One – Page 3 – Harmonia Philosophica

Proton. Mass. Higgs. Phantoms of science.

Photo by **Spiros Kakos** from **Pexels**

A proton’s mass is more just than the sum of its parts. And now scientists know just what accounts for the subatomic particle’s heft.

Protons are made up of even smaller particles called quarks, so you might expect that simply adding up the quarks’ masses should give you the proton’s mass. However, that sum is much too small to explain the proton’s bulk. And new, detailed calculations show that only 9 percent of the proton’s heft comes from the mass of constituent quarks. The rest of the proton’s mass comes from complicated effects occurring inside the particle, researchers report in the Nov. 23 Physical Review Letters.

Quarks get their masses from a process connected to the Higgs boson, an elementary particle first detected in 2012 (SN: 7/28/12, p. 5). But “the quark masses are tiny,” says study coauthor and theoretical physicist Keh-Fei Liu of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. So, for protons, the Higgs explanation falls short.

Instead, most of the proton’s 938 million electron volts of mass is due to complexities of quantum chromodynamics, or QCD, the theory which accounts for the churning of particles within the proton. (1)

Not the sum of its parts…

Can this be true in any way?

Everything is the sum of its parts. But some of the parts are invisible. And you need to know where to look for them. Why do we not see the QCD as part of the proton? Why don’t we see the soul as part of man? Why don’t we see man as part of the cosmos? Why don’t we see the cosmos as part of God?

Our ability to see the parts of things is intently related to our ability see just parts of those parts. For if we were able to see all the parts we would simply look at the whole…

It may sound weird, but only when we look at no parts at all will we be able to see them all at once…

How can anything be part of something?

To what else can everything be part of?

If not part of nothing?

See the proton.

There is no proton.

Can you see its parts now?

Reading. Breathing.

Reading is something very complex. Moving from what letters look like to what they sound like is a complex multi-sensory task that requires cooperation among brain areas specialized for visual and auditory processing.

Researchers call this collection of specialized brain regions that map letters to sounds (or phonemes) the reading network. The extent to which these sensory-specific parts of the brain are able to connect as a network, not necessarily anatomically, but functionally, during a child’s development predicts their reading proficiency, according to a new neuroimaging study from the University at Buffalo.

This developmental shift integrates previously segregated parts of the brain, suggesting that changes in reading skill are associated with the nature and degree of these changes to the neural pathways within the reading network. Essentially “[…] the brain rewires itself so that it goes from having one area working on visual matters and another working on auditory matters to the two areas working together as a cohesive unit,” says Chris McNorgan, an assistant professor of psychology at UB and co-author of the research published in a special edition of Frontiers in Psychology focusing on audio-visual processing in reading. (1)

In the beginning there was One.

And there was no need to talk.

No need to read or understand.

Because we just experienced it.

Being part of it. Knowing it.

Then we broke the mirror in a thousand pieces.

And we now need to put them back together.

But we don’t understand is that the tool we are using to do that is the same tool which created the pieces in the first place. Stop trying to make things right we must. Stop thinking. Stop trying to understand. And just let things be. It sounds so easy an option. So seemingly self-satisfying. And yet we are afraid of it. Because we see our own self in those pieces. And we know that once we put them all together we will be gone.

People won’t read about us in books.

No one will speak about us anymore.

But we will be in the heart of the cosmos.

Spreading in the morning wind.

Through the songs of the mocking birds…

Predict what is not…

Artificial neural networks – algorithms inspired by connections in the brain – have ‘learned’ to perform a variety of tasks, from pedestrian detection in self-driving cars, to analyzing medical images, to translating languages. Now, researchers are training artificial neural networks to predict new stable materials. (1)

Using an unstable network. To predict the existence of stability.

For what is will always be. And only what is not can ever detect it.

Through eternity the specks of present pass by.

Making it shine through the aeons…

Memory. Doing better next time…

Photo by **Francesco Ungaro** from **Pexels**

We may not be able to change recent events in our lives, but how well we remember them plays a key role in how our brains model what’s happening in the present and predict what is likely to occur in the future, finds new research in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

“Memory isn’t for trying to remember”, said Jeff Zacks, professor of psychology and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and an author of the study. “It’s for doing better the next time”. (1)

Obsessed with “doing something”.

But we don’t need to.

Stay under the tree.

Smell the forest.

There is nothing to do.

There is nothing to remember.

You are already doing everything.

By doing nothing.

You are already remembering everything.

Because there is nothing to remember.

Existing. Being.

Wise butterfly.

You will be dead soon…

Instability… Randomness… Out of design…

A study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University has brought science one step closer to a molecular-level understanding of how patterns form in living tissue. The researchers engineered bacteria that, when incubated and grown, exhibited stochastic Turing patterns: a “lawn” of synthesized bacteria in a petri dish fluoresced an irregular pattern of red polka dots on a field of green.

Researchers showed that the stochastic Turing model is driven by randomness. In the study, scientists demonstrated both experimentally and theoretically that Turing patterns do in fact occur in living tissues – but with a twist. Where the instability that generates the patterns in Turing’s model is defined as a high diffusion ratio between two chemicals, an activator and an inhibitor, in this study, researchers demonstrate that it’s actually randomness – which would in most experiments be considered background noise – that generates what Goldenfeld has coined a stochastic Turing pattern. (1)

Trying to design bacteria.

So that they are unstable.

And they generate stable patterns…

Chaos births Order.

In the same way Order generates Chaos.

The world is One.

Moving in circles.

Every single moment.

Circles around itself.

Circles around an invisible point of nothingness.

Containing everything and nothing at the same time.

Watch these tigers waiting behind the bushes.

No, they are not trying to hide behind the trees.

They are the trees…