… Yucca Mountain radioactive storehouse…

Before George Bush Part II was elected (the first time), he opposed the creation of the Yucca Mountain mega-site. Less than one year after he took office, he approved its creation.

Yucca Mountain is the official dump site for all the long term radioactive waste in the United States located in the Nevada desert. It is supposed to be our “long term” solution to the problem of using nuclear fission to produce energy.

Nuclear energy production yields radioactive waste with very long half-lives. By long, I mean hundreds of thousands of years. When the EPA had to create a mandate to manage the Yucca site, it had to be put into effect for a term of one million years.

One million years!!!!

The site will remain toxic to all life for thousands of years and the government has tried to figure out a way to warn future generations and keep them far away from the contaminated radioactive “death zone”. In designing a warning sign that will withstand tens of thousands of years and still be understood by future civilizations, scientists involved with the project have some pretty tough limitations to overcome:

1. The physical materials used should have “little value,” so the markers themselves are not stolen.
2. It should be “non-linguistic” so it is not rooted in any particular culture or language.
3. The markers should convey a sense of “danger, foreboding, and dread.”
(from:lasvegasnow.com)

Some of the ideas that have been discussed include placing fields of inverted cones or spikes scattered across the site. I particularly like the sound the suggested “foreboding blocks”.

The idea of creating something now with the intention of scaring off future generations is destined to fail. Humans are curious creatures, and any strange looking objects sitting on top of a distant mountain are destined to attract a crowd … and maybe even a devout following.

One viable option would be to create and recruit a designated order of society charged with warning future generations against the dangers of Yucca Mountain. This could be done using the examples of the major surviving ancient religions as a model. Our government could fund the project initially (to atone for creating toxic waste that survives for eons in the first place). With an emphasis on self preservation and self sufficiency, it might survive for a while.

Simply creating a sign in sculpture or vague pictograms won’t cut it.

The information needs to evolve over time with the surrounding society. That is one thing our governement doesn’t really get.

Oh well … just hang a sign out and put up some pokey stuff that looks like cool post modern art from the 1980’s. That will keep the frog men in the year 37548 away!

… the scientific method …

Maybe you learned about it in high school … I don’t know. It’s the way in which most advances in sciences, technology and commercial products are made and I just wanted to go on record and say that I think that it’s missing something.

It goes something like this:

1) Pose a question
2) Compose a hypothesis
3) Experiment and collect data
4) Analyze data
5) Publish your results

This method has been used in some form or another for hundreds and hundreds of years. The progress of human knowledge has has proceeded on and on and now there are countless specialized fields of study. The many branches of science spread out growing new tendrils every day.

This fits with the goal or purpose of the scientific method; to break down observable phenomena into its constituent pieces. The pieces get smaller and smaller until all the ingredients are distilled into primary components.

The problem is … we keep finding small and smaller pieces that make up the universe, and the laws that bind them together become increasingly strange. Our understanding of the universe becomes increasing complex in order to explain the ultimate simplicity - a Grand Unified Theory.

Our knowledge is becoming more compartmentalized, instead of melding together. The scientific method does not allow for creative leaps of intuition or flashes of insight. Instead, it depends upon a rigorously plotted course of action based on experimentally proven data aimed towards a foreseeable end.

Avenues of science come into being, grow, and are sometimes discarded if they don’t fit into the current structure of belief. But so much of science depends upon the ability of the individual to conceptualize something outside the scope of what is believed to be true. I don’t want to venture too much further down the philosophical path … but let me just say this:

Today, scientists are taught the fundamentals of known physics and mathematics, how to follow proper experimental procedure, and how to formalize research findings … ect.. No one teaches you the importance of being creative, how to form conjecture, or how to pursue the unknown in an unorthodox or personal manner.

Maybe you can’t teach these things. Maybe you’re born with that certain “spark of genius”. But I have a feeling that’s what the one group of cavemen was thinking about the other group of cavemen that learned to make fire:

“Wow Thack, that’s great! I would have never thought of that!”

… Hydrogen VST progress …

I’ve been working on my VST (virtual instument) that translates the spectral lines of Hydrogen into the audio spectrum.

It will turn the intervals between the lines into musical notes. It will probably sound very, very bad and unmusical … unearthly.

I have the wavelengths converted into frequencies. Now I need to decide how to crunch them into the audio spectrum. Aliasing? Re-scaling????

I’ve modified the equation for linear pitch space to try and fit the data from the spectral line series…

We’ll see what happens.

… Hydrogen Spectra VSTi (preliminary idea) …

For my personal project in my computational physics class, I have decided to create a new VST instrument based on the atomic spectra of the hydrogen atom. Hydrogen is the most fundamental physical element in the universe (not including photons - whatever they are).

I plan on including the Lymann, Balmer, Paschen, Brackett and Pfund series of spectral lines. The user will be able to switch each line on/off in any combination. This will amount to over twenty tones.

The VST might be oscillator based and contain a certain amount of built in instability or granularity in the pitch to account for the slope up and down on each side of the spectral line.

It will not be a “keyboard style synth”. It will be an ambient sound-maker that may have tempo synch elements in it.

I am writing a program in Python to translate the wavelength of each spectral line into the neighborhood of the western twelve tone scale (27.50 - 4186.01 Hz). Using linear pitch space, the notes will be dropped into our chromatic scale according to the equation:

p = 69 + 12 * log2(f / 440)

The Highest Resolution Possible

When I was a kid, I would imagine that I was an alien, dreaming this whole world up with the aid of some strange device … a kind of cosmic reality video game. Like “The Sims” … but with really good graphics. I half expected that someday I would wake up, shake off my green tentacles, wipe the slime from my beak and turn off the “human” video game.

This hasn’t happened (yet).

That doesn’t mean that universe doesn’t have some video game like properties!

People like to think that time and space flow smoothly. When you walk down the street, the relationship between time and space seems to be a pretty fluid affair (for most people).

In video games, it’s not so fluid (albeit they look better now than when I was a kid). Both time and space are quantized into discrete quantities. Artificial choppiness. Frames per second and pixel resolution dominate the video game universe.

The real universe happens to be dominated by something called the Planck Constant in a similar respect. One Plank Length is apparently the resolving resolution of our universe.

This amounts to about 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 meters.

Pretty small. Anything smaller than that falls into that horrible fuzz called Quantum Mechanics. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle takes over and the concept of “knowing” anything goes out the window.

If someone were to try and measure a distance smaller than one Planck Length with a high enough energy photon, they would theoretically create a mini-black hole. This probably wouldn’t be a good thing.

There are also corresponding units of Planck time, mass, temperature and so forth.

Summary Haiku:

the universe is
quantized, a video game
with awesome graphics

Everyone is throwing their old CRT TVs into the trash heap and replacing them with a crisp new LCDs. Maybe I’ll hold off until they release the “True to the Planck Length” model.

The cosmic mistake and Digital Television

Goodbye T.V. static. You were a good friend. I’ve spent many hours toying with the rabbit ears on my set, trying to bring a good picture. Digital T.V. will be the end of you. Twenty years from now … people will scarcely have a memory of the fuzzy snow that permeated the first 50 or so years of the idiot box.

So here is my reminder {if this site is still up in the year 2028 … awesome}.

~2.5mb
Double click to play (yes … it’s really just static):

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

But wait … what were you Mr. T.V. Static??

Most of T.V. static comes from local electro magnetic interference - your fridge, air conditioner and other man-made electric devices.

Some of it comes from our sun. Our local star is constantly blasting us with high energy particles, some of which hit our antennas and create random spots of interference on the screen. Cool.

My favorite part of T.V. static comes from the residual photons left over from the Big Bang. When you are standing in front of the T.V., trying to get “Friends” to come in a little clearer, you are actually tuning out the ultimate broadcast.

When astronomers look out into deep space, they are looking back in time as well. The further out they look, the further back in time they go. They always hit the same wall - it’s called Three Cosmic Background Radiation. We can’t see past it. Behind it, is the big Bang itself.

This radiation blankets the universe in an isotropic soup of photons (space isn’t really empty) and accounts for the average temperature of empty space being ~2.75 Kelvin. The fluctuations in this temperature give us some insight in the original configuration, shape and/or density of the universe. Wayward photons have been scooting around space since the beginning. They bump into our antennas and cause us to get up off of the couch and wrestle with our T.V. reception.

So rock on DTV! Turn off the Universe Channel please. Let’s get perfect and clean signals! Perfect and clean … perfect and clean …

We perceive a forward motion in time due to the process of entropy. The universe is cooling … breaking down … things get old and collapse … stars fade out. Depressing.

But life itself may be working counter to that notion. Through extropy, life may be creating order out of our universes decline into chaos. I guess it depends on how much energy we waste in the process. This gets a little envirometaphysical…

It is our natural inclination to create order and attempt perfection. Pitch correction??? Liposuction??? Digital noise reduction???

But let us not forget that the universe, no matter how you look at it … religion … science … the universe started as an unfathomable thing to our minds. A cosmic conundrum. Unknowable.

Let’s tone down the noise reduction and let some mistakes through. You never know what will happen. That’s the good part.

Bye bye static …

(now go watch T.V.)

My first Transmission Electron Microscope

Last spring (2007) I made an electron microscope with my lab partners at PSU. Using an old article from the 1960’s, Becca, Brad, some guy (I think his name was Hank) and I constructed the contraption out of an old beaker, some wire, two metal spools, some rubber stoppers, a vacuum pump and a whole bunch of volts.

The general design principles can be seen here.

In theory, we should have been able to fire some high energy electrons through a pair of electromagnetic lenses and create an image on some phosphorescent material that we coated onto the beaker. A specimin holder sits between the coils and holds the sample (which gets bombarded with electrons). The image is created by the electrons that manage to pass through the sample.

I wrapped the coils by hand and made the specimen holder.

We could never pull a good enough vacuum. The purple color you see early on in the clip is due to contamination of air in the chamber. There should be little to no gas in that first chamber.

The green dot that shows up on the beaker is proof that we got our microscope to fire electrons. The white phosphorescent material coating the tube is glowing due to the high energy electrons striking it.

I attached a bug wing to the specimen holder and we hoped that the electrons transmitted through it would appear on the beaker as an enlarged image of the wing. We ended up just cooking the bug wing.

We could never get the beam focused on the sample. Our lenses were not the right width apart to be able to focus on the tube. I think it is still sitting up in Science Building 2 at PSU.

I wrote the tune last night.
(shot in the dark on my HV20)

~20mb - let it stream…

Double Click to play