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Natalie Wolchover at Quanta Magazine has a fascinating article up on the cosmic magnetic field. Over the last twenty years astronomers have increasingly found magnetic filaments that have formed in the vast expanses between galaxy clusters. The question is where did they come from.

One possibility is that cosmic magnetism is primordial, tracing all the way back to the birth of the universe. In that case, weak magnetism should exist everywhere, even in the “voids” of the cosmic web — the very darkest, emptiest regions of the universe. The omnipresent magnetism would have seeded the stronger fields that blossomed in galaxies and clusters.

Some cosmologists are looking to these magnetic fields to explain the discrepancy in how fast the universe seems to be expanding vs. its predicted value.

A number of years ago I wrote an highly speculative 旋风加速器专业版安卓 about the alignment of the dating of the time of the accelerating expansion and the estimated timing of appearance of life on earth. Scientists estimate the timing of the accelerated expansion to be about four billion years ago. This is, of course, in the general vicinity of best estimates for appearance of life on earth. Is this pure coincidence?

From the article:

However, once a “seed” magnetic field arises from charged particles in motion, it can become bigger and stronger by aligning weaker fields with it. Magnetism “is a little bit like a living organism,” said Torsten Enßlin, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, “because magnetic fields tap into every free energy source they can hold onto and grow. They can spread and affect other areas with their presence, where they grow as well.”

Ruth Durrer, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Geneva, explained that magnetism is the only force apart from gravity that can shape the large-scale structure of the cosmos, because only magnetism and gravity can “reach out to you” across vast distances. Electricity, by contrast, is local and short-lived, since the positive and negative charge in any region will neutralize overall. But you can’t cancel out magnetic fields; they tend to add up and survive.

Of course, the astrophysicist is speaking metaphorically in comparing a magnetic field to a living organism, but could there be a more direct, maybe even literal, connection between life and electromagnetism? If the fields have been growing from the early universe, couldn’t the appearance of life at the same time the shift in acceleration occurred be tied to the growing universal magnetic field? Certainly the characteristic of taping into free energy sources could be used to describe life itself as well as magnetic fields. Might there have occurred a sort of phase transition that simultaneously caused the acceleration of the expansion of the universe and enabled life to form?

The idea would be that life itself is an electromagnetic phenomenon that exists as a local perturbation in the universal magnetic field and requires a certain strength of the universal field to come into existence. If consciousness itself is an even more concentrated form of electromagnetic phenomenon, then there might have been required some additional transition or growth in the universal magnetic field for consciousness to appear. This provides an unique explanation for the Fermi Paradox. If life in the galaxy could only come into existence about four billion years ago and conscious life only about a billion years ago, then life on other planets may be roughly at the same point in development as life on earth. Intelligent life elsewhere may have only recently appeared and be struggling with similar issues and challenges as we are.

Anyway, this is interesting speculation, I think, if it is nothing more.

 

Posted in 旋风加速器专业版下载安装, Electromagnetism, Fermi Paradox, Time | 9 Comments

怎样在中国手机上登录外网

Aging is a fact of life for most, if not all, complex multicellular animals. Aging means simply the regenerative processes work less and less effectively as time passes. We see the signs of it everywhere in our bodies: sagging skin, diminished exercise capacity, increased susceptibility to disease, hair loss, aching bodies, and joints. Eventually we die from a side effect of this degeneration if we do not die from genetic flaw, accident, or mishap earlier. There are some small multicellular organisms, planaria for example, that do not seem to age. Some also argue a few larger organisms, such as some mollusks, crustaceans, and sharks, for which we can find examples of apparently incredibly old organisms with little sign of aging, may not age. We may eventually discover these more complex organisms do slowly age or that they have some secret in their genes that allow them potentially to regenerate and live forever. For most part, however, complex animals age and we do not understand exactly how and why.

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Posted in Aging, Human Evolution, Transhumanism | 7 Comments

怎样在中国手机上登录外网

A study out of Duke threatens to throw into chaos the last decade or more of fMRI studies that correlate consciousness with brain activity.

Hundreds of published studies over the last decade have claimed it’s possible to predict an individual’s patterns of thoughts and feelings by scanning their brain in an MRI machine as they perform some mental tasks.

But a new analysis by some of the researchers who have done the most work in this area finds that those measurements are highly suspect when it comes to drawing conclusions about any individual person’s brain.

They also examined data from the brain-scanning Human Connectome Project — “Our field’s Bible at the moment,” Hariri called it — and looked at test/retest results for 45 individuals. For six out of seven measures of brain function, the correlation between tests taken about four months apart with the same person was weak. The seventh measure studied, language processing, was only a fair correlation, not good or excellent.

Finally they looked at data they collected through the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study in New Zealand, in which 20 individuals were put through task-based fMRI twice, two or three months apart. Again, they found poor correlation from one test to the next in an individual.

McFadden made eight predictions for his cemi theory of consciousness. Prediction number 8 was:

The last prediction of the cemi theory — that consciousness should demonstrate field-level dynamics — is perhaps the most interesting, but also the most difficult to approach experimentally. In principle it should be possible to distinguish a wave-mechanical (em field) model of consciousness from a digital (neuronal) model. Although neurons and the fields generated by neurons hold the same information, the form of that information is not equivalent. For instance, although a complete description of neuron firing patterns would completely specify the associated field, the reverse is not true: a particular configuration of the brain’s em field could not be used to ‘reverse engineer’ the neuron firing patterns that generated that field. This is because any complex wave may be ‘decomposed’ into a superposition of many different component waves: a particular field configuration (state of consciousness) may be the product of many distinct neuron-firing patterns.

The Duke study is suggestive that McFadden’s prediction may be confirmed and that brain mapping projects associating particular circuits with specific states of consciousness or activities may be somewhat misguided.

Posted in Consciousness, Electromagnetism | 11 Comments