Ahmed Mohamad And America’s Post 9/11 Education Scene

Is America’s post 9/11 education scene way different than what has come before when a 14-year-old Arab-American high school freshman gets arrested for being an electronics enthusiast?

By: Ringo Bones 

During a typical Monday morning back in September 14, 2014, a 14-year-old Arab American high school freshman of MacArthur High in Irving, Texas named Ahmed Mohamad was arrested by the local police after his teacher mistakes the clock that he had worked over the weekend and bought to his class’ show-and-tell for a bomb. Later investigation showed that the uproar over the young electronic enthusiast was primarily racially motivated via the post 9/11 paranoia that is still gripping white Anglo Saxon conservative America, Ahmed Mohamad was later invited by President Barack Obama to the White House and given a commendation. Given the “politics” surrounding the incident, is the post-9/11 paranoia harbored by white Anglo Saxon Protestant America hurting, rather than helping, science education in America?   

The political blowback of the incident made Ahmed Mohamad to decide that he won’t be going back to MacArthur High anymore after being singled-out due to his ethnicity. After all, there are white Anglo Saxon Protestant high school students his age that were carrying loaded assault rifles publicly in the name of the “Open Carry Law” elsewhere in Texas and nobody dared to call them as “Christian Terrorists”?  

Is post the white Anglo Saxon Protestant Post 9/11 Paranoia destroying the social fabric of diversity in America? Ahmed Mohamad could be a case-in-point of this and it is also ruining the inclusiveness of science education in America where kids of high school freshmen are seeing science education as “uncool” thanks to former US President George “Dubya” Bush. Ahmed Mohamad’s exceptional abilities in digital electronics should have been nurtured given that when I was his age back in the 1980s, was still learning the rudiments of digital electronics –i.e. still learning about logic gates and J-K flip-flops. 

Graphene: The Wonder Material Awaiting Commercial Applications?

Even though its two discoverers already share a Nobel Physics Prize, is graphene that wonder material that’s desperately seeking commercial applications? 

By: Ringo Bones 

Even though the properties of this so-called wonder material is already familiar to materials researchers as far back as 1947, it wasn’t until the 1970s that two Manchester University physicists, Prof. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov developed a method to consistently synthesize the one-atom-thick-carbon wonder material now known as graphene, which eventually allowed them to share the 2010 Nobel Physics Prize. Given that it is 207 times stronger than steel and is a very good conductor of heat and electricity, the wonder material grapheme has defied commercial exploitation because of a lack of an economically viable way to synthesize and manufacture it, until now. 

Known as the “first lady of graphene”, Catharine Paukner, CEO and founder of Cambridge Nanosystems had recently developed an economically viable method to produce graphene on a mass scale. Using methane extracted from communal landfills and cow flatulence, Paukner has managed to convert this potent greenhouse gas (one molecule methane has 25 times the greenhouse warming effect of a single molecule of carbon dioxide) into something useful – the famed wonder material graphene. 

Already in the planning stage, Catharine Paukner’s large-scale methane to graphene plant, based on the workings of a domestic kitchen microwave oven, will be able to produce 5-metric tons of graphene a year. As a wonder material with hundreds of potential very lucrative commercial uses since it was extensively studied in the past 25 years, graphene still elude practical everyday applications due to the difficulty of producing it in quantity at a cost-effective manner. Ultra-light carbon composites more than 200 times stronger than steel for electric powered aircraft applications and replacement body parts are just some of the commercial applications that could make graphene production a potential multi-billion dollar a year industry.    

Homer Simpson: Brilliant Theoretical Physicist?

Even though the world-renowned patriarch of The Simpsons is a well-known bumbling oaf, but did you know that Homer Simpson, at one time, exhibited his genius as a "theoretical physicist"?

By: Ringo Bones

Though he is more well-known as a dunce and a bumbling oaf, Homer Simpson – a world-renown animated character often used by its creators to assess the prevailing zeitgeist – once displayed his mathematical genius and even predicted the mass of the Higgs Boson to within more than 90-percent accuracy 14 years before it was confirmed by a team of particle physicists operating CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. To the curious, this was from an episode titled “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” where Homer Simpson got envious of Thomas Alva Edison and tries to out-invent the “Wizard of Menlo Park”. Does this mean that Homer Simpson is now in hallowed company with Peter Higgs?

The episode would have been forgotten and would have languished in some obscure footnote of 20^th Century history if not for Dr. Simon Singh who wrote a book back in 2013 titled “The Simpsons And Their Mathematical Secrets” that included a spotlight on the 1998 episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” when Homer becomes “obsessed” with Thomas Alva Edison and decides to become an inventor. A scene in that particular The Simpsons episode script required a reading glasses-clad Homer to be placed in front of a chalkboard with complex mathematical equations. One of the writers on staff had a physicist friend who was researching the then-theoretical Higgs Boson particle and needed a “scientifically believable” illustration of Homer dabbling with a complex mathematical equation predicting the mass of the Higgs Boson particle – which is also known as the “God Particle”.

“That particular equation - as shown on TV on that particular 1998 The Simpsons episode – predicts the mass of the Higgs Boson” says Dr. Simon Singh. “If you work it out, you get the mass of the Higgs Boson that’s only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs Boson actually is. It is kind of amazing as Homer makes the prediction 14 years before it was discovered” (in the CERN’s Large Hadron Collider). For those super interested, the Higgs Boson particle was discovered to have a mass of 126 GeV.

The Higgs Boson particle is the “visible” that interacts with the Higgs Field – just like gravitons do with the gravitational field. The Higgs Field is an energy force that permeates across the universe that gives baryonic matter mass and allows the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force to co-exist in the “Standard Model” of how we think, so far, on how universal molecular physics work.
Even though Homer’s mathematical musings on the Higgs Boson somewhat reminds me of 1984 Nobel Physics Prize winner Carlo Rubbia’s mathematical musings that was pictured on a 1990 era Time magazine, the field of particle physics / quantum mechanics, mathematics can be a very useful tool in discovering and describing an “unknown particle” with better than 90-percent accuracy. Back in 1962, a then 32 year old Caltech physicist named Murray Gell-Mann proposed a search for a then theoretical particle called the Omega Minus. The particle’s existence was mathematically predicted by the Standard Model, Gell-Mann argued by a theory he formulated himself and by another physicist – a then 37 year old former Israeli Army officer named Yuval Ne’eman.

This theory which Gell-Mann called “The Eightfold Way” was based on an obscure mathematical system invented in the 19^th Century in order to manipulate numbers in groups of eight since each interacting nuclear particle had eight quantum numbers how subatomic baryons and mesons are organized into octets. Independently, Ne’eman did the same. Eventually, Gell-Mann was awarded the 1969 Nobel Physics Prize for his work on elementary particles and by 1971 began work in search for a then unknown family of particles called “quarks” using "The Eightfold Way".

Is The Force Of Gravity Weakening?

Even though gravity is still the least understood of the four fundamental forces of our universe, is there any evidence that the force of gravity is actually getting weaker? 

By: Ringo Bones 

When compared to the other fundamental forces of the universe – i.e. the strong and weak forces and the electromagnetic force, the force of gravity is currently the least understood. Until the results of the experiments done at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN makes us gain a handle on String Theory, Albert Einstein’s Theory General of Relativity is the best one yet explaining how gravity works. But is there any evidence that the force of gravity is actually getting weaker? 

There have been many challenges to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity since its presentation in 1916 – all of them unsuccessful. But that record did not daunt astronomer Thomas C. Van Flandern a researcher at the US Naval Observatory, who back in 1974 found evidence of what he believes is the gradual weakening of gravity, a force that according to General Relativity never varies. 

Van Flandern’s evidence is based on the motion of celestial objects, which would be affected by a change in gravitational force. By studying the precise times that the moon has blocked from view various stars over the past 19 years, Van Flandern calculated the changes in the moon’s orbital velocity. The rate, Van Flandern said, was twice the amount of slowdown that would be expected from known causes, principally the mutual tugs of the tides on earth and moon. The difference could be accounted for by a decrease of the force of gravity of one part in 10-billion per year. 

A discrepancy in the changes in the earth’s rotation, also caused by the tidal effects, could similarly be explained by a decrease in gravitational force, according to Van Flandern. The same gradual phenomenon may even account for a gradual increase in the size of the earth and thus explain such geological phenomena as sea-floor spreading and the movements of crustal plates. 

Thomas Van Flandern is not the only one who finds Einstein’s General Relativity wanting. The late physicist Paul Dirac also conjectured that that the universal force of gravity is slowly decreasing. And the idea that the universal force of gravity is gradually decreasing even gave the idea to science writer Robert Schadewald who back in April 1978 wrote an article about his “Schadewald Gravity Engine” the first true working energy generating device that works on the principle of perpetual motion. 

Chemically Dehydrating Seeds: Longest Botanical Experiment Ever?

Even though the results of this experiments now guides us in effectively storing seeds in the Svalbard Doomsday Vault, is Dr. Fritz Went’s chemically dehydrated seeds experiment now the longest ongoing botanical experiment ever? 

By: Ringo Bones 

This botanical experiment started back in 1947 in order to find out how long humanity can store seeds slated for future germination in a farming field in the far-off future and was intended to last for 300 years. But does the chemically dehydrated seed experiment that was started by Dr. Fritz Went still the current holder for the longest ongoing botanical experiment ever? 

Ordinarily, seeds can be stored for only one or two years before humidity makes them dissipate their stored energy and they will no longer germinate. Those seeds with firm, hard coats retain their viability longest and most seeds keep best when stored in dry storage at low temperatures like that in the current Svalbard Doomsday Vault seed repository. Under such favorable conditions, seeds of common farm and garden plants have lasted from 10 to 25 years. Would these seeds last even longer if kept completely dry? 

Seeking to find out the answer, Dr. Fritz Went launched an experiment back in 1947 which is designed to continue for more than 300 years. Seeds of 120 California wild plants were chemically dehydrated in a vacuum and then the seeds of each species were divided among 20 vacuum-sealed tubes and stored in dated jars that stated their date of germination, some as far as into 2307 A.D. Since the start of the experiment, seeds from the four sets of tubes have been germinated. The results: so far the test seeds have proved on average to be viable after 10 years’ storage as they were immediately after drying. 

During the experiment, Dr. Went shelves 20 identical sets of seeds according to date of future use. For each tube, 60 to 100 seeds will be remoistened at a temperature of 18 degrees Celsius to start germination. Some seeds from each tube will be raised for future comparison of the revived plants with their wild descendents. And such procedure invented in 1947 would then be applied to the seeds that are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault - also known to "pessimists" as the Doomsday Vault - located halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole.