Saturday, October 8, 2016

Destiny of our universe - Forbes

Our universe is being pushed away by dark energy. Could this force have a connection to the inflationary phenomena that started everything in the first place? Image credit: NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst and H. Yan.
The very earliest stages of the Universe as-we-know-it began with the hot Big Bang, where the expanding Universe was filled with high energy particles, antiparticles and radiation. But in order to set that up, we needed a time where the Universe was dominated by energy inherent to space itself, expanded at an exponential rate and eventually decayed, giving rise to a matter, antimatter and radiation-filled Universe. Today, 13.8 billion years after the end of inflation, the matter and radiation in the Universe has become so sparse, so low in density, that it’s revealed a new component: dark energy. Dark energy appears to be energy inherent to space itself, and is causing the Universe to expand at an exponential rate. Although there are some differences between dark energy and inflation, there are some unique similarities, too. Could these two phenomena be related? And if so, does that mean the beginning and end of our Universe are connected?

scale get stretched across the Universe during inflation, giving rise to imperfections in both density and gravitational waves. Image credit: E. Siegel, with images derived from ESA/Planck and the DoE/NASA/ NSF interagency task force on CMB research.
It would seem very strange to us if there were two entirely different forces or mechanisms at play to cause the Universe to expand: one billions of years ago and one today. When it comes to the Universe, however, there’s a lot going on that appears very strange to us.  First off, the Universe very, very surely is expanding. But it didn’t need a force of any type in order to do so. In fact, when you take a Universe like our own, a Universe that is:
  • governed by Einstein’s General Relativity,
  • filled with matter, radiation and any other “stuff” you like,
  • and that’s roughly the same, on average, at all locations and in all directions,
you wind up with a funny, uncomfortable conclusion. That conclusion was first reached by Einstein himself back in the first few years of relativity itself: that such a Universe is inherently unstable against gravitational collapse.

A nearly uniform Universe, expanding over time and under the influence of gravity, will create a cosmic web of structure. Image credit: Western Washington University, via http://www.wwu.edu/skywise/a101_cosmologyglossary.html.
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In other words, unless you concocted some “magic fix” for the problem, your Universe was going to have to either expand or contract, with both solutions being possibilities. What it couldn’t do, unless you cooked up some new type of force, was remain static.
Of course, the work of Edwin Hubble hadn’t yet come along. In addition to not knowing that the Universe was expanding, we didn’t even know whether those spiral shapes in the sky were objects within our own Milky Way or whether they were entire galaxies themselves. Because Einstein favored a static Universe at the time (like most), he made such an ad hoc fix to keep the Universe static: he introduced the idea of a cosmological constant.

The Einstein field equations, with a cosmological constant included as the final term on the left-hand side.
The central idea of Einstein’s relativity is that there are two sides to the equation: a matter-and-energy side, and a space-and-time side. It says that the presence of matter and energy determines the curvature and evolution of spacetime, and that the way spacetime curves and evolves determines the fate of every individual quantum of matter and energy within it.
What the addition of a cosmological constant did was say, “there is this new type of energy, inherent to space itself, that causes the fabric of the Universe to expand at a constant rate.” So if you had the force of gravity due to all the matter-and-energy working to collapse the Universe, while you had this cosmological constant working to expand the Universe, you could wind up with a static Universe after all. All you would need was for those two rates to match, and to exactly cancel one another out.

expanding, and there didn’t need to be a cosmological constant there to counteract the force of gravity. Instead, there was an initial condition, that the Universe began expanding very rapidly, that counteracted the force of gravity from all the matter and energy. Instead of contracting, the Universe was expanding, and that expansion rate was slowing down.
Now, there are two questions that are natural to ask — and in fact were natural to ask since this discovery in the 1920s — in the aftermath of this:
  1. What caused the Universe to begin expanding at this rapid rate early on?
  2. What will the fate of the Universe be? Will it expand forever, will it eventually reverse and recollapse, will it be on the border of these two, or something else?

The different possible fates of the Universe. The actual, accelerating fate is shown at the right; the Big Bang itself offers no explanation for the origin of the Universe itself. Image credit: NASA and ESA, via http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo9919k/.
The first question went unanswered for over half a century, although interestingly enough there was an initial proposal by Willem de Sitter almost immediately that it was a cosmological constant that caused this expansion to begin.

Previously thought to only occur from a cosmological constant, Alan Guth’s revelation at the end of 1979 led to the birth of cosmic inflation as a way to “blow up” the Universe at its inception. Image credit: Alan Guth’s 1979 notebook, tweeted via @SLAClab, from https://twitter.com/SLAClab/status/445589255792766976.
Finally, in the early 1980s, it was the theory of cosmological inflation that came about, proposing that there was an early phase of exponential expansion, where the Universe was dominated by something very much like a cosmological constant.
Now, it couldn’t have been a true cosmological constant — also known as vacuum energy — because the Universe didn’t remain in that state forever. Instead, the Universe could have been in a false vacuum state, where it had some energy inherent to space itself that then decayed to a lower-energy state, resulting in matter and radiation coming out: the hot Big Bang!

There are a number of other predictions that came out of inflation, all but one of which has been confirmed, and hence we accept that this early phase in the Universe did exist.
Yet, when we turn to the second question — about the Universe’s fate — we find something very strange. While we had expected that there would be a sort of race between the initial, rapid expansion and the force of gravitation acting on all the matter-and-energy in the Universe, what we found was that there was a new form of energy that was quite unexpected: something dubbed dark energy. And wouldn’t you know it? This dark energy, to the best of our knowledge, appears to take on the same form as a cosmological constant.

The far distant fates of the Universe offer a number of possibilities, but if dark energy is truly a constant, as the data indicates, it will continue to follow the red curve. Image credit: NASA / GSFC.
Now, these two types of exponential expansion, the early kind and the late kind, are very, very different in detail.
  • The early Universe’s inflationary period lasted for an indeterminate amount of time — possibly as short as 10^-33 seconds, possibly as long as near-infinite — while today’s dark energy has been dominant for around six billion years.
  • The early inflationary state was incredibly rapid, where the cosmological expansion rate was some 10^50 times what it is today. By contrast, today’s dark energy is responsible for about 70% of what the expansion rate is today.
  • The early state must have coupled, somehow, to matter and radiation. At high enough energies, there must be some sort of “inflaton” particle, assuming quantum field theory is correct. The late-time dark energy has no known couplings at all.
That said, there are some similarities, too.

indistinguishable) equations-of-state, meaning that the relationship between the Universe’s scale and time is identical for both.
They both have identical relationships between the energy density and pressure they cause in general relativity.
And they both cause the same type of expansion — exponential expansion — in the Universe.

The “open funnel” portion of these illustrations represents exponential expansion, which occurs both at the beginning (during inflation) and at the end (when dark energy dominates). Image credit: C. Faucher-Giguère, A. Lidz, and L. Hernquist, Science 319, 5859 (47).
But are they related? It’s very, very difficult to say. The reason, of course, is that we don’t understand either one very well at all! I like to imagine a 2-liter soda bottle, partway filled, when I think about inflation. I imagine a drop of oil floating on the top of the liquid inside. That high energy state is like the Universe during inflation.
Then something happens to cause the liquid to drain out of the bottle. The oil sinks to the bottom, of course, in a low-energy state.

If inflation is like starting off at the “top” of a full soda bottle, then dark energy is like realizing the bottom of your bottle isn’t totally empty. In both cases, there’s an energy inherent to space itself; inflation’s was much larger, but dark energy’s is non-zero. Public domain images.
But if that drop winds up not at the very bottom — not at zero, but at some finite, non-zero value (like the Higgs field when its symmetry breaks) — it could be responsible for dark energy. Models that tie these two fields together, the inflationary field and the dark energy field, are known generically as quintessence.
It’s pretty easy to make a quintessence model that works. The problem is, it’s pretty easy to make two separate models — one for inflation and one for dark energy — that work, too. We have two new phenomena and they require the introduction of at least two new “free parameters” to make the theory work. You can tie them together or not, but in no way are these models distinguishable from each other.

The models that have dark energy evolving too much (i.e., w ≠ -1 always) can be ruled out with data. Image credit: Pantazis, G. et al. Phys.Rev. D93 (2016) no.10, 103503.
All we’ve been able to do, to date, is rule out certain classes of models where the early-time or late-time rates of expansion don’t agree with observation. But observations are also consistent with inflation is a thing on its own, and dark energy arises from a completely different source. I hate having to go through the full explanation of what we know, to have one phenomenon (inflation) occurring at an energy scale of around 10^15 GeV, to have another phenomenon (dark energy) at an energy scale of around 1 milli-eV, and then to have to say “we don’t know if they’re related,” but that’s the situation here.
Unfortunately, even with all the proposed missions we have — James Webb, WFIRST, LISA and the ILC — we don’t anticipate this question being answered from the data anytime soon. Our best hope is for a theoretical breakthrough. And as someone who’s worked on this problem myself, I have no idea how we’ll get there.


Astrophysicist and author Ethan Siegel is the founder and primary writer of Starts With A Bang. Follow him on TwitterFacebookG+Tumblr, and order his book: Beyond The Galaxy, today!

Can US Republican Party still dump Trump at this late stage ? - BBC

For all Republicans out there longing to boot Donald Trump off the presidential ticket even at this late stage, there are four key words.
Death, declination, or otherwise.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) sets out in its Rule 9 the terms for "filling vacancies in nominations".
It reads: "The Republican National Committee is hereby authorized and empowered to fill any and all vacancies which may occur by reason of death, declination, or otherwise of the Republican candidate for President of the United States."
Death may be off the agenda, so what about the other scenarios?

Declination...

Mr Trump would voluntarily leave the race.
With "Rule 9" invoked, the RNC could then either reconvene the 2,472-delegate convention to vote again - a virtual impossibility at this stage - or the board of the RNC, with 160 members representing all states and territories, would select a replacement.
Each state and territory would have the same amount of voting power that it had at the convention. Mike Pence, the vice-presidential nominee, would not get an automatic promotion because the board could choose anyone to fill the vacancy.
Many Republican representatives and senators would welcome a new candidate as he or she could help them hold on to their seats.
Unfortunately for Trump opponents, the candidate has shown no intention of exiting the scene. His comments after the latest obscene remarks controversy - "See you at the debate on Sunday."

...or otherwise

The anti-Trumpers might take some comfort in the vagueness of the phrase.
Rule 9 has never actually been used before and so its boundaries have never been tested. The last time a candidate left the ticket late was in 1972. Democratic vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton was forced off after his bouts of depression were made public.
Thomas Eagleton, left, was booted from the campaign of George McGovern in 1972Image copyrightAP
Image captionThomas Eagleton, left, was booted from the campaign of George McGovern in 1972
"Otherwise" is generally taken to cover the gap between death and declination, perhaps a coma or stroke or other illness that leaves the candidate alive but unable to signal withdrawal.
As such, it is about filling vacancies and not creating them.
But some have suggested a broader interpretation, taking "otherwise" into areas such as acts of criminality, treason or even adopting principles "fundamentally at variance with party principles", as commentator Thomas Balch puts it.
But Mr Trump could sue if the "otherwise" path were taken against him.
By the way, even if he did commit a criminal act, it would not bar him from running for the presidency. He could possibly pardon himself after winning.

Rewriting the rules

Time has run out, it would seem, even if there were the inclination.
Rule 9 can be amended by a majority vote of the RNC's Standing Committee on Rules, followed by a three-quarter majority in the RNC. But it would only take effect 30 days later.

The voting problem

Tens of thousands of Republicans have already cast their absentee votes, many of them in the key states of Florida and North Carolina. What happens to them?
Many state set deadlines locking the names on ballot papers so that electoral procedures can run smoothly. Those ballots now have Mr Trump's name on them, and the deadlines have passed. Anyone voting for a Republican candidate would probably have to select Mr Trump.
This happened in Florida in 2006, when representative Mark Foley resigned five weeks before polling day. The Republican Party failed to get replacement Joe Negron on the ballot. Its "punch Foley for Joe" campaign failed to retain what had been a safe Republican seat.

Vote for someone else

Media captionGary Johnson and Jill Stein: Will third party candidates decide US election?
Without Mr Trump leaving the race, a Republican replacement isn't possible under the rules.
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is a former Republican and served as the governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003. He did pull in 1.275 million votes in 2012 and is on the ballot in all 50 states.
Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent and Republican Congressional staff member, is also running as an independent, but he entered the race too late to compete in every state.
The downside for conservatives is a third-party vote could aid a victory for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
The Green Party's Jill Stein probably won't attract many Republicans.

Denounce him and sit this one out

Mitt RomneyImage copyrightAP
Image captionMitt Romney: "Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud"
"Better luck next time" isn't the most comforting election strategy, but some disaffected Republicans think their best option is to denounce him and wait. More and more are signing letters and writing columns denouncing Mr Trump.
Thirty former Republican lawmakers did that on 6 October, saying in a letter that Mr Trump lacked the "intelligence" and temperament to be president. They didn't propose any removal, just that voters reject him at the ballot box.

Hope he wins and pick up the pieces

Mr Trump has been underestimated before and eventually came out on top. Republicans have made it this far enduring Mr Trump's wild campaign, so what's another month? 
The executive branch is a huge undertaking involving thousands of positions and there aren't enough Trump loyalists to fill them all. Republicans - even ones uneasy with Mr Trump - will be able to shape policy and deliver on issues important to their constituents for the next four years. 
On the other hand, Mr Trump may have done lasting damage to the Republican Party's brand with Latino, black, Muslim and women voters.

How a Peanut Seller Became One of Asia’s Biggest Billionaires - Fortune


Posted: 06 Oct 2016 07:17 PM PDT

The man has made billions building up a conglomerate spanning real estate, gambling, and hospitality. His name is emblazoned across university buildings. He has been honored by Queen Elizabeth. And, for a time, his net worth propelled him to the title of Asia’s second richest man.
But as Lui Che Woo sits in a convention center on Monday morning, the 87-year-old Hong Kong tycoon wants to talk about something else, something he says has stuck with him since childhood.
In his words, it’s the importance of world civilization, positive energy, and moral education—one of the lessons he adopted from growing up in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, and the reason he’s decided to honor former U.S. President Jimmy Carter this week with the Lui Che Woo Prize, a now-annual tradition he says he’ll pass on to his children.
This year’s recipients: President Carter, Chinese agricultural scientist Yuan Longping, and the Doctors Without Borders organization. Each will receive HK$20 million (US$2.56 million) for their contributions to international human rights, food supply security, and the treatments of cholera and Ebola, respectively.
Taking delicate sips from a glass of water as his workers scurry to set up the evening’s ceremony, Lui reflects on what were likely some of his and Hong Kong’s darkest days. For someone who is pledging millions of dollars to promote the hard-won progress of society, the self-made billionaire has seen some downright uncivilized things.
After all, he was only a boy when he saw bodies piled in the streets during the Second World War. He was still young, he says, when he saw regular people “starving to death.” And he may never forget the day he saw an act of outright cannibalism.
“I saw much of the difficulties people faced during that time,” Lui tells Fortune in an interview. “I remembered all this.”
It was, among other things, a formative lesson for the future K. Wah Group and Galaxy Entertainment chairman about the meaning of economic empowerment. In particular, Lui says, he wondered why the “Chinese people were mistreated by the Japanese.”
“They said, ‘You Chinese are poor and illiterate,’” he says. “I remember that in my heart, even up to this day.”
Read More: 9 Billionaires Who Plan to Give Away the Majority of Their Fortunes
Lui had to drop out of school in the sixth grade. As a teenager, he made a living selling peanuts and peanut brittle to people lining up to leave Hong Kong’s turmoil.
“During those sam nin ling bat goh yuet, we didn’t go hungry,” he says, using the Cantonese colloquialism for Japan’s 44-month occupation. “And in the later stage, I could even make some money.”
When the war ended, Lui followed his uncle into a car parts trading company, where he worked as a stock keeper. He later branched out, buying another firm when he was about 20 years old. Then he started hearing about all the leftover U.S. military equipment that was being auctioned off in Okinawa, Japan.
The bulldozers he bought there would help create Lui’s meal ticket to Hong Kong’s restrictive and lucrative land development business, at a time when the city “still relied on manual labor to flatten hills and reclaim land,” he recalls. Lui’s empire gradually expanded to launch businesses in the construction materials, property development, and hotel industries.
The opportunities he found weren’t lost on him. “I was lucky,” he says repeatedly.
About 60 years ago, as he began making money, Lui says he was constantly reminded by the fact that “there were few opportunities for people to study. Why was that? They had no facilities, no campuses, no schools, no nothing.”
He started offering to help set up schools in China, a number he’s now lost track of but suggests stretches into the hundreds. Later, he included universities in his donations, returning to the hometown he left at age 4, Jiangmen, to set up a building at the local Wuyi University.
“I engage in philanthropy and donate money when and where I think is needed and right,” says Lui. “That’s always been my intention.”
While advancements in technology and development reach new heights, values that were “written clearly in religious principles” have been neglected, he says.
“How not to fight with one another. How to help one another whenever someone is down,” Lui says. “I want to remind society of how to do these simple things.”
Read More: These Are the Richest People in the World
The soft-spoken chairman says he’s not particularly religious, choosing instead to adopt basic principles: “to help people, to not do things I shouldn’t do, to help this world.”
“I don’t want to just say it—but to do what I really need to do,” he adds.
Asked whether he believes enough of China’s rising wealthy class give back to their communities, Lui responds, “However others do it, they still do it out of their good intentions. I, myself, respect each one of them, and will not comment or criticize what they do.”
It’s all rather Zen, befitting Lui’s belief in the importance of emanating “positive energy.” But at a time when a not-so-different question of “temperament” is being weighed heavily in the U.S. presidential election, does Lui have thoughts on, say, the discourse around leaders like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? How’s their energy?
Lui chuckles. “Being a leader in today’s world is hard, very hard,” he says simply. “There are too many people with knowledge and opinions. It’s hard to pacify and satisfy them.”
Lui has a relatively low profile outside of China. He is perhaps best recognized for his signature look, a newsboy cap that he wears everywhere, even meeting with world leaders. Today, he’s picked a dark gray from his collection of more than 100 hats, pairing it with a suit and a black and burnt orange tie.
Asked why he’s never without the hat, Lui breaks into a smile. The short answer? “I am bald, and I might catch colds easily,” he says. He talks about the air-conditioning at his meetings “blowing in any direction.”
Sometimes, people who remember his trademark look give him beautiful hats as gifts, he adds. “On Sundays and holidays, I might even wear fancier hats than usual. The pretty boy hats.”
Kevin Lui from TIME contributed research.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Trump apologised for lewd comments on women in 2005 interview - BBC News

Senior Republicans have condemned obscene comments Donald Trump made about women in a 2005 videotape.
In the video, posted by the Washington Post, Mr Trump is heard telling TV host Billy Bush "you can do anything" to women "when you're a star".
The New York businessman bragged about trying to have sex with a married woman as well as kissing and groping others.
Mr Trump later issued an apology: "I said it. I was wrong, I apologise. I pledge to be a better man."
In a filmed statement on his Facebook page, he added that the videotape was a "distraction" from more important political issues. 
Earlier on Friday, when the video first emerged, he had dismissed it as "locker room banter" and added "Bill Clinton has said far worse to me".
He attacked the former president in his Facebook apology.
"I've said some foolish things, but there's a big difference between the words and actions of other people," he said.
"Bill Clinton has actually abused women. And Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days."

After the video became public on Friday evening, senior Republicans were harsh in their condemnation of Mr Trump's comments. 
House Speaker Paul Ryan rescinded his invitation to Mr Trump to attend the Republican Fall Fest in his home state of Wisconsin this weekend.
Mr Trump said that his vice-presidential running mate Mike Pence would represent him at the Wisconsin event.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said the comments were "repugnant," adding that Mr Trump "needs to apologise directly to women and girls everywhere".
Another senior Republican, John McCain, said there were "no excuses for Donald Trump's offensive and demeaning comments".
The video has emerged two days before Mr Trump takes part in the second presidential debate with his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.
The two candidates will be in St Louis for the televised encounter, with polling day only a month away.

'Automatically attracted'

The clip was part of unaired footage of an Access Hollywood segment ahead of Mr Trump's appearance on the soap opera Days of Our Lives.
"I moved on her and I failed. I'll admit it," Trump is heard saying. "She was married. And I moved on her very heavily."
"I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn't get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. She's totally changed her look."
Later in the conversation, he told Bush he is "automatically attracted to beautiful" women and often tries to kiss them. 
"I just start kissing them," he said. "I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."
says. "You can do anything."
Mr Trump issued a statement shortly after the footage was leaked.
"This was locker room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago," the statement read.
"Bill Clinton has said far worse to me on the golf course - not even close. I apologise if anyone was offended."
For his part, Mr Bush said he was "embarrassed and ashamed" at the contents of the video. 
"It's no excuse, but this happened 11 years ago - I was younger, less mature, and acted foolishly in playing along. I'm very sorry."

Analysis by BBC North America reporter Anthony Zurcher
water for public comments he's made about women over the years. It turns out he's said lewd and disparaging things in private as well. Go figure.
The videotape release comes at a most inopportune time for the Republican nominee, who was trying to use his running mate's well-received debate performance on Tuesday to reboot his campaign after a week of distractions and controversy. On Wednesday he told a local news interviewer that his previous offensive comments about women - which have dogged his campaign since the first Republican primary debate last August - were made for the "purpose of entertainment".
That explanation doesn't fit with the boorish, newly married Trump shown on the video privately boasting about his efforts to seduce a married woman and have his way with whomever he pleases.
Now Mr Trump will enter Sunday's debate with a new cloud hanging over his candidacy. It's almost certain that one of the town hall participants will ask him about it. There may be no easy way to respond - but Mr Trump will have to find an acceptable answer. If he bungles it, everything else he says during the 90-minute debate won't matter.

Hillary Clinton described the comments as "horrific". 
"We cannot allow this man to become president," she posted on Twitter.
Mr Trump has said he will not bring up stories about Bill Clinton's infidelities in this Sunday's US presidential debate after previously threatening to do so.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said: "I am sickened by what I heard today.
"I hope Mr Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests."