Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Today we have a look at Chapter Thirteen, “The Life of the Universe.”

Excerpt:

If our comoving patch defines an approximately closed system, the next step is to think about its space of states. General relativity tells us that space itself, the stage on which particles and matter move and interact, evolves over time. Because of this, the definition of the space of states becomes more subtle than it would have been in if spacetime were absolute. Most physicists would agree that information is conserved as the universe evolves, but the way that works is quite unclear in a cosmological context. The essential problem is that more and more things can fit into the universe as it expands, so—naively, anyway—it looks as if the space of states is getting bigger. That would be in flagrant contradiction to the usual rules of reversible, information-conserving physics, where the space of states is fixed once and for all.

Of course we’ve already looked a bit at the life of the universe, way back in Chapter Three. The difference is that we’re now focusing on how entropy evolves, given our hard-acquired understanding of what entropy is and how it works for black holes. This is where we review Roger Penrose’s well-known-yet-still-widely-ignored argument that the low entropy of the early universe is something that needs to be explained.

In a sense, this is pretty straightforward stuff, following directly from what we’ve already done in the book. But it’s also somewhat controversial among professional cosmologists. The reason why can be found in the slightly technical digression that begins on page 292, “Conservation of information in an expanding universe.”

The point is that physicists often think of “the space of states in a region of spacetime” as being equal to “the space of states we can describe by quantum field theory.” They know that’s not right, because gravity doesn’t fit into that description, but these are the states they know how to deal with. This collection of states isn’t fixed; it grows with time as the universe expands. You will therefore sometimes hear cosmologists talk about the high entropy of the early universe, under the misguided assumption that there were fewer states that could “fit” into the universe at that time. (Equivalently, that gravity can be ignored.) This approach has, in my opinion anyway, done great damage to how cosmologists think about fine-tuning problems. One of the major motivations for writing the book was to explain these issues, not only to the general reader but also to my scientist friends.

At the end of the chapter I deviate from Penrose’s argument a bit. He believes that a high-entropy state of the universe would be one that was highly inhomogeneous, full of black holes and white holes and what have you. I think that’s right if you are thinking about a very dense configuration of matter. But matter doesn’t have to be dense — the expansion of the universe can dilute it away. So I argue that the truly highest-entropy configuration is one where space is essentially empty, with nothing but vacuum energy. This is also very far from being widely accepted, and certainly relies on a bit of hand-waving. But again, I think the failure to appreciate this point has distorted how cosmologists think about the problems presented by the early universe. So hopefully they read this far in the book!

A commenter takes a microbe-lover to task. It’s on! Jonathan Eisen, we await your flying scissor kick!

[Link to comment fixed]

Over the last few days, questions surrounding the iPad have normally been along the lines of: When will I get my paws on one? What apps should I get? What if I break it? But the question over at the blender company Blendtec has been more straightforward as everyone wondered, “Will it blend?”

Over the last few years, the company has been producing videos that showcase the industrial strength of their commercial blenders. In this video, they set out to find if Apple’s tablet can be blended into an iPad smoothie by chucking it into the “Total Blender” and turning in on. Needless to say, we gripped the edges of our table and wept a little (ok, a lot) as the brand-new iPad was smashed to smithereens.

Past “Will it Blend” videos have shown objects like glow sticks or an iPhone being demolished by the roaring blender. Blendec’s website proudly states:

The Total Blender two jar package includes both the standard 2-quart BPA-free jar, as well as the new BPA-free 3-quart jar featuring a precision tuned 4” blade and a patented fifth side. This larger five sided jar / 4″ blade combination creates a more powerful blending vortex, allowing you to power through tougher blending tasks with ease in less time.

Are you ready? Then watch what happens here.

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Image: Apple

Doctors already use concentrated sound waves to see through solid tissue and take a look inside the body, as with ultrasound scans. But in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Caltech scientists say they’ve developed a metamaterial that focuses sound to such a high concentration that it could go on the offensive, targeting cancers or kidney stones while leaving the surrounding tissues alone. Oh, and one other thing: The military could use it to make weapons.

“The beauty of this system is that it’s just a bunch of ball bearings that we control with weights,” said Chiara Daraio [Discovery News], a member of the research team. Caltech’s acoustic lens relies on the same principle as Newton’s cradle—that toy your high school science teacher probably kept on his or her desk with metal balls on strings that demonstrated the conservation of energy. In this design, 21 parallel chains each contain 21 bearings. When the team strikes one end, it starts a compression wave that carries through the system. But instead of having the last ball swing out like a pendulum and bring the momentum back into the system, like the toy does, the acoustic lens focuses all the energy at the end of the system onto one spot, just a few inches away from the metamaterial.

Researcher Alessandro Spadoni says the team had medical uses in mind when they designed this acoustic lens. “In particular, tissue temperature at the focal point can be increased with high acoustic-energy density, which results from a compact focal volume and high pressure induced by sound bullets,” Spadoni adds [Scientific American]. Thus, he says, you could potentially target and heat up cancerous tissue without affecting surrounding healthy tissue. Or, if they modulated the system a different way, the researchers say it could be used to see inside the body without the possible risks related to radiation-based imaging. The paper also hints at use in defense systems, though it leaves the implications of that to the imaginations of others. Sound bullets could be used by the military to create submarine melting waves of pressure or shock waves powerful enough to destroy caves otherwise untouchable by conventional weapons [Discovery News].

The Caltech scientists are far from the first to tinker with acoustic lenses, but the simplicity of their design makes it appealing. The research model currently works in two dimensions and hasn’t been tested on living cells. But, researchers says, scaling up to 3D could focus sound waves even better, and the applications of such a technology will depend on how much sound wave intensity the team can focus into one spot.

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Image: PNAS

I wish I had thought of the title of this post, but I have to give credit to the wonderful Rachel Maddow. I happened to catch a few minutes of her show while on the road the other day, and although it made my blood boil, I watched the entire segment, which is now online:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In her segment, Ms. Maddow talks about the out-and-out lying being done by so many right-wing media outlets, in this case about ACORN and Climategate. As I have been saying many times, the far right in this country have been beating the pulpit to a bloody mess with their distortions and noise-making. They will do or say just about anything to distract people from the real issues. As long as people are scared to death by this noise, they won’t think about issues, they’ll react to them.

Elizabeth Kolbert — gotta love that name — has an article in The New Yorker on a similar theme, saying how the sturm und drang over Climategate is much ado about nothing, an overtrumped, overhyped, and breathlessly hyperbolied mountain crafted entirely out of molehills. I have said exactly that myself. Twice. And as I expected when I posted those articles, there was a huge amount of noise, but the points I was making — the ones I was actually making, and not the ones denialists tried play up — still stand. The hacked emails did not show widespread conspiracy by climatologists, and in fact a parliamentary committee that convened to investigate the hacked emails cleared scientists of all wrongdoing.

I’ll note that the far right doesn’t own the copyright on this; the far left has its share of antireality. The alternative medicine movement is a fine example of this. But the right is the one currently making the most noise. I agree with some of the basic tenets of Republicanism — I’d prefer a small government over a bloated bureaucracy, and I believe in fiscal responsibility — but the GOP as it stands now is a far cry from the roots of its party. I think the unholy (so to speak) alliance it curried with fundamental religion a few decades ago has led it to the antireality stance it has today. And either way, and from whatever direction, the noise machines are in full swing.

We’ve seen this over and over again, and it will continue for as long as the media allow it, and we allow the media to allow it. I’m really glad Ms. Maddow and The New Yorker called them out on it. The blogosphere does what it can, but until the main stream media take this issue on, I fear that most people won’t see the man behind the curtain.

Global warming is real. Evolution is real. Vaccines do not cause autism. Homeopathy doesn’t work. These are facts, and they don’t care whether or not denialists spin, fold, and mutilate them. Until we face up to reality, however, they will spin, fold, and mutilate us.