Lots of interesting particle physics news recently on the Cosmic Frontier front.
Science News reports that the National Research Council’s March 7 report for science in the coming decade recommends completion of the Large Synoptic Space Telescope.
…which will not only probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy but aid in tracking near-Earth asteroids.
LSST is a huge public and private partnership, which includes many of the national labs, among them Fermilab, which hopes to build on its computing experience with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to help manage the unprecedented flow of data expected from LSST. The February issue of symmetry magazine outlines the partnership needs the experiment will require.
…the LSST camera will produce 3.2-billion-pixel images and generate, on an average viewing night, about 15 terabytes of raw data, or 25,000 CDs worth. To display one of the LSST full-sky images on a television would require not just a high-definition screen, but 1500 of them.
While LSST is not expected to take data for quite sometime, its predecessor the Dark Energy Survey should start its first sky survey in October. The blog dark matter, dark energy, dark gravity explains how DES will be the first experiment to use four different methods at once to search for dark energy. Medill news services uses a great video to show physicists at Fermilab wrapping up tests on camera components before shipping the final parts to Chile for assembly on the 4-meter Blanco telescope. Sadly, the New York Times reports that the driving force behind making the telescope a bastion of U.S. science in Chile, Victor Blanco, passed away.
Unlike DES and LSST, the holometer experiment aims not to record the sky as we see it but as Fermilab theorist Craig Hogan thinks it really is: a giant hologram. The Little India newspaper explains Hogan’s theory and how it relates to black hole science.
Scientists have known for long time that information plays a key role in the creation of a system. Our computers and robots are just metals and wires if no information is exchanged in the form of bits. Our brain is inanimate if no information is carried by the neurons. Our genes are futile if no information is available from DNA that instructs how to function. In everything we know information is the key.
Similarly the entire information about our universe must be encoded elsewhere. Like a hologram on our credit cards, which contains the information in a thin film, and can generate 3D objects when viewed in proper light, the reality we tempt to believe is actually just one way of viewing information printed on a distant cosmic film. What we see and experience as reality are the shadows of the truth.
–Tona Kunz
High-tech jobs are just the first casualty of such cuts. Rolling back funding for basic science would dim our nation’s spirit of discovery and entrepreneurship. It would curtail research into how our world works — research that spurs new theories and technologies. And the cuts would be felt across Chicago’s wider high-tech community, which depends on collaboration, new ventures and a workforce trained at some of the world’s most sophisticated facilities.
