Yoda Sutras: Concourse No.46

Series 1

VI - 1: Joy is the Sutra

Mind is a tangled web.

Use it to catch the world.

Try to comprehend the infinite complexity of it all…

…elegantly embedded in the fabric of space and time.

Open your eyes in amazement.

Be Aware.

See.

Mathematics:

Largest Known Prime Number

Here’s a number to savor: 2^43,112,609-1. Its size is mind-boggling. With nearly 13 million digits, it makes the number of atoms in the known universe seem negligible, a mere 80 digits. And its form is tidy and lovely: 2ⁿ-1. But its true beauty is far grander: It is a prime number. Indeed, it is the largest prime number ever found. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, a computing project that uses volunteers’ computers to hunt for primes, found the prime and just confirmed the discovery. It can now claim a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for being the first to find a prime number that has more than 10 million digits. Prime numbers make up the “periodic table” of numbers, the building blocks that combine to form all numbers. A prime number is a whole number divisible only by 1 and itself. Euclid in 300 B.C. proved that there are infinitely many of them. Still, that doesn’t make them easy to find. At the beginning of the number line, the primes seem to be everywhere — 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13… — but in the number line’s more distant reaches, prime numbers become elusive. Because 2^43,112,609-1 has the form 2ⁿ-1, it’s called a “Mersenne prime,” after a French monk born in the 16^th century who made an (incorrect) conjecture about them. Mersenne primes are of particular interest partly because they can be expressed in such a compact form. (It sure is easier to write 2^43,112,609-1 than to type out all 13 million digits!) More significantly, though, some clever methods have been developed to identify them. The most obvious way to go about identifying any prime number is to try factoring it. First, try dividing by 3, then 5, then 7, etc., and if none of them work, you’ve got a prime. But the last time a new prime was identified this way was in 1588, because as the numbers get bigger, the division takes longer and longer. So mathematicians have developed clever tests for primeness that are simpler to compute. The best one of all, called the Lucas-Lehmer test, only works for Mersenne primes. Remarkably, the method requires no division at all, making it extremely quick. Only 46 Mersenne primes have ever been found, and GIMPS has found 12 of them. The project recruits volunteers to donate their computers’ CPU cycles when they would otherwise be idle. Each computer works on a single number, first trying to find small factors. If that fails, it applies the Lucas-Lehmer test. A computer working full-time can test a single 10-million-digit number in eight days.

Think.

Earth: Meteorite Impact at Andes

Learn.

Scientists have crunched the numbers for the September 2007 meteorite that landed in the Andes and suggest that the larger than normal impact crater resulted from the object’s unusually high speed. Most stony objects that blaze through Earth’s atmosphere are blasted to bits by air resistance at high altitude. Because the meteorite that struck eastern Peru on September 15 landed intact, its minerals must have been stronger than those typically found in similar extraterrestrial objects. Data gathered by infrasonic sensors — part of the worldwide system designed to detect atmospheric pressure waves from nuclear explosions — indicate that the object entered the atmosphere from the east-northeast at a speed of around 12 kilometers per second. By the time the object slammed into the high ground of the Andes — at an elevation of 3,800 meters, where the air is much thinner than it is at sea level — it probably was traveling no more than 4 kilometers per second, the researchers estimate. Still, the team’s analyses indicate that, had the object struck somewhere near sea level, air resistance would have further slowed the body’s speed to below 1 kilometer per second. The meteorite probably measured about 1 meter across and weighed about 1.5 metric tons when it reached the ground. Because the impact speed of the object was abnormally high, the crater it gouged — about 13.5 meters across — was larger than the average crater created by other meteorites of its size. The energy released by the 2007 impact, which flung rocks and soil as far as 200 meters from the crater, was equal to that generated by exploding more than two tons of TNT.

Imagine.

Understand.

Space Exploration:

Martian Sandstorms

The Martian atmosphere is thin, but it can whip up a mean sandstorm: On the Red Planet, wind-driven grains travel up to 10 times faster than those blowing along Earth’s surface, new analyses suggest. As on Earth, most windblown sand grains on Mars get where they’re going by saltating, or repeatedly bouncing along the surface. On Mars, however, sand grains can hop higher than they do on Earth because gravity at the planet’s surface is much weaker than it is here on Earth. That, in turn, stretches the length of each hop, a parameter that influences the spacing of ripples and other features on dunes, which are massive accumulations of tiny grains. Using a detailed model of turbulent winds, as well as data gathered by Mars rovers and satellites, a team of researchers analyzed how saltating sand grains behave on the Red Planet. Grains of Martian sand are made of basalt, which is denser than the quartz that makes up much of our planet’s sand, suggesting they wouldn’t bounce as high. However, the gravity at Mars’ surface is less than 40 percent that experienced at ground level on Earth. That decreased downward pull is why Martian sand grains bounce so high and blow so fast. On Earth, saltating sand grains typically bounce no more than 15 centimeters high, a diminutive hop that doesn’t carry the particle out of the ground-hugging layer of air where winds are significantly slower than those at higher altitudes. On Mars, however, sand grains can reach heights of 5 meters, which exposes them to the full force of the wind. As a result, a wind-driven grain of Martian sand can fly the length of a football field in a single bounce. Each time it strikes the ground, it does so at speeds five to 10 times faster than a saltating sand grain on Earth. Each high-energy impact blasts more grains into the air, until the atmosphere hugging the ground is saturated with sand. Although sand grains on Mars travel fast once they’re airborne, in the thin atmosphere there, they need a big push to get started: Data gathered by Mars rovers indicate that the minimum wind speed needed to kick up sand grains — around 220 kilometers per hour at a height 1.5 meters above the ground — only occur, on average, once every five years and last no more than 40 seconds. At that rate, a 100-meter-by-100-meter dune would take 7,000 years to migrate one meter.

Explore.

Investigate.

Experiment.

Cosmology: Small but Hefty Galaxies

Imagine picking up a tiny baby and finding that he’s as heavy as a full-grown adult. A group of astronomers found themselves in a similar situation recently when they observed nine galaxies that hail from a time when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was less than 3 billion years old. Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea revealed that the galaxies, already known to be surprisingly massive, were small, measuring only about 5,000 light-years across — one-twentieth the diameter of the Milky Way. The small size combined with the enormous heft of these young galaxies poses a mystery. Most young galaxies are both small and lightweight. The findings raise some profound questions as to how galaxies might grow to form the giant galaxies we see today. The puzzle is that many seem to have already attained large masses at early times and yet are physically very small.

Analyze.

Know.

Study.

Physics:

Less is More

What’s true for jealous lovers and frustrated parents also applies to nanoscale cogs and wheels and environmental regulations: Cutting some slack sometimes gives better results than being too strict. Giovanni Volpe, a physicist at the Institute for Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, and his colleagues took a fresh look at the mathematics of constraints — specifically, of “noisy” constraints. That’s when both the constrained object and the stuff that’s constraining it experience small, random fluctuations, or noise. An example is the atomic force microscope, a tool that can sense and impart tiny forces on objects as small as single atoms, but has limited accuracy because of thermal vibrations. Other examples include molecular machines that transport stuff within living cells while attached to microscopic strings — again a situation where thermal shaking is relentless. Volpe’s team calculated what happens when constraints become tighter. Initially, an object becomes more stable, as expected. But only to an extent. Beyond a certain threshold, however, things start to get worse. Staying right at that threshold provides just the right amount of slack to get the best possible results. It’s similar to how a child will remain calm when allowed to move around but will get more fidgety when asked to stay still. And it’s a happy medium that evolution may have found eons of years ago for cellular machines. To corroborate their theory, the researchers tried applying their reverse psychology to microscopic beads suspended in water. A tool called an optical tweezer can keep a bead more or less in place using laser pulses. But the bead will keep jostling a bit, due to random collisions with the water molecules that surround it. To some extent, the bead can be stabilized. As the power of the laser is increased, the particle becomes more and more still. But when the researchers kept cranking up the power of their optical tweezer, they obtained the opposite result. Past a certain threshold, a 200-nanometer bead became more restless, not less. The result could have applications in the design of nanoscale machines. For example, it shows that making an atomic force microscope stiffer won’t necessarily help. The newly discovered principle could find applications to ecosystems and to social and economic sciences — all of which involve random, unpredictable fluctuations — assuming that those phenomena obey the same mathematical rules.

Innovate.

Ponder.

Perceive.

Create.

Quantum Physics: Evidence for WIMPS

Penetrate.

At a meeting in Venice on elementary particles, Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome announced that her team has found additional evidence for an exotic type of subatomic particle called a WIMP, for weakly interacting massive particle. The new findings, based on several years of experiments conducted beneath the Apennines east of Rome, are controversial. Despite years of searching, no other experiment has ever found evidence for the elusive particle. But the stakes are high, because proving the existence of WIMPS could in one fell swoop settle a 75-year-old puzzle about the identity of the dark matter in the cosmos. A true WIMP discovery would also provide a key clue to unifying the four fundamental forces of nature. In the latest version of their experiment, known as DAMA/LIBRA, Bernabei and her colleagues analyzed faint flashes of light from 25 ultrasensitive sodium iodide detectors at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory beneath the Apennines. Like many other WIMP experiments, this one is conducted underground to provide shielding from stray cosmic rays that might confound the results. For 11 years, using two different sets of detectors, the team has found an annual rise and fall in the number of flashes that the scientists say is consistent with Earth moving through a vast cloud, or halo, of WIMPS enveloping our galaxy. The data show, with very high confidence level, agreement with all the features expected for the presence of dark matter particles in the galactic halo. No known systematic errors or process related to known elementary particles can account for the annual modulation in flashes, Bernabei says.

Wonder…

But Beware!

Don't get caught in the mighty maze of your own mind.

_________Transcend._________

Atha Yodanushasanam

Now begins the teaching of Yoda.

The way is to let things be. You don't come in, you don't come in your own way.

Thoughts are there. Let them be there. You be unconcerned! Let them be there — you don't get involved with them.

Thoughts are not a burden — unneeded thoughts are a burden, they create your blurred vision. Because of unnecessary thoughts the blurriness comes.

Mind is good in itself. Everything is good in itself, in its place. Then everything fits. When mind is needed, use it; when it is not needed, put it aside.

When every function fits, the body is forgotten; when every function fits, this world of appearances is no more. Enlightened you are!

You are here to enjoy this moment that has been given to you, this graceful moment, this beatitude that has happened to you. You are alive, conscious, and such a vast world!

Life grows through enjoyment. Joy is the sutra. Be joyful, grateful, whatsoever you have. Whatsoever! be ecstatic about it.

One who is not grateful will lose whatsoever he has. One who is grateful, the whole existence helps him to grow more, because he is worthy and he is realizing what he has got.

Be more loving, and more love will come to you. Be more peaceful, and more peace will come to you. Give more, and you will have more to give. Share, and your being increases.

10.

This life, as it is, is already too much. Be ecstatic about it, about small things. Even food should become a sacrament. Even being with people should become a deep bliss —

11.

Don’t dislike the world of senses, and don't dislike the world of ideas, because beautiful they too are in their own right.

12.

Enjoy every sense in its own right, and when you are enjoying it, become it — so no energy is left to move anywhere, the whole energy moves into it.

Close your eyes, meditate.

May the force be with you.

Women all over the world in the past were never allowed to do these stupidities that men are allowed. They were not allowed to smoke, they were not allowed chewing gum or things like that; they were not good and graceful. So what did they do? They started talking. That's why girls talk more, because a substitute is needed. The mouth MUST go on. They start talking. You cannot find two women sitting and not talking with each other — unless they are English women, who are no women at all. So much has been suppressed in them, they have become just like zombies. Otherwise women go on chattering; just like birds in the trees, they go on chattering. Just the other day a few women were working here in the garden. The whole day they chattered — the whole day! It cannot be purposeful because there is nothing... but they chattered.

- Osho