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Microsoft is hosting the videos of a famous lecture series given by Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman back in 1964. The lectures, which will be hosted by Microsoft Research under the name Project Tuva, are lectures that the physicist gave just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics - along with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga - for cracking some pesky problems in quantum electrodynamics.

This lecture has been credited by some (and discredited by others) as being the stimulus that started people thinking about nanotechnology. You can read a transcript of that lecture here. There is apparently a video of a follow-on lecture that Feynman gave, called Infinitesimal Machinery.

Check the videos out here!

Below is the foward to the book, "Everything Forever" by Gevin Giorbran. This book describes the timelessness of the universe. As Einstein once said, "this distinction of past, present, and future is only an illusion." The book also divulges heavily into zero and the ultimate quandary of nothing versus something. A good read for the curious mind.

Their website has some good material as well.

"If someone picks up this book and reads only this one page I want them to be left knowing what is to come in the future. In 1998 astrophysicists discovered that the expansion of our universe is accelerating. We all know the universe is accelerating away from the dense and hot conditions of the big bang, but what are we now accelerating towards? Recently physicists are beginning to state openly that time ends in the future with our universe evolving into empty space. Of course empty space is the ultimate zero, the bottom end to all physics. If our universe reaches zero all space will be stretched perfectly flat and no matter will remain. A single unified space will then extend infinitely in all directions. So is this final space the ultimate nothingness? Actually many physicists and mathematicians think of zero as the most ordered state of all possibilities. Zero is balance. Zero is perfect symmetry. But what is this ultimate zero doing in our future? The answer is that zero is timelessness. Absolute zero is the timeless quantum superposition of all the universes that exist. Zero is the great sum of all. An ultimate zero has always existed, and will always exist. Zero is the native state of existence, or what the physicist David Bohm, Einstein’s favorite student, called Implicate order. It sounds odd at first but we are inside zero.

Today in science the second law of thermodynamics suggests our single universe is becoming increasingly disordered with time. Many scientists claim our universe is winding down and dying of disorder. It is certainly true that entropy, the measure of spent energy, is always increasing. However, half of the second law is wrong. Our universe is not becoming increasingly disordered with time. Quite the contrary, we are headed for zero, and zero is a powerful kind of order.

The timeless zero in our future is the internal complexity of everything and the outer simplicity of nothing at the same time. There cannot be the simplicity of the single whole without all the inner complexity of universes that enfold into and create zero. What zero is not, is nonexistence. As Parmenides said, nonexistence cannot be. There is no state more extreme, either less than or more than the perfect zero. Zero is the default setting of reality.

The big mystery of “why is there something rather than nothing?” is answered simply by understanding that nothing still exists. All possible moments of time and all possible universes physically exist simultaneously, because all are merely fragments of a physically real zero. In the same way all colors exist in white light, or just as all positive and negative numbers sum to zero, all the moments of time sum up to construct a greater balanced whole we call zero. Zero is like a whole pie that can be sliced up infinitely many ways, but always remains a single whole. It is a difficult mental switch to adjust to, but everything we know is less than zero, not simply more than nothing. And so our beautiful universe is not dying. The very surprising purely scientific truth, as explained in this book, is that our universe is in the process of merging with the timeless sum of all, with the infinite whole, with everything forever."

The six experiments at the LHC are all run by international collaborations, bringing together scientists from institutes all over the world. Each experiment is distinct, characterised by its unique particle detector.

The two large experiments, ATLAS and CMS, are based on general-purpose detectors to analyse the myriad of particles produced by the collisions in the accelerator. They are designed to investigate the largest range of physics possible. Having two independently designed detectors is vital for cross-confirmation of any new discoveries made.

Two medium-size experiments, ALICE and LHCb, have specialised detectors for analysing the LHC collisions in relation to specific phenomena.

Two experiments, TOTEM and LHCf, are much smaller in size. They are designed to focus on ‘forward particles’ (protons or heavy ions). These are particles that just brush past each other as the beams collide, rather than meeting head-on

The ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb detectors are installed in four huge underground caverns located around the ring of the LHC. The detectors used by the TOTEM experiment are positioned near the CMS detector, whereas those used by LHCf are near the ATLAS detector.

Artist's view of star formation in the early universe. By Adolf Schaller. Source: NASA.

I recently came across an article, by Ethan Zuckerman, on Murray Gell-Mann, a world renowned theoretical physicist (having worked on the atomic bomb, and discovering quarks to name a few). In the article, Gell-man briefly describes the trials and tribulations of forming theories and discovering the laws of the Universe. Here is a succinct snippet from the article:

[Murray] Gell-Mann tells us that in 1957, he and colleagues put forth a theory of the weak nuclear force that contradicted seven experiments. But it was very beautiful. And it turned out to be right - all seven experiments were proved wrong. What’s striking, he tells us, is that in fundamental physics, a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than an inelegant theory.

Gell-Mann points out that Einstein was famously indifferent to experiments that contracted his theories. “It’ll go away,” he’d dismiss an experiment that appeared to contradict his work.

What do we mean by beauty and elegance? It’s not a human role - these laws aren’t just the construct of the human mind, they’re really big. Newton believed that natural philosophy was about discovering these laws. A clue that you’re onto a law is that it “can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics that we already have.” That’s Gell-Mann’s mathematical definition of beauty.

In trying to build laws of the universe, it’s a mistake to think of a “theory of everything”. Any theory that works will be a quantum theory, which means that it will be probabilistic, even if some of those probabilities are near certainty.

In discovering these laws, we’re “peeling the skin of the onion”, using higher levels of energy, getting deeper into particle structures and closer to the fundamental law. As we peel the onion, we see that each layer is similar to its neighbors - they require similar mathematics. “The manifestation of the law at different scales exhibit approximate self-similarity” - Netwon called this “Nature Conformable to Herself”

Gell-Mann clearly states a truth of truths: amongst chaos, beauty reigns king. I agree with most of what is said in the article. However, the thing that struck me as odd was the notion that the laws of the universe are contained at the smallest possible level. This theory is rather ignorant of the universe itself. Take for example: time. Time is the result of the laws of the Universe put into motion. Yet the driving force for this motion seems to have no laws except itself. Fundamentally creating a paradox for the Universe as a whole. However, every force is the result of a transfer of one form to another. What I propose is that this so called "peeling the skin of the onion," should not be limited in scope to an inward view of reality, but an outward one as well. Laws of the universe exist not only on a small scale, but a large one as well. I think that what we will find to be true in the future is that we are on a very small ring of a very large onion. Only time will tell, and even then, it will be a mystery.