13 things that do not make sense


http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18524911.600

13 things that do not make sense

1 The placebo effect
2 The horizon problem
3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays
4 Belfast homeopathy results
5 Dark matter
6 Viking's methane
7 Tetraneutrons
8 The Pioneer anomaly
9 Dark energy
10 The Kuiper cliff
11 The Wow signal
12 Not-so-constant constants
13 Cold fusion
(complete text after the next paragraph)

I only know the answer to no. 1 and 4. Maybe Others (self
proclaimed experts, alternative theory wizards, and plan
crackpots) can offer suggestions for the others? (or prove
they are just misinterpratations of the data?) For the
pioneer anomaly. Both of the probes has same result so gas
leak for both is less likely. Tetraneutrons? Has anyone
tried the experiment too? Esp. Frank Heymann who loves
exotic experiment (where really is he); Kuiper cliff
related to 10th Planet? But the latest sci-am mag says
many rough planets can travel in space; Viking's methane?
But it's just one experiment amidst hundreds; Ultra-energy
cosmic rays? Maybe output from parallel brane universe?;
Horizon problem? The idea that space can expand to the
size of the universe from something smaller than an atom
is just mind boggling; Cold fusion? Hope not true to
prevent Al Qaeda from building cheap weapons based on
that; Not so constant constants? Some argued the speed
of light is not the same speed in different parts of the
universe. About no. 1 and 4. The answer is there is such
thing called conscious energy that regular biochemistry
and you will see the details of the science in mainstream
science journal and magazines after a decade or two.

The rest is the text from the new-scientist site detailing
the 13 things that do not make sense (or so they thought).
Some physicists may dislike it because in their view, only
those they prefer or liked must be published. But thanks
to freedom of expression and speech. We are not totally
imprisoned in their small world.

---
1 The placebo effect

DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days,
you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine
until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the
morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the
pain away. This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a
whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite
nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in
Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by
adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to
the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of
saline solution disappeared. So what is going on? Doctors have
known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone
result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow
biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know. Benedetti
has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and
muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (Nature
Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the
activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered
the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic
nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve
Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline
was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature
ass ociated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at
the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely
doing something. We have a lot to learn about what is happening
here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect
the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation
and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand
mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify
when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it
has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different
illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.

2 The horizon problem

OUR universe appears to be unfathomably uniform. Look across
space from one edge of the visible universe to the other, and
you'll see that the microwave background radiation filling the
cosmos is at the same temperature everywhere. That may not seem
surprising until you consider that the two edges are nearly 28
billion light years apart and our universe is only 14 billion
years old. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, so
there is no way heat radiation could have travelled between the
two horizons to even out the hot and cold spots created in the
big bang and leave the thermal equilibrium we see now. This
"horizon problem" is a big headache for cosmologists, so big that
they have come up with some pretty wild solutions. "Inflation",
for example. You can solve the horizon problem by having the
universe expand ultra-fast for a time, just after the big bang,
blowing up by a factor of 1050 in 10-33 seconds. But is that just
wishful thinking? "Inflation would be an explanation if it
occurred," says University of Cambridge astronomer Martin Rees.
The trouble is that no one knows what could have made that
happen. So, in effect, inflation solves one mystery only to
invoke another. A variation in the speed of light could also
solve the horizon problem - but this too is impotent in the face
of the question "why?" In scientific terms, the uniform
temperature of the background radiation remains an anomaly. "A
variation in the speed of light could solve the problem, but this
too is impotent in the face of the question 'why?'"

3 Ultra-energetic cosmic rays

FOR more than a decade, physicists in Japan have been seeing
cosmic rays that should not exist. Cosmic rays are particles -
mostly protons but sometimes heavy atomic nuclei - that travel
through the universe at close to the speed of light. Some cosmic
rays detected on Earth are produced in violent events such as
supernovae, but we still don't know the origins of the
highest-energy particles, which are the most energetic particles
ever seen in nature. But that's not the real mystery. As
cosmic-ray particles travel through space, they lose energy in
collisions with the low-energy photons that pervade the universe,
such as those of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Einstein's special theory of relativity dictates that any cosmic
rays reaching Earth from a source outside our galaxy will have
suffered so many energy-shedding collisions that their maximum
possible energy is 5 x 1019 electronvolts. This is known as the
Greisen-Zat sepin-Kuzmin limit. Over the past decade, however,
the University of Tokyo's Akeno Giant Air Shower Array - 111
particle detectors spread out over 100 square kilometres - has
detected several cosmic rays above the GZK limit. In theory, they
can only have come from within our galaxy, avoiding an
energy-sapping journey across the cosmos. However, astronomers
can find no source for these cosmic rays in our galaxy. So what
is going on? One possibility is that there is something wrong
with the Akeno results. Another is that Einstein was wrong. His
special theory of relativity says that space is the same in all
directions, but what if particles found it easier to move in
certain directions? Then the cosmic rays could retain more of
their energy, allowing them to beat the GZK limit. Physicists at
the Pierre Auger experiment in Mendoza, Argentina, are now
working on this problem. Using 1600 detectors spread over 3000
square kilometres, Auger should be able to determine the energies
of incoming cosmic rays and shed more light on the Akeno results.
Alan Watson, an astronomer at the University of Leeds, UK, and
spokesman for the Pierre Auger project, is already convinced
there is something worth following up here. "I have no doubts
that events above 1020 electronvolts exist. There are sufficient
examples to convince me," he says. The question now is, what are
they? How many of these particles are coming in, and what
direction are they coming from? Until we get that information,
there's n o telling how exotic the true explanation could be.
"One possibility is that there is something wrong with the Akeno
results. Another is that Einstein was wrong"

4 Belfast homeopathy results

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast,
was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that
a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample
was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water,
and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out
to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum. In her most
recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects
of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells
involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine
when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine
stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four
different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that
they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worke
d just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with t he
homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled
out. So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by
dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider
venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in
water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution,
homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint
on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution
becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.
You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains
true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a
large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the
Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests
that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper,
"unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to
encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results
turn out to b e real, she says, the implications are profound: we
may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

5 Dark matter

TAKE our best understanding of gravity, apply it to the way
galaxies spin, and you'll quickly see the problem: the galaxies
should be falling apart. Galactic matter orbits around a central
point because its mutual gravitational attraction creates
centripetal forces. But there is not enough mass in the galaxies
to produce the observed spin. Vera Rubin, an astronomer working
at the Carnegie Institution's department of terrestrial magnetism
in Washington DC, spotted this anomaly in the late 1970s. The
best response from physicists was to suggest there is more stuff
out there than we can see. The trouble was, nobody could explain
what this "dark matter" was. And they still can't. Although
researchers have made many suggestions about what kind of
particles might make up dark matter, there is no consensus. It's
an embarrassing hole in our understanding. Astronomical
observations suggest that dark matter must make up about 90 per
cent of the mass in the universe, yet we are astonishingly
ignorant what that 90 per cent is. Maybe we can't work out what
dark matter is because it doesn't actually exist. That's
certainly the way Rubin would like it to turn out. "If I could
have my pick, I would like to learn that Newton's laws must be
modified in order to correctly describe gravitational
interactions at large distances," she says. "That's more
appealing than a universe filled with a new kind of sub-nuclear
particle." "If the results turn out to be real, the implications
are profound. We may have to rewrite physics and chemistry"

6 Viking's methane

JULY 20, 1976. Gilbert Levin is on the edge of his seat. Millions
of kilometres away on Mars, the Viking landers have scooped up
some soil and mixed it with carbon-14-labelled nutrients. The
mission's scientists have all agreed that if Levin's instruments
on board the landers detect emissions of carbon-14-containing
methane from the soil, then there must be life on Mars. Viking
reports a positive result. Something is ingesting the nutrients,
metabolising them, and then belching out gas laced with
carbon-14. So why no party?

Because another instrument, designed to identify organic
molecules considered essential signs of life, found nothing.
Almost all the mission scientists erred on the side of caution
and declared Viking's discovery a false positive. But was it? The
arguments continue to rage, but results from NASA's latest rovers
show that the surface of Mars was almost certainly wet in the
past and therefore hospitable to life. And there is plenty more
evidence where that came from, Levin says. "Every mission to Mars
has produced evidence supporting my conclusion. None has
contradicted it." Levin stands by his claim, and he is no longer
alone. Joe Miller, a cell biologist at the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles, has re-analysed the data and he thinks
that the emissions show evidence of a circadian cycle. That is
highly suggestive of life. Levin is petitioning ESA and NASA to
fly a modified version of his mission to look for "chiral"
molecules. These come in left or right-handed versions: they are
mirror images of each other. While biological processes tend to
produce molecules that favour one chirality over the other,
non-living processes create left and right-handed versions in
equal numbers. If a future mission to Mars were to find that
Martian "metabolism" also prefers one chiral form of a molecule
to the other, that would be the best ind ication yet of life on
Mars. "Something on Mars is ingesting nutrients, metabolising
them and then belching out radioactive methane"

7 Tetraneutrons

FOUR years ago, a particle accelerator in France
detected six particles that should not exist. They are called
tetraneutrons: four neutrons that are bound together in a way
that defies the laws of physics. Francisco Miguel Marqu?s and
colleagues at the Ganil accelerator in Caen are now gearing up to
do it again. If they succeed, these clusters may oblige us to
rethink the forces that hold atomic nuclei together. The team
fired beryllium nuclei at a small carbon target and analysed the
debris that shot into surrounding particle detectors. They
expected to see evidence for four separate neutrons hitting their
detectors. Instead the Ganil team found just one flash of light
in one detector. And the energy of this flash suggested that four
neutrons were arriving together at the detector. Of course, their
finding could have been an accident: four neutrons might just ha
ve arrived in the same place at the same time by coin cidence.
But that's ridiculously improbable. Not as improbable as
tetraneutrons, some might say, because in the standard model of
particle physics tetraneutrons simply can't exist. According to
the Pauli exclusion principle, not even two protons or neutrons
in the same system can have identical quantum properties. In
fact, the strong nuclear force that would hold them together is
tuned in such a way that it can't even hold two lone neutrons
together, let alone four. Marqu?s and his team were so bemused by
their resu lt that they buried the data in a re search paper that
was ostensibly about the possibility of finding tetraneutrons in
the future (Physical Review C, vol 65, p 44006). And there are
still more compelling reasons to doubt the existence of
tetraneutrons. If you tweak the laws of physics to allow four
neutrons to bind together, all kinds of chaos ensues (Journal of
Physics G, vol 29, L9). It would mean that the mix of elements
formed after the big bang was inconsistent with what we now
observe and, even worse, the elements formed would have quickly
become far too heavy for the cosmos to cope. "Maybe the universe
would have col lapsed before it had any chance to expand," says
Natalia Timofeyuk, a theorist at the University of Surrey in
Guildford, UK. There are, however, a couple of holes in this
reasoning. Established theory does allow the tetraneutron to
exist - though only as a ridiculously short-lived particle. "This
could be a reason for four neutrons hitting the Ganil detectors
simultaneously," Timofeyuk says. And there is other evidence that
supports the idea of matter composed of multiple neutrons:
neutron stars. These bodies, which contain an enormous number of
bound neutrons, suggest that as yet unexplained forces come into
play when neutrons g ather en masse.

8 The Pioneer anomaly

THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched
in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both
craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one
watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too
fascinating to ignore. That's because something has been pulling
- or pushing - on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting
acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per
second. That's equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the
gravity at Earth's surface, but it is enough to have shifted
Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch
with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing
exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is
causing it? Nobody knows. Some possible explanations have already
been ruled out, including software errors, the solar wind or a
fuel leak. If the cause is some gravitational effect, it is not
one we know anything about. In fact, physicists are so completely
at a loss that some have resorted to linking this mystery with
other inexplicable phenomena. Bruce Bassett of the University of
Portsmouth, UK, has suggested that the Pioneer conundrum might
have something to do with variations in alpha, the fine structure
constant (see "Not so constant constants", page 37). Others have
talked about it as arising from dark matter - but since we don't
know what dark matter is, that doesn't help much either. "This is
all so maddeningly intriguing," says Michael Martin Nieto of the
Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We only have proposals, none of
which has been demonst rated."

Nieto has called for a new analysis of the early trajectory data
from the craft, which he says might yield fresh clues. But to get
to the bottom of the problem what scientists really need is a
mission designed specifically to test unusual gravitational
effects in the outer reaches of the solar system. Such a probe
would cost between $300 million and $500 million and could
piggyback on a future mission to the outer reaches of the solar
system (www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0411077). "An explanation will be
found eventually," Nieto says. "Of course I hope it is due to new
physics - how stupendous that would be. But once a physicist
starts working on the basis of hope he is heading for a fall."
Disappointing as it may seem, Nieto thinks the explanation for
the Pioneer anomaly will eventually be found in some mundane
effect, such as an unnoticed source of heat on board the craft.

9 Dark energy

IT IS one of the most famous, and most
embarrassing, problems in physics. In 1998, astronomers
discovered that the universe is expanding at ever faster speeds.
It's an effect still searching for a cause - until then, everyone
thought the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big
bang. "Theorists are still floundering around, looking for a
sensible explanation," says cosmologist Katherine Freese of the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "We're all hoping that
upcoming observations of supernovae, of clusters of galaxies and
so on will give us more clues." One suggestion is that some
property of empty space is responsible - cosmologists call it
dark energy. But all attempts to pin it down have fallen woefully
short. It's also possible that Einstein's theory of general
relativity may need to be tweaked when applied to the very
largest scales of the universe. "The field is still wide open,"
Freese says.

10 The Kuiper cliff

IF YOU travel out to the far edge of the solar system, into the
frigid wastes beyond Pluto, you'll see something strange.
Suddenly, after passing through the Kuiper belt, a region of
space teeming with icy rocks, there's nothing. Astronomers call
this boundary the Kuiper cliff, because the density of space
rocks drops off so steeply. What caused it? The only answer seems
to be a 10th planet. We're not talking about Quaoar or Sedna:
this is a massive object, as big as Earth or Mars, that has swept
the area clean of debris. The evidence for the existence of
"Planet X" is compelling, says Alan Stern, an astronomer at the
Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. But although
calculations show that such a body could account for the Kuiper
cliff (Icarus, vol 160, p 32), no one has ever seen this fabled
10th planet. There's a good reason for that. The Kuiper belt is
just too far away for us to get a decent view. We need to get out
there and have a look before we can say anything about the
region. And that won't be possible for another decade, at least.
NASA's New Horizons probe, which will head out to Pluto and the
Kuiper belt, is scheduled for launch in January 2006. It won't
reach Pluto until 2015, so if you are looking for an explanation
of the vast, empty gulf of the Kuiper cliff, watch this space.

11 The Wow signal

IT WAS 37 seconds long and came from outer space. On 15 August
1977 it caused astronomer Jerry Ehman, then of Ohio State
University in Columbus, to scrawl "Wow!" on the printout from Big
Ear, Ohio State's radio telescope in Delaware. And 28 years later
no one knows what created the signal. "I am still waiting for a
definitive explanation that makes sense," Ehman says. Coming from
the direction of Sagittarius, the pulse of radiation was confined
to a narrow range of radio frequencies around 1420 megahertz.
This frequency is in a part of the radio spectrum in which all
transmissions are prohibited by international agreement. Natural
sources of radiation, such as the thermal emissions from planets,
usually cover a much broader sweep of frequencies. So what caused
it? The nearest star in that direction is 220 light years away.
If that is where is came from, it would have had to be a pretty
powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien civilisation
using an astonishingly large and powerful transmitter. The fact
that hundreds of sweeps over the same patch of sky have found
nothing like the Wow signal doesn't mean it's not aliens. When
you consider the fact that the Big Ear telescope covers only
one-millionth of the sky at any time, and an alien transmitter
would also likely beam out over the same fraction of sky, the
chances of spotting the signal again are remote, to say the
least. Others think there must be a mundane explanation. Dan
Wertheimer, chief scientist for the SETI@home project, says the
Wow signal was almost certainly pollution: radio-frequency
interference from Earth-based transmissions. "We've seen many
signals like this, and these sorts of signals have always turned
out to be interference," he says. The debate continues. "It was
either a powerful astronomical event - or an advanced alien
civilisation beaming out a signal"

12 Not-so-constant constants

IN 1997 astronomer John Webb and his team at the University of
New South Wales in Sydney analysed the light reaching Earth from
distant quasars. On its 12-billion-year journey, the light had
passed through interstellar clouds of metals such as iron, nickel
and chromium, and the researchers found these atoms had absorbed
some of the photons of quasar light - but not the ones they were
expecting. If the observations are correct, the only vaguely
reasonable explanation is that a constant of physics called the
fine structure constant, or alpha, had a different value at the
time the light passed through the clouds. But that's heresy.
Alpha is an extremely important constant that determines how
light interacts with matter - and it shouldn't be able to change.
Its value depends on, among other things, the charge on the
electron, the speed of light and Planck's constant. Could one of
these really have changed? No one in physics wanted to believe
the measurements. Webb and his team have been trying for years to
find an error in their results. But so far they have failed.
Webb's are not the only results that suggest something is missing
from our understanding of alpha. A recent analysis of the only
known natural nuclear reactor, which was active nearly 2 billion
years ago at what is now Oklo in Gabon, also suggests something
about light's interaction with matter has changed. The ratio of
certain radioactive isotopes produced within such a reactor
depends on alpha, and so looking at the fission products left
behind in the ground at Oklo provides a way to work out the value
of the constant at the time of their formation. Using this
method, Steve Lamoreaux and his colleagues at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory in New Mexico suggest that alpha may have
decreased by more than 4 per cent since Oklo started up (Physical
Review D, vo l 69, p 121701). There are gainsayers who still
dispute any change in alpha. Patrick Petitjean, an astronomer at
the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, led a team that analysed
quasar light picked up by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile
and found no evidence that alpha has changed. But Webb, who is
now looking at the VLT measurements, says that they require a
more complex analysis than Petitjean's team has carried out.
Webb's group is working on that now, and may be in a position to
decl are the anomaly resolved - or not - later this year. "It's
difficult to say how long it's going to take," says team member
Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "The more we look
at these new data, the more difficulties we see." But whatever
the answer, the work will still be valuable. An analysis of the
way light passes through distant molecular clouds will reveal
more about how the elements were produced early in the universe's
history.

13 Cold fusion

AFTER 16 years, it's back. In fact, cold fusion never really went
away. Over a 10-year period from 1989, US navy labs ran more than
200 experiments to investigate whether nuclear reactions
generating more energy than they consume - supposedly only
possible inside stars - can occur at room temperature. Numerous
researchers have since pronounced themselves believers. With
controllable cold fusion, many of the world's energy problems
would melt away: no wonder the US Department of Energy is
interested. In December, after a lengthy review of the evidence,
it said it was open to receiving proposals for new cold fusion
experiments. That's quite a turnaround. The DoE's first report on
the subject, published 15 years ago, concluded that the original
cold fusion results, produced by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley
Pons of the University of Utah and unveiled at a press conference
in 1989, were impossible to reproduce, and thus probably false.
The basic claim of cold fusion is that dunking palladium
electrodes into heavy water - in which oxygen is combined with
the hydrogen isotope deuterium - can release a large amount of
energy. Placing a voltage across the electrodes supposedly allows
deuterium nuclei to move into palladium's molecular lattice,
enabling them to overcome their natural repulsion and fuse
together, releasing a blast of energy. The snag is that fusion at
room temperat ure is deemed impossible by every accepted
scientific theory. "Cold fusion would make the world's energy
problems melt away. No wonder the Department of Energy is
interested" That doesn't matter, according to David Nagel, an
engineer at George Washington University in Washington DC.
Superconductors took 40 years to explain, he points out, so
there's no reason to dismiss cold fusion. "The experimental case
is bulletproof," he says. "You can't make it go away."

.

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