Travis Dotson, Councilman

These pages contain my personal opinions, views and interests regarding the Village of Bethel, its Council meetings as well as other items of interests in my life, such as my family, photography and other hobbies.

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Location: Bethel, Ohio, United States

My blogs are about my hobbies and interests.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Big Bang Produced A "Perfect Fluid"

A recent article posted in Science News magazine is shown in the second paragraph below. What do you think of the comparison?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that [it was] good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which [were] under the firmament from the waters which [were] above the firmament: and it was so.


Big Bang Produced A "Perfect Fluid"
An unexpected discovery may see physicists heading back to the drawing board in order to update models representing the Universe immediately after the Big Bang. In an experiment not previously possible, physicists have created the state of matter thought to have filled the Universe just a few microseconds after the Big Bang. To their astonishment, physicists found that instead of a gas, the substance was more like a liquid. Understanding why it is a liquid should take physicists a step closer to explaining the earliest moments of our Universe.
The liquid is said to exhibit characteristics like nothing else physicists have observed before, and its collective movement is rather like the way a school of fish swims "as one". In fact, physicists' tentative calculations suggest that its extraordinarily low viscosity makes it the most perfect fluid ever created.
The new state of matter was forged in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, situated at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Colliding the central cores of gold atoms together, head-on at almost the speed of light, the researchers created a fleeting, microscopic version of the Universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang. This included achieving a temperature of several million million degrees (about 150,000 times the temperature at the center of the Sun). They then detected and analyzed the explosive rush of particles that this miniature Big Bang created. Researchers had confidently believed that they would observe something like "steam", made up of free quarks and gluons, but instead the researchers saw evidence of collective movement as the hot matter flowed out of the collision site. This indicated stronger interactions between the particles than expected, leading to the belief that the quark-gluon plasma is similar to a liquid.
This latest development is much more unusual than anyone expected. "No one predicted that it would be a liquid," said Professor John Nelson from the University of Birmingham, who heads the British involvement in the multinational experiment. "This aspect was totally unexpected and will lead to new scientific research regarding the properties of matter at extremes of temperature and density, previously inaccessible in a laboratory."
The liquid defies physicists' current understanding of how matter in the universe behaved microseconds after the Big Bang. According to previous models there should be no evidence of matter - as we know it - in existence mere microseconds after the big bang, because the extreme temperatures generated would have been far to high for any matter to exist…

Monday, January 16, 2006

A Quote from Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

...Therefore, I must ask why this prize is awarded to a movement which is beleagured and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement which has not won the very peace and brotherhood which is the essense of the Nobel Prize.

After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of that movement is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood, If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love....

It seems at times that his message has been lost...