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description= Nigel Calder takes the pulse of science, as the author of Magic Universe and Einstein s Universe. He checks predictions of the past half-century, to see how they worked out. And his hand is on the brow of frenzied climatology, as a co-author of The Chilling Stars: A Cosmic View of Climate Change.;
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versity about 270 million years ago that contradicts the declining sea level svensmark knew that there was a strong peak in the supernova rate around that time so he looked to see what would happen to the wiggles over the whole 440 million years if he normalized the biodiversity to remove the influence of sea level that simple operation is shown in sketch c where the 270 million year spike becomes broader and taller sketch d shows svensmark s reckoning of the changing rates of nearby supernovae during the same period let me stress that these are all freehand sketches to explain the operations not to convey the data in the published paper the graphs as in c and d are drawn precisely and superimposed for comparison this is svensmark s figure 20 with axes re labelled with simpler words for the ras press release biodiversity the normalized marine invertebrate genera count is in blue with vertical bars indicating possible errors the supernova rates are in black there are many fascinating particulars that i might use to illustrate the significance of svensmark s findings to choose the gorgon s story that follows is not entirely arbitrary because this brings in another of those top results about supernovae and bio productivity the great dying at the end of the permian out of breath poor gorgon gasping for some supernovae named after scary creatures of greek myth the gorgonopsia of the late permian period included this fossil species sauroctonus progressus 3 metres long like many of its therapsid cousins near relatives of our own ancestors it died out during the permo triassic event source http en wikipedia org wiki gorgonopsia luckiest among our ancestors was a mammal like reptile or therapsid that scraped through the permo triassic event the worst catastrophe in the history of animal life the climax was 251 million years ago at the end of the permian period nearly all animal species in the sea went extinct along with most on land the event ended the era of old life the palaeozoic and ushered in the mesozoic era when our ancestors would become small mammals trying to keep clear of the dinosaurs so what put to death our previously flourishing gorgon faced cousins of the late permian according to henrik svensmark the galaxy let the reptiles down forget old suggestions by myself included that the impact of a comet or asteroid was to blame like the one that did for the dinosaurs at the end of the mesozoic the greatest dying was less sudden than that similarly the impressive evidence for an eruption 250 million years ago a flood basalt event that smothered siberia with noxious volcanic rocks covering an area half the size of australia tells of only a belated regional coup de grâce it s more to the point that oxygen was in short supply geologists speak of a superanoxic ocean and there was far more carbon dioxide in the air than there is now well there you go some people will say we told you co 2 is bad for you that of course overlooks the fact that the notorious gas keeps us alive the recently increased co 2 shares with the plant breeders the credit for feeding the growing human population plants and photosynthetic microbes covet co 2 to grow so in the late permian its high concentration was a symptom of a big shortfall in life s productivity due to few supernovae ice free conditions and a lack of weather to circulate the nutrients and as photosynthesis is also badly needed to turn h 2 o into o 2 the doomed animals were left gasping for oxygen with little more than half of what we re lucky to breathe today when svensmark comments briefly on the permo triassic event in his new paper evidence of nearby supernovae affecting life on earth he does so in the context of the finding that high rates of nearby supernovae promote life s productivity by chilling the planet and so improving the circulation of nutrients needed by the photosynthetic organisms here s a sketch from figure 22 in the paper simplified to make it easier to read heavy carbon 13 c is an indicator of how much photosynthesis was going on plumb in the middle is a downward pointing green dagger that marks the permo triassic event and in the local supernova rate black curve svensmark notes that the late permian saw the largest fall in the local supernova rate seen in the past 500 million years this was when the solar system had left the hyperactive norma arm of the milky way galaxy behind it and entered the quiet space beyond fatal consequences would ensue for marine life svensmark writes if a rapid warming led to nutrient exhaustion occurring too quickly for species to adapt one size doesn t fit all and a fuller story of late permian biodiversity becomes subtler and even more persuasive about 6 million years before the culminating mass extinction of 251 million years ago a lesser one occurred at the end of the guadalupian stage this earlier extinction was linked with a brief resurgence in the supernova rate and a global cooling that interrupted the mid permian warming in contrast with the end of the permian bio productivity was high the chief victims of this die off were warm water creatures including gigantic bivalves and rugose corals why it s tagged as astrobiology so what you may wonder is the most life enhancing supernova rate without wanting to sound like voltaire s dr pangloss it s probably not very far from the average rate for the past few hundred million years nor very different from what we have now biodiversity and bio productivity are both generous at present svensmark has commented not in the paper itself on a closely related question where s the best place to live in the galaxy too many supernovae can threaten life with extinction although they came before the time range of the present paper very severe episodes called snowball earth have been blamed on bursts of rapid star formation i ve tagged the paper as astrobiology because we may be very lucky in our location in the galaxy other regions may be inhospitable for advanced forms of life because of too many supernovae or too few astronomers searching for life elsewhere speak of a goldilocks zone in planetary systems a planet fit for life should be neither too near to nor too far from the parent star we re there in the solar system sure enough we may also be in a similar goldilocks zone of the milky way and other galaxies with too many or too few supernovae may be unfit for life add to that the huge planetary collision that created the earth s disproportionately large moon and provided the orbital stability and active geology on which life relies and you may suspect that astronomically at least dr pangloss was right everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds don t fret about the diehards if this blog has sometimes seemed too cocky about the svensmark hypothesis it s because i ve known what was in the pipeline from theories observations and experiments long before publication since 1996 the hypothesis has brought new successes year by year and has resisted umpteen attempts to falsify it new additions at the level of microphysics include a previously unknown reaction of sulphuric acid as in a recent preprint on a vastly different scale svensmark s present supernova paper gives us better knowledge of the shape of the milky way galaxy a mark of a good hypothesis is that it looks better and better as time passes with the triumph of plate tectonics diehard opponents were left redfaced and blustering in 1960 you d not get a job in an american geology department if you believed in continental drift but by 1970 you d not get the job if you didn t that s what a paradigm shift means in practice and it will happen sometime soon with cosmic rays in climate physics plate tectonics was never much of a political issue except in the communist bloc there the immobility of continents was doctrinally imposed by the soviet academy of sciences an analagous diehard doctrine in climate physics went global two decades ago when the intergovernmental panel on climate change was conceived to insist that natural causes of climate change are minor compared with human impacts don t fret about the diehards the glory of empirical science is this no matter how many years decades or sometimes centuries it may take in the end the story will come out right 99 comments 3a news and comments 3b the svensmark hypothesis tagged astrobiology bio productivity biodiversity carbon dioxide cinderella zone climate climate physics cloud cover continental drift cosmic rays downlaps dr pangloss evolution flood basalt event fossil record gorgonopsia guadalupian extinction henrik svensmark ipcc life on earth marine invertebrates mesozoic era milky way galaxy mnras monthly notices of the royal astronomical society net primary productivity npp nutrient exhaustion open star clusters oxygen palaeobiology palaeoclimatology palaeozoic era paradigm shift permian period permo triassic event photosynthesis plate tectonics pleiades royal astronomical society sea level solar system soviet academy of sciences intergovernmental panel on climate change superanoxic ocean supernova rate supernovae therapsid permalink posted by calderup quantum computing forges ahead 08 03 2012 updating magic universe so what s a majorana fermion then a news item in today s nature reminds me that last week it was all happening with quantum computing at a meeting of the american physical society ibm announced a breakthrough in the technology predicting practical computers of unimaginable power within 10 or 15 years and in nature eugenie samuel reich discusses what seems to be a discovery of cosmic importance by a team in delft announced at the aps meeting i ll sum up two strands of progress in a brief update in magic universe the last section of the story called bits and qubits the digital world and its quantum shadow looming reads so far towards quantum computers for a second revolution in information technology the experts looked to the spooky behaviour of electrons and atoms known in quantum theory by 2002 physicists in australia had made the equivalent of shannon s relays of 65 years earlier but now the switches offered not binary bits but qubits pronounced cue bits they raised hopes that the first quantum computers might be operating before the first decade of the new century was out whereas electric relays and their electronic successors in microchips provide the simple on off true false 1 0 options expressed as bits of information the qubits in the corresponding quantum devices will have many possible states in theory it is possible to make an extremely fast computer by exploiting ambiguities that are present all the time in quantum theory if you re not sure whether an electron in an atom is in one possible energy state or in the next higher energy state permitted by the physical laws then it can be considered to be both states at once in computing terms it represents both 1 and 0 at the same time two such ambiguities give you four numbers 00 01 10 and 11 which are the binary number equivalents of good old 0 1 2 and 3 three ambiguities give eight numbers and so on until with fifty you have a million billion numbers represented simultaneously in the quantum computer in theory the machine can compute with all of them at the same time such quantum spookiness spooks the spooks the world s secret services are still engaged in the centuries old contest between code makers and code breakers there are new concepts called quantum one time pads for a supposedly unbreakable cipher but some experts suspect that a powerful enough quantum computer could crack anything who knows what developments may be going on behind the scenes like the secret work on digital computing by alan turing at bletchley park in england during the second world war the australians were up front about their intentions they simply wanted to beat the rest of the world in developing a practical machine for the sake of the commercial payoff it would bring the centre for quantum computer technology was founded in january 2000 with federal funding and with participating teams in the universities of new south wales queensland and melbourne the striking thing was the confidence of project members about what they were attempting a widespread opinion at the start of the 20th century held that quantum computing was beyond practical reach for the time being it was seen as requiring exquisite delicacy in construction and operation with the ever present danger that the slightest external interference or mismanagement could cause the whole multiply parallel computation to cave in like a mistimed soufflé the qubit switches developed in australia consist of phosphorus atoms implanted in silicon using a high energy beam aimed with high precision phosphorus atoms can sustain a particular state of charge for longer than most atoms thereby reducing the risk of the soufflé effect a pair of phosphorus atoms together with a transistor for reading out their state constitutes one qubit unveiling the first example at a meeting in london robert clark of new south wales said this was thought to be impossible just a few years ago update march 2012 subject to confirmation of the majorana fermion ten years later when many others had joined in a prolonged experimental quest for quantum computing ibm researchers at yorktown height s claimed to be within sight of a practical device within 10 or 15 years dogging all the experimenters was a problem called decoherence would the qbits survive long enough to be checked for possible errors in 2012 matthias steffen of ibm told a reporter in 1999 coherence times were about 1 nanosecond last year coherence times were achieved for as long as 1 to 4 microseconds with our new techniques we ve achieved coherence times of 10 to 100 microseconds we need to improve that by a factor of 10 to 100 before we re at the threshold where we want to be but considering that in the past ten years we ve increased coherence times by a factor of 10 000 i m not scared then it would be a matter of scaling up from devices handling one or two qbits to an array with say 250 qubits that would contain more ordinary bits of information than there are atoms in the entire universe and it would be capable of performing millions of computations simultaneously no existing code could withstand its probing which probably explains why the us army funded ibm s work ettore majorana cern image a by product of quantum computing research was the discovery of a new particle in the cosmos in 1937 the italian physicist ettore majorana adapted a theory by the british paul dirac to predict a particle that is its own antiparticle a very strange item indeed it would be electrically neutral and exhibit peculiar behaviour a team led by leo kouwenhoven at delft university of technology in the netherland tested experimentally a suggestion from 2010 about how to create a pair of these particles at a very low temperature and in a magnetic field you ...
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