Globe of Science and Innovation
History of the universe

source: exploratoriumedu

Did you know that the matter in your body is billions of years old?

According to most astrophysicists, all the matter found in the universe today — including the matter in people, plants, animals, the earth, stars, and galaxies — was created at the very first moment of time, thought to be about 13 billion years ago.

The universe began, scientists believe, with every speck of its energy jammed into a very tiny point. This extremely dense point exploded with unimaginable force, creating matter and propelling it outward to make the billions of galaxies of our vast universe. Astrophysicists dubbed this titanic explosion the Big Bang.

The Big Bang was like no explosion you might witness on earth today. For instance, a hydrogen bomb explosion, whose center registers approximately 100 million degrees Celsius, moves through the air at about 300 meters per second. In contrast, cosmologists believe the Big Bang flung energy in all directions at the speed of light (300,000,000 meters per second, a million times faster than the H-bomb) and estimate that the temperature of the entire universe was 1000 trillion degrees Celsius at just a tiny fraction of a second after the explosion. Even the cores of the hottest stars in today’s universe are much cooler than that.

There’s another important quality of the Big Bang that makes it unique. While an explosion of a man-made bomb expands through air, the Big Bang did not expand through anything. That’s because there was no space to expand through at the beginning of time. Rather, physicists believe the Big Bang created and stretched space itself, expanding the universe.

As the early universe cooled, the matter produced in the Big Bang gathered into stars and galaxies.

For a brief moment after the Big Bang, the immense heat created conditions unlike any conditions astrophysicists see in the universe today. While planets and stars today are composed of atoms of elements like hydrogen and silicon, scientists believe the universe back then was too hot for anything other than the most fundamental particles — such as quarks and photons.

But as the universe quickly expanded, the energy of the Big Bang became more and more “diluted” in space, causing the universe to cool. Popping open a beer bottle results in a roughly similar cooling, expanding effect: gas, once confined in the bottle, spreads into the air, and the temperature of the beer drops.

Rapid cooling allowed for matter as we know it to form in the universe, although physicists are still trying to figure out exactly how this happened. About one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang, protons and neutrons formed, and within a few minutes these particles stuck together to form atomic nuclei, mostly hydrogen and helium. Hundreds of thousands of years later, electrons stuck to the nuclei to make complete atoms.

About a billion years after the Big Bang, gravity caused these atoms to gather in huge clouds of gas, forming collections of stars known as galaxies. Gravity is the force that pulls any objects with mass towards one another — the same force, for example, that causes a ball thrown in the air to fall to the earth.

Where do planets like earth come from? Over billions of years, stars “cook” hydrogen and helium atoms in their hot cores to make heavier elements like carbon and oxygen. Large stars explode over time, blasting these elements into space. This matter then condenses into the stars, planets, and satellites that make up solar systems like our own.

How do we know the Big Bang happened?

Astrophysicists have uncovered a great deal of compelling evidence over the past hundred years to support the Big Bang theory. Among this evidence is the observation that the universe is expanding. By looking at light emitted by distant galaxies, scientists have found that these galaxies are rapidly moving away from our galaxy, the Milky Way. An explosion like the Big Bang, which sent matter flying outward from a point, explains this observation.

Did you know that the static on your television is caused by radiation left over from the Big Bang?

Another critical discovery was the observation of low levels of microwaves throughout space. Astronomers believe these microwaves, whose temperature is about -270 degrees Celsius, are the remnants of the extremely high-temperature radiation produced by the Big Bang.

Interestingly, astronomers can get an idea of how hot the universe used to be by looking at very distant clouds of gas through high-power telescopes. Because light from these clouds can take billions of years to reach our telescopes, we see such bodies as they appeared eons ago. Lo and behold, these ancient clouds of gas seem to be hotter than younger clouds.

Scientists have also been able to uphold the Big Bang theory by measuring the relative amounts of different elements in the universe. They’ve found that the universe contains about 74 percent hydrogen and 26 percent helium by mass, the two lightest elements. All the other heavier elements — including elements common on earth, such as carbon and oxygen — make up just a tiny trace of all matter.

So how does this prove anything about the Big Bang? Scientists have shown, using theoretical calculations, that these abundances could only have been made in a universe that began in a very hot, dense state, and then quickly cooled and expanded. This is exactly the kind of universe that the Big Bang theory predicts.

CERN and the Big Bang

Dr. Alaro De Rujula
How do experiments at CERN improve our understanding of the early universe? Click the photo above to hear Dr. Alvaro De Rujula explain. You will need the RealPlayer in order to view this video.

In the first few minutes after the Big Bang, the universe was far hotter — billions of billions of billions of degrees hotter — than anywhere in the universe today. This heat gave particles of matter in the early universe an extraordinary amount of energy, causing them to behave in a much different way from particles in the universe today. For example, particles moved much faster back then and collided into one another with much greater energy.

If these conditions do not exist anymore, how do scientists study the behavior of matter in the early universe? One of the most powerful tools for such analysis is the particle accelerator. This device allows physicists to recreate conditions just after the Big Bang by making a beam of fast-moving particles and bringing them together in very high-energy collisions.

Researchers at CERN are using an accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to accelerate subatomic particles called protons to close to the speed of light. This is how fast scientists believed these particles moved in the instants after the Big Bang. By looking at the behavior of these protons, CERN physicists hope to better understand how the Big Bang created the universe.

When completed in 2005, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN will provide new insight into the past, present and future of our universe.
What is the fate of the universe?

The Big Bang theory raises some important questions about the fundamental nature of the universe: Will the expansion of the universe, set in action by the Big Bang, continue forever? Or will gravity stop the expansion and eventually cause all the matter in the universe to contract in a Big Crunch?

Scientists don’t yet know the answers to these questions for certain. But particle physics experiments like the accelerator studies at CERN may offer some clues down the road. By probing into what matter is made of and how it behaves, such experiments can help us explore what the matter in our universe–the planets, stars, and galaxies–might be doing billions of years from now.
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source: totbro

Neutrinii trimiși prin pământ de la Cern spre laboratorul Gran Sasso la 732 de kilometri depărtare arată că aceștia au ajuns cu o fracțiune de secundă mai repede decât ar ajunge lumina.

Rezultatul, care amenință a răsturna un secol de fizică, va fi analizat cu atenție și de alți cercetători.

Cercetătorii de la Cern spun că au încercat să găsească toate explicațiile pentru acest fapt și să idenfice orice fel de greșeală, dar n-au găsit.
Viteza luminii este limita de viteză din Univers și mare parte din fizica modernă, cum a fost teoretizată în parte de Albert Einstein în teoria relativității, depinde de ideea că nimic nu poate depăși viteza luminii.

Mii de experimente au avut loc pentru a o măsură cât mai precis și niciun rezultat nu a identificat o particulă care să o depășească.
Însă cercetătorii de la Cern derulează de trei ani un experiment care sugerează că neutrinii fac acest lucru. “Nu susținem anumite lucruri, doar vrem să fim ajutați de comunitatea de cercetători pentru a înțelege rezultatul nostru nebunesc”, spune dr. Antonio Ereditato.
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source: yorokobues

Cuando uno trabaja con conceptos y con palabras que se usan constantemente, como ‘diseño e innovación’, muchas veces uno puede sentirse frustrado por la dificultad que encuentra a la hora de transmitir con claridad y sencillez el significado real de lo que hace y el valor que puede aportar. Sobre todo si lo que está tratando de contar es el verdadero sentido de su trabajo: mejorar la calidad de vida de las personas.

No es una cuestión de definiciones, que por encontrarse se encuentran hasta debajo de las piedras, sino de acepciones. Ambos conceptos se han utilizado tantas veces y en contextos tan diversos que sin darnos cuenta caemos en los ‘tipiquismos’. Innovación igual a tecnología, diseño igual a estética. Y nos limitamos a trabajar en esas dimensiones incapaces de ver el verdadero potencial.

Puede que todo pase porque no nos hemos preguntado nunca cuál es el sentido real de innovar en nuestra organización, o en qué me puede ayudar realmente el diseño, además de para ‘ponerlo en bonito’.

Porque… ¿sabemos qué queremos realmente? ¿Ganar más dinero o hacerle la vida más fácil a nuestros clientes? ¿Conseguir premios o luchar por mejorar y ofrecer más oportunidades adecuadas a sus necesidades reales? ¿Transformar los productos y los servicios o transformar el mundo?

En definitiva, ¿qué papel juegan las personas (tus clientes) a la hora de ponerte a innovar o a diseñar un nuevo producto o servicio dentro de tu organización? ¿Un papel principal en el que se conoce perfectamente a los actores, el rol que juegan, lo que necesitan…? ¿O uno secundario pero perfectamente orquestado por una súper-campaña de marketing?

Quizá ahí este el error de interpretación, la razón por la cual tu proyecto, tu organización nunca será capaz de ofrecer nada singular, nada distinto, y seguirá cayendo en el bucle del ‘más de lo mismo’, sin saber realmente qué es lo que tiene que hacer para abandonar el ‘tipiquismo’ y ofrecer un valor diferencial.

Es hora de cambiar el foco, de incorporar un toque más humano en todo lo que hacemos, de replantearnos ciertas estrategias vinculadas a mejorar resultados en vez de a mejorar experiencias. Es hora de empezar a pensar de verdad en las personas. De pasar del marketing puntual a la cultura del día a día.

Las personas son —o deberían ser— la clave de cualquier proceso de innovación, de cualquier estrategia de diseño, porque son ellas y no la tecnología ni la estética las que elevan a categoría de primer orden lo que un innovador puede conseguir para cambiar su organización, para cambiar la sociedad y, por supuesto, para cambiar el mundo.