Slashdot Mirror
Nuclear Decay May Vary With Earth-Sun Distance
KentuckyFC writes "We've long thought that nuclear decay rates are constant regardless of ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain two puzzling experiments from the 1980s that found periodic variations over many years in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226. Now a new analysis of the raw data says that changes in the decay rate are synchronized with each other and with Earth's distance from the sun. The physicists behind this work offer two theories to explain why this might be happening (abstract). First, some theorists think the sun produces a field that changes the value of the fine structure constant on Earth as its distance from the sun varies. That would certainly affect the rate of nuclear decay. Another idea is that the effect is caused by some kind of interaction with the neutrino flux from the sun's interior which also varies with distance. Take your pick. What makes the whole story even more intriguing is that for years physicists have disagreed over the decay rates of several isotopes such as titanium-44, silicon-32, and cesium-137. Perhaps they took their data at different times of the year?"
Does this have any ramifications for carbon dating?
There is a war going on for your mind.
First, some theorists think the sun produces a field that changes the value of the fine structure constant on Earth as its distance from the sun varies. That would certainly affect the rate of nuclear decay. Another idea is that the effect is caused by some kind of interaction with the neutrino flux from the sun's interior which also varies with distance. Take your pick.
You left out the best part of the paper, where they propose how to test these theories:
These conclusions can be tested in a number of ways. In addition to repeating long-term decay measurements on Earth, measurements on radioactive samples carried aboard spacecraft to other planets would be very useful since the sample-Sun distance would then vary over a much wider range. The neutrino flux hypothesis might also be tested using samples placed in the neutrino flux produced by nuclear reactors.
Sounds like we could test the latter relatively easily.
Also, Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere H. Jenkins!!!
My work here is dung.
...has Pamela Anderson been given the news?
Could this be the cause of the Pioneer Anomaly ?
If this turns out to be true, and not a product of some experimental error, it sounds like it could lead to some very interesting new theories. If it's due to neutrino flux, that indicates neutrinos interact much more strongly than previously thought.
Seems that I did all those pesky logarithmic decay problems for Physics 101 in vain....
On a more serious note, how does this influence all those archaeological and geological dating techniques that are based on radioactive decay rates?
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
So the earth may really be 5,000 years old? Shit. I have some apologizing to do on the Creationism vs Evolution yahoo message boards.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
variable constant
I wonder what kind of new building materials would be available if we colonized a planet such as Mars or perhaps Pluto or something far from a star. Perhaps the perfect building material is no good on earth because of nuclear decay?
See! I told you that dendrochronology was more accurate!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology
I pity the man who has to interrupt two scientists arguing about decay rates and tell them they were both right.
Could perhaps the distance between the earth and the sun and the relationship for nuclear decay be in some way effected by the gravitational field fluctuations that occur as well? Time is dilated by gravity, so perhaps are we seeing a further proof of Special relativity?
Or are they simply looking for casual relationships where none actually exist. Perhaps the decay rate relates to the amount of pastafarians on earth.
If you count the presence or absence of observation as part of "ambient conditions", there are two cases where nuclear decay rates are affected by ambient conditions: The quantum Zeno effect and the quantum anti-Zeno effect.
Scroogle
They are just trying to force me to buy new updated nuclear engineering text books. I won't fall for it!
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
It's the Phlogiston, released by the central furnace of the sun. Doesn't seem quite so funny now, does it Pinkerton?
Now if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment with my Phrenologist.
Clearly, this is why jumping to warp speed within the solar system is not a safe practice.
In their theory, the Sun produces a scalar field which would modulate the terrestrial value of the electromagnetic fine structure constant EM.
The fine structure constant (about 1/137) has been measured to a whopping 10 significant digits, one of the most precisely measure physical constants. If there is a seasonal variation enough to influence decay rates by .1%, wouldn't this show up in different experiments measuring the fine structure constant?
If we could figure out what mechanism is at work here, perhaps in the distant future, we could learn to alter the half-lives of elements. That could lead to 100% utilization of Uranium in nuclear reactors (instead of being left with a bunch of leftover fissionable material that cannot be used), or perhaps even being able to use other fissionable materials other than Uranium as an energy source.
Does this have any ramifications for carbon dating?
Seriously : No.
For 2 reasons.
I. - Effect on carbon
For now carbon isn't on the list of the elements that seem affected by the distance to the sun.
II. - Not a significant variation. :
in TFA, variation seem to be very well correlated with the distance *BUT* these variations are really small : only a small fraction of percent (~0.15%). To cite one of the commenters on TFA's blog thread
That said, itâ(TM)s not *terribly* unsettling to me; the variations are small (measurable,but small) and to me itâ(TM)s all part of the Wonderful World of the Weird that is QM.
If we discover that carbon is among the elements influenced by the sun too, those mere ~0.15% of variation will be insignificant compared to the skew that happens with varying concentration of carbon-14 in the atmosphere (see wikipedia's graph of variation) - which already requires that we do calibrations anyway.
(Current carbon dating doesn't extrapolate the age purely by deducing the levels from the decay rate, but instead uses tables where corrections have been inserted based on the carbon dating of thing with known age)
So in short : for now it doesn't have any ramification and anyway it couldn't have any more than we already compensate for.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
...stored on the interstellar star voyager I'm building, then.
Should be able to pack a few more women on-board that way.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Would be interesting to see if this can be reproduced artificially. Maybe it could lead to new ways of dealing with nuclear waste, by accelerating its decay rate. On the other hand, the effect seem to be so small that, even if artificially amplifying it, it would be of little use.
We're still very far from that point, but it opens up interesting new perspectives.
Nobody mentions a very stark correlation evident from the figure. The peak always occurs around the New Years, everybody is having a gala time, the experimenters, the earth, the sun, neutrinos, why should alpha (fine structure constant) be left behind? Folks, believe me, its the celebrations that's to be blamed!
First, some theorists think the sun produces a field that changes the value of the fine structure constant on Earth as its distance from the sun varies.
If this is true, we get some fundamental variables besides $_, @_, etc.
I'm more worried about the effect on Cesium decay. Did we accidentally base our definition of time on a variable rather than a constant?
Maybe it's the perfectly spherical shell of dark matter which supposedly surrounds our galaxy, or maybe it's the invisible epicycles of the sun, or maybe it's Al Gore's cologne.
Couldn't possibly be our understanding of gravity, or even electromagnetic waves, is imperfect.
The obvious solution is that time speeds up when we get closer to the sun due to the higher gravatational field. This would explain why the days seem to drag by right before Christmas. We're further away which also makes everything colder. *
* Time slowing down at Christmas is realative to how far along you are on your shopping list.
I use my own Occam's blade to cut off the first one and pick the second one.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The always 'trustworthy' wikipedia tells me that the fine structure constant is what determines how strongly electromagnetism affects matter. If it were true that proximity to the sun alters that, it seems to me it could have major implications, for, say, a bunch of computer geeks.
that changes the value of the fine structure constant
I do not think that word means what you think it means...
Also, note that since the perihelion is right around Jan 1, only about eleven days after solstace-- this data equally well correlates with season.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So could this possibly lead to a way to "drain" radioactive waste by exposing it to a high neutrino flux? Or is it the other way around... does a higher flux slow it down and we're already near the limit of the highest speed of decay?
Perhaps some heretofore undetected/unconsidered form of solar radiation is affecting the decay rates.
Most of the time, the differences are minimal, so we consider them to be constant. Very few parameters in the universe are truly constants.
Are the reasons your extensive diamond knowledge will never come in handy.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Wouldn't you expect different decay rates on the poles and the equator ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Hey, correlation is not causation. It might be that the variations in the decay pull and push the Earth closer and farther from the sun.
It would certainly explain why time seems to move slower whenever I'm talking to certain coworkers.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
...but not the subject of the experiment.
I read for example about a planet orbiting a pulsar whose orbital period was half of Earth's. Turns out it was a misconfiguration involving the Doppler effect.
I'll need more evidence than this horrible correlation. Something involving deep space probes would be better. But if it turns out to be true, then this is HUGE!
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
your children won't need the fixes your phrenologist makes to your skull
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: nope.
Even longer answer:
1. Carbon isn't one of the isotopes that are affected by this.
2. The fluctuations have a period of about year, so they average out when you measure something over millenia.
3. The fluctuations are very very tiny, waay below one percent even. So basically even if you happened to take one extreme as your value, and in reality it was the opposite extreme, and even with "compound interest" so to speak... worst that could happen is that a 100,000 year old bone turns out to be "only" a bit over 99,000 year old. The creationists still aren't going to like it.
4. The variability in C14 production and distribution are much bigger than this fluctuation, and we learned to deal with those perfectly well. (C14 is constantly produced as neutrons from solar radiation knock off and replace a proton from an N14 atom, turning it into a C14 atom.)
5. The way we deal with those is by calibrating that dating. There's stuff that we already know when it happened, by other means (chronicles, geologic events, etc), and we can see how much C14 is left in stuff from that year. That lets you calibrate your C14 dating pretty damn well.
The last one also tells you why actually #2 is the only one that matters: we already calibrated for long intervals, and such fluctuations were already averaged into the calibration. This new discovery won't affect C14 dating at all. The effect is exactly zero. Null. Nada. Nix.
Of course, that won't stop young-Earth creationists from coming out of the woodwork, and waving yet another thing they don't understand as "proof" that science is wrong and their bible is the literal history of Earth. What else is new? No, seriously.
I figure everyone and everything has their place and role, though. The young-earth creationists' is simply to make everyone else look smart. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This graph seems to indicate that the correlation is between the decay rate and the radius of Earth's orbit squared, not just r.
Could it be that the correlation between decay rates is with Earth's orbital velocity, acceleration, or dTheta/dT (rate of change of the Earth/Sun vector due to Earth's elliptical orbit)?
Additionally, there seems to be a phase shift between peak r^2 and peak decay rates with the decay rate peak seemingly correlated with our peak acceleration toward the sun.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
This reminds me of Asimov's book "The Gods Themselves" where the exchange of electrons between parallel universes, creating limitless and wasteless energy, increases the strength of the nuclear force in our universe. Thus making our huge sun (by parallel universe standards) likely to explode/implode.
so said the Buddha. So is the Planck constant really constant as well? Would it be reasonable to believe that its value actually varies at different time of the universe? Just shooting off my head. ;-)
Reality is what we taste, smell, see, hear and touch yet we cannot comprehend it...only approximate it.
This is a good example of how many holes there might be in our theories about the universe. We have been making measurements for a few 1000 years in one solar system (mostly just on one planet) and things that we don't see changing, like radioactive decay rates, we consider constant. It's exciting to think how much more there may still be to discover.
This makes me wonder about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generatorpower sources on board the Voyager spacecraft, as they are based on the decay of radioactive material. Has our earth-centric understanding of the universe led us to build probes designed to push the boundaries of the solar system and continue into interstellar space, that will gradually lose power the further they get from the sun?
Whoops.
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
The discussion of casual relationships is further up the page, in replies to a post about carbon dating.
If you don't dry your isotopes out in the sun, of course they won't last long.. I guess it's just another slow news day.
Since gravity does not vary _that_ much during the earths voyage around the sun (if it did orbital decay would have solved the whole never-wear white after labour-day problem); lets consider some other alternatives. Use something with a relatively short and predictable half-life. - radiation shielding; take 2 samples of identical density/size. Place one in a lead-lined box, and the other in cardboard. measure both. - use the time-of-day as a measurement, (let the planet 'block' any suspected interference from the sun.) If neither of these eliminate a variable, then we can conclude that it isn't a radiation source that we know of causing the blip. Here is another idea; since many NASA probes/rovers use nuclear-decay power sources, can we not measure the current power output vs the expected output? these probes are much further away from the sun then we are.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Let's be certain we really see a difference that is actually due to the actual isotope decay rate differences. Alas, this is going to have to wait a few more years. :-)
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
anus penis?
The decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 are stable - it's the cesium clocks used to measure the effect that are affected. I'm just saying ...
If the decay rate of caesium or whatever element they use in atomic clocks these days is effected by the sun surely this means all timing systems used everywhere on earth are unknowingly being effected by this?? Who knows what knock on effects this has already had if this is the case.
Some years ago I went to a symposium on global scaling phenomenon. I was very confused because there were some high profile (so I was told) phds having talks on various things that one would consider silly. One of them was "Die Struktur des Zufalls - Alle Prozesse haben eine gemeinsame kosmische Dynamik" (its german - use babelfish or sth). The talk was phenomenal, revolutionary and well... silly. Why would someone who discovered such a big thing talk on a little simposium with mainly non technical audience? Why not simply publish in Nature or somewhere similar? So thought he maybe made a little mistake in his analysis and came to earn some money. A year later the leader of this "Global scaling" group - Hartmut Müller - had a lecture on Global scaling (I think it was on university of KÃln,Germany) where he wanted to show that he can "teleport" information from a gsm phone (surrounded by water so that no EM radiation could come to or from the water box the gsm was in) but the gsm had signal and the experiment wasn`t walid (the lecture was taped, you can buy the CD on their site) But that would be his second public experiment, he`s already done one where he talked on a funny thing from Germany to Australia (one can find more out in the magazine "Raum und Zeit")... and so on. Well here`s a link where one can read about the research http://www.info.global-scaling-verein.de/Intro/Intro06E.htm. Also there`s some interesting material on their main site at http://globalscaling.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=25. I can`t really say anything other than I`m shocked this really happened to be true. Some professors found it amusing when I discussed what I had heard/saw on that symposium other students laughed so I went with the main stream and forgot all about it. Maybe sometimes it`s best to think for one self and not let others think for you...
Thanks to the internet we can all learn about a 22 year old discovery today. I wonder how many other mind blowing preinternet discoveries are waiting in obscurity in some old journal just waiting to be rehashed and then put on arxiv so it can finally have its world debut.
If the "real" rate of decay is 100 it could be (100-0.15) here on earth, (100-0.25) on Venus and (100-07) on the solar surface.
Moving to Saturn could have it go to (100-0.01).
After all, the change doesn't have to change linearly with distance but inversely.
So is Schrodingers cat more likely to die in summer ow winter?
So our yellow sun... ...really can give Superman his powers!!!
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
For Gundam fans, doesn't this seem reminiscent of the N-Jammer?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cosmic_Era_superweapons#Neutron_Jammer
Taking this news at face falue, I'm kind of wondering what the ramifications would be for the dangers of radioactive contamination? If nuclear decay varies, then perhaps isotopes left behind from nuclear testing and nuclear accidents may actually decay quicker, or, slower. Also, this process might be influenced by some means, for instance a high-powered energy field or some device that emits neutrinos. If this is even theoretically possible, then perhaps we can clean up sites such as Chernobyl a lot faster, or perhaps even treat people who have been accidentally exposed to radioactive isotopes... Of course, on the flip side, people may find another reason to advocate the use of fission power plants. Personally, I'd rather wait for fusion. Heck, who knows the process of fusion might be affected by this knowledge in some way as well...
The Fine structure addressed in this article is not the hyperfine structure which cesium clocks use.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Their suggestions for potential causes indicate they've already thought about this. They mention a potential cause is neutrino flux from the sun. Neutrinos are not stopped significantly by the Earth and certainly not by a box of lead (or any other material), but the neutrino flux drops off as 1/r^2 as you increase the distance r from the source.
... not more action at a distance. I find the existing stuff difficult enough to conceptualize.
Ha so the earth is 5000 years old!
This variance in isotope decay may very well explain the 'voyager acceleration' mystery. Base discrepancies between the on-board clocks and Terran clocks could cause it to falsely appear that the voyagers were accelerating.
The sun rotates in 26 days so that isnt it.
The earth tilts toward or away from the sun depending on north/south hemisphere. Is there a latitudual variation in this effect?
The planets orbits are all over the place in a year. I would expect a correlation with those.
The earth does change its distance with respect the galactic center over the course of the year. Its an extremely small percentage change, but an annual one nonetheless.
Seismologists recently figured out the cause of annual variation in background earth seismic noise (called Earth "hum"). It was attrubtesd to annual changes in storm activity over the oceans. Its not obvious to me how something like this coudl correlate with radioactive decay.
As someone who made the equipment that the scientist probably used to do the counting, I have one possible explanation. Most Multichannel Analyzers (MCAs) of the time used a line clock to determine the time. They assume that the power company delivered 60Hz power (or 50 Hz in Europe), This frequency was almost never precise but varied by .1 to .2% (one plant where I measured the frequency put out 58.8Hz for example, a real mess for us) from time to time. A systemic variation due to power loads (heating in winter/ AC in summer) could easily bias the power frequency by about the right amount with the right periodicity.
The universe might well be safe.
i.e. Interaction of the gravitational field
with nuclear forces? i.e. Grand unification?
...only if they maintain the correct Bond.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Wait a minute. Did someone just say that the distance between the Earth and the sun changes over time? I know this story is about nuclear decay, but perhaps this has a bit more to do with "climate change" than whatever conditions people blame for the same effect. If the Earth gets, say, a million miles closer to the sun, it will obviously heat things up, and plenty more than all the SUVs and carbon in the world.
But of course this is /., so watch this get modded -99 Lunatic for daring to insinuate something like that.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Hotter atoms vibrate and bounce about more vigorously than cold atoms... [relatively] loosely held extra neutrons in heavy isotopes just might be shaken loose from these more energetic hot atoms more easily/often than from colder, slower atoms... That's not even taking into account the relative motion/potential [deterministic/QM] of the nucleons in question. Seems like this is sort of a corollary of the Third Law of Thermodynamics.
oh great, another score for the creationists. lol "See, we told ya carbon dating was created to look that way on 14,000 years ago." lol
Why is it funny? That's how science _works_. The whole framework is geared towards, basically, fixing past mistakes or refining what wasn't quite right.
No real scientist can ever assert something as the final word, the immutable absolute truth, the thing beyond challenging. That's not how science works. You can only assert that, given the data you have, this theory is the simplest thing that explains that data. And here's the reasoning and the data, please _do_ try to poke holes in it and find cases that I've missed.
Science isn't about a set of edicts to learn by heart. It's a process. A method. It's the way to refine the current knowledge towards something more accurate, and to find and discard knowledge that turned out to be wrong after all.
Science doesn't have absolute truths. It only has falsifiable theories. Some of them actually getting proven wrong, or in your words "if not exactly wrong - not quite there yet" is not just normal, but the way progress happens.
In other words, it's a good thing, not a bad thing. And any scientist worth anything already knows that.
_Hopefully_ a lot, because that's how progress happens. If there were nothing more to discover, and the theories we have were the whole and exact truth, well, then we'd be stuck at the current tech level for ever. Which isn't necessarily a good thing.
Also, scepticism is a good thing in science. By all means, please be a sceptic. There is however a difference between scepticism as in "show me the data before I believe that" and block-headed counter-enlightenment as in "I already decided my immovable truth, and if any data contradicts it, then your data is wrong and the work of Satan." The latter isn't scepticism, it's just being a dumbass. And the fundies don't fail by being sceptical, they fail in the latter way.
At the risk of sounding a bit like a personal attack, and I apologize in advance for it: try understanding the scientific method first. Because if I'm to take a guess based on what you wrote above, you don't really seem to understand what science _is_. Just reading some books and taking those predictions as some kind of religious truths, asserted by the High Priests, and as some failure of those if they turn out to be wrong... well, that's actually how religion works, not science.
But then it's entirely possible that you've just not explained your position well enough, or that I've misunderstood it completely.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
First, some theorists think the sun produces a field that changes the value of the fine structure constant on Earth as its distance from the sun varies.
As any decent programmer would tell you, if it changes you call it a variable.
We always knew there had to be inaccuracies in dating methods that showed the earth was more than 6000 years old.
The authors just chose to plot vs r^2, rather than r. Since the data is noisy and Earth's orbit is only slightly elliptical, the data would correlate just as well to r.
Get serious. It's influenced by Dark Matter.
Now if the rate of nuclear decay isn't constant (there's always been a statistical element to predicting nuclear decay), it seems to be the cumulative effect is to change particular interactions at the subatomic level. This has to have a subtle but measurable effect on electromagnetic quanta (photons) emitted during the change in energy state of an electron.
So . . . is Heisenberg rearing his ugly head for us again? Now, even proximity to a star can affect the accuracy of our observed results? I only ask because every planet I've ever been on tends to be within around 1AU of its primary.
This could be one of those "oh shit" moments. Nowadays, when the slightest observational anomaly gets string theorists salivating, perhaps we need to lay in a stock of Bill Ockham's finest razor blades.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
That didn't work too well for Chernobyl.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
I have come to be convinced of a general faulty premise in most of our learning and machinations (economics, engineering, medicine, etc.) that was founded in the crucible of a faulty premise in education: "if you work hard and get a good specialization, you will get a career that will provide you with the things you want." Said statement ignores the fact that when you are in a society of theft, hard work simply gives more to more thieves.
In re-evaluation of our engineering, I conclude that the false premise is that our engineering can improve our lives. I doesn't: it just increases the power of the powerful. The difference between a household with a broom and a household with a vac is not a difference in how much time cleanup takes (just as an example). With all our engineering, our environment is much worse, not better. Or for another example, our petroleum-intensive farming is not superior to bio-intensive farming, but it just means that the farmer can keep much more of his profits, producing fewer jobs, less food, and more pollution.
Likewise, I find that the basic premises of medicine seem to be faulty. Again, our lives don't improve greatly with our medical knowledge -- more and more, it is inaccessible. But the faith healings of the pentecostal movement defies medical explanation (or those of Lourdes). Howbeit if faith in medicine interferes with a much better, free, graced alternative, much as artificial birth control interferes with a much better, graced alternative (NFP... you'd have to go through it to understand)?
So in the end, I'm losing my confidence in technology, and the promises that it seems to give.
So will I buy a new, updated nuke eng. book? Nope. I've gotten rid of the ones I have, and don't expect to use them again. I'm getting off the bus.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
TFA's frame of reference is the Earth's orbit about the Sun, and reports a small but significant correlation between aphelion - perihelion and decay rates of some radioactive nuclides. TFA suggests that the 4% change between Earth's closest approach to the Sun and its most distant point is a possible cause for the change in decay rates.
When the frame of reference is expanded to galactic distances, we find that Earth's aphelion point is coincidentally very close to a line drawn from the Sun to the center of the galactic core. So it could also be that some shielding or suppressive effect of the Sun's local environment is reducing decay rates when the Earth is behind the Sun relative to the galactic core.
Proposed hypothesis: the changes in radioactive decay rates are related in an unknown fashion to the annual changes in the geometry of the Earth - Sun - galactic core.
This could probably be ruled out with a couple of tests of the existing data:
Aphelion occurs on Jan 4, while Earth's fullest exposure to any presumed galactic core influence occurs on Dec 17. Does the data suggest that increased activity centers around aphelion, or 18 days earlier?
If TFA's heliocentric model is correct, the change in rates of decay from month to month will be a smooth sinusoidal curve over the course of the year. But if the galactic core is involved, the changes in rates of decay will depart from this since the ecliptic does not parallel the galactic plane, and the degree of the Earth's "exposure" to galactic core will vary in a more complex way. Does the data support either of these conjectures?
I'm not going to cite my references here: they would be a distraction. Key words for google: aphelion, perihelion, solstice, galactic core, "plane of the ecliptic", "galactic plane". Um, a quick review of high school trigonometry might be useful, too.
Kudos to all the researchers and lab assistants who contributed to this work. It sounds like years of seemingly mindless drudge data collection went into this database. Yet the results are stunning: something Out There is affecting "constants" that we thought were intrinsic and immutable. That changes things. That changes everything.
Or in the way I've been suggesting for years; with the fine structure constant actually being variable depending on electro-magnetc-gravitic fields, at Voyager distances, light propagates at a higher rate, making it seem as if the Voyagers were closer to Earth than they actually are.
Is that Jimmy Carter issued a decree that we not use them. Otherwise we can refine them and use them again, and again.
If this effect varies with distance to the sun, how much would it affect physics INSIDE the sun? If it can affect decay can it also affect fusion? If so what would that mean for our understanding of the life cycle of stars?
I wonder how much the seasonal variation of decay in radium 226 would explain the variation in home radon testing results.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
Based on the data presented so far it would appear that increased ambient radiation (or whatever it is) decreases decay rates, so being farther from the sun would result in an increase in nuclear decay.
Would be kind of interesting if we were thereby unable to take nukes out of the solar system (how's that for intelligent design!) although I rather doubt the effects would be nearly so pronounced.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
If the decay rate is variable based on distance, I wonder - are the vibrations used by the Cesium clocks are variable, also?
All kinds of research is based on the assumption that a second (or other favorite unit of time) is measurable.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
Trivia: Believe it or not, I once asked a chemist, who studied diamonds, the temperature at which they burned. His reply was that they didn't. Instead, according to him, at about 2000 F they break down into graphite and then the graphite burns.
Looking at the graph of the data, it looks like the decay rate changes in sync to changes in the Earth's speed towards/away from the sun. If so the rate of decay in the space probes PUs would only change when it changed its rate of speed away from the sun, not its distance. A test would have to factor this in as well.
"All those, moments will be lost, in time, like tears, in rain. Time to die." Roy Batty
Rather than the decay rate itself being affected by any solar-earth cycles, it might be an ordinary process that affects detectors systematically. It is like plugging a laser spectrometer into a noisy 60Hz plug and then wondering why you have a big 60Hz spike in your data. It's not that the physics of spectroscopy is affected by the power company, rather the assumptions about the instrument's operating conditions weren't held constant. Of course, that's probably the first thing these guys thought of...Interesting to see how peer review sees this work.
Alexander Franklin Mayer (jaypritzker.org) posited that Einstein made a very small error in the Theory of Relativity that results in what he calls "gravitational transverse redshift". The implications being that the Universe is not expanding and that time is a local verticle (ie time is a local variable within the universe.) It explains a stack of anomalies (including the Pioneer anomaly) I have a sneaking suspicion that that these experiments, if their results are shown to be correct, will prove Mayer is correct. From memory Mayers calculation of the effect of Einstein's error is about 1 part in 45 million.
FTA:
Why on earth would we think this? The first bit, I mean, not the special cases? I sure as hell wouldn't think this. As we're finding out lately, very few things in the universe are constant.
I am the only one concerned that Leroy's brother Jere Jenkins is the first author? Hopefully the tendency to run headlong into trouble isn't genetic.
So if evolution requires the occasional presence of radioactive carbon in DNA, and if carbon happens to be one of those elements affected by planet-star distance, then wouldn't the habitable zone of life be considerably smaller? In other words, if for instance carbon-13 has a faster decay rate for planets closer to their star, then evolution would be less present (less carbon-13 to alter DNA) and life may cease to exist as a result. This all assumes of course that evolution is required for life to exist in the long-term.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Because that's not how science works. The current theory at any given time is simply the current best at explaining the data we have. Nothing more, nothing less.
Still waiting for more evidence if it didn't reach their pre-conceived "solution" isn't any useful kind of skepticism and it isn't science. It's just a way of clinging to a fairy tale which has even _less_ evidence to support it.
Well, that's perfectly ok then, because we calibrate for thousands of years, nor for one year. And it's calibrated against stuff which is already known to have happened at a given time.
E.g., yeah, you _could_ imagine a scenario where carbon decay was 1,000,000 times faster until very recently. (To account for the difference between billions of years and the thousands of years of new-Earth creationists.) But then in that scenario, Rameses II's boat would be mere days old. We already _know_ that that's not the case. Our measurement is already calibrated for the interval we're measuring, and shows _no_ sign whatsoever of any major deviation like that.
At any rate, see that 1,000,000 times difference required to support a young Earth. It's pretty damn hard to massage a 0.15% periodic difference into accounting for six bloody orders of magnitude.
Not that it will stop fundies from pretending that it's still some controversy.
Well, it _could_ be the case, but see again:
1. we're talking about explaining a difference of 6 freaking orders of magnitude. Requiring an effect almost 10,000,000 times stronger than the Sun produces. It's not a minor fluctuation, it's something which would have _massive_ effects on almost everything on Earth.
Life, for example, would experience almost instant multiple-DNA breaks where C14 instantly decays, and pretty much just instantly die. We're talking C14 everywhere getting a half-life of 0.005 years, or less than two days. It would be an _extremely_ radioactive isotope in those conditions. E.g, a helluva lot more radioactive than the Caesium isotopes used for radiotherapy, or about 100 times more radioactive than the most active isotope of Polonium. Most C14 atoms in your DNA or proteins, would decay and break that DNA or protein, before the cell has any chance to repair the previous breaks. That effect alone is comparable to a massive ionizing radiation dose. But those breaks at that rate would cause additional ionization inside the cells, so it would be pretty damned deadly.
Other radioactive materials would experience an even more dramatic effect. Uranium ores everywhere would just freaking blow up. You don't even need a chain reaction there: merely shortening the half-life like that, would cause a lot of it to split, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. For that matter, since the Earth's magma gets its energy from fission, the freaking inner side of the planet would suddenly get 10,000,000 times more energy and probably blow up the planet. But at the very least, it would melt the surface and vapourize all life.
So if something like that had ever happened, at the scale needed to keep young-Earth creationists here, we wouldn't be here. We already have a pretty damn good indication that it didn't happen, and it couldn't have happened.
2. Our estimate of the Earth's universe is based on more than C14 decay. Sorry. So it would take a lot more th
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I wasn't clear in that when I previously used the word "direct" I didn't mean "a direct cause", I was just stating that the connection between the Earth and Sun was a direct connection, as opposed to all implied indirectness of the watered down semantics used by scientists too afraid to admit that there is electricity in space.
As far as the cause, I meant to imply that these changes in the electromagnetic forces alter something else that we don't fully understand, even though we thought we did because of how (relatively) constant these forces have averaged in our extremely short time observing them.
What would we all do without that biting pear?..
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
it's magnetism, you insensitive clod!
Check out follow up experiment to the article at:
http://news.uns.purdue.edu/insidepurdue/2008/080828-IP-Web.pdf
Page 8/9
Interesting follow on work done during a solar eclipse is found at http://news.uns.purdue.edu/insidepurdue/2008/080828-IP-Web.pdf on page 8
Instead of looking for ways to get rid of waste, a better idea is to find ways to use waste. The problem with nuclear "waste" is that it has excess binding energy left, and a natural tendency to release it (via decay) at fairly high rates. We actually do know how to utilize that energy currently, but generally at very low efficiency and with more work than just digging up some more uranium.
The 2nd biggest potential development in nuclear energy (aside from viable fusion power), is an effective (and for mainly political reasons, proliferation-resistent) fission fuel cycle.
Graphite is for-evah, shiny graphite is for-evah, unless you use a bloody rubber, for you Americans that's an eraser...
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Oh sweet Orion! Astrology may be true! Stars have some unknown influence on local physical properties depending upon distance. Is it any massive body? Moon/Planets? You just know this research is going to be abused, right?
Likewise, I find that the basic premises of medicine seem to be faulty. Again, our lives don't improve greatly with our medical knowledge
Good luck with your leech therapy, dude.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
We always assume the laws of physics are the same everywhere. This is probably true at a fundamental level, but it doesn't mean we understand all the laws of physics.
Yeah, it's clear that the science is in an eternal "work in progress" state. It's the fundamental way in which science work that causes all the laws of physics to be falsifiable, eventually, if we come up with a better model.
But it's another thing that most of the time, the newer and better physics model will globally be the same as the current one, and only differ in small corner case and details, where exceptionally the old model failed and not the new.
The progress lies in the details (apparently, details aren't devil's monopoly).
But on the other hand, if the older model have worked "well-enough" for so long and that we only reconsider them now, maybe that means that they are really close to the reality, except for some exception. But don't expect big moments of "Sorry, everything you learned is completely bogus and should be throne away. Instead learn our new explanation of everything" - that's more characteristic of crackpot theories (well, crackpots, and publications whoring for money by trying to overstate the importance of the result interpretation).
Take for example, Newton's laws of dynamic. They were considered good for a very long time. They are still good enough approximation for most of the everyday cases.
Einstein came with his own model of physics. Which basically gives the same result for most usual situations, and only show its differences at extreme cases (travel at near speed-of-light, gravity lens-effect of massive stars, etc...)
It's not that the old model has to be thrown away as it is utter bullshit. It's just that the old model was close enough to reality for most situations and that the new model gives the same results most of the time and performs better on some extreme cases.
Same goes for string theory. It helps explain some even rarer events, for which relativism and quantum mechanic conflicts.
The kind of stuff that we currently can't even produce or find to test our models gainst.
As such consider the current problem.
Radioactive decay is known and has been used for ages. Carbon dating has worked very well up to now.
If something new happens, it would be a small detail. Which doesn't contradict all the successful usage up until now (if we were *that* wrong about the model we should'nt have expected it to work at all up until now).
As such, yeah, TFA points out a modification about our knowledge of isotope decay. But this change only accounts for a very small deviation (~0.2%). If neutrino's effect had been bigger, we would have realised much earlier.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I just did.
The patterns are observable to any who look, and there have long been physical mechanisms which might be used to explain those patterns. Here is another one.
There is no magic. Long live magic.
-FL
Correction.
I should have said that there have recently been physical mechanisms examined which might be used to explain the patterns noted in astrology. Electromagnetics and the ability of cells to react to EM radiation in a variety of spectrums in combination with lunar gravity. --Both of which have been posited as possible reasons why subterranean organisms have the apparent ability to regulate their internal cycles with the day night cycle of the planet, to take one example.
-FL
If the Solar System does indeed contain a field which inhibits radioactive decay, even a little, and is dynamic, then can't motion through that field be harnessed as a power source?
Like how the Earth's magnetic field, which is very weak compared to the electromagnetic phenomena that humans generate with which it interacts, still has enough power to drive effects in very tiny devices, like magnetized compass needles, and even smaller microelectronics. Except that we're not really orbiting very much through Earth's magnetic fields that are either really small, or don't have lots more power available from other sources, like solar power or precharged batteries.
But on Earth, though, really small devices that could harness this effect for power are all already flying through this field, showing its effects. And plenty of them aren't candidates for solar power, because they're not reliably hit by sunlight.
If we can understand and engineer this force, can't we make perhaps nanotech with embedded atoms or molecules that are pushed around by this force enough to power the rest of the devices? At a cost of slowing the Earth's orbit by an imperceptible amount, but which is enough wattage to really make a difference in usable machines.
--
make install -not war
Creation pseudo-scientists have never touched the one and only flaw in the accepted methods of isotopic dating: the untestable assumption that the isotopes on which the measurements are based were deposited (and have decayed) at roughly the same rate over the scale of time being measured. Most of them don't bring this up because their understanding of real science is so poor they wouldn't understand this weakness in the theory even if it were explained to them. The others probably avoid it because to acknowledge the small possibility that scientific dating methods are flawed would also be to acknowledge that they are most likely accurate. But this new finding actually raises the probability that dating methods are flawed to a point that should merit investigation. The idea that the planet is 6000 years old will still be laughable, of course...
That's just it. George Washington was leeched to death. The cure of his pneumonia killed him. Yet I don't deny that medicine does in many cases work, or that engineering does in many cases work, for specific tasks. I just find that it doesn't significantly improve our lives. Indeed, when you balance out the cost of medicine against the benefits, it seems to me that it has only limited value. Look up Smith Wigglesworth, a pentecostal preacher who also healed many people through faith healings -- he charged nothing for this. Although not healed by him, I do know of a woman who was healed of one leg shorter than the other, in this way. Yet even if we didn't have faith healings, I find that an openness to life as it is seems to improve one's life far more than the continual death-fearing focus on maintaining one's health.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Leeches, as used back in the bad old days, are not good medicine. Those doctors back then didn't know that, because they believed that ill people have bad blood in them, and leeches must be used to suck it out. Complete bollocks in retrospect.
Medicine does in many cases work, and nowadays it is a science, with double-blind tests for new medicines. Engineering used to be bad: look at all the centuries-old buildings with their massively overengineered walls, and the puny bridges they used to build way back, and what the application of mathematics has done to the discipline: now we have skyscrapers and huge bridges, all over the world.
So, unless you want to live in a mud hut and die of dysentery on your trek to the west in search of a new food source, yes, the application of math and science to human needs has drastically improved our lives.
Faith healings? Of course! That's why nobody died from infectious diseases back in the dark ages, when people were so much more pious! Hey, that's the solution to the health insurance problems in the USA: if you get ill, go to church and have people pray for you, and in exchange, you'll pray for other people when they get ill, it's almost like BitTorrent!
From the Wikipedia page:
Healing claims
Wigglesworth believed that God had cured him of hemorrhoids, and much of his ministry was focused on faith healing. He avoided medical treatment as far as possible, despite suffering from kidney stones in his later years. In his books, Wigglesworth said he refused any surgical procedure stating that no knife would ever touch his body either in life or death. This was substantiated by a friend, Albert Hibbert, who stated in his book 'Smith Wigglesworth: The Secret of His Power" that no autopsy was ever performed after Wigglesworth's death. Wigglesworth even claimed that God had allowed him to raise several persons from the dead.
I think this speaks for itself.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Why only look at the factors mentioned by the authors? Does the combined gravity of the sun, moon, and oh say Jupiter, correlate better than the sun alone? What about the speed of the Earth around the galaxy? That varies on a yearly not so?
No, I am not suggesting that these are the real factors to look at, I am just saying that all the discussion is centered around the ideas of the authors without any one suggesting something else. don't let the original authors imagination limit our imaginations.
Stonewolf
I'm not saying engineering (or medicine) doesn't work. I'm saying that it keeps going bad on us, because all it does is increase our power. But if you give more horsepower to a drunk on the road, he just hits a tree all the harder.
The engineering and medicine don't increase our wisdom, and that is what is needed to improve our quality of life and lifestyle.
The bad thing about the engineering and medicine is that they take away from the faith focus, which in turn *can* increase our wisdom.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I'm suprised nobody else has pointed out this.
If you look at the graph, it has incredibly regular spikes up and down, with a period very close to a month.
Also the spikes seem to have a somewhat higher amplitude than the annual wave, which fits well with gravity from the moon being about twice of that of the sun, iirc. I wonder how well the graph would correlate with the tides, which also is due to solar and lunar gravitational pull.
Janna
If that's true, then our perception of (say) dark energy might be significantly related to our (relative) nearness to the galactic core. Our various instruments might be subtly compromised, and our measurements distorted, by the immense amount of gravitational influence locked in the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Our apparent perception of the increasing acceleration of the Universe might turn out to be nothing more than a local phenomenon.
One way to test this theory would be to send off two spacecraft with decaying isotopes: one heading directly coreward, and one going in exactly the opposite direction. If scientists were able to tease out a shift in decay rates based on our distance from the sun, a mere decade of data from these two spacecraft might yield amazing results!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.