Science In The New Year 2010

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There is so much interesting stuff going on in the world of science. The field of science is probably more active now than it has even been since the beginning of time. There are just so many different projects going on. Some seem like something out of science fiction while others, though not less important, seem pretty mundane. Time also plays in how we feel about what is going on. If I would have said that research is going on into transistors in the 1940s, people might have got very excited, but if I said that now, I would probably receive a ho hum. That is because transistors have been out for over 50 years and we are all used to this fact. Getting in at the beginning of an invention or project, is a lot more exciting than future research into that product after it has been around for awhile.

Scientists are very excited about a new material that they have discovered. So what you say, who cares? Well if you give me a chance to explain, you just might be impressed. The material is a carbon sheet that is only one atom thick. It is stronger than a diamond and can conduct electricity over 100 times faster than the computer chips we use now. The material is called graphene. Remember that name because I think you will be hearing a lot about it in the future. Graphene is so thin that it is said to be the thinnest material there is, thinner than anything else you could ever find in the universe. It is so thin that only a few grains could cover an entire football fields. Scientists are saying that even though the material seems so perfect for computer chips, do not look for it to replace chip material in the near future, because the computer chip industry has too much tied up in their factories and processing. The defense industry is already testing out the feasibility of computer chips and such made from this stuff. Tremendous progress has been made in the methods used to produce this material in the last few month and look for more to come.

Some scientists are actually saying that the first human that will reach 1000 years old is alive today. What they are referring to with this statement, is the fact that they believe that the young of today will have a chance through scientific breakthroughs to live to that ripe old age and maybe even longer. Some go on to say that they believe that the human body does not have to age and barring an accident, disease, or war, they should be able to keep us alive forever in the future. Others are arguing over the morality of such a thing. They say things like the earth is already overpopulated and that there would not be enough food for everyone. The ones that believe that long life is a good thing reply that we could colonize other planets and that if we apply scientific food growing techniques to the entire planet we would have plenty of food for a population far larger than what we have today. If aging in humans is solved someday, many of the diseases related to aging will disappear.

We all are familiar with time. It travels in a straight line from our beginning to our end, right? Maybe not. One scientist is stating that he believes that there are two different dimensions of time. He doesn't believe that time travels from the past to the future, but that there are curves embedded in six dimensions that consist of four of space and two of time and that history passes through as curves not straight lines. "There isn't just one dimension of time," the scientist from the University of Southern California states, "There are two. One whole dimension of time and another of space have until now gone entirely unnoticed by us." If this theory is confirmed, it could unite all the physical laws of the universe, including quantum theory. As we stand now, the Macro Universe and Micro Universe have different laws governing them. There is more to this theory. If it is correct then instead of that straight line that we envision for time, we would have a two dimensional plane. This means that we would be able to travel through time, both forwards and backwards, much more easily than envisioned now.

Scientists have long thought that when a massive star collapses then a black hole forms. Physics would seem to indicate that this is true, but now some are starting to think that there just might be some naked singularities formed and if this is true, how can they account for this? A naked singularity is an object without an event horizon The event horizon is what is around a black hole. It is where all the material swirls around it, until it is pulled into the hole and this allows us to see the hole. If the event horizon was not there, we would never see the black hole itself, because no light leaves it due to the tremendous force of gravity drawing in everything. This might mean that there are singularities all around us and we don't even know it. The singularities are said to have so much gravity that it becomes infinite and the laws physics fail. Research has now shown that there are many different scenarios where event horizons will not form when a massive star collapses. There is still no quantum theory that can account for this.

The black box is still going strong. That is the simple device that is in the basement of a library in Edinburgh in Scotland, that puts out two numbers a one and a zero randomly. Over 75 respected scientists from 41 nations monitor this device. In the beginning people on the street were brought in and asked to concentrate and this made the device put out far more of one number, which is entirely against all odds and seems impossible. Since then, before every major disaster the number generator does this and there is just nothing that explains why. On 9/11 it went crazy pumping out the same number over and over. This type of device was brought to meditations and again the device produced far more of one number than another. The scientific community was shocked. Forty of these devices were then hooked up to the Internet and run day and night. Most of the time an even amount of zeros and ones were produced as should be, but this changed at times. The machines are hooked up to a graph and when the number of zeros and ones are about even this produces a straight line. During the funeral of Diana a spike went so high on the graph that it went to the top of the paper. It seemed that the mental state of millions of people influenced the device. Scientists claim that huge global celebrations register on the device, as do large tragedies. Scientists do not understand why this happens, just that there is no mistaking when it does.

All you seem to see are predictions of disaster on the History and Science channels lately. Sometime that talk about huge cosmic radiation blasts coming from stars that would incinerate the earth and other times they talk about being hit by large bodies heading our way. We have to realize that these cosmic blasts are nothing new. On December 27, 2004, the earth was hit by a blast from an object that was 50,000 light years away. While not exactly right around the corner, this is pretty close in cosmic terms. The blast hit us from the Constellation Sagittarius and only lasted for a few tenths of a second, but sent the equivalent of half a million years of sunlight to the earth. This destroyed the electronics in satellites and ionized the upper atmosphere of the the planet, yet we survived and didn't even notice it. The blast was caused by a Magnetar. When the crust of the Magnetar is breached it releases a gigantic burst, or pulse of energy that has a death zone of a few light years. The magnetic field of a Magnetar is about 1000 times that of a pulsar. In 2008 a powerful jet also hit the earth, it came from the constellation Bootes. It was so bright that it could be seen with eyes only. What makes this so incredible is that the burst reached us at all, since it was from a star that was 7.5 billion light years away.

Is Moore's Law coming near its end? Moore's law states that that the number of transistors that can be placed in a circuit (chip) doubles about every two years. Some say every 18 months. This has been holding true for about 50 years, but as chips shrink to ever and ever smaller sizes, scientists are beginning to believe that the end of this law is near. If Moore's Law is coming to an end, that would mean that more efficient devices would be needed to replace those in existence and that efficiency could not come form making the devices smaller. What would the computer industry do? They could use the many new materials that are becoming available to improve the operation of their chips, or they could move to a different type of computing, such as quantum, biological, or even light powered. Only time will tell us which technology will be accepted.