Anxiety about death leads people to believe in intelligent design

Individuals concerned about their impending deaths show greater support for the theory of intelligent design and are less inclined to embrace evolutionary theory, according to a University of British Columbia (UBC) study.

The study, led by UBC Psychology Asst. Prof. Jessica Tracy with co-authors Joshua Hart, assistant professor of psychology at Union College, and UBC psychology PhD student Jason Martens, is the first of its kind to examine the implicit psychological motives that underpin one of the most heated debates in North America. Despite scientific consensus that intelligent design theory is inherently unscientific, 25 percent of high school biology teachers in the U.S. devote at least some class time to the topic of intelligent design.

“Our results suggest that when confronted with existential concerns, people respond by searching for a sense of meaning and purpose in life,” says Tracy. “For many, it appears that evolutionary theory doesn’t offer enough of a compelling answer to deal with these big questions.”

However, the study also indicated that those individuals who were inclined toward the belief in naturalism – the scientific approach that underlies evolution, but not intelligent design – showed reduced belief in intelligent design after being reminded of their own mortality. Carl Sagan, the cosmologist science writer, argued that the belief in naturalism can also provide a sense of meaning.

Tracy says, “These findings suggest that individuals can come to see evolution as a meaningful solution to existential concerns, but may need to be explicitly taught that taking a naturalistic approach to understanding life can be highly meaningful.”

The elusive quest for the Unifying Theory

Proving the existence of a “unifying theory,” a single set of rules that ties together the theories that define all the fundamental forces of the universe, has been an elusive quest for scientists since Albert Einstein postulated the possibility of such a theory.

So where are we in our pursuit of fitting together the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics?

Based on the “Theory of Everything,” Large Hadron Collider could be first time machine

The Large Hadron Collider, the atom smasher potentially capable of producing the Higgs boson particle – a.k.a. the elusive “God Particle” – could possibly be the world’s first machine to project matter through time.

Tom Weiler of Vanderbilt University and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho theorize that if the Collider succeeds in generating the Higgs boson particle, a second particle could also be generated, called the Higgs singlet. This Higgs singlet, according to the researchers’ theory, could become transported into an extra dimension where it can easily jump forward or backward in time.

They admit their theory is a long shot, but they also acknowledge that it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.

“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”

The researchers’ assumptions are based on M-theory, a “theory of everything,” which defines the basic structure of our existence and involves an eleven-dimensional universe in which the weak and strong forces and gravity are unified and ties together the five superstring theories. The M-theory includes a four-dimensional membrane floating in a multi-dimensional space-time. Though our basic building blocks of the universe are stuck to this “brane,” the singlets are believed to be beyond the basic force of the brane that would cause it to stay in one dimension.

Rapid progress made toward important discovery at Large Hadron Collider

Researchers at CERN working with high-energy particle accelerator the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they are within reach of answering some fundamental questions about the origins of our Universe, and have delayed shutting down the project for 12 months at the end of this year.

Professor Geoff Hall from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, said: “We have made an important step forward in the hunt for dark matter, although no discovery has yet been made. These results have come faster than we expected because the LHC and CMS ran better last year than we dared hope and we are now very optimistic about the prospects of pinning down Supersymmetry in the next few years.”

If successful, the LHC will – among other objectives – track the hypothetical Higgs boson particle, otherwise known as the God particle, believed to be the force which turned mass into solid matter soon after the creation of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.

Physicists show how time travel is possible

Physicists Jay Olson and Timothy Ralph at the University of Queensland in Australia say the possibility of teleportation in time may actually exist, based on their new findings recently published in the Cornell University’s Library online publication, arXiv.org. The findings are based on the elusive quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, where two particles can become so intimately linked that if you change the state of one particle, the other one will change in exactly the same way, no matter how far apart they are.

In Olson and Ralph’s mathematical model, a new type of quantum entanglement extends not through space, but through time. “If you use our timelike entanglement, you find that [a quantum message] moves in time, while skipping over the intermediate points,” Olson said. “There really is no difference mathematically. Whatever you can do with ordinary entanglement, you should be able to do with timelike entanglement.”

In this respect, a message from one particle can travel from the present to the future of the other particle, without existing in the time in between the two points, providing a shortcut into the future. “You can send your quantum state into the future without traversing the middle time,” said Olson, lead author of the new study.

In addition, the time of day must be in alignment for the transference to take place. “If the past detector was active at a quarter to 12:00, then the future detector must wait to become active at precisely a quarter past 12:00 in order to achieve entanglement,” suggesting such a protocol might be called “teleportation in time.”

Quantum entanglement is believed to explain a fundamental reality of our universe

Source: arxiv.org/abs/1101.2565 “Extraction Of Timelike Entanglement From The Quantum Vacuum”

Could the world have come from nothing?

Scientists are now able to explain how it is possible to create something out of nothing.

“We can now calculate how, from a single electron, several hundred particles can be produced. We believe this happens in nature near pulsars and neutron stars,” said Igor Sokolov, an engineering research scientist who conducted this research along with associate research scientist John Nees, emeritus electrical engineering professor Gerard Mourou and their colleagues in France.

Using a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse, particles and anti-particles can be produced out of nothing more than a vacuum, based on new equations developed by researchers at the University of Michigan.

The core of the research is derived from the concept that a vacuum is not exactly nothing but rather a combination of dense matter and anti-matter, which destroy each other when they come into contact under normal conditions.

To Sokolov, his work can be viewed upon from a philosophical perspective.

“The basic question what is a vacuum, and what is nothing, goes beyond science,” he said. “It’s embedded deeply in the base not only of theoretical physics, but of our philosophical perception of everything — of reality, of life, even the religious question of could the world have come from nothing.”

Researchers uncover surprise link between weird quantum phenomena

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle sets limits on Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance,’ new research finds

Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore: Researchers have uncovered a fundamental link between the two defining properties of quantum physics. Stephanie Wehner of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies and the National University of Singapore and Jonathan Oppenheim of the United Kingdom’s University of Cambridge published their work today in the latest edition of the journal Science.

The result is being heralded as a dramatic breakthrough in our basic understanding of quantum mechanics and provides new clues to researchers seeking to understand the foundations of quantum theory. The result addresses the question of why quantum behavior is as weird as it is—but no weirder.

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Experiment to test if the universe is a hologram

Physorg.com: The idea of the holographic universe is not new, but physicists at Fermilab are now designing an experiment to test its validity. Fermilab particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan and others are building a holographic interferometer, or “holometer,” in an attempt to detect the noise inherent in spacetime, which would reveal the ultimate maximum frequency limit imposed by nature.

As Hogan explains in a recent issue of Fermilab’s symmetry magazine, the holometer will be “the most sensitive measurement ever made of spacetime itself.”

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Large Hadron Collider scientists spot potential new discovery: CERN

Scientists at the world’s biggest atom smasher said Tuesday they appeared to have discovered a previously unobserved phenomenon in their quest to unravel the deepest secrets of the universe.

PhysOrg.com: Results from one of the detectors in the Large Hadron Collider experiment indicated that “some of the particles are intimately linked in a way not seen before in proton collisions,” the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on its website.

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Study sheds new light on how the sun affects the Earth’s climate

Imperial College London: The sun’s activity has recently affected the Earth’s atmosphere and climate in unexpected ways, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature

The Sun’s activity has recently affected the Earth’s atmosphere and climate in unexpected ways, according to a new study published today in the journal Nature. The study, by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Colorado, shows that a decline in the Sun’s activity does not always mean that the Earth becomes cooler.

It is well established that the Sun’s activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year cycle and that as its activity wanes, the overall amount of radiation reaching the Earth decreases. Today’s study looked at the Sun’s activity over the period 2004-2007, when it was in a declining part of its 11-year activity cycle.

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