November 28, 2021

Whether extraterrestrial life exists or whether intelligent extraterrestrial life exists aren't the same question. Finding the former is, of course, more likely than finding the latter. We are simultaneously looking for both, but both require an entirely different approach.

When it comes to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, SETI (which literally stands for Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) contains a comprehensive variety of efforts.

During the early beginnings in the late 1800s, we first started looking for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence within our own solar system. In modern times, however, most of the global effort goes to monitoring electromagnetic radiation to detect potential transmissions.

A more recent niche avenue in the search takes aim at technosignatures (where scientists look for signs of megastructures like space mirrors and Dyson spheres). At the very cutting edge in the search, we find interstellar quantum communications. Scientists have only recently started thinking of concrete ways of how to search for this kind of transmission.

But if we are to actually discover extraterrestrial life, what do scientists expect to find? According to cosmologist Martin Rees, we aren't likely to find the classic aliens as commonly portrayed in sci-fi movies; he thinks it is far likely that we will stumble upon something else.

In this article, Rees explains why he expects that the bulk of civilizations out there would probably be artificial. Enjoy!

By Martin Rees - Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge

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In 1929, Edwin Hubble (shown here at Mount Wilson Observatory) showed that more distant galaxies were flying away from us faster than nearby galaxies, which suggested an expanding universe. PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

By Tom Siegfried

SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

From the day Archimedes cut his bath short to shout “Eureka,” science has been a constant source of surprises.

Even after the abundant accumulation of knowledge in the intervening two millennia, science still retains the capacity to astonish, and the century since Science News began reporting has produced its share of shocking discoveries. Some such surprises happened suddenly (if not necessarily with eureka moments); in other cases, revolutionary shifts in understanding took a while to seep slowly into general scientific awareness.

In either case, Science News was sooner or later on the job during the last 100 years, identifying and reporting the never-ending series of surprises, too numerous to mention here, except for my Top 10.

10. Parity violation

In the 20th century, physicists established the importance of mathematical symmetries in the laws of nature. While all sorts of changes occur in the physical world, the equations describing them remain the same. So it seemed obvious that viewing the universe in a mirror — switching left and right — should have no effect on the accuracy of those equations. Hermann Weyl, a prominent mathematician who died in 1955, boldly stated that “there can be no doubt that all natural laws are invariant with respect to an interchange of right with left.”

But then in 1956 physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang published a theoretical paper suggesting otherwise, and almost immediately two teams of experimenters showed that nature did indeed distinguish left from right (in technical terms, violating parity). Radioactive beta decay of cobalt atoms and the decay of unstable particles called muons both exhibited a left-right disparity in the directions traveled by the emitted beta particles — a major surprise. “It was socko!” recalled Leon Lederman, one of the experimenters, in an interview four decades later. “New atomic matter laws” proclaimed the headline in Science News Letter, the predecessor to Science News, with the subhead declaring the results “a revolution in theoretical physics.”

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Report commissioned by the European Physical Society says industries that rely on expertise in physics contribute 12 per cent of EU economic output

By Nicholas Wallace

Industries that rely on physics expertise contribute more to the EU economy than financial services or retail, according to a new study.

A report commissioned by the European Physical Society (EPS) says that in the EU, physics made a net contribution to the economy of at least €1.45 trillion per year – or 12 per cent –which is more than retail (4.5 per cent), construction (5.3 per cent) or financial services (5.3 per cent). Physics-based industries, it says, include electrical, civil and mechanical engineering, as well as computing and other industries reliant on physics research.

The EPS paper comes as EU countries debate how much to spend on Horizon Europe, the EU’s next research programme, which will pump billions into scientific research and technological development. The European Commission wants to spend €94.1 billion on Horizon Europe and the European Parliament wants €120 billion, but some member states, particularly Germany, say the Commission’s proposal for the entire EU budget is too big – meaning Horizon Europe could end up much smaller than scientists had hoped.

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Multi-national study challenges long-held assumptions about efficiency.

23 May 2018

Smriti Mallapaty

Scientists are more efficient at producing high-quality research when they have more academic freedom, according to a recent study of 18 economically advanced countries. Researchers in the Netherlands are the most efficient of all.

The existence of a national evaluation system that is not tied to funding was also associated with efficiency, the study finds.

The analysis challenges the prevailing view that competition for funding and strong university management drive efficiency. “For both variables we find the opposite,” says Peter Van den Besselaar, an informatics researcher at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who co-authored the paper with Ulf Sandström at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Pros and cons of competition

Until recently, studies into research efficiency usually looked at the attributes of countries that scored highly when measuring their inputs (funding) against their outputs (publications) in absolute terms. Van den Besselaar and Sandström looked instead at relative changes, to gauge a system’s efficiency at converting additional funding to additional publications.

Specifically, they assessed how a change in spending on higher education between 2000 and 2009 contributed to a change in authorship in the top 10% of highly cited papers in the Web of Science database. In this assessment, the Netherlands scored the highest, with a funding-to-publication ratio of 2.67, followed by Belgium.

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The full article can be downloaded from here

NASA, ESA, AND D. COE, J. ANDERSON, AND R. VAN DER MAREL (STSCI)

The most prestigious journal in physics highlights dozens of its most famous papers
BY TOM SIEGFRIED 11:00AM, FEBRUARY 8, 2018

No anniversary list is ever complete. Just last month, for instance, my Top 10 scientific anniversaries of 2018 omitted the publication two centuries ago of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It should have at least received honorable mention.

Perhaps more egregious, though, was overlooking the 125th anniversary of the physics journal Physical Review. Since 1893, the Physical Review has published hundreds of thousands of papers and has been long regarded as the premier repository for reports of advances in humankind’s knowledge of the physical world. In recent decades it has split itself into subjournals (A through E, plus L — for Letters — and also X) to prevent excessive muscle building by librarians and also better organize papers by physics subfield. (You don’t want to know what sorts of things get published in X.)

To celebrate the Physical Review anniversary, the American Physical Society (which itself is younger, forming in 1899 and taking charge of the journal in 1913), has released a list, selected by the journals’ editors, of noteworthy papers from Physical Review history.

The list comprises more than four dozen papers, oblivious to the concerns of journalists composing Top 10 lists. If you prefer the full list without a selective, arbitrary and idiosyncratic Top 10 filter, you can go straight to the Physical Review journals’ own list. But if you want to know which two papers the journal editors missed, you’ll have to read on.

10. ....

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Photo Archive VISTA

Donald Lynden-Bell CBE FRS (5 April 1935 - 5 February 2018) was an English astrophysicist, best known for his theories that galaxies contain massive black holes at their centre, and that such black holes are the principal source of energy in quasars. He was a co-recipient, with Maarten Schmidt, of the inaugural Kavli Prize for Astrophysics in 2008. Lynden-Bell was the president of the Royal Astronomical Society. He worked at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge; he was the Institute's first director.

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http://www.kavliprize.org/prizes-and-laureates/laureates/donald-lynden-bell

NATURE | EDITORIAL

Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know.

For his 2012 PhD thesis, the sociologist Chris Platts surveyed and interviewed more than 300 young footballers — aged 17 and 18 — at UK club academies who were hoping to pursue a career in the game. He told the newspaper The Guardian this month that just four of them currently have gained a professional contract. That’s a drop-out rate of 99%.

For our Careers section this week, Nature surveyed more than 5,700 early-career scientists worldwide who are working on PhDs. Three-quarters of them, they told us, think it’s likely that they will pursue an academic career when they graduate, just like Platts — now a senior lecturer in sport development and sport business management at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. How many will succeed?

Statistics say these young researchers will have a better chance of pursuing their chosen job than the young footballers. But not by much. Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a university. It’s only a little better in the United States.

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11 Jul 2017

The Nobel laureate discusses his dissatisfaction with the state of quantum physics and suggests a new way to move forward.
Melinda Baldwin

The laws of quantum mechanics seem to tell us that there is a fundamental random component to the universe. But Gerard ’t Hooft, who received the Nobel Prize in 1999 for his work on gauge theories in particle physics, is not convinced that physicists have to abandon determinism.

In his new book, The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Springer, 2016), ’t Hooft suggests that we may simply be lacking the data that would turn quantum probability distributions into specific predictions. Reviewer Stefano Forte praises it as a “beautifully written, entertaining, and provocative book” that “will dwarf all other contributions ’t Hooft has given to science” if correct. The book is also open access, available as a free e-book on Springer’s website.

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NOTE: You can freely download his book

BEATRICE DE GEA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math.

But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings.

He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.”

After that, he was fired.

His message is clearly aimed at young people: If I can do it, so can you.

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Physicists typically think they “need philosophers and historians of science like birds need ornithologists,” the Nobel laureate David Gross told a roomful of philosophers, historians, and physicists in Munich, Germany, paraphrasing Richard Feynman.

But desperate times call for desperate measures.

Fundamental physics faces a problem, Gross explained—one dire enough to call for outsiders’ perspectives. “I’m not sure that we don’t need each other at this point in time,” he said.

It was the opening session of a three-day workshop, held on December 7 in a Romanesque-style lecture hall at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU Munich) one year after George Ellis and Joe Silk, two white-haired physicists now sitting in the front row, called for such a conference in an incendiary opinion piece in Nature. One hundred attendees had descended on a land with a celebrated tradition in both physics and the philosophy of science to wage what Ellis and Silk declared a “battle for the heart and soul of physics.”

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