February 2019 – Harmonia Philosophica

Why?

A question that hides all the answers.

Why does the world exist? We wander…

Without understanding just how what we ask also answers our question. How would we look for whys in a world without cause?

How?

A question that in itself explains why we should not even ask her…

Everything can be done in many ways. And any question with many answers tells us that it is not even worth answering it…

Where?

A question that hides in a common view its insignificance… A question with so many possible equally valid answers that cries out how unnecessary is to try to find out which one is the correct one.

Where did this happen? you ask.

And at the same time you ask you feel that what matters is what happened and not where it did happen.

Who?

A question you consider crucial only if the “he” or “me” makes sense. Yet you and anyone else exist only out of time and space, on a level that the “self” remains unchanged, and therefore makes any other question useless. In such a world it makes no sense to ask who did anything. In such a world only one “I” exists and contains everyone.

Look around you and listen to the silence of the night.

She asks the most important questions.

Under the moon, the Why does not make sense.

In a dark world, only light can exist.

And it is in no mood to ask why.

The darkness can only give birth to light.

And this can only evolve to darkness.

One can only give birth to the many.

And the many only point towards One.

There is no Why with no Answer.

And yet every answer hides a question.

Why do you ask why there is something?

Do you not see that you are born of nothing?

Why do you answer how your life makes sense?

Do you not see that if this is the case then you wouldn’t even ask this question?

Everything was once part of One. And then you decided to break the mirror. Everything was once You. And then you decided to start seeing others. Nothing ever happened. And then you decided to start looking for what and how. Once upon a time you did not wonder why. You were the answer to everything.

Once upon a time you never asked any questions.

Because you had all the answers…

Now you ask everything.

And you do not know anything.

Look at the answer.

It hides a basic question within it.

Why do you ask?

Do not you want to learn?

Spyridon Kakos

Kythira,

2018-08-06, 11: 55pm

Emulating… Existing…

For the first time, physicists have built a two-dimensional experimental system that allows them to study the physical properties of materials that were theorized to exist only in four-dimensional space. An international team of researchers from Penn State, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the University of Pittsburgh, and the Holon Institute of Technology in Israel have demonstrated that the behavior of particles of light can be made to match predictions about the four-dimensional version of the “quantum Hall effect” – a phenomenon that has been at the root of three Nobel Prizes in physics – in a two-dimensional array of “waveguides”.

A paper describing the research appeared on January 4, 2018 in the journal Nature along with a paper from a separate group from Germany that shows that a similar mechanism can be used to make a gas of ultracold atoms exhibit four-dimensional quantum Hall physics as well.

“When it was theorized that the quantum Hall effect could be observed in four-dimensional space”, said Mikael Rechtsman, assistant professor of physics and an author of the paper, “it was considered to be of purely theoretical interest because the real world consists of only three spatial dimensions; it was more or less a curiosity. But, we have now shown that four-dimensional quantum Hall physics can be emulated using photons – particles of light – flowing through an intricately structured piece of glass – a waveguide array”. (1)

We can emulate anything.

Not only things which exist but also things which do not.

Not only things which do not exist but also things which cannot exist.

Three dimensions… Four dimensions…

Existing… Not existing…

Under the proper circumstances, anything can exist. And, thus, anything can be emulated. Are some things more “real” than others? An emulation cannot answer that. Science cannot answer that question either; it is based on hypotheses and emulations, so how can it question its own self? For science anything could potentially exist. And a scientific model could be created for anything. There is nothing fundamental ruling out the possibility of something existing. This is a very important and powerful key foundation pillar of science and we always tend to forget it.

Existence cannot be limited.

Its potential is always there.

In unicorns. (they exist by the way – see here)

In parallel universes. (see quantum mechanics)

In love… In evil…

What will be, already is.

It is up to you.

Choose wisely.

There is only a limited number of things you can emulate…

Light speed. Less than 1000 m/s.

Researchers at TU Wien were the first to successfully detect Weyl particles in strongly correlated electron systems – that is, materials where the electrons have a strong interaction with each other. In materials like this, the Weyl particles move extremely slowly, despite having no mass.

“The strong interactions in such materials usually lead, via the so-called Kondo effect, to particles behaving as if they had an extremely large mass”, explains Sami Dzsaber. “So it was astonishing for us to detect Weyl fermions with a mass of zero in this particular type of material”. According to the laws of relativity, free massless particles must always spread at light speed. This is, however, not the case in solid states: “Even though our Weyl fermions have no mass, their speed is extremely low,” says Bühler-Paschen. The solid state lends them its own fixed ‘light speed’ to a certain extent. This is lower than 1000 m/s, i.e. only around three millionth of the speed of light in a vacuum. “As such, they are even slower than phonons, the analogue to the water wave in the solid state, and this makes them detectable in our experiment”. (1)

Low speeds. High speeds.

What is the difference?

The light is fast. But not for light.

Weyl particles are slow. But not for Weyl particles.

The limits you imagine are not there.

Imagine a Weyl particle.

Fast as 10 m/s…

Massless particles. Heavy particles.

High speed particles. Low speed particles.

Depending on the environmental interactions.

Remove them and see.

Everything is fast. Everything is slow…

Imagine a Weyl particle. Fast as light…

In the beginning everything was still and fast as light at the same time. Until we came. And started observing… The cosmos was once still and, thus, fast like lightning. Then the cosmos started moving. And everything came to a halt.

Note: Weyl particles are not particles which can move on their own (like electrons or protons), they only exist as ‘quasiparticles’ within a solid material. “Quasiparticles are not particles in the conventional sense, but rather excitations of a system consisting of many interacting particles”, explains Prof. Silke Bühler-Paschen from the Institute of Solid State Physics at TU Wien. In some sense, they are similar to a wave in water. The wave is not a water molecule, rather it is based on the movement of many molecules. When the wave moves forward, this does not mean that the particles in the water are moving at that speed. It is not the water molecules themselves, but their excitation in wave form that spreads. After physician Paul Dirac had arrived at his Dirac equation in 1928, which can be used to describe the behavior of relativistic electrons, Hermann Weyl found a particular solution for this equation – namely for particles with zero mass, or ‘Weyl fermions’. The neutrino was originally thought to be such a massless Weyl particle, until it was discovered that it does indeed have mass. The mysterious Weyl fermions were, in fact, detected for the first time in 2015.

Replicability of results. A problem we choose to ignore.

Can companies rely on the results of one or two scientific studies to design a new industrial process or launch a new product? In at least one area of materials chemistry, the answer may be yes – but only 80 percent of the time.

The replicability of results from scientific studies has become a major source of concern in the research community, particularly in the social sciences and biomedical sciences. But many researchers in the fields of engineering and the hard sciences haven’t felt the same level of concern for independent validation of their results.

A new study that compared the results reported in thousands of papers published about the properties of metal organic framework (MOF) materials – which are prominent candidates for carbon dioxide adsorption and other separations – suggests the replicability problem should be a concern for materials researchers, too.

One in five studies of MOF materials examined by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology were judged to be “outliers,” with results far beyond the error bars normally used to evaluate study results. The thousands of research papers yielded just nine MOF compounds for which four or more independent studies allowed appropriate comparison of results. (1)

We like to believe science and data are reliable.

But real life has nothing to do with science and data.

Everything changes. There is chaos everywhere.

And yet, we see order. Order not existing out there. But inside us.

There is nothing to replicate.

Nothing stays the same.

It was us from the very beginning.

Seeing similarities in dissimilar situations.

Because deep inside us we know…

That this is the only thing we should be seeing…

Humans affecting the forest. Forest affecting humans.

Human biomass utilization reduces global carbon stocks in vegetation by 50%, implying that massive emissions of CO₂ to the atmosphere have occurred over the past centuries and millennia. The contribution of forest management and livestock grazing on natural grasslands to global carbon losses is of similar magnitude as that of deforestation. Currently, these effects are underappreciated in existing global carbon models and assessments of the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from land-based production. Without full consideration of land management effects, global climate forecasts and calculations of the GHG effects of future bioenergy policies are error prone, seriously jeopardizing the robust evaluation of measures that would help achieving the 1,5°C target of the Paris Agreement. These are some of the result of a study headed by Karl-Heinz Erb from the Institute of Social Ecology, published in the scientific journal Nature on 20.12.2017. (1)

Scientists analyzing how we affect the forest.

But the forest has affected us a long time ago.

When we walked into the dark and we found our self.

When Midas chased Silenus only to discover what he didn’t want to discover.

Yes, we affect the forests today.

But only from afar. And only to destroy it.

Try to get into a forest and see for yourself.

The owls are not hollowing…

The birds are not singing…

You are deep into the forest alone.

But you know you are not…

The forest is changing you.

You were once part of the forest…

You will once be again…