W BOSON AND THE UNIVERSE

 It's Sunday and not much happening anywhere of much concern to me.  I could go spiritual, but can't think of anything worthwhile.

Two items, though, the tiniest possible, and the second as vast as it can be, caught my attention:

• Fundamental physicists just reported that a fundamental particle had more mass than expected, throwing the whole field into turmoil.
• A W boson is supposed to have an energy effect of 80,357,000 electron volts.
• Hard to believe this is even physically possible, but a team of 400 scientists associated with the U.S. Fermi National Accelerator Lab reported in Science that they measured 80,433,000 ev.  
• 
  This difference of a slightly more than one part in a thousand means that their understanding of nature is wrong!
• So what is the solution?  Run another 10-year study or two.
• Then what happens if the Fermi result is confirmed?  Then quantum mechanics will need to find another Standard Model.

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  Perhaps all this bewilderment will someday instead be settled when they actually find dark matter/energy.  If you have eleven minutes, watch How Close Are We to Finding Dark Matter?  No one has seen or measured Dark Matter and Dark Energy.  You can't get any more spiritual than trying to explain what they are.

• 
  Ozy's The Daily Dose had an issue entitled Visitors from Another World.  I've only posted on this subject about a hundred times.  So today I'll meld Ozy's input with mine.
• Certainly our earliest roots in Africa imagined other worlds.
• However, as far back as the 4th century BC Greeks Anaximander, Democritus and Epicurus also similarly speculated.  

• 
  Aristotle believed other worlds were impossible.
• A mysterious infant later named Astraios was supposedly sent to Earth by extraterrestrials, found and given to Greek mathematician Pythagoras, who is remembered for mathematics and trigonometry.
• Romans carried on this tradition.

• 
  Dominican Monk Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for his beliefs.
• More recently:
• In 1896 Nikola Tesla attempted to communicate with Mars.
• What started the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) was a 1959 paper by Philip Morrison and Giuseppe Cocconi.
• In 1960 Frank Drake of Cornell performed the first SETI experiment named Project Ozma.

• 
  NASA in 1971 funded Drake and Barney Oliver of Hewlett-Packard to develop Project Cyclops for $10 billion.
• I formed a friendship with Oliver and Jack Billingham of the NASA Ames Research Center while working on a project for NASA in 1974 called Earth 2020.

• 
  They invited me to join 19 other university faculty members at Ames in 1976 on Project Orion to detect the first extrasolar planet.  We searched the Waterhole portion of the microwave window.

• 
  The Planetary Society was founded by Carl Sagan and others in 1980.

• 
  The first extrasolar planet was found in 1988, but not confirmed until 2003.  Another was confirmed in 1992.  The techniques used for them, and still utilized today, are the rather crude transit and wobble systems.

• 
  The movie Contact was released in 1997.
• Around 2004 the Allen Telescope Array began to be built around 290 miles northeast of San Francisco.
• The $100 million Breakthrough Listen project of Yuri Milner is a 10-year initiative began in 2015 to look for signs of advanced extraterrestrial life.

• 
  He also that year launched an open competition called Breakthrough Message to study the ethics of sending messages into deep space.

• 
  But only listening and communicating was not enough, so Milner, with Stephen Hawking and Mark Zuckerberg, in 2016 announced another $100 million Breakthrough Starshot effort to reach Alpha Centauri at 20% the speed of light to get there in 20 years.
• Milner was destined to do all that because he was named after Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to venture into space.  
• He is worth $7.3 billion.
• Has recently distanced himself from Vladmir Putin.
• He owns a $100 million mansion in Los Altos of Silicon Valley.

• In March of 2022 more than 5000 extrasolar planets were confirmed.
• I can go on and on but let me end by sending you to a posting last month on THE ULTIMATE EVOLUTION OF LIFE, with the ending quote:

It occurred to me that we can send ants and bacteria to some appropriate earth-like planet, and hope that the most difficult first step was the appearance of archaea.  Once they get established, perhaps evolution will eventually create some semblance of intelligent life.  Or does it matter, as artificial intelligence will most likely deem biological life to be deficient, leading to a future society lacking us.  Cheaper and safer for us to send AI ambassadors to colonize future Earths anyway.  At least our universe will have intelligence for a longer period, and hopefully forever.

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