Science 2.0 is all about better way of Science practice in new time. A new academic discipline of Science Engineering is emerging?!
This is what came to my mind, when I saw Michael Nielsen resigned from Perimeter Institute for pursuing his new interests in the development of new tools for scientific collaboration and publication.
Yesterday, the 62nd General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy, with the aim of increasing awareness among the public of the importance of astronomical sciences and of promoting widespread access to new knowledge and experiences of astronomical observation.
The year 2009 is chosen to commemorate the 400 years since renowned scientist Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope towards the sky. This led him to discover, among other things, the four major satellites of Jupiter, the mountains and craters on the Moon, as well as sunspots. More importantly perhaps, Galileo’s use of the telescope substantiated Copernicus’ heliocentric model of our Solar System, paving the way for modern science, and for four hundred years of amazing discoveries in astronomy.
To me, 2007 is not an exciting year for laser research itself. Maybe, there are great breakthroughs, I am just not aware of, that’s why I put a question mark on the title.
But this year I did read a lot of interesting research stories that use lasers as tool. Physics News Update listed top ten Physics stories of the year. One of them is on laser, and three of them use lasers.
China’s first lunar orbiter, Chang’e 1, begins switching on its science instruments today. The spacecraft should help determine the thickness of the lunar soil and shed new light on the Moon’s internal composition, which could help in understanding its origins. via: New Scientist
There are three other spacecrafts, which have similar capabilities: Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft, which is already in orbit, India’s Chandrayaan-1, due to launch in early to mid 2008, and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), slated for launch in late 2008. According to New Scientist, Chang’e does have one unique instrument – a radiometer that operates at microwave frequencies.
The microwave radiometer will measure heat radiation coming from the Moon. This will allow it to map the depth of the lunar soil across the Moon’s surface because the layer’s thickness affects the flow of heat.
These measurements may also shed light on the proportion of radioactive elements like uranium and thorium inside the Moon, since their decay produces heat and should increase the amount of heat radiated by the Moon, says Paul Spudis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, US, who is developing radar instruments to fly on LRO and Chandrayaan-1.
The amount of these elements would give clues to the Moon’s origins, he says, since different formation scenarios lead to different compositions.
Such missions are not cheap, so it is questionable why countries do it without coordination to avoid duplication. But it seems they all agree to share data ultimately. Let’s consider them as cross-checking or competing approaches.
What I’m suggesting — this is where things depart from the conventional view — is that the laws of physics themselves are subject to the same quantum uncertainty. So that an observation performed today will select not only a number of histories from an infinite number of possible past histories, but will also select a subset of the laws of physics which are consistent with the emergence of life. That’s the radical departure. It’s not the backward-in-time aspect, which has been established by experiment. There’s really no doubt that quantum mechanics opens the way to linking future with past. I’m suggesting that we extend those notions from the state of the universe to the underlying laws of physics themselves. That’s the radical step, because most physicists regard the laws as God-given, imprinted on the universe, fixed and immutable. But Wheeler — and I follow him on this — suggested that the laws of physics are not immutable.
Life as we know it on Earth is not the only kind possible in the universe, scientists reminded NASA in a report released today.
Issued by the National Academy of Sciences and sponsored by the space agency, the 116-page report reviews current research into what life is and what it needs to survive, as well as the way life might differ on other worlds.
“Our investigation made clear that life is possible in forms different than those on Earth,” said committee chair John Baross, an oceanographer at the University of Washington, Seattle.
The result is obvious to me. What they did is just to make it clear ti NASA.
“Life is hard, you get some research money, and then you die.”
So does a conference submission invitation email from Optical Society of America start. :) Of course, it is followed by
But, life is also sprinkled with those exhilarating moments when we make great discoveries, or reveal a bit of Nature’s hidden workings, or simply share our scientific insights with appreciative colleagues.
The quote is really fun. I wonder who is the author.
The rise of the social media sites, such as blogs, wikis, Digg and Flickr among others, underscores the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are collaboratively creating, evaluating and distributing information. The innovations introduced by social media has lead to a new paradigm for interacting with information, what we call ’social information processing’. In this paper, we study how social news aggregator Digg exploits social information processing to solve the problems of document recommendation and rating. First, we show, by tracking stories over time, that social networks play an important role in document recommendation. The second contribution of this paper consists of two mathematical models. The first model describes how collaborative rating and promotion of stories emerges from the independent decisions made by many users. The second model describes how a user’s influence, the number of promoted stories and the user’s social network, changes in time. We find qualitative agreement between predictions of the model and user data gathered from Digg.
