The Worldwide Grid: The Next Level of Internet?

About 7000 CERN scientists at the LHC will use the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to share data over the net. Grid computing is already being used in several other projects, e.g. weather forecasting.

As LHC begins to work, data will be tranferred to 11 large servers (linked with 200 smaller centres worldwide) at rates of up to 10 gigabits/second. CERN is linked with the 11 large hubs via fibre-optic links but the smaller centres use research networks and "common" internet. It is able to tranfer 2.3 terabytes, i.e. 2.3 million million bytes in a week and will handle the 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually planned to be generated by the LHC.

These large Grids are likely to substitute the previously planned supercomputers. The SETI programme (SETI @ home), Carl Sagan's brainchild, has already provided evidence for successful use of multiple PCs in completing a single task. The SETI programme has incidently set up an Arthur C Clarke tribute page.

The real difference between the Internet and the Grid is that the Grid not only shares information like internet, but is also able to allow sharing of computing resources (e.g. computing power, storage, running of programmes).

However, publically available (Read: for most of you and me) use of such high speeds, with immensely fast download speeds (about 10,000 times faster than today's broadband speeds), is possibly sometime in the future. This has some interesting parallels with the evolution of Asimov's multivac.


The word "Grid" is akin to its use in electricity grid and was used for the first time in a book by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman (see their second book above).

Some of these Grids resemble maps for metros/local city trains and the current plans are almost worldwide. For such a high-speed, dedicated network, security is a major concern [not unlike some of the newly weds who key-in a padlock and throw the key in to the Tiber :-)]. But seriously, it is absolutely vital that this data is safe from any prying hackers.

Photo courtesy of Brunico Bridge Padlocks: Peter Casier.

Search for Higgs Boson

Part 1 of a 3-part video. The date has of course changed from November 2007 to (?) last week of May 2008.

A Monty Python style Psychopharmacologist

Watch a "not-so modest" Stephen Stahl.....

Wikisky and the Youngest Supernova

Close on the heels of Google Sky follows the Microsoft World Wide Telescope (WWT) (Thanks Richard) though my favourites remain Google Sky and Wiki Sky. Hopefully the race between the three will proved us with the ultimate "laptop telescope" (dream on!).

Photo Courtesy: Chandra X-Ray Observatory

The youngest known supernova in the Milky Way Galaxy which is only 140 year old and has expanded clearly since 1985, is called G1.9+0.3. The expansion is occurring at an amazing speed of 5% of speed of light (about 35 million miles per hour!). The supernova is located in the constellation Sagittarius (RA: 17h 48m 45s; Dec: −27d 10m) and is about 25,000 light years away from us (i.e. the explosion occurred nearly 25,000 years in the past).

The expansion was confirmed by the space-based NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Due to its close location to the centre of the Galaxy, it is hard to see it visually due to dust though it can be "observed" by the emitted X-rays and radio waves.

Higgs Mechanism and Boson

So, what is Higgs boson? There is the long answer but it is harder to come up with a short answer. A 1993 challenge to physicists to find an A4 sheet answer yielded 5 answers.

Professor Roger John Cashmore, CMG (Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George), Principal of Brasenose College and Professor of Experimental Physics at Oxford University (UK) provided a very elegant summary and I quote, ".....Peter Higgs.....proposed that the whole of space is permeated by a field, similar in some ways to the electromagnetic field. As particles move through space they travel through this field, and if they interact with it they acquire what appears to be mass. This is similar to the action of viscous forces felt by particles moving through any thick liquid. the larger the interaction of the particles with the field, the more mass they appear to have. Thus the existence of this field is essential in Higg's hypothesis for the production of the mass of particles."

Professor David J Miller, Department of Physics, University College London, explains as to how Higgs mechanism can exist with or without a Higgs boson actually present (using an interesting example of a certain lady ex-Prime Minister in the room).

Quantum Cafe

Scientific experimentation has presumed that clear answers to questions (hypotheses) are needed to arrive at meaningful answers. However, the Quantum Cafe clearly disregards any such rules and any answer is possible in the Quantum World. It states that all of the universe is a game of chance.

Angelus Silesius was a 6th century philosopher and poet. He stated:

Time is of your own making;
its clock ticks in your head.
The moment you stop thought
time too stops dead.

In one of the very lucid books on quantum physics, "In search of Schrodinger's Cat", John Gribbin writes, "it is interesting that there are limits to our knowledge of what an electron is doing when we are looking at it, but it is absolutely mind-blowing to discover that we have no idea at all what it is doing when we are not looking at it".

In Quantum physics, the observer can not only influence the results of what he/she is observing but also determine whether the observed phenomenon (reality) happens or not in the first place.

Our place in the Universe

Just a reiteration (in Carl Sagan's voice) of the how insignificant our lives must seem in the larger scheme of things, if there is any.

Look up at the sky....

Picture Coutesy: Google Sky (Note that the picture is almost South facing with West to the right)
As the nights become shorter, it is harder to find time to watch the stars/planets (not that I am complaining about the arrival of spring). Both Mars and Saturn are easy to spot near nightfall, with Mars near Pollux and Castor (Gemini constellation) and Saturn near Regulus (in Leo constellation).

Mars-Pollux-Castor form almost a straight line in Gemini (with Pollux in the middle) and are seen highup in the West. Saturn is also seen high in the South at nightfall.

There are no clouds tonight (I hope) and I might just catch the nightfall on my way back from my run.

Incidently, the star cluster Pleiades (also called M45 or Messier object 45) in constellation Taurus (to your left) appears to have 6 stars in it. It was called as the "7 sisters" (or also called "7 sister-in-laws and one brother-in-law" !!) though really only 6 stars shine brightly. The Talmud refers to about 100 stars in this cluster and Pleiades is now known to have at least 1000 stars.

Pleiades were of course the 7 daughters of Atlas in Greek mythology and they were pictured in the sky as being pursued by Orion. Not surprisingly, the stories about Pleiades vary in different parts of the world.

In the older days, you needed to count atleast 6-7 stars in to qualify for a job on a ship (to be a pirate!). It is interesting to note that several cultures have used this as a test of vision. If your eyesight is 6/5, you might be able to count upto 9-10 with the naked eye.

And it is now time to test my vision.....without my glasses, I mean ;-).

Flat universe and Cosmic microwave

He has still got it. Thats right; even in his mid-80s, Sir Patrick Moore is still clearly enthused by his favourite subject. In the 666th episode of the Sky at Night, he plays the 'devil' in an interesting debate entitled "we just don't know".

This is one of the best episodes ... ever! It seems that dark matter is not dark afterall, but is instead "transparent" matter. Otherwise, we would not be able to see through it as we can not through the dense microwave radiation that prevents observation of events closer to the big-bang, if there was ever one.

Earth was thought to be flat first and then found to be round (well, nearly). And now, the geometry of our universe seems to be flatter than it was thought originally.

Particle physics recap

I found these interesting video and powerpoint resources to brush up on my current understanding of the sub-atomic (and pre-historic astronomical) cafetaria.

There is an introductory video at Youtube and a BBC Horizon report on LHC at CERN (the date has changed to May 2008 though).

An introduction to particle physics provides very good powerpoint introduction to the topic and this is the Link to several excellent powerpoint slides.

But nothing beats the fab website The Particle Adventure at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). They even had the time to make the quarks dance :-).

Picture courtesy: Particle Data Group

And now about Higgs...

Peter Ware Higgs was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1929. He is currently Professor-Emeritus at University of Edinburgh. Read his story at the Physics World website. Widely acclaimed as the 'next' Noble Prize winner, he was inspired by Paul Dirac in his early years.

Stephen Hawking has offered £100 in wager if Higgs-boson (or God particle, as it often called) is ever found.

Since the particle was discovered by Robert Brout and François Englert at the same time as Peter Higgs, it is probably more appropriately called as Higgs-Brout-Englert boson.

Read the story in Guardian and watch Peter Higg's interview on youtube.

Bose and Bosons

Bosons (and Fermions) are causing much excitement these days, thanks to the much anticipated experiments planned at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN later this month.

You can read here the remarkable story of Satyendra Nath Bose after whom bosons are named.

http://snb.project.googlepages.com

www.calcuttaweb.com/people/snbose.shtml

The last question

If you enjoyed the O'Henry ending Isaac Asimov so successfully employed in his tale of the Last Question, then you can ask multivac yourself the same question at http://www.multivax.com/.

You can read the original story at the site http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html. There is also a link to http://interconnected.org/notes/2003/05/last-query.html with Google replacing AC in a minor variation of the story.