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I was in the middle of writing my article on teleportation when my new resposibilities of my work overwhelmed me. IT can be really demanding, or better said, your users can be.

So, not wanting to let a month pass without saying anything, I decided to write a little about a discovery that hasn’t reached popular media yet—and maybe it will never. It’s the discovery of the first particle made of five quarks: a pentaquark.

Why not all the hype like it happened with the Higgs boson? Maybe because the Higgs boson was wrongly called the God particle and that sounds controversial and polemic from the point of view of news people, no matter the true nature of the Higgs particle is beyond the understanding of many people. What counts is to be controversial, not truthful.

I hope I have some time in the future to write extensively about quarks and other related matters that have to do with what makes up matter. At the time I will only say that quarks are the constituents of protons and neutrons and other heavy particles we usually don’t hear about in everyday life but they exist. Electrons and neutrinos, which are lighter particles, along with photons and other particles responsible for carrying forces (photons carry electromagnetic radiation–light, X rays, gamma rays, radio–are not made of quarks.

Until now, we knew there are six types of quarks and each type comes in three different forms, each of them representing a nuclear charge, also known as a color. You see, when talking about electricity we learn of positive charges and negative charges. Those charges repel or attract according to the laws of electromagnetism. Quark charges—color—obey the laws of the nuclear force, the force that keeps atomic nuclei together, no matter positively charged protons would try to repel each other. These six types of quarks with three different colors make up a set of eighteen possible quarks (6 x 3), but if we count their anti-matter counterparts, we end up with 36 different quarks.

We knew that protons or neutrons were made of three quarks each, along with other heavy particles. Medium weight particles known as mesons have are made of just two quarks.

What kind of particles are those made of five quarks? Super heavy particles.

The relevance of this discovery is that it will open new avenues in our understanding of the microcosms. Theories will have to be revised and experiments devised.

A wonderful future of knowledge await us.

I hope you liked this, brief but concise. J

One of the activities I do as a member of my local astronomical society is to deliver ,small talks about science in movies and TV. I do these presentations more or less in a monthly bases and the topic I wrote about last month–robots–was one I talked about in these small presentations.

Other topic I attacked was teleportation and I’m preparing a little article for this blog. Wait for it. If all goes well, I hope to have it next month.

The recent movie Avengers: Age of Ultron and the upcoming Terminator: Genysis got me thinking about the impossibility of robots or computers rebelling against humankind. Yes, I wrote impossibility because what the movies present us is not possible, at least not in the foreseeable future and–my personal opinion—will never occur.

I can tell you that, if you examine carefully the logic our cybernetic enemies follow in order to deduce that they should destroy mankind, you will find that they are faulty. Their logic lacks assertions and facts and they always get to conclusions jumping from one assertion without anything to support the conclusion.

Ultron was built to keep humans in peace and away from pain, but Ultron deduces that humans are the cause of their pain and their lack of peace and decides to destroy us. If it destroys us, it will be causing us pain and warring against us is not peace.

In the Terminator saga, Skynet achieves consciousness and, as It has been programed for war, decides to make war on us. Why? Because machines are superior to us. How did it reach that conclusion? Nobody knows for sure.

In the Dune saga—the books, not the movies—there is a story about the Butlerian Jihad, a Holy War against the machines initiated by Serena Butler because the robot Erasmus killed her baby. The machines had been ruling over humans for centuries, because machines—in particular their leader, Omnius—considered machines superior because they were more efficient than humans. There’s no justification in that for the machines to control us.

Because of these stories there are people who really believe machines can overthrow or destroy humans and are afraid of artificial intelligence research.

But, first of all, what is a computer? A computer differentiates itself from other machines—for example: a car or a refrigerator—in that a computer can do more than one thing as long it is programmed to do so. All of you are familiar with computers: you are using one to read this article, either a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone—yes, the smartphone is a computer if you hadn’t thought of it that way because of being called a phone. Computers have, in essence, four components: a storage device to keep your files and programs, memory to store the program that is currently being run, devices to input and output data—for instance: a keyboard or a display—, and a CPU or central processor unit that is a microchip wired in a way that can perform simple arithmetic and logic—comparisons—operations following a program. A program is a set of instructions that the CPU can understand.

As you can see, a CPU can only perform math and logic operations, like adding numbers or deciding if some character string has more letters than certain quantity. Programming languages don’t have instructions like “kill” or “destroy”, these are very abstract concepts.

So, by far, your laptop cannot perform any instruction that Microsoft, Apple or whoever designed its operating system and applications hasn’t given it.

Now, what is artificial intelligence? If you saw the movie The Imitation Game, about the life of the father of computer science, Alan Turing, you surely heard the character explaining the imitation game, which is not the central topic in the movie and that’s why I consider it should bear another title, besides, there are some exaggerations and false information in the movie, but I won’t talk about them to not deviate from what I’m talking about. The imitation game consists in having a man and a machine behind a wall. An examiner can ask them questions and receive their answers by passing typed questions and answers through two slits in the wall, so the examiner cannot know which is the man and which is the machine. If a considerable amount of time passes and a lot of questions have been asked without allowing the examiner to know which is which, it is said that the machine passed the test and is bale to imitate a man. Turing never said how much time was required or how many questions, but no machine has passed the test to date.

The imitation game inspired the first studies in artificial intelligence, but here is something very important: intelligence is about learning and solving problems that haven’t been confronted previously by an individual. To pass Turing’s test the machine needs to imitate a man, that means, not only being intelligent, but being able to express emotions and being conscious, and those two things aren’t sought by AI scientists. You cannot, at least not at present, represent emotions and consciousness mathematically, therefore you cannot program them-

Nowadays some machines are able to learn and solve problems. The predictive keyboard you hve in your smartphone is an example. There’s no way your keyboard will desire one day to get rid of you because it is more efficient than you, it won’t even decide to type your messages for you and chat with your WhatsApp contacts.

The predictive keyboard is just one example. There are more professional programs that use AI to do specific jobs, like finding oil wells and help mechanics diagnose what’s wrong with your car. As you can see, all this applications are specific—it computer jargon It is called domain specific–, you can say that those AI programs learn and solve problems, but they act like human consultants or experts: they know just about one thing and no more.

Computers like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey are far away in the future and, if you saw the movie, you surely realized that HAL killed the astronauts because it had been given erroneous instructions by its programmers: the mission was more important than the life of the crew and passengers and, when the computer discovered that the pilots intended to turn it off—after a wrong diagnose given by HAL—the computer just decided to kill the humans because if it was deactivated it could no longer accomplish its mission.

Despite the logic in this case is not faulty, don’t worry: it’s just science fiction.

But suppose for a moment that a computer arrives to the conclusion that it’s better than man. Does it mean necessarily that it will try to kill us? If it considers itself better than us, maybe it will deemed destruction, extinction and assassination vices pertaining lesser entities, so maybe it just would arrive at the conclusion that it’s better than us and that’s all.

Nut suppose it wanted to destroy us. How much would it have to learn to kill or destroy a man? Machines don’t have common sense and don’t have access to the knowledge we learn by experience. To learn the same a grown up human knows the computer would have to be educated like a child.

Returning to HAL, it was able to kill the scientist in the spaceship because it was in charge of taking care of them while they were in suspended animation. It knew that if it disconnected the oxygen flow, for example, they would die, but that was something it knew because it had been previously instructed by a human programmer or a human teacher. It knew that lack of oxygen kills a man, and that’s why it killed one of the pilots by cutting his oxygen line while doing a spacewalk and tried to kill the other pilot by removing the oxygen in the hatch he would use to come back to the spaceship.

Nevertheless, we don’t need HALs if one day mankind is going to send astronauts to the farthest reaches of the Solar System.

So, don’t worry about humans creating machines so intellitgent that they will dominate or exterminate us. That won’t happen.

As always, the pictures were taken from the public domain.

Hope you like it.

I’ve been so busy these last two months, with no time for writing but a lot of ideas to write about.

The recent movie Avengers: Age of Ultron inspired me to talk a little about robots, so wait for a coming article about tha,

Sssshhhhhh….

Thinking of what topic to write about.

Expect something soon!

Directors Ethan and Joel Cohen have distinguished themselves for their low-profile characters—“nowhere men” as The Beatles would say in their famous sing—facing everyday situations, sometimes a little bizarre.

Characters like the ones we saw since 1980s’ Raising Arizona to the present, including those seen in movies like No place for old men and many others are people like you and me, living their everyday life, but with—I hope—with a big difference from you and me: They are low-profile, with no great expectations of the future, no big dreams.

Imagine a couple of miners living in a planet circling a red dwarf star, for example, Gliese 681 at 15 light-years from home. Why a red dwarf? Because it happened that stars like Tau Ceti or Epsilon Indi that are more similar to our Sun seem to be inhabited and the scientists somehow had convinced politicians that it wasn’t ethical to colonize worlds that could harbor native intelligent life. At this point an answer comes to my head: politicians don’t want to spend money checking those solar systems just to find out that they are inhabited. Besides, there’s possibility of a war, or at least a more expensive colonization. Regardless of the reason why, politicians give the “GO” for a project to colonize one of the planets of Gliese 681 so it can become habitable for humans. The first colonist will have to terraform it—change its environment so it resembles the one in our planet. During the first years of terraforming, water and other resources are scarce, so droid-ships fly from the planet to the system’s Kuiper Belt—like an asteroid belt, but this one consisting of comets and icy planetoids—to extract organic molecules and water to take them back to the colony.

This is just the stage for what I imagine could be a Cohen Brothers’ sci-fi film. Let’s pretend is not a too serious film, instead it includes some comic moments and situations that could be believable to appear in a Cohens’ film. I call it Fools’ Planet.

What happens next?

Well, the colonists are moving from living inside caves to a pressurized dome, but they still need to get essential minerals, so the old caves and some others that hadn’t been inhabited are turned into mines. This is where our two guys come into the story. They are misfits who volunteered for the long trip from Earth to Gliese, no matter they would never see their dysfunctional families on Earth anymore. It didn’t matter to them having to spend more than fifty years in hibernation during the trip—ensuring their folks, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins and even wives and kids that had them fed up and bored were really dead.

These miners, Joe and Joe, no matter what they were hoping to escape from, have found a new way to have a boring and unpromising life. They have to wake up early each morning—days are shorter on the planet due to its rotation, a day barely lasts fifteen hours–, take a three-minute bath as water is scarce; have their breakfast consisting of synthetic food that pretends to look like a ham and cheese sandwich or a veggie omelet but it tastes like plastic; wear a space-suit—or better said an environment-suit—to go outside, drive rover and get to the mine, where they spent eight boring hours drilling, boring and doing all the things the miners do. They go back to the dome at twilight, have some beers—synthetic too—and chat and joke with the waitresses at the canteen.

But one day the two Joes find themselves really bored of their fellow miners and separate from the rest, entering a tunnel that hasn’t been explored. Because they were a good pair of nobodies, none of the other miners missed them when they detonated some explosives, causing a cave-in and leaving the two unfortunate guys inside the tunnel they were exploring.

However, the cave-in brought them a trio of interesting discoveries: There was an underground river—to that moment water had been scarce, barely enough for everyday life–, giving the colony–if they ever were rescued—the possibility of a huge reservoir of water. But the other two discoveries promised to bring doom to the colony: there was some kind of fungus growing on the rocks near the river and those rocks were made of gold.

Thanks to Lucy, one of the waitresses that chatted with the Joes every evening, the other miners realized the two men had been trapped in the mine and they rescued them the next day.

Should they say something about what they had discovered? If so, whom to tell? The waitresses? The sheriff? The mayor? They knew water would benefit everyone, gold would start a fever and the knowledge of life on the planet would start a dilemma: Should they live the planet, no matter all the work they have done, or should they stay?

No matter whom they tell, sooner or later gossip would start, followed by discussions, factions and riots. And worst of all for the Joes: after deciding to confide in Lucy—who told all her friends at the canteen—the mayor decides to award them and treat them as heroes—something they don’t want, as they prefer to stay low-profile.

When the Joes are asked where the gold and water are, they refuse to say, so the mayor decides to ask the guys who rescued them. But the greedy miners had returned to the mine, looking for the gold and the water, whereas other miners—maybe greedier—caused a cave-in, killing the only personas, besides the Joes, that could have the slightest idea where the resources were (the killers, who claimed their fellow workers’ death had been an accident, were never tried, as the sheriff was more interested in finding that gold than to perform his duties, besides, all the riots in the colony were more than he could handle).

Everyone wants to befriend them in order to know where the gold and precious water is, but they didn’t say a word.

A lot of situations happen—enough to write a novel or a movie script to narrate them—and at the end they are regarded as guilty of all the trouble the colony underwent.

So, at the end, the mayor asked the sheriff to apprehend them and they were condemned to go back to Earth. That could be done because the ship that had brought them to the planet was still in orbit and It needed no pilots once its course and destination were programmed.

Maybe the Joes will find peace at the end of their voyage back home. Maybe, in a world where nobody knew them they could start a new life as nowhere men.

Ethan and Joel Cohen’s pictures were taken from the public domain.

Hope you liked it.

After some months of not writing about this topic, I decided to return to it.

By the 1930s and 1940s there was almost no doubt that the universe was expanding and that it should have had a beginning in the form of what sometimes it was called a primordial atom or a cosmic egg. Neither of these figures must be taken literary. Scientists just said that the universe was extremely dense and compact, but how much compact and how much dense?

If we apply the formulas of Einstein’s theory of relativity to a universe going backwards—contracting—we will end with a universe compacted into a single point, infinitely dense as its volume is zero.

The above idea is not easy to grasp and those days it wasn’t either. Some scientists believed that the primordial atom wasn’t compressed into a single point, but to a broader volume. There had to be something that prevented an infinitely dense point—or singularity–, but the mechanism hadn’t been figured out yet. What was the size of the universe at its birth? Nobody knew at that time how massive the universe was and its age was estimated in ten billion years or even less. So, for some scientists, the universe didn’t require a cosmic egg compressed into a singularity, but just a really compact universe, like, for example, a volume equal to the volume of the Solar System.

For other scientists, an expansion from a starting point was inadmissible. That’s why I said almost at the beginning of this article. Remember that, before Friedman, Lemaitre and Hubble the universe was conceived as eternal—in the sense that it didn’t have a beginning and I won’t have an end, but as we saw in an earlier cosmology article, an eternal universe creates an Olbers’ paradox because an eternal universe must contain light rays from all its stars reaching our eyes at any given moment, as no matter how far away they are, due to the infinite longevity of the universe all of them will reach our eyes, not allowing us to have dark nights, but bright ones: white mantles over our heads.

  Cosmology IV

Among those who didn’t believe that the universe had a definite beginning were Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold and Hermann Bondi. In 1948 they went to see a movie called Dead of Night. I don’t know if the movie had some influence on them or if it was a happy coincidence, but they came up with a theory to explain the redshifted light from the “supposed” receding galaxies without having to believe that the universe had a beginning.

That theory was called The stationary universe.

They presented their theory in 1948 and they claimed that the universe seemed to be expanding because matter was being created at the rate of one hydrogen atom per cubic meter every 1,000,000,000 years. That creation of matter didn’t violate the law of conservation of matter and energy because this matter was created by a C-Field (or creation field) that increased its negative pressure with each bit of matter that was created, thus balancing always the amount of matter and energy in the universe.

And one day, while debating on the radio with George Gamow, a Russian astrophysicist and cosmologist who defended the expansion of the universe, Fred Hoyle called it mockingly The Big Bang. The name stuck.

Let’s not consider the stationary universe a foolish theory. The C-Field is something that looks like inflation—a phenomenon that Big Bang defenders claimed that happened at the beginning of the life of the universe. The C-Field is supported by mathematics and the whole theory is as scientifically plausible as the Big Bang. Why have we discarded now?

Well, that will be another story.

As always, all the images were taken from the public domain.

I hope you liked it.

Just some days into this new year I remember reading a trilogy by Stephen Baxter called Manifold. In this trilogy, each novel, although presenting the same characters, is totally independent from the others and those novels presents some vision about humanity’s destiny in the long-term future.

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Two of these noels: Space and Origins take place in 2015. You will be guessing right when I thought: “We have come to 2015 and nothing is like in the novels!”.

That was the same thought I had when we reached 2000. When I was a child I envisioned a 2000 full of flying cars and housekeeping robots, but although we have the technology for those, it’s still expensive and the technological trends have taken other unexpected and unforeseeable paths not imagined by most visionaries and sci-fi writers some decades ago.

2000 and 2015 are examples of what I call iconic years: years that have some meaning or relevance thanks to sci-fi, years in which we expected or hoped to find technologies and events predicted or imagined in books or movies.

This time, I will take a quick tour of my personal iconic years.

1980

Two TV series produced in the sixties and early seventies presented a futuristic 1980.

Irwin Allen’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea didn’t show much of daily Earth but I always thought that life on Earth hadn’t changed much, just the technology, represented by the submarine Seaview and other marine vehicles that we could see from time to time.

What really got me impressed was the future world presented in Gerry Anderson’s UFO, in which 1980 was a year with cars whose doors opened vertically, like wings, and there were a lot of high-tech vehicles to defend the Earth against a UFO invacsion and there was a moonbase.

1984

George Orwell’s novel, 1984, in which the world is ruled by an overseeing government, made this year iconic. From this novel came the idea of The Big Brother, where everybody is watched all the time.

1986

It’s iconic because of the return of Halley’s comet.

1999

A nuclear explosion causes the Moon to leave its orbit in the TV series Space 1999.

1997

That was the year that the Jupiter 2, the spaceship in the series Lost in Space was launched, the year in which Skynet in the Terminator sagas took control of the Internet and all machines and it was the year when we made contact with aliens, as in the movie and novel that bears the same name (written by Carls Sagan).

2000

This year is conic just because it was the last year of the 20th Century. It wasn’t, as most people think, the first year of the 21st Century–which was 2001–, remember that there’s no year 0 in our calendar. After year 1. B. C. came year 1. A. D.

2001

2001: A space odyssey made this year iconic.

2010

2001’s sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two made this year iconic.

2015

It’s iconic to me because of the Manifold trilogy I already mentioned.

2048

In Greg Bear’s novel Queen of Angels, this year is called The Binary Millenium. I won’t enter into a full discussion about the binary system, just suffers to say that 2047 in binary is written as a series of 1s and 2048 adds o leading 1 to the number and changes all the other 1s by 0s. I will show with a shorter number:

The number 7 in binary is represented as 111 and the number 8 is 1000.

2061

Arthur C. Clarke’s 2061: Odyssey Three inspired my decision to include this year as iconic. Also, is the next coming of Halley’s comet.

2065

The year in which the earliest Gerry Anderson’s series took place, like The Thunderbirds or Stingray.

3001

Made iconic because of 3001: Odyssey Four.

I think I have to stop here. There are a lot of comments that could be derive from any of this year, but maybe someday I will write something about them again.

As always, all images are from the public domain.

I hope you liked it.

Interstellar was for me, not just the best sci-fi movie of the year, but the best movie. I hardly imagine I can see a better movie before the year ends.

The movie was directed by Christopher Nolan, the director of the latest Batman trilogy and Inception, one of my favorites sci-fi movies ever. Interstellar had Kip Thorne as scientific advisor.

Who is this guy? Well, Kip Thorne is one of the top physicists of today and a good friend of Stephen Hawking’s. Kip Thorne is responsible, among other things, of Carl Sagan’s idea of using a wormhole in the novel Contact to transport the people inside the machine that was built with the help of the alien blueprints–Sagan was about to use a black hole, but fortunately asked for Thorne’s advice and he changed that. Also, derived from that advice he gave to Sagan, Thorne developed the first accepted theory regarding time-travel–there were others before his, but they didn’t arise much excitement because they dealt with impossible universes.

Of course, we know that time travel is not possible, but at least theoretically it could be, but there are a lot of “ifs” that must be true in order to make it possible.

Interstellar is a movie that has a lot of details to talk about. As any movie, it doesn’t matter how much advice it received, there are places that profit from “literary license”, disregarding some natural laws and phenomena in favor of putting some ideas that could help the plot and be more appealed to movie-goers.

So, prepare for the months to come, some of the aspects of this movie will be commented in this blog, along with other pending topics, like cosmology and time travel.

As always, photos and images were taken from the public domain.

Hope you like this and my best wishes for you all in the following holidays.

As I said last month, these two months are really very busy for me, regarding two of the hobbies about which I like to write.

As you know, because I have mentioned it earlier and because of the menus you can navigate in this blog, I’m a sci-fi writer, and I have a book that you can get as an e-book in English or in print form, in the case of Spanish speakers who live in Monterrey.

Well, I released my Spanish version of the book in the International Book Fair of Monterrey and all my books were sold! This encourages me to continue writing and I hope my work leaves me enough time for doing so.

In the case of the other hobby about which I write: science, I will be a speaker for the National Amateur Astronomy Meeting that is held yearly in Monterrey at the Alpha Planetarium. The title of my talk will be: “The influence of stars: A scientific view”, so don’t expect to see me wearing a stars, moons and planets gown, I have not changed to astrology!

If everything goes well, I hope to return next month with some new article.