Finally, some science at LANL

John Singleton and colleagues created a set of electrical circuits that generated a EM wavefront that moved at greater than the speed of light. Since the particles that generated this EM wave were not moving faster than light, relativity was not violated. The wave that was generated this way propagated and follow the expected behavior of EM waves moving at the speed of light.

Demand driven blog

If people put up comments, I will put up new posts.

The retirement of LANL: the rest of the story

If people want to continue to post information about LANL once the other blog closes, they can post it here.

Beyond the standard civility constraints of a blog, here are the rules.

1. I am not posting things to fill up space.
2. I will post things that are relevant to the future of LANL workers and Northern New Mexico.
3. If someone wants to help out, I welcome it.
   
4. Non substantive comments will be deleted
5. Anonymous postings or comments are allowed.
6. Non anonymous postings and comments are much preferred.
7. Ad hominem attacks will never get posted as comments.
   

Science leaving LANL

I am getting more and more requests for physicists, mathematicians, and computer programmers--the kind who used to be at LANL.

The requesters are offering jobs in interesting industries.

I am trying out a new blog, Getting there from here.
This one will be disassembled. Pieces may show up on the new one.

The two main rationales for the new blog are:

1. Very little cutting edge science that I care about is being done at LANL anymore. I can't see a rejuvenation of cutting edge science at LANL.
2. There are lots of new science topics to discuss and lots of ways to make a blog more effective, ways that cannot be implemented well on either Facebook or Twitter.

We will see how this effort turns out.

Memory and locality

A while ago, I put up a post about how the workings of memory all had to be local.

I have had a working prototype for about a year now. Mostly this prototype is letting me keep track of references, documents, pictures, etc. in a flexible, dynamic, non-database format.

Each operation that I do each day is local to the folder that I am in. The operations change many things when viewed globally, but I as a user am not aware of this global structure nor do I need to be aware of it. The local actions accomplish all that I need.

Pretty cool.

(As you may guess, details of what is going on are shared privately and not on this blog.)

Science not at LANL

Since last fall, I have ignored this blog and my other ones.

The reason: I am starting two new companies, Efficient Engines and Cognitive Architectures for Learning. The first company is making a highly efficient engine for the power industry. This engine will run on solar or other fuels and will, initially, come in 20 and 40 MW sizes. The second company is in final testing of software/hardware based on a clear understanding of human memory. This product is unobtrusive and appears to go faster than the nominal quantum limit. The first application will allow people's computers to appear to run much faster.

I follow this blog.

If you want more information than is here, email or call me.

Cheers

Science?

We may be getting to a turning point at LANL, a turning point for the better.


We should know in a month or so.

Images

A standard image can be considered to be a two dimensional set of pixels. In a black and white image, each pixel can have any of 256 values.

This description of an image can be extended in a number of ways. First, we can assign 4 pixels to each point of the image. If one of the pixels corresponds to the original black and white sensing pixel and the other three have frequency dependence maximized at red, green, and blue, then we can create a standard color image.

The image can be extended into more dimensions by assigning values to the dimensions and to the pixels within each dimension. The images that a normal human body creates, second by second, appear to be these high dimensional, large number of sensors, images.

Then the brain has to extract meaning, in real time, from these complex images.

Renewable energy

It is interesting to me how far apart news reports, which act as if the country could run on solar or wind power tomorrow, and reality are. In reality, coal and oil will dominate (86%) energy production for decades.

Walter Skotchdopole

In today's New Scientist, there is an article about Walter Skotchdopole who has Alzheimer's disease.

Walter was not functioning well and was disconnected from reality.

Then he was treated with an anti-inflammatory drug normally used to treat arthritis.

His brain works much better.

Why does reduction in inflammation increase the clarity of thought?

Nanoinks

Long ago, I did a traditional undergraduate physical chemistry experiment. I made a monolayer of of material that floated on water, a Langmuir Blodgett film. The molecules that formed this monolayer had polar groups at one end, alcohols or organic acids, and non polar groups at the other end, usually hydrocarbons. The polar groups would all align next to the water layer while the non polar groups would be as far away from the water layer as chemical bonding would allow.

If I make two layers of the molecules on water, and do a couple of other tricks, I get bilayers, often lipid bilayers the stuff of cell walls.

Now this monolayer approach has been taken a step further. If I pattern the monolayer, by binding the lipid end to a nanopatterned stamp, a stamp created by electron beam etching of a polymerized siloxane (see Xia and Whitesides for a good review), I get a patterned layer instead of a uniform monolayer.

This patterned layer can act as a coating, similar to a photoresist, to allow the nano pattern to be reproduced on a new surface. The lipids, actually amphilic molecules, are now called nanoinks and can be used to create surfaces that are very expensive to create by traditional methods such as e-beam carving.

New topics

1. Micron level flow patterns
2. New composites
3. Young's modulus
4. Neurobiology
5. Genetics of sensory systems
6. Multiphase complex systems
7. Control systems
8. Digital photography
   

Apropos the demise of world class science at LANL

"This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper."

T.S. Eliot "The Hollow Men"

Makeover

This blog will get a makeover, not an extreme makeover but sort of a sashay makeover. Since, for the most part science at LANL has either died or is on life support, the blog will be retitled something fun like 'Cool technical shit' and will be devoted to parts of cutting edge science from whatever source.

Maybe there should be a memorial party for science at LANL, everyone can be anonymous and not come. ;-D

Memristors

Anyone out there understand the functioning of memristors and is willing to share?

Science at LANL 2

The engine project, the learning and memory project and the photography projects are going well and are consuming most of my science time.

The history of Los Alamos

Photography is one of the things that I do. At the moment, I am making a CD showing the history of Los Alamos from the settlements by early Pueblo people through now.

I am looking for suggestions about the optimal way to lay out this CD and present the information to buyers. If you want to help me or just see the progress on the CD or see other pictures, follow the link above.

Projects breaking

The projects on novel engines, learning and memory, and photography are getting much more serious. They are improving daily.

I am looking for people across a range of skill sets to help make the projects go faster. If you have skills that may be useful or if you just want to know more about what the projects are, contact me soon.

I moved to Los Alamos long ago to be part of projects that were this exciting and moved at this speed. Now, I am. It is very exciting.

Later.

Progress

1. The prototype for learning and memory is running well and quickly.
2. The alternative engine stuff has also progressed far and is courting investment dollars.
   

B mesons

In today's New Scientist, there is an article about flipping particles.

B mesons consist of a bottom quark and an anti-strange quark. It turns out that the bottom becomes an anti-strange and the anti-strange becomes a bottom. This exchange occurs one trillion times a second. The change appears to be mediated by some boson that noone has seen before.

The exchange violates CP conservation.

So the standard model of particle physics may need revision.

Alternative energy institute

I went to a meeting yesterday and talked with Miro about an alternative energy institute that is forming in Espanola. Miro is knowledgeable, serious, and driven. He is looking for talent.

There is a lot of talent in Los Alamos that could help institute become a major player nationwide.

A kaon

I am still thinking about particle physics. Things are getting 'curiouser and curiouser.'

Stenger was one of the first few people to see the tracks left by a kaon (for instance, a particle talked about as the fusion of an anti-strange and a down quark). Tracks, however, like those left by a fox in the snow, are what are seen after the fox is gone not while the fox is around.

The length of a kaon track (ignoring relativistic effects) is 10^-15 seconds long. So this particle does not exist for very long. If I think of the track a little more, then I notice that the track has footprints in it. The first set of footprints is the footprints of the down quark going forward in time. Right next to these footprints are the footprints of the anti-strange quark coming the other way. The footprints are right next to each other. They are apparently held next to each other by a depression in the snow-the nuclear strong force.

Where these quarks come from and where they go after this little stroll down the same trail in the snow, I don't know. Why the antistrange appears at the right time and does the pas de deux with the down, I also do not know.

Can anyone help me with some comprehension?

Particles and the void

Another insight from Stenger.

All that exists are particles and the void. There are photons, leptons, and bosons. There may be gravitons. These particles all interact with each other at the speed of light and follow SU3 symmetry. Beyond these particles, nothing else exists. The fields that were presented in introductory physics - electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields, temperature fields - do not exist only the particle-particle interactions do. Calculus is not reality but is a pre-computer approximation of reality. Calculus helped scientists make progress on understanding reality before we had large computers that help us understand reality faster.

A high energy anti-photon (a photon moving backward in time and having negative energy) can knock an electron backwards in time (giving the electron negative energy) making it appear as a positron in a detector.

The elephant and the event horizon

From Jeremy Susskind at Stanford by way of New Scientist.

If you drop an elephant with a rider on it into a black hole, an observer outside the black hole sees the elephant not go through the event horizon. The rider on the elephant safely goes through the event horizon.

The elephant is 'actually' in both places, even if the places are many light years apart.

Part of the underlying theory comes from Juan Maldacenas and includes holographic projections of the universe.

Space time

I am now into Stenger's book as far as the topics of conservation of energy, angular momentum, etc.
The last chapter was on the summation over all possible histories that would constitute an observed event.
It is disconcerting that the only real way to consider these events is to remove the axes from the drawing so that time and the other directions are equivalent and so that 'forward' time and 'reverse' time are interchangeable.

It is going to take a while for these new perspectives to sink in.

Virtual particles is another difficult concept for me.

Timeless reality

I am reading a book, Timeless Reality, by Victor Stenger, the former head of the physics department at the University of Hawaii.

From the point of view of the history of physics; especially quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics, and beyond; it is a fascinating book. I never understood why there were terms in quantum mechanics that went to infinity and that were set to 0. Now, I do, sort of. I never understood the sum over histories approach to quantum interactions. Now, I do, sort of.

The book is slow reading because it is technically dense. The author assumes that the readers know most of philosophy and much of current quantum physics. There are probably not many readers who know these things at the depth that the author assumes a reader should have.

There is another story in the book, a post modern story, a story that has been played out in Los Alamos since the '40s. In this story, individual theoretical physicists are the heroes of mankind going on their mathematical journey to find 'reality.' In this story, none of the rest of the universe--people, trees, families, money, society exists. World War II is covered in less than a paragraph. It was an event that distracted theoretical physicists from the pursuit of reality. Chemistry, biology, et al. are dismissed in a single line (of a 400 page book). Experimentalists are dismissed as necessary servants of the philosopher king - the theoretical physicist.

An interesting part, to me, and to steal Wojciech Zurek's notion of decoherence, is that an initial state of theoretical physicist kings supported by peons (the rest of us) established in the '40s will decay (with 100% certainty) to the Los Alamos that we see today. Entities like LockMart, Congress, LANS, Nanos, Agnew, etc. are the agents in the decay (like the atoms that make Brownian motion); but they are not the cause of the decay. These agents determine the rate of decay when viewed day by day but not when viewed decade by decade. The cause of the decay, just as the cause of time's apparent arrow, is the initial condition of the system--the inflation of the power of theoretical physicists in a new small town in New Mexico in the 1940s. The decay itself comes from the interaction of this isolated town with a changing earth outside the town.

Comments?

Fun

Over the last two weeks, I focused on non-LANL things.

So, this weekend I went to the East coast to raise some money for a new company that will produce a breakthrough engine.

I had fun.

Complex transformation

I have been asked to comment on transformation of the nuclear weapons complex. I have an environmental impact statement draft to comment on. If you want to help, let me know.

More details at the workingatlanl blog.

A cautionary tale

A number of people have commented that Director Anastasio should be removed. Here is an example from the Los Angeles Times of what happens when the leader resists firing people. The leader is fired and replaced with a leader who will fire people.

LANL Science

One person on LANL:The Rest of the Story started to list science successes. He or she listed mostly big projects that failed and that were directly weapons related. Here are some that I know about and that succeeded. Please add to the list.

1. The many R&D 100 award winning projects
2. Secure labels
3. The Human Genome Project
4. Parts of the biology of radiation damage
5. Numerous approaches and computer codes in fluid dynamics
6. Single molecule detection
7. Preparation of organic compounds with labeled isotopes
8. GenBank
9. Lots of physics in the '70s.
10. Plutonium chemistry
11. High end machining
12. Supercritical extraction and cleaning
13. Near field microscopy
14. Designing or testing much of leading edge computer hardware and software
15. High speed computer networks
16. Accurate predictions from very large simulations of physical processes
17. Novel photonic materials
18. High field magnet studies
19. Low temperature magnetic studies of the brain
20. Weather forecasting
21. Wildfire forecasting
22. Detailed models of combustion in automobiles
23. High density energy storage
24. Fuel cell design
25. Anyons
26. Modeling of the evolution of the universe
27. Desktop based supercomputers
28. Radio frequency identification
29. Quantum gravity
30. Quark dynamics
31. Detailed analysis of world energy usage
32. Highest speed computer network data transmission
33. Computer security
34. Computer operating systems
35. Beryllium, uranium and plutonium chemistry
36. Space weather
37. Sensors of many kinds
38. Satellite design, especially sensors and now using FPGAs
39. hot dry rocks
40. Bioinformatics
41. The large number of former LANL staff (TSMs, technicians, post docs, and students) who have been successful elsewhere.
42. Approximately $30,000,000,000 into Northern New Mexico that would have gone elsewhere.
43. The atom bomb
44. The hydrogen bomb
45. The subterfuge that was Star Wars (the physics was not possible but the politics worked)
46. Using LANL as a backdrop to intimidate bad guys around the world.
47. Various aspects of superconductivity
48. An understanding of gamma ray bursts
49. Various aspects of building and understanding nanotubes
50. Models of the flow of heat and materials in the earth's core.
    

This is just a start. I am adding more continuously. Some of the topics are directly science, others are a mixture of science, politics, academics, and business.

Cleaning up uranium contamination

Here is an article from New Scientist on a large organic molecule, a macrocycle, that can trap uranium ions and, possibly, remove them from solution. The authors' next ion target is plutonium.

Driving out the talented

Here is an article from Slate. It talks about the Army losing young talented officers who would like to make the Army better.

It seems that I have heard this story before. Last time I heard it the story was about National Labs.

Global science cities

For those who want Los Alamos to become stronger in cutting edge science, listen to this week's Scientific American podcast or read the February issue of the magazine. Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University has gotten a monkey in North Carolina to use the pattern of neural firings in its brain to control a robot in Japan and make it walk.

Nicolelis is establishing science cities around the world and talking at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Nicolelis wants to show the potential of bringing up children to reach their potential mental capabilities. The first city will be in Natal in the northeast corner of Brazil.

New posts

I have ignored this blog for a while. I have been working on doing science.

Some of the projects that I have been working on are:

1. Placing scientists and technicians in other jobs.
2. Using the working prototype of 'learning and memory' to get tasks done very quickly.
3. Designing and building a much more efficient engine.
4. Finding out whether Major League Baseball really wants a detector for Human Growth Hormone or not.
5. Completing the next CDs of pictures of the area.
   

In all of these tasks, I need more people to talk to and to help to make things. If you are interested in learning what is going on or in helping some of these tasks go faster, let me know.

More jobs

CEO, COO, CSO, CTO and many others.

Some require technical backgrounds. Many don't.

A few are local.

Many of them require a strong work ethic, a willingness to learn new skills, a consistent meeting of hard deadlines, and ambition.

The reward structures for the jobs appear to be good.

I moved this to the top again. There are still lots of openings. I am filling them from beyond Los Alamos for lack of enough local applicants.

Per request - My phone is 505-662-3115. My email is eric.fairfield@gmail.com

Updated

Learning and memory 2

A couple of years ago, when I had this insight about how learning and memory might work, I went "Ah, this is really interesting and not like computer science."

Now that I am building and running various models of learning and memory, I realize that:

1. My insight of two years ago was good but naive.
2. The brain works in ways for which there are few words that function well in describing it.
   

hgh

Thanks to the people who contacted me. I had the phone conference. The next step appears to be starting talks with Olympic testing laboratories.

A Los Alamos Research Institute

Over the years, I have talked with people, locally and non-locally, about establishing a research institute similar to Bell Labs or the Roche Institute.

With the layoffs, this discussion has started up again.

If you want to be part of the current discussion, contact me.

An immediate need

I have an immediate need for information on detecting human growth hormone and steroids, either the biology or the instrumentation.

I need to know more than I do by about 8AM tomorrow morning.

Thanks.