholar-monk, Ven. Nyanatiloka, deduces that since it is not included in an all-inclusive Commentarial summary of reality, it does not have objective (but only conceptual) existence. He goes on to point out that later Buddhist schools "regarded it as one of several unconditioned or uncreated states (asankhata dharma)" whereas Theravada Buddhism regards only nirvana as an "unconditioned" [i.e., without constituents] element.
Ulitmately, whether discussing a material form or a psychological "element" (sensation, perception, mental-formation, and consciousness) the same thing may be said. "It still remains a firm condition, an immutable fact, a fixed law that all formations [i.e., all conditioned phenomena] are radically impermanent (in constant flux), unsatisfactory, and impersonal (empty)." Therefore, for practical purposes but not ultimately, it matters what the LHC finds: hadrons, kalapas, the "God particle," a Black Hole on the French side of the border.
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