Chasing Ghosts of the Universe

You probably heard that matter is pretty much an empty space. It's true. Everything is made of tiny particles with nuclei in their centers and clouds of electrons orbiting around. If we take hydrogen (H), for example, the smallest atom with just one proton in the nucleus orbited by just one electron, and if we scale the proton to be the size of a basketball, the orbit of the electron in diameter would be something about 15 km. Both the nucleus and electrons are electromagnetically charged, keeping everything in stable equilibrium, and also inside the nucleus, two more fundamental forces—strong and weak nuclear interactions—are keeping all the matter and energy in line. However, the smallest atom in the universe is not the smallest standalone system we know of. According to the standard model, all atoms and complex molecules found in nature or artificially produced are made of fundamental particles. Something we cannot cut into smaller pieces. Electron is one of them. But there are more. So far, as far as we know, if we count all of those basic particles inside protons or neutrons and those that represent force carriers in addition to the "god" particle that makes all the mass possible, there are exactly 17 of them. But one of them deserves its own story to tell. Its nickname is "the ghost particle," and it is literally capable of passing through any mountain like it is made of cheese.

You probably guessed, this will be a short story about neutrinos, the most elusive particles in the universe we can play with. They are products of radioactive beta decay in heavy nuclei where a proton or neutron decays into other subatomic particles, i.e., if a proton decays in a process known as 'beta plus decay', it transforms into a neutron, a positron, and a neutrino. In the moment of its creation, even if it happens in the center of the sun, it escapes the entire star immediately. There are many different beta decay types, and I mentioned just one; others help as classified neutrinos. Just like with other fundamental particles that come in three flavors—the charged leptons (electron, muon, tau), the up-type quarks (up, charm, top), and the down-type quarks (down, strange, bottom), bottom)—neutrinos can also be different in mass and property. The one created in the previous example with the creation of positrons is called an electron neutrino, but if anti-tau or anti-muons are created in the process, neutrinos that emerge on the other side of the decay will be tau or muon neutrinos, respectively. A neutrino, no matter which type it is, belongs to leptons as well. This means it is not affected by strong nuclear force at all, and it only interacts with weak nuclear force, and because it is a particle with mass, it also follows gravity as well. To simply illustrate its ghostly manner, I will just note that its tiny mass is about 4 millionths of the electron mass (and electron mass is 1837 times less heavy than the entire mass of hydrogen). Furthermore, it is not electromagnetically charged and therefore not affected by this fundamental force as well. In other words, if you like to watch horror movies or believe in ghosts, the obvious conclusion is that they are made of neutrinos. That would perfectly explain how ghosts travel through walls and doors just like Patrick Swayze did in the movie "Ghost" a couple of decades ago.

Well, kidding aside, and thankfully for these neutrino features, they are really one ghostly particle that is extremely hard to either control or detect. However, this phantom behavior of theirs immediately triggers some extraordinary ideas. If we could embed messages into neutrinos and control the path of their beam, we might literally send them through anything. If some neutrino-based portable device is possible to be built and you are located, for example, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and you want to send a message to Beijing, China, you would have to point your neutrino device slightly toward the center of the Earth*, and neutrinos would reach the receiver with the speed of light all the way through the planet. But before we glimpse into the obvious possibility of whether or not it is possible to use neutrinos in some sort of communication, let's check some more facts about them.

Basically, neutrinos, strictly speaking, belong to the radiation realm. They are indeed carriers of radioactive energy. The same as alpha and beta particles, gamma rays, muon radiations, and tons of other types of particles floating around the universe as a result of different types of particle decays or some other processes in the universe. Actually, we are living in a soup of radioactive energy on a daily basis from various sources, as pretty much everything in the universe is decaying or decomposing toward the ultimate fate of the universe, which will in the end be just one giant soup of basic ingredients, if the everlasting expansion of the universe is the correct theory, that is. Therefore, the choice between usage of paper and plastic bags has nothing green in the potential answer. Either way, both bags will eventually decompose. Just give them enough time. Humans are also radioactive; we also emit radioactive particles thanks to the radioactive food we are consuming. Technically speaking, all food is radioactive because all organic food contains carbon-14, or radiocarbon, as it is nicknamed. Many other radioactive elements can be found in other products, and the most notable one is potassium-40. This one is actually a radioactive isotope that undergoes all three types of beta decay. In one of them it emits neutrinos as well. So, if you like eating bananas, rest assured that you are one of the neutrino producers, as well as bananas are very rich in potassium. Believe it or not, large container shipments full of bananas at ports or airports regularly trigger radiation alarms. Well, if you have not eaten the entire container full of bananas, you are safe. Radiation from a couple of bananas is harmless, way below the edge, and potassium is actually very good for you, and if you emit a neutrino here and there, nobody will notice. Believe me. Well, on second thought, don't believe me. Even though neutrinos are very hard to detect, there is still, after all, a way to do it.

Neutrinos are tiny particles, but a few of them, on rare occasions, still collide with the atom nucleus of the material they are passing through. And by few, I mean the literal meaning of the word. The Sun is producing an extremely large number of neutrinos—60 billion per square centimeter are passing through Earth and... us each second. That is maybe around 100 trillionneutrinos passing average humans. To detect that few, several extremely large detectors are created, and one of them is shown in the above image: Super-Kamiokande under Mount Ikeno in Japan. It utilizes Cherenkov radiation, optically equivalent to a sonic boom, to detect collisions. If a neutrino collides with the electron or nuclei of water, the neutrino only changes direction, but the particle that was struck recoils in sudden motion and faster than the speed of light in water (which is slower than the maximum speed of light in a vacuum). This creates a flash of light, which is amplified with photodetectors (those round bulbs all over the water pool). This flash provides information on the direction and type of the neutrino. SK is located in the old zinc mine 1 km below the surface in order to exclude all other radiation from reaching the water and ensure that only neutrinos are detected. To illustrate the small number of neutrinos detected with this approach, state the fact that the total number of collisions detected from supernova SN1987A in Kamiokande was only 19 out of trillions of neutrinos emitted by the supernova. A small number of neutrinos are regularly detected from the Sun, and their number is way smaller than predicted by the number of estimated nuclear reactions in the star, which provides proof that neutrinos are able to change their flavor during their travel, and as it seems, especially during their travel through solid matter. Different numbers of solar neutrinos are detected during the night as they pass a long way through the solid matter of the entire planet Earth, while during daylight they need to penetrate only those 1000 meters to reach the mine chamber.

Poor detection of neutrinos due to their weak interaction with matter is only the start of bad news regarding the potential communication device we are trying to build. More difficulties follow. For example, artificial production of desirable types of neutrinos is either with nuclear reactions or in particle accelerators, which are either too large or too dangerous to build. Encoded information in beamed neutrinos can also be lost with their oscillation between flavors during travel. Creating desirable beams and paths is still not perfect, and last but not least, there is too much noise on the way, as billions and billions of other neutrinos are also there, either created in stars, supernovas, or those created in the very beginning during the Big Bang. Even so, scientists with powerful proton accelerators developed a procedure to develop stable beams of neutrinos or anti-neutrinos**, which are then directed toward near and/or distant detectors. Two experiments emerged with potential scientific value: in the first, a neutrino beam at Fermilab was sent with a short, encoded message through 240 meters of rock toward the MINERvA neutrino detector, and the word "neutrino", which was binary encoded within the beam sequence, was successfully decoded. The second and most challenging one was performed in Japan. Within the "T2K experiment", both neutrino and anti-neutrino beams are created in the J-PARC laboratory and sent toward the 295 km distant Super-Kamiokande. Both are successfully detected and, in return, opened the first working neutrino beamline over large distances.

So in both theory and practice, neutrino communication might be possible, and current experiments confirm it with working proof of concepts made in large neutrino observatories and accelerators. Actually, it resembles the state of computers as they were some half a century ago, when they were large and limited in mathematical computation and built with bulky vacuum tubes. With the invention of semiconductors and transistors, everything changed, and the result is pretty much in front of you, either on your desk, lap, or palm. Perhaps a similar breakthrough is waiting to be invented so we could equip our smartphones of the future with neutrino messaging when we would be finally able to send texts to Mars from our living room without enormous satellite dishes. Who knows, maybe the search for extraterrestrials would gain a completely new angle, and perhaps many of those neutrinos that are passing through our bodies right now could be complex messages from E.T., and neutrino communication in the future might be our ticket into the Milky Way alien internet. Universe's WiFi. So to speak.

Speaking about E.T. and science fiction in general, this neutrino story reminded me about two more things I love to share in conclusion for this post. The first one is John Cramer, an experimental and theoretical physicist and professor at the Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle. Some seven or eight years ago, Cramer intended to perform an experiment with two quantum entangled laser beams pointed in different directions. He was trying to prove that by fiddling with one beam that was sent into a circuitous detour miles away through optical cable, it would be detectable on the second beam that ended in a detector much earlier in a different location. Detection of this form of laser beam fiddling would be an indication that quantum entanglement is a phenomenon not only between spatially distant particles but also distant in time. When asked what he expects in the outcome, John Cramer, being a science fiction author as well, said, "If this experiment we're doing works, then I will follow up and push it as hard as possible. And if it doesn't work, I will write a science-fiction novel where it does work. It's a win-win situation."

The second thing, and in the recent tradition of MPJ and its "books" thread, what partially hinted at this post is the great novel "Signal", written by Patrick Lee, with the entire plot triggered by the neutrino-based portable device capable of catching radio waves from the future by harvesting neutrinos that move against the direction of time. The device is able to hook into radio stations 10 hours ahead. Just try to imagine all the implications and applications of this kind of fictitious device. If you can't, I am encouraging you to grab Patrick's novel and read it. I literally swallowed it and, during reading, eagerly waited for another chapter. I really can't emphasize what is better, the thriller plot, the sci-fi, or the intense writing. I will say no more.

Image refs:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-neutrino-detectors-look-so-cool
http://irfu.cea.fr/Sphn/Phocea/Vie_des_labos/Ast/
http://www.patrickleefiction.com/
http://www.nuclear-power.net/nuclear-power/fundamental-particles/antineutrino/
http://particleadventure.org/neutrinos.html

In text refs:
* http://www.antipodesmap.com/
** http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/november-2012/how-to-make-a-neutrino-beam

Refs:
http://physics.info/standard/practice.shtml
http://chemistry.about.com/od/foodcookingchemistry/tp/Radioactive-Foods.htm
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/life-is-rad
http://www2.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/03/2.html
https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/neutrinos/neutrino-types/
http://timeblimp.com/?page_id=1033
http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2007/07/17/4350992-backward-research-goes-forward
http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/cramer.html

Warfare Then and Now

Lately I was watching the current stream of war-related news and the Syrian migrant crisis, and I thought of what I would say on the blog about actual, continuous, and devastating warfare in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and the stupidity of the literally inexplicable background of who is fighting whom in all those conflicts and what cause would justify the aftermaths in the form of devastated cities and long refugee corridors... Or even what words should I use to describe the foolishness of the new cold war between nuclear-powered "super countries" and what that will mean for our children and theirs in the future... Then I realized that reacting to meaningless affairs and worldwide political absurdity in a world so divided by racial, structural, governmental, and religious diversity is also meaningless. I also realized that I said enough in the past. There is nothing new to be added or said. There will always be people who will think that a rifle is not a rifle if it never fires a bullet.

And to use a rifle, you need war, right?

I have to admit that I have mixed feelings when it comes to the military, soldiers, wars, battles, tactics, military gadgets, and stuff. On the 'interesting' side of the medal, warfare, if placed in history, good stories, or movies, is simply extraordinary, and I love it. Perhaps, in a way, it was also based on my experience as a soldier: I served in the army more than two decades ago within the mandatory military service, and I was situated in the surface-to-surface missile unit and trained for operating small rockets designed for targeting tanks and other heavy machinery. I couldn't say I enjoyed all the time spent in the service, but I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said that it wasn't interesting and educational, at least from the technical point of view.

The cannon from the Hill of Čegar

Speaking of history and tales, this summer, I mentioned one of the most famous last stands in the history of wars in the post "Fishermen and Pirates of Evia", when King Leonidas of Sparta confronted a large army of the Persian Empire and stood to the very end guarding a narrow pass in the battle of Thermopylae almost 2500 years ago. Anyhow, here, in Serbia, in our own history, we also have one of those suicide missions, conveniently called "last stands" by military vocabulary, and it happened only a couple of kilometers to the north from our house on the nearby hill called Čegar. Just like Leonidas, Serbian general Stevan Sindjelić, during the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottoman Empire in the year 1809, confronted a huge Ottoman offensive after the Serbian army failed to capture the main Turkish fortress in the city. Outnumbered by 1 to 10, Serbian trenches only managed to reject several attacks, and after almost all day long of fighting, the battle turned out to be one of the best-known last stands in the long history of Ottoman occupation of Serbian lands. Ultimately, when the battle turned to be hand-to-hand combat in the trench, Stevan fired his flintlock pistol into a pile of gunpowder kegs in the moment when Ottoman soldiers swarmed the trench from all sides and headed for him personally. The explosion was tremendous, and the fall of Stevan's trench created time for other Serbian troops in the remaining 5 trenches to retreat on time, and, in the aftermath, Turks took all the Serbian soldiers' heads off and used the skulls to build a tower along the road to Constantinople as a warning to anyone rising against the Ottoman Empire.

Yesterday, we decided to visit the hill where it all happened and took some photos with two remaining cannons from the battle and from the monumental tower standing in the middle of the field. It was a one-of-a-kind experience that leaves a distressed feeling, especially after the glimpse from the top of the narrow tower toward the planes and the city.

Stevan Sindjelić & Remains of the Skull Tower in Niš

But there is another side of my mixed feelings regarding this topic. Simply put, if you place the warfare outside the history or fiction and experience it live, for me, all the magic from movies and books evaporates into thin air almost immediately. While I wasn't participating in any warfare in the army, I have witnessed real air strikes performed by NATO aircraft, dropping cluster bombs just hundreds of meters away from my house. I saw them explode*. I saw real damage in neighboring houses and streets and saw people injured from the impacts. Real people. Not soldiers. Collateral victims. Civilians. It wasn't fun. It seems that warfare two centuries before was more dignified, to say the least. The battles before were "organized" outside settlements, and most of them took place in the fields where no civilian casualties could be possible. Today, if you look at the aftermath of any wars happening everywhere on the globe, the first thing you will notice are devastated cities, villages, houses, schools, hospitals, even... Murdered innocent people and children. Ruins in all directions. It is easy today to pull the trigger. From the distance. There are no real heroes or knights today like before.

Modern times and technological advances perhaps ruined the very essence of war, but deep in its core, war was, is, and will always stay our darkest invention. Yes, it looks amazing with special effects in movies and written in our history books full of heroes and heroic events, but in a nutshell, it represents the worst genes we kept from our animal ancestors, evolutionary speaking.

View from Čegar's monumental tower with Viktor's plastic AK-47 toy gun

And the armies... They are a big part of it. The following words, said a couple of years before the battle of Čegar, on a different continent, are still fresh and valid, just like if they were said yesterday. Almost certainly, the famous James Madison quote will stay accurate for many more centuries. After all, as a species, humans are not really capable of learning from their own mistakes:

"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." - James Madison, Political Observations, 1795

I am sure proving his point is as easy as glimpsing the yearly statistics for the Global Firepower, aka GFP. The following numbers I acquired from "Business Insider" and "The Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation". They are collected for the latest year, and I summarized the data for only the top 5 armies in the world: the US, Russia, China, India, and the UK (and you can freely double these numbers for accounts of all other countries).

Anyway, more or less, give or take, believe it or not, in a nutshell, GFP numbers are:

6,000,000+ soldiers (human beings, men in the uniform)
35,000+ tanks (the iron amphibian combat vehicles with heavy guns on the top)
22,000+ aircraft (fighters, bombers, logistic planes, all kinds of military flying machines)
16,000+ nuclear warheads (only couple of them needed to cease all life on earth)
1000+ warships (cruisers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes, etc.)
15+ aircraft carriers (monster nuclear-powered ships)
230+ combat submarines (with large nuclear engines under the sea)
900,000,000,000+ dollars spent for military budgets (per year)

And don't forget to add an uncountable, and I really mean devastating, large number of missiles and rockets, all kinds of ballistics, regular weapons, drones, rifles, pistols, cold weapons, military-based factories, scientific research facilities, spy satellites and military space programs, state-of-the-art uniforms, etc. Indeed, we don't have a name for that big number in mathematics. Even the number of zeros in that count would probably be longer than the letters in this very sentence.

The 11 Most Powerful Militaries In The World**

Now, only by comparing these numbers with James Madison's words, it seems that after 200+ years, perhaps armies are not children of war anymore. In the dawn of the third millennium, it seems now that they are perfectly capable of creating wars just to justify their own existence. If only war could stay in history and fairy tales... But we all know that's not going to happen. With all that weaponry in existence, there will always be people who will think that a rifle is not a rifle if it never fires a bullet.

Original post date: November 2014; Update: November 2015

Image ref:
**http://www.businessinsider.com/11-most-powerful-militaries-in-the-world-2014-4

Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Čegar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Tower
http://armscontrolcenter.org/
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons
http://armscontrolcenter.org/issues/nuclearweapons/articles/fact_sheet_2014
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Madison
http://www.businessinsider.com/35-most-powerful-militaries-in-the-world-2014-7
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_bombing_of_Niš