Older and Slower! Now With More Dark Matter!

(CNN) -- How cute was our universe as a baby? We now know better than ever: The picture of our early universe just got sharper and tells scientists with greater precision many important facts about how the universe evolved.

This new photogenic moment, released Thursday, comes courtesy of the European Space Agency's Planck space telescope, which detects cosmic microwave background radiation -- the light left over from the Big Bang. Scientists used data from Planck to create an artificially colored map of temperature variations across the sky in the early universe, in more detail than ever before.

"It's a big deal," said Charles Lawrence, Planck project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a news briefing. He added, "We can tie together a whole range of phenomena that couldn't be tied together so well before, and the sum total of that, the impact, is felt in many, many ways."

The light is technically from 380,000 years after the Big Bang, but that's still infancy when you consider that, according to the new data, the age of the universe is about 13.8 billion years.

"By the matching observations from Planck to predictions from models, we can assemble a surprisingly detailed picture of the universe as it was one nano-nano-nano-nanosecond after the Big Bang," said Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy at John Hopkins University.

Kamionkowski compared the Planck map to the Human Genome Project in terms of its importance for cosmology.

After analyzing the new data, scientists now believe that the universe is about 100 million years older than they thought.

The universe's light started out as a white hot glow and would have been blindingly bright if anyone had been around to see it, Lawrence said.

But since the Big Bang, that hot light has cooled significantly, and the universe itself has expanded by a factor of 1,100. The light has cooled so much that we can't see it, but Planck can detect subtle variations in temperature, which give scientists a wealth of information. By subtle, we mean about one-hundred-millionth of a degree.

The colors in the temperature map image that scientists released Thursday were arbitrarily chosen to show these intensity variations, Lawrence said. Red means a little bit warmer than average, blue means cooler than average, and white is average.

Planck data also suggest that our universe has more dark matter than previously thought. A full 26.8% appears to be dark matter, an invisible phenomenon that scientists have only been able to detect indirectly; experiments both in space and at the Large Hadron Collider are hoping to pin it down.

It appears that ordinary matter -- all of the stuff that we can see, such as planets and stars -- makes up only 4.9% of all the universe.

The rest of the universe is an even more mysterious phenomenon called dark energy, which has also never been detected and appears to be in less abundance than researchers thought.

Scientists said the rate at which the universe is expanding, based on these observations, is 67.15 kilometers per second per megaparsec, a unit of vast distance in space (1 megaparsec = 3.3 million light years). That's significantly less than what had been calculated previously (73.8 km/sec/Mpc). This number, known as the Hubble constant, describes the acceleration of the stretching of spacetime.

The discrepancy between these Hubble constants will likely attract a lot of attention in the scientific community and is one of the most exciting parts of the new data, said Martin White, a scientist with the Planck mission based at the University of California, Berkeley.

"The hope would be that this is actually pointing toward some deficiency in the models, or some extra physics that we're not aware of, and maybe spark a whole new research direction," White said.

One theory that could be explored is that the nature of dark energy, which scientists think is causing the accelerated expansion of the universe, is different from the simplest human-calculated models. Is dark energy increasing with time over some volume of space? That's a radical theory, though, White said, and there are other possibilities.

Another anomaly of these results is that temperature fluctuations are not uniform across the sky map. There are more variations in one direction than in another.

"Perhaps we could say that our universe has thrown us a curve ball, and it rarely fails to surprise us," said Krzysztof Gorski, Planck scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Scientists ran 10 million computer simulations and chose from among them the best match to the new data, White said. Out of those, they found a good match describing important statistics about the universe.

The Planck telescope is aboard a spacecraft that launched in May 2009. It is not circling the Earth but orbits a point in the Sun-Earth system called the second Lagrange point.

The Planck mission helps to nail down many of the parameters that other experiments must know to explore aspects of the universe, such as its expansion history, White said.

New analyses are based on the first 15.5 months of data from this mission, which is run principally by the European Space Agency. NASA is a partner of the project.

Planck represents the third generation of attempts to map the cosmic microwave background. The first was COBE, launched in 1989, followed by WMAP, launched in 2001. Comparing the resulting maps shows just how much better the maps have gotten with each successive satellite.

"This is a beautiful illustration of how science works," Lawrence said. "Make a measurement, learn from it, make a better measurement, learn from it."

By Elizabeth Landau
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/21/tech/innovation/universe-planck-map/index.html?hpt=hp_c3

BEAUTY: Sculpture--Mihoko Ogaki

Japanese conceptual artist Mihoko Ogaki's series "Milky Ways--Breath" features fibre-reinforced plastic figures of dying or dead people with entire galaxies or even universes inside them. Small holes in the surface of the figure allow star maps to be projected onto the surrounding walls. This simple yet profound image is breathtaking in its scope of meaning. The pieces are rife with the ideas of cycles, transformation, transmogrification, macro and micro, and our connection and place in the reality around us.

http://www.mihoko-ogaki.com/index.html

I am sure I have posted these images before, but here they are again because they are so relevant to the art of Ogaki.

Ideas, Awe, and Euphoria

By Jason Silva for CNN

Can ideas get you high?

My approach to creating content is focused on pulling people out of their intellectual comfort zones. I'm interested in presenting ideas in unique ways that challenge people to question their assumptions.

My mode of presentation is short-form video -- basically I create fast cut, impassioned "idea explainers" that explode with enthusiasm and intensity as they distill how technology is expanding our sphere of possibility.

I want big ideas to have aesthetic relevance. I want to tickle people's intellectual sensibilities and instill a sense of wonder. I think big ideas should get people high!

My short videos, which I call shots of philosophical espresso, are trailers for these ideas. They are not a substitute for a book or academic paper -- they are instigators. My work is simply another way for wider audiences to engage with these ideas.

My goal is for those who might not be inclined toward heady discourse to find a way still to connect to these ideas.

Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey coined the term "the biological advantage of being awestruck" to describe his theory on why our unique ability to be enthralled was, somehow, biologically selected for in a Darwinian sense. He believes this quirk of our consciousness imbues our lives with a sense of cosmic significance that over the course of history has resulted in a species that works harder not just to survive but to flourish and thrive. To "awe" gives us a "raison d'etre." A reason for being. You can learn more about Humphrey's idea in my video "A Movie Trailer for Awe."

Humphrey says being enchanted by the magic of experience, rather than being just an aid to survival, provides an essential incentive to survive.

"We relish just being here," he says. "We feel the yen to confirm and renew, in small ways or large, our own occupancy of the present moment, to go deeper, to extend it, to revel in being there, and when we have the skill, to celebrate it in words. ..."

As pop philosopher Alain De Botton wrote in "The Art of Travel," "There is an urge to say: I was here, I felt this, and it matters!"

And this sense of cosmic awe continues to manifest itself in the age of technology, as Erik Davis wrote in his book "TechGnosis":

"Collectively, Human societies can no more dodge sublime imaginings or spiritual yearnings than they can transcend the tidal pulls of Eros. ...

"We are beset with a thirst for meaning and connection that centuries of skeptical philosophy, hardheaded materialism cannot eliminate. ... Today we turn to the cosmic awe conjured by science fiction, or the outer-space snapshots of the Hubble telescope as it calls forth our ever-deeper, ever-brighter possible selves."

Terence McKenna, in his book "Food of the Gods," wrote about the origins of human language: this unique, often ecstatic expression of consciousness that bursts forth as morsels of meaning encoded as vocal patterns.

He believes the origins of language stem from our early use of psychedelic compounds, which caused a sort of "ontological awakening" of our species and thus acted as an early catalyst for religion, cosmic feelings of awe and a desire for transcendent experiences.

These experiences, to borrow the words of Tim Doody, re-contextualize oneself as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole, through which molecules and meaning flow, from nebulae to neurons and back again. Early shamans, Davis wrote in "TechGnosis," became ecstatic technicians of the sacred.

Regardless of whether you buy McKenna's theory, he does provide a compelling case for the relationship between "cosmic, out-of-body euphoria" and the cognitive leaps to which it can give rise.

Some of our greatest poets, scientists and other thinkers have attributed some of their greatest inspiration to the use of these psychedelic chemicals and their resulting out-of-context perspectives.

But it's not necessarily the chemicals themselves I'm interested in, but rather what they do to our sense of perspective and our reference points. My focus is the subjective experiences they seem "to occasion."

Tom Robbins explains:

"The plant genies don't manufacture imagination, nor do they market wonder and beauty -- but they force us out of context so dramatically and so meditatively that we gawk in amazement at the ubiquitous everyday wonders that we are culturally disposed to overlook, and they teach us invaluable lessons about fluidity, relativity, flexibility and paradox. Such an increase in awareness, if skillfully applied, can lift a disciplined, adventurous artist permanently out of reach of the faded jaws of mediocrity."

In my mind the key idea here is that of being forced out of context. We don't necessarily require psychedelics for this, although they might offer a shortcut.

What we require is a bold new attitude and a sense of humility that accepts the ambiguity of many of our so-called truths, habitual thought patterns and cultural reality tunnels. By accepting the need to constantly de-condition our thinking to approach the world with new eyes, we can reconnect with our sense of awe and wonder.

As Michael Pollan wrote, "In order to see things as if for the first time, we must remember to forget." Bucky Fuller used to say "dare to be naive." Oftentimes, our sense of what we think we know is precisely what prevents us from approaching situations free of prejudice.

"Banality is a defense against being overwhelmed," Pollan wrote in his book "The Botany of Desire."

This makes perfect sense to me: In a world where disruption is the new normal, and technological change is happening at an exponential rate; a world where we are bombarded with media messages, and where "attention" is the new limited resource, it seems easier to recoil away from all the mindblowingness going on, and instead look for reasons to be bored. The mundane can be quite comforting for those terrified of leaving their comfort zone.

And this where I think my work serves the purpose of infecting people with wonderment. My short videos are "digital psychedelics" meant to "de-center" the self, dwindle the broadcast of the ego and provide people with a long view, "big picture" perspective on humanity, technology and how their symbiosis might make a dent in the cosmos.

As Alan Harrington wrote in "The Immortalist": "We must never forget we are cosmic revolutionaries."

Original article on CNN.com here.
http://thisisjasonsilva.com/



Do yourself a favor and watch these very short, very inspirational films. Silva talks fast, but stay with him... or just let it wash over you and feel it. His excitement is contagious.

Happy Birthday, Carl!

Today would have been Carl Sagan's 78th birthday.

Happy birthday, Carl. Thank you for your mind, your work, and your legacy.

Ensō

The Japanese word ensō may mean "circle" but the Zen Buddhist concept it represents is far larger than a single word. It contains the ideas of enlightenment, cycles, unity, time, nature, the void, infinity, and the totality of the universe itself.

Imagine for a moment that you are man primeval, on a plane, looking out around you, with little or no linguistic skills, and certainly no scientific or objective knowledge of what you are seeing. Above you is a flaming circle, giving light and warmth. When that goes away, quite regularly as it turns out, it is replaced by a great white, glowing circle that inflates and deflates over a short period of time. The two of these things chase each other in a circle as they go from side to side in the sky. At night, the sky is peppered with tiny twinkling circles. On the plane around you, berries and fruits and flowers are circular. You turn in a circle, surveying the reality around you, as your body describes the shape of a circle, and you stand as the still point, the center of this circular universe. You are in the center of the circle. The still point of the circle is where ever you are. Plants grow, are harvested, it grows colder, tiny white cold circles fall from the sky, and then soon, the warmth comes back and the plants once again begin to grow. The circle of time. And reality is an endless circle which allows that to happen.

The circle is the first, original shape, the primary form, the sound of the universe...

"Everything comes around

Bringing us back again

Here is where we start

And where we end"

--Alison Goldfrapp