A “planet” is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

It is the third test that Pluto fails; it has not “cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit” (whatever that means) since its orbit and Neptune’s overlap.

Fair enough. Too bad, Pluto.

But just as Pluto’s and Neptune’s respective orbits overlap, so too do Neptune’s and Pluto’s. Neptune, then, has not “cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit” either.

Perhaps I’m missing something in the highly rigorous definitions of “to clear” and “neighbourhood”, but it seems the new rules have been inconsistently applied to yield an ‘eight planet system’.

I should also point out that the new definitions do nothing to define the status of bodies orbiting other stars since all of the language used refers to “the sun” and “the solar system”. Are the IAU resolutions science, then, or just self-important verbiage?

I hope my confusion comes only from my ignorance and that there’s a good answer to all of this.

In the IQI hood, beeyahtch. Represent. Step off fohz my homes cap y’all whit theyz provably secure implementation of Quantum Key Distribution. Be cracked to front on me, brothah! M’doin some serious QMA-complete sheeyit ovuh heah!

I’m still working on gang signs.

Suck on that, Jeff. None of this namby pamby kidney nonsense :)

Use the little page numbers below to navigate this post.

Pretty awesome, though.

The first… article tells the tale of a man and his motorcycle – both driven to seek out extraterrestrials where any reasonable human would most expect to find them: in the woods ripping down the occassional tree and yelling a lot. After passing up the possibility to closely inspect one, nay, two clearly alien spacecraft, he heads to the nearest town for a drink and a chance to interview the locals who had taken advantage of a similar opportunity. Unfortunately, those locals had a dying aunt, or some such, and it wasn’t a good time to discuss the issue. Given, though, the nature of the periodical, you can safely assume he eventually found some aliens (…or did he???). It is particularly remarkable that, in the account, there are literally dozens of witnesses who, one supposes, could verify the presence of our hero near the sighting, yet at the time when he claims to have seen the beast(s?), the author was alone. Naturally, no details about the author are given.

A very entertaining read. Almost as good as the accompanying illustrations.

The second portion of the Report was called “The Technical Corner”. This month’s issue (recall, it’s January ’87) features a discussion on the author’s (unnamed – surprised?) recent invention of the “Work Function Power Cell (WFPC)”. Due to various phenomenon [sic] which, when combined, appear to violet [sic] the first two laws of thermodynamics, but in actuality do not and instead have the abiliy [sic] to produce an arbitrarily large amount of free energy. It takes advantage of the background quantum electromagnetic sea comprised of an exceedingly dense superimposition [sic] of near zero energy virtual photons (the intermeterary [sic] agents of the electric field). All that is needed is a well calumniated [sic] beam of light. See figure 1 (a picture of an alien ripping down trees in the woods).

The author admits that this is not the most practical source of free energy, but merely a proof of concept meant to break down the psychological barrier present in academia and society at large regarding energy resources. After this humble bit of modesty, though, the author is good enough to provide the reader with the following tidbit: that there are four known (to the author) means of producing free energy. The first being that mentioned above, the second involving plasma and car batteries, the third being unnamed and left undescribed, and the fourth being an “MHD” type process used by star ships to recharge their power cells.

So fear not, even though this solution isn’t practical, there are others which are. The author, however, has chosen not to waste the readers’ time by explaining any of them. The truth is out there.

January 14th, Hyugens descended into Titan’s atmosphere and it’s four hour data collection spree began. Four hours for two reasons: (1) the batteries wouldn’t last too much longer, and, more importantly (2) because Hyugens transmits to Cassini, not to Earth. And Cassini wasn’t stopping.

Well, as of 2am this morning, a lot of the data have been analyzed. Except for some awesome pictures, though, little has been released; wait until next week, say.

But, I can say that there is quite a high probability that there exitsts life on Titan.

Unfortunately, that life was brought there in the form of (now frozen) spores from Earth.

Complex lifeforms might die in vacuum or cold, but some little guys like bacteria, spores and viruses (of course, defining “life” becomes an issue) can survive even those extreme environments. To really sterilize something, you’ve got only a couple choices: harsh chemicals or high heat (grouping excessive radiation with heat). Only chemical breakdown will kill those representatives from Earth: small maybe, but doughty. Back in the good ol’ days, spacecraft and probes could be more easily sterilized using these methods. However, the instruments held in modern exploratory spacecraft are too delicate to withstand 300 °C baking or nasty, corroding chemical treatment. And clean rooms are only so clean (and have people in them…).

So: Life on Titan. Likewise on Mars.

Apparently there’s a group at NASA (and presumably at the European Space Agency and others) devoted to preventing contamination of the subjects of these scientific experiments. It doesn’t much matter for a moon like Titan, since the surface temperature is something like 100 K. But at the end of Galileo’s Juptiter exploration mission, the spacecraft was plunged into Jupiter to be crushed, melted and vaporized (give or take in that order) in order to prevent any possible contamination of Europa (where liquid water was discovered) or any other of Jupiter’s moons.

It brings to mind an amusing (and hopefully inaccurate) scenario: vaporized Galileo bits killing off an entire biosphere of ultra-high density Jovian life. The same fate may be in store for Cassini and the inhabitants of Saturn.

Now, you may say, “Life on Titan? Bah! There may be spores, but they’re permanently frozen and so incapable of reproduction. They’re not really alive but rather suspended.” Stuff it. I’ll be the only one arguing semantics here. And besides, how permanent is “permanent”? The universe is rather long lived.

No dice. Last weekend was apparently ridiculously busy, and they’re out of cider. You’d think three days would be enough time to restock, but maybe they were so busy that their cider supply went into the red. Ah well, their Star of India tea was good enough to keep me there taking up half of a big table with various papers and texts.

More interesting than quantizing the Majorana fermion theory was the conversation the two girls (one claiming to be 21, the other 17) were having at the table next door. The conversation was politcal, complete with rightist (the older, fashonista, lush, wannabe socialite) and leftist (the younger, product of divorced parents (whoa there – just stating facts), teetotaler (but only after having a bad experience or two with drugs (and their abusers), outwardly extroverted to compensate for fundamental self-confidence/image issues). Neither was making any real argument, each was just spouting off moral judgements or personal theories without any support (other than, “I have seen a homeless person before”, to paraphrase). I’m sure most of what they said was deeply felt, but none of it was terribly well developed. Well, maybe that’s unfair; at best their ideas were poorly communicated.

It was frustrating to listen to these people trying to string together sentences out of but-grasped-for ideas. I think the amount of information conveyed in their hour long conversation was on the order of bits. Clearly a very noisy channel.

But, hell, at least they were talking about the current administration and what they thought could be better with the country. More power to ‘em.

Best Sound bites (all by Rightie): “But we need homeless people. We need 18% unemployment [sic] for this society to function.” “Not everyone needs healthcare.” “I like living in the most powerful country in the world. Having that behind me and being able to tell people that.”

He lifted the receiver and was connected with Stockholm.

I like to think the King himself was on the phone, but, as far as I know, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, though founded by the Crown, is entirely independent; I do not believe the current King is a member.

Dr. Politzer was awarded the prize for his earlier work in on the concept of asymptotic freedom. The strong nuclear force is responsible for holding together such “everyday” particles as the proton and the neutron (together known as nucleons). These nucleons are in turn comprised of other, more fundamental particles called quarks and gluons. The odd thing (at least in the early 1970′s) is that particle collision experiments suggest that quarks are held together only very weakly inside a nucleon, however they have never been observed on their own outside of a nucleon. How can particles held together so very weakly not be pulled apart and examined individually?

Dr. Politzer is (in part) responsible for the answer to this question. It turns out that gluons are the key. These gluons are the force mediating particles for the strong nuclear force, just as photons are the force mediating particles of the electromagnetic forces. However, unlike photons (which have no electromagnetic charge), gluons do carry strong force “charge”, which is called “color”. Naively, Quarks are always “surrounded” by gluons (whether you like it or not, electrons are always “surrounded” by photons), and since gluons themselves carry color, there’s an awful lot of color going around. Pull two quarks away from each other, and you get more gluons, more color, and so more force keeping them together. In fact, it requires so much energy to pull quarks apart because of all the colored gluons, that, once you reach a certain distance between the two quarks in question, it becomes energetically more favorable for nature to create two more quarks inbetween (so you get two paris of closely spaced quarks instead of two quarks far apart from one another). Thus, quarks are never seen individually, but only with other quarks. This is called “quark confinement”. (In the above I have made no distinction between quarks and anti-quarks.)

On the other hand, if you had a really tiny stick and could weave it past all the gluons and start poking the just the quark, you would find a very weak color charge; the quark is just one particle and only carries one unit of charge (In contrast to when you have a thicker stick and are poking the quark and all its gluons. In this situation, you are poking many particles and you find a lot of color). So if two quarks are really close to one another (close enough to “get past” all the gluons), they see only a small amount of color and so feel only a very weak force between them. This is “asymptotic freedom”: the closer two quarks get to each other, the less color they see, the less force the feel.

The difference is one of length scales. At large lengths (poking with a fatter stick – seeing lots of color – quark confinement), the strong nuclear force between two quarks is enormous because of all the gluons. At small lenghts (poking with a skinny stick – seeing little color – asymptotic freedom), the strong force seems much weaker. The paricle collision experiments mentioned above probe the system at very high energies, which translate into very small length scales (analogous to poking with a very skinny stick), which is why they suggest a very weak force.

Dr. Politzer shares the prize with Professor David Gross (now at UCSB) and Professor Frank Wilczek (now at MIT). Did I mention that Politzer published the relevant paper in grad school (Harvard)? Did I further mention that this was his very first paper? And here I am – blogging.

So I finally got to sleep, but I guess being awake at 4:00am isn’t always so frustrating.