₦airaland Forum

Meet the technosignature researcher on the lookout for exo-civilizations

Sofia Sheikh is one of a handful of postdoctoral researchers who have specialized in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. She talks to David Appell about strange signals, Star Trek, picking a tricky research field and the importance of mentorship

When a suspicious radio signal emerged from the direction of the solar system’s nearest neighbouring star in 2019, the Breakthrough Listen project put Sofia Sheikh in charge of figuring out what produced it.

Was it from an alien civilization from an exoplanet in the habitable zone orbiting Proxima Centauri, just 4.2 light-years from Earth?

Or was it a radio signal from any of an almost innumerable number of potential sources on and around Earth?

Sheikh, a first-year postdoctoral researcher, was then part of the Berkeley SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

She co-ordinated a team that analysed the collected data in great detail, looking for similar signal patterns.

Meanwhile, other project members searched, as best they could, through whatever public information they could gather on satellite transmissions and planetary spacecraft.

They even examined aircraft in Australia that happen to use frequencies close to the suspicious five-hour signal.

Dubbed the Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1 (BLC1), the signal was detected by the 64-metre Parkes Murriyang radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Now 26 years old, Sheikh received her undergraduate degree in physics and astronomy from the University of California at Berkeley in 2017.

While there, she worked with the Breakthrough Listen project to plan a search campaign of the Earth Transit Zone.

It’s a special band of space from which an extraterrestrial observer would be able to detect Earth, by seeing it transit in front of the Sun.

In this region, our own technosignatures – a clear indication of past or present technological activity, pointing out the existence of an advanced planetary civilization – can be easily picked up, thereby making potential advanced alien civilizations elsewhere more inclined to send radio signals our way.

The work was published in the Astrophysical Journal in 2020 with Sheikh as the lead author (160 29).

When she entered graduate school at Pennsylvania State University, Sheikh thought she would move from studying technosignatures to the more accepted field of exoplanet research.

“It’s adjacent, but better supported,” she felt. But through talking to her future adviser, astronomer Jason Wright, a leader in the SETI field, she remembered what she loved so much about technosignature research.

“I thought, even if it’s tricky, I want to continue,” recalls Sheikh, who ended up doing a PhD on radio techno-signatures and pulsars.

10th PhD in SETI

Earning her PhD in 2021, Sheikh was just the 10th person to finish a dissertation in SETI in the physical sciences, says Wright.

In September last year, she was awarded a Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending (MPS-Ascend) postdoctoral research fellowship by the National Science Foundation. Sheikh moved to SETI as of January this year, and is now working with the legendary astronomer Jill Tarter and Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and principal investigator for the Breakthrough Listen programme.

This $100m privately funded programme was launch in 2015 by Russian billionaires Julia and Yuri Milner.

“The combination of Sofia’s keen scientific abilities and audacious passion for carving her path is truly remarkable,” says Siemion, adding that Sheikh is a “world-class scientist who is demonstrating vision, tenacity and academic excellence in researching a profound and challenging topic”.

Tarter herself agrees, saying that “When you work on a potentially multi-generation project, you really need to think seriously about training your replacements.

Sofia’s MPS-Ascend award gives us the opportunity to invoke the next generation and think laterally about what/who/where we can expand opportunities for commensal observing programmes.”

The BLC1 signal was first identified by Shane Smith, while an undergraduate student at Hillsdale College in Michigan, when he was sifting through four million signals from a 26-hour period of the Parkes radio-telescope data.

It was soon shared on Breakthrough Listen’s Slack platform, and initial screening tests quickly ruled out any obvious sources of radio interference.

The team then began looking for other interference in detail. Sheikh had a “could-this-be-it?” moment, she recalls.

"I just stopped for a second after seeing the BLC1 plot, where I thought this is everything we wanted it to be.”

Sheikh and her team analysed an estimated 160 terabytes of data that the telescope had also collected, looking for similar signals to the BLC1 signal that had been identified.

It required a great deal of learning along the way and a lot of coding in Python to characterize signals quickly and efficiently. The COVID-19 pandemic made for even more challenging conditions.

"It was fun to focus on one thing, dig deep, with a detective mind set,” she tells Physics World. The whole team worked very hard, she says, even meeting on Christmas day, 2020.

The BLC1 signal happened to be “weird” in just the right way to fool our filters, but it was a good dry run for when the next tantalizing signal arrives

Ultimately Sheikh and her colleagues found around 60 signals that had many of the same characteristics as the original BLC1 candidate signal, but remained after the telescope was pointed away from Proxima Centauri.

“We can therefore say confidently that these other signals are local to the telescope and human-generated”, she told SciTechDaily in October.

Appearing at regular frequency intervals, they likely came from oscillators commonly used in various electronics devices. The BLC1 signal, she explains, “happens to be ‘weird’ in just the right way to fool our filters”.

Despite this, their analysis let them develop a great deal of code to characterize signals quickly and efficiently. By helping to improve search algorithms, their work was effectively a good dry run for when the next tantalizing signal arrives, she adds.


The Guardian broke the story of the BLC1 signal on 18 December 2020, and soon the news was everywhere.

A screenshot on a YouTube video about the work included Sheikh’s e-mail address, and she quickly started receiving comments from the public.

Not all of them, however, were friendly. Sheikh recalls some nasty e-mails targeting her for being a woman in STEM; as well as her identity, with a Pakistani last name.

Luckily, Sheikh’s personal experiences as a woman in science “for the most part hasn’t been too much of an issue” except for occasional microaggressions that “you brush off”.

Good, supportive mentors, such as Wright and Siemion, have helped in that regard, she adds.

Star Trek and “impossible” ideas
Sheikh grew up in South Carolina, where her father was a gastroenterologist and her mother a homemaker and stained-glass artist.

She was “for sure” a fan of science fiction, and watched plenty of Star Trek with her dad.

She was also captivated by books such as Physics of the Impossible by physicist and science communicator Michio Kaku.

While by no means unique to SETI researchers or astronomers in general, her interest in science fiction has helped Sheikh develop plans to look at alternative strategies for detecting intelligent alien life.

One could be to look for Clarke exobelts – rings of geosynchronous satellites around exoplanets.

Another would be to search gravitational waves from accelerating spaceships moving somewhere nearby in the galaxy.

As part of her new position at the SETI Institute, Sheikh is also developing a mentoring programme involving science and coding for sophomore community college students in the Bay Area around San Francisco.

She plans to take feeds from the refurbished Allen Telescope Array in northern California and run projects for students to understand the radio-frequency interference environment. At the same time, she will provide students with the skills to take on other astronomy and physics projects.

Rising star
Today, Sheikh is rising to prominence in the field, speaking at conferences and publishing recognized papers, serving as lead author on an October 2021 Nature Astronomy paper that presented the analysis of the BLC1 signal (5 1153).

Sheikh has also been invited to collaborate on important ventures, like the Characterizing Atmospheric Technosignatures project led by Adam Frank of the University of Rochester in New York.

The study will build a library of technosignatures produced by current-day Earth that examines how sensitive our state-of-the-art instrumentation can be at detecting those signals.

It’s the first NASA non-radio techno-signature grant ever awarded.

So what does Sheikh attribute her success to, at such a young age? Her “incredible mentors” Jason Wright and Andrew Siemion played a key role. Sheikh also advocates “always saying yes to speaking opportunities and conferences to get your work out there.”

Young students who want to get to the cutting edge of any scientific field need to build a network, attend conferences, workshops and meetings. “See if you can find a place to show up.”

But just as important, Sheikh believes, is to try your best to “juggle a half-dozen projects at any given time”. What you need to do, she says, is “to be involved with everything!”

While neither a pessimist nor optimist about finding extraterrestrial life during her career, let alone a large spaceship appearing over London or Johannesburg, “the fact that we’ll have the technology is exciting” she says.

Sheikh is now open to looking at other unusual ways for possibly detecting intelligent alien life.

Source: https://physicsworld.com/a/meet-the-technosignature-researcher-on-the-lookout-for-exo-civilizations/

A rising star in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

Imagine this. You have just joined the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) community and you are asked to investigate the most intriguing signal of the past half century.

That’s what happened to the astrophysicist Sofia Sheikh while working towards her PhD at the Berkeley SETI Research Center in 2020.

Sheikh – who now works at the SETI Institute – was asked to lead a team to investigate the Breakthrough Listen Candidate 1, an intriguing signal that appeared to be coming from Proxima Centauri.

Watch this short video (link in the source below) to find out what happened next.

Discover more about Sofia Sheikh’s rise to prominence in the SETI community, in this feature article (below), originally published in the February issue of Physics World.

Source: https://physicsworld.com/a/a-rising-star-in-the-search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence/

KnownUnknown:
Don’t view theoretical physics through the lens of mysticism. The physicists who actually do the work do not assert anything similar to what Quantum Mythicists claim.
People who barely understand F = MA making theoretical physics claims is the height of absurdity.

You're the one making those ideas (quantum mysticism and co) up in your head because you're clearly ignorant about the established concepts and principles in Physics, and the hypotheses and ideas modern physicists in various parts of the world are working on.

(Then, you can't even spell mysticism correctly.)

Even the simple equation you put up there is trash; there's nothing like F = MA in Physics. First learn the basics in Physics before you discuss about what you don't know.

Better stop discussing anything related to Physics because it's obvious you've no idea about what you're talking about.

KnownUnknown:
You are not an Agnostic because you u have created your own concept of God and claim it’s unknowable. The gods the agnostic say may exist or not is any gods presented to them; the same gods you refer to as ancient aliens. The God you claim you don’t know exist is your own creation, so how are you not a deist?
Agnostic aren’t speaking about the “source of all things”, they are expressing skepticism about claims made by others. They certainly don’t reclassify Gods as aliens so they can call “God” unknown.

Read the post again but this time slowly to comprehend the clear statements I made there. Can you tell me where I told you all things have a source or origin?

I don't think you read and understand the post you quoted. And it's obvious you don't know Jack about agnosticism (check the attached image).

Whether agnostic or not, every sane person thinks and talks about the source or origin of all things. But it's not everyone that calls the source of all things God.

KnownUnknown:
Why should the source of all things be “God”.

Show me where I made such an assertion.

KnownUnknown:
But I’m widely read enough to recognize science fiction influenced by religious fables.

Your comments don't prove this. And then you don't even read things carefully.

KnownUnknown:
You could have saved yourself some time (which you don’t have much of) by just agreeing that god isn’t a scientific term and science isn’t about looking for the supernatural.

Show me where I told you God/god is a scientific term. I don't really have the time for these cyclical arguments on Nairaland when you don't understand simple and clear expressions I made above.

KnownUnknown:
What is nothing?

Nothing is a scientific/philosophical concept. It says the Universe can arise ex nihilo (from nothing ).

If the hypothesis turns out to be true, that means the Universe has no origin or first cause.

Then, it's even a scientific fact something can come from nothing.

Personally, I posit the Universe can be self-created or come from an earlier universe that's self-created.

These sources explain the concept of nothing well:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_comes_from_nothing
Lawrence Krauss' A Universe from Nothing.

KnownUnknown:
There is no argument because you are just making claims that can be categorically dismissed because they are your assumptions about early history.
e.g. you claim that it was singular individuals that came up with language, which is absurd because language evolved/evolves and it most likely wasn’t created by singular persons. Unless we are talking about fictional languages created by linguists but those are still based on extant languages.

It's better for me to not to go into this aspect at all. I don't have the time to engage in this sort of length arguments. And these longs posts take time to type.

You can call my points and assertions anything you like; that has no real effect.

KnownUnknown:
Aren’t they just dead?!! What do you mean by they “become alien to this planet”?

No need to go into this. All these Nairaland arguments are time wasting.

Maybe later in the year, I can create a thread about some of your inputs when I'm less busy.

I don't want to start the New Year with Nairaland arguments that don't add a dime to my account.

Freedom for Bala!

KnownUnknown:
You've classified the gods as aliens while holding on to your idea of an unknown or unknowable god. It's similar to Christians who classify other gods as demons while venerating their god as the one true god. So, you are an Ancient Alien theorist as well as a deist. Agnostics say they don't know if there is a god or not while deists say there is a god that is unknowable.

That means you don't understand what agnosticism is all about. An agnostic says there may be a God or not, meaning the nature of God (meaning the source of all things) is unknown.

Deists believe in God, but I don't.

KnownUnknown:
Okay, science fiction is always interesting.

This simply shows you're not widely read.

KnownUnknown:
No, science is not looking for God. How would they go about investigating a philosiphical or religious term? Science seeks the how while philosophy asks itself why, which some philosophers answer as "God". Then they give the God all the attributes they can think of.

It seems you don't know science itself has its roots in (natural) philosophy and that many principles and concepts in science today started as philosophical concepts and arguments before the Age of Scientific Enlightenment.

Philosophy is the mother of science, of all disciplines. That's why every student of Physics in universities takes courses in Philosophy.

As said earlier, scientists (astrophysicists and cosmologists) conduct research on the source or origin of the Universe.

Maybe you should do a quick Google search to check the meaning of cosmology.

God, as defined by some, is the origin of the Universe. Some others take the Universe as God.

But God isn't a scientific term and even if scientists discover an origin of the Universe in the future, most likely, they won't call it God.

It's all semantics. And based on the current understanding of the universe, it's possible the Universe has no origin but arose from nothing.

KnownUnknown:
It's not either or. Some will definitely be historical characters while some will be fiction. The supernatural aspects are nothing but embellishments for one reason or the other. Take Emperor Flavius Vespasian of the Roman Empire. After defeating the jews he went back to Rome to take over the empire. According to Seutonius, on his way back he stopped in Alexandria, Egypt, and went to the Temple of Serapis Christus. During his visit, he was approached by a lame man and a blind man who said Serapis sent them to Vespasian to be healed. Lo and behold, they were healed. Do you really think the Roman Emperor healed anybody thereby showing himself to be divine like Julius Caesar or do you think it is an embellished tale?
Sure some humans were deified in the past, but the gods they were being syncretized with would be the various personification of nature that formed the people's spiritual beliefs.

Of course, it's not all the historical facts about them that are true, and most are even exaggerated tales concocted by their worshippers.

And also, it's not all of them that really existed.

KnownUnknown:
No, it's a claim like most of everything you've said. Language doesn't even develop the way you claim. It would have evolved slowly as new words and expression take root amongst a group. Same with most other things you claim.

I don't have the time to argue much about this. When I am discussing with someone that knows a lot about human history and language development, I'd know from the depth of their takes on issues.

KnownUnknown:
I prefer Aliens because that clarifies what you're claiming. Were these Aliens humans?

Yes, if someone is existing today, but dies later on in the future, they become an alien to this planet.

KnownUnknown:
That thread does not indicate that you're a Physicist or that you possess any expertise in Theoretical Physics, Astrophysics, or Cosmology.
The thread is filled with memes and articles from popular science magazines. Sorry, just expect more from a Theoretical Physicist.
Where do you do your research?
Which universities are you associated with?
Have you published any papers?
Can you post some of your equations and what they prove?
Are you leaning toward Quantum Loop Theory or String Theory? Why?
Do you do this Theoretical Physics in Nigeria?
Sure.

My career in Physics is in the budding stage (MSc/PhD). Sorry, I can't disclose more personal information about myself on an anonymous online forum.

I'll address the other questions when I'm less busy.

Are we living in a baby universe that looks like a black hole to outsiders?

The inside of every black hole leads to the birth of a new Universe. Could our Universe have arisen from one?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

-Our Universe appears to be expanding and cooling, having originated some 13.8 billion years ago in a hot Big Bang.

-However, it's plausible that what we see from inside our Universe is simply the result of being inside a black hole that formed from some parent Universe.

-If the black holes that form in our cosmos give birth to baby Universes, perhaps we arose from the formation of a black hole ourselves.

Source: https://bigthink.com/hard-science/baby-universes-black-holes-dark-matter/

This article is an interesting read and suggests our universe could be inside of a black hole and may be one of the several universes existing within numerous other black holes out there.

This is an insightful take on the multiverse theory in Physics.

What will the James Webb Space Telescope look at first?


"The first images are going to be ugly."

As the James Webb Space Telescope begins the lengthy process of aligning its 18 primary mirror segments, a question burns in the astronomical community: What will the huge observatory look at first?

Webb soared into space successfully on Dec. 25 and successfully completed its major deployments about two weeks later while speeding toward its ultimate destination: the Earth-sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), a gravitationally stable spot in space about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet.

The telescope includes 18 hexagonal mirror segments that need to be gradually aligned into a single, nearly perfect light-collecting surface.

A necessary part of that process is taking images of the sky to see how well the alignment is proceeding, but Jane Rigby, Webb operations project scientist, warned everyone not to expect much from the "first light" of Webb.

"The first images are going to be ugly. It is going to be blurry. We'll [have] 18 of these little images all over the sky," Rigby told reporters during a livestreamed press conference on Saturday (Jan. discussing the successful deployment of Webb's 21.3-foot-wide (6.3 meters) primary mirror that day.

Rigby was speaking from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where telescope operations are centered.

Webb team members didn't say during the press conference if they plan to release those early, "ugly" images.

The primary mirror segments will at first be off by millimeters, which is a large degree of imprecision when it comes to honing in on a distant exoplanet or seeing the stars in a faraway galaxy.

But by roughly Day 120 of the mission, which is about April 24, engineers expect that the telescope will be seeing far more precisely, with the alignment procedure complete.

"I like to think of it as, it's like we have 18 mirrors that are, right now, little prima donnas, all doing their own thing, singing their own tune in whatever key they're in," Rigby said.


"We have to make them work like a chorus, and that is a methodical, laborious process."

The next major question is what Webb will first focus its eyes on.

The observatory, billed as a successor to the groundbreaking Hubble Space Telescope that launched in 1990, has received many requests for "telescope time" among astronomers, and the vast majority of those had to be turned down.

A few "early science" programs are listed on NASA's website, but where Webb will look first has not yet been disclosed.

However, we do know some of the engineering alignment targets that the observatory will examine during early commissioning.

"We have some sources that are [of] nice and uniform brightness," Rigby said, "so we can check how the detectors are working ...

A lot of those targets are in the Large Magellanic Cloud, because we can always see the north and south ecliptic poles. They're always available."

Rigby added that the team picked many of the commissioning period targets in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy relatively close to the Milky Way, because they would always be in sight no matter when Webb launched.

"We knew we didn't have to keep replanning if the launch date changed," she said.

That consistency was, in retrospect, a wise choice, as Webb's launch date was delayed repeatedly in the last few weeks alone due to last-minute issues, including a faulty data cable and an unplanned clamp band release during launch preparations.

All issues were successfully resolved before launch.

Source: https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-first-observing-targets?utm_campaign=socialflow

HardMirror:
you are an incredibly dishonest person. You started by talking about gods of Egypt, the higher beings and you mixed in string theory later on to distract us from the actual nonsense of gods of egypt you were talking about, because you can quote string theory does not make you smart, anyone can do that and it in no way give credence to your Egyptian higher beings nonsense. You are just pained we are not buying your buuullshit

You're simply a foolish person; I don't know which lie I told here now that you're crying about. That you call yourself an atheist doesn't automatically mean you're smart.

When next you want to make a fool of yourself saying gods and goddesses of religions are mere fictional characters, I encourage you to go to Osun state and tell the worshippers of goddess Osun their ancestor called Osun or Oya never existed.

Or tell those in Ogun State the deity called Ogun is a mere fictional character or an object of myth.

When you don't know history and know very little about your traditions, you're nothing but an ignorant fellow who lacks knowledge about his roots.

Those of us with a real working brain don't just post foolish comments on Nairaland about these things to sound smart.

We conduct investigations offline to learn history of these entities that people worship as a god or goddess to reach conclusions on their nature/existence.

Only a silly person relies on what he read somewhere online or in a book and merely reproduces everything online like a parrot because it looks logical and reasonable without first making his own findings offline in the appropriate places to establish the truth.

There are a number of things or claims in life that look logical and reasonable on the surface, until one looks deeper and sees they're bogus.

Once I read your posts and you call the local deities fictional characters that never existed, immediately your ignorance and folly becomes glaring.

In the future, your descendents will also call you a fictitious character the same way you call your ancestors (the local deities in your place of origin) fictitious characters to look like a civilized person.

Ignorant mofos with deep-seated inferiority complex, regarding the local cultures as barbaric and primitive while they glorify the foreign ones.

The actual smart atheists and agnostics investigate things offline and relate with the old people that worship these entities to learn some wisdom from them about their beliefs.

Learning about the local cultures and beliefs is a good way to preserve our cultures and language, and that doesn't mean one will start practicing the worship of the local deities.

I'll simply ignore your ignorant posts on this thread henceforth. Posters that are foolish and arrogant like you don't deserve a further response from me.

Just continue to wallow in your ignorance.

KnownUnknown:
I'm asking you specifically

The entities religious people call gods and goddesses are those I regard as the early settlers on this planet or aliens. But I posit God is unknown or unknowable.

KnownUnknown:
How further back in time does one have to go to identify these progenitors?

If I'm to do justice to this question, I should create a separate thread for it and take my time to research well about it so I can give proofs backing my points and assertions.

Perhaps I'll do so when I'm less busy.

KnownUnknown:
So these settlers molded the first humans who then deified and worshipped them. Where did these humans get the idea of deification? In order to worship them as "gods", these people had to have a concept of "god". No?

My position (not a scientific fact, at least yet) is that early humans were molded and brought to life by the first settlers on this planet based on oral histories (and documented ones) in various cultures and traditions around the world, and these settlers that colonized Earth designed and programmed the humans primarily as their slaves.

That's how religion began. That's why Allah and Yahweh would call their worshippers their slaves in the Qur'an and the Bible respectively.

KnownUnknown:
The earth been 4.5 billion years doesn't mean recorded histories should cover a significant amount of that period or that snetient beings capable of making records would have existed for a significant amount of time. 4.5 billion years doesn't mean that the earth was habitable during all those times. According to geologists, there was time when the world did not have the oxygen that our form of life depends on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event

The Great Oxidation Event (GOE), also called the Great Oxygenation Event, the Oxygen Catastrophe, and the Oxygen Crisis, was a time interval when the Earth's atmosphere and the shallow ocean first experienced a rise in the amount of oxygen. This occurred approximately 2.4–2.0 Ga (billion years ago), during the Paleoproterozoic era.[2] Geological, isotopic, and chemical evidence suggests that biologically-produced molecular oxygen (dioxygen, O2) started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere and changed it from a weakly reducing atmosphere practically free of oxygen into an oxidizing atmosphere containing abundant oxygen.[3]

The sudden injection of toxic oxygen into an anaerobic biosphere doubtless caused the extinction of many existing anaerobic species on Earth.[4] Although the event is inferred to have constituted a mass extinction,[5] due in part to the great difficulty in surveying microscopic species' abundances, and in part to the extreme age of fossil remains from that time, the Oxygen Catastrophe is typically not counted among conventional lists of "great extinctions", which are implicitly limited to the Phanerozoic eon.

The event is inferred to have been caused by cyanobacteria producing the oxygen, which stored enough chemical energy[6] to enable the subsequent development of multicellular life-forms.[7]

These theories have their limits and scopes. And when reading scientific papers, words like suggest, can, may, and the likes are crucial so you don't get surprised when new discoveries are made and some theories are either modified or abandoned altogether.

Some aspects in that excerpt are active areas of research in Geology.

KnownUnknown:
The concept of God has never depended on a scientific understanding of the universe so why does your agnosticism depend on it. Science is not looking for anything called God so what does it have to do with the atheistic position?

It depends on what you mean by God. God is a philosophical or religious term.

If it means the origin or source of the universe or the first cause, then astrophysicists and cosmologists are interested in that.

KnownUnknown:
Have you considered the fact that these religious texts may be similar to Hollywood scripts i.e. the mere creations of the writers, and that these gods are just characters in a story and not even deified people.

No, the historical facts about them don't support that notion that they're mere characters.

You can't tell me as a Yoruba man that gods like Orunmila, Oduduwa, and Ogun are mere characters in a story or fable when I know the history of these gods (as they're called by their worshippers) and how they existed as humans in their time and were deified.

In many parts of the world, the first human to speak a language naturally in a place (all the languages in the world today came naturally with some humans in the past), the first person to build a house with a brick, the person that established a place, the first person to forge a sword with a metal in a place, and many other firsts, or heroic/memorable acts were deified as gods and goddesses by their people.

That's real history, not a mere claim.

But while past humans or religious people call(ed) these entities gods and goddesses, I prefer the term higher beings because some humans are more gifted by nature than others.

It's a matter of intellect to decide to call a gifted person a god and worship him/her or just respect the person as a human like yourself.

But when a person (the early humans) is molded by another, then he/she will naturally act based on the purpose behind their design. That, as far as I'm concerned, is the origin of religion.

KnownUnknown:
Everyone makes observations to understand the world and science goes further than mere observation. What branch of physics is your expertise? Can you enlighten us with a couple of your favorite physics equations and put them in layman's terms?

My area of specialization is Theoretical Physics, especially in Astrophysics/Cosmology.

This thread sheds more light on the other questions: https://www.nairaland.com/6690123/all-science-key-facts-researches

KnownUnknown:
I have had lucid dreams but I don't understand. Dreams are just activities of a functioning braining similar to thinking, except one happens when you're asleep and is mostly uncontrollable. In the same vein, OBEs are activities of a malfunctioning brain.
Also, you mentioned that these "realms" are independent of each other, so how would a lucid dreamer and OBE experience these realms that are independent of the physcial realm where the dreaming/OBE is taking place?

I don't have the luxury of time to talk much about this. Sorry. I've a lot at hand at the moment.

KnownUnknown:
So, there could exist a multiverse. Why don't you say that instead of realms and worlds?

Yes, multiverse is the right word. But it's not the exact term. I don't want to discuss these things further because of time constraints.

KnownUnknown:
Do you mean Theoretical Physicists because the works you keep citing are not the province of regular Physicists.

Physics is broad, and there are lots of research areas (and they keep increasing now and then) in just the field of Theoretical Physics alone without considering the others.

KnownUnknown:
Why not go into it when you introduced the microscopic world to support your claims?

This sort of arguments takes a lot of time, which I can't afford at the moment. Since I'm not selling any ideas to you or anyone here or seeking to convince people, I don't have to go into details about them.

KnownUnknown:
What is the difference between gods, goddesses, Gods, and God?

The difference depends on a person's religious views.

KnownUnknown:
What makes all these deities higher beings?

Our ancestors are higher beings being our progenitors.

Also, I hold the notions that life on earth is both due to intelligent design and evolution, though evolution is the established concept in science as of now, and that early humans (our forefathers) were molded by these first settlers on this planet long, long in the ancient past as stated in oral histories in almost all cultures of the world.

(Though those first settlers are deified and worshipped as a god, a goddess, or God in these cultures.)

The Earth is at least 4.5 billion years old, yet recorded histories only account for less than 5% of that time.

I posit most historical details about life on Earth are lost and unknown, and we only know few aspects of them.

KnownUnknown:
Settlers imlies they came from elsewhere. Where did they come from?

Space.

KnownUnknown:
You've redefined this past Gods as "higher beings" that existed, so how are you agnostic?
It seems you've created your own idea of "God" while simultaneously claiming agnosticism about its existence.

I don't believe in or worship a god, goddess or God and find the agnostic position about God convenient due to the limited scientific understanding of the universe at this period, but the atheistic position doesn't make much sense to me, and it looks too simplistic.

What I believe in is myself.

Then, that these gods are deified humans or beings is even glaring when one considers their human-like traits in religious texts.

KnownUnknown:
If you've seen these realms, shouldn't you make some observations that you can relay to the scientists so that the theoretical becomes practical?

I'm a physicist and use my observations primarily to understand the world I live in. With such an understanding, I could make discoveries in the near future.

KnownUnknown:
How many realms are there according to what you've seen?

It's not something I count. People that have had lucid dreams or OBEs would understand.

KnownUnknown:
We they see it like they see the microbial realm or the way you've seen it?

It will be seen objectively the way microbiologists view microorganisms objectively.

KnownUnknown:
Does Physics include theories or laws about "realms of existence"?

Yes. By realms of existence, I mean other worlds or universes.

KnownUnknown:
Even the "many worlds interpretation" of Theoretical Physics doesn't talk about "realms of existence".

Read about the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics in the link below (summarized in the photo below):
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/

Many physicists around the world think other universes or another universe or realm might exist in addition to this universe, and some physicists assert other universes or another universe or realm of existence does exist.

KnownUnknown:
Do you mean beings that would make us look microscopic exist in other "realms" in this "physical realm"?

No need to go into this aspect. It's not necessary.

LordReed:
The post I quoted did not define who these higher beings are hence my question.

I refer to the entities religious people call gods and goddesses and worship ignorantly as God as higher beings or early/past beings or early settlers on this planet or ancestors of early humans (our forefathers) in different parts of the world.

As stated before, my approach to anything called God is agnostic.

HardMirror:
you are the educated person talking about gods and higher Egyptian beings. Mixing actual science with mystical nonsense does not make you smarter than others. You can only deceive stupid people. You are just pained that with all the Packaging you are giving your nonsense we ain't buying it. You are putting so much effort to look at actual science and wrapping actual science with nonsense in hope it sounds smart and intriguing even though it is nonsense

There's nothing to take seriously about your posts on these issues, except the OP (the first post) which is spot-on.

I don't know how you think you can change my mind about what I've seen with my two eyes a number of times (that there are other realms in existence apart from the physical realm) with even theoretical backing in science (yes, theoretical at this stage, not practical).

I don't know what you feel like. Maybe you think being an atheist makes you so smart or means you know all things.

I repeat again that your problem is you're being arrogantly ignorant.

I know there would have been myopic people like you in the past centuries that scoffed at the few enlightened people in that era that predicted scientists would design an instrument some day to peer into the microbial realm or world (which is still a part of our world, the physical realm) when most people thought diseases were caused by demons.

In the future, scientists would also design a device that can see things (beings, entities, etc.) in other realms of existence.

Only someone who doesn't know much about Physics would say it as a matter of fact that ours is the only realm in existence.

In any space around, there are multiple (even possibly infinite) realms of existence, existing independently of each other.

It's even laughable to make such an assertion that ours is the only realm of existence when oceans of mysteries in the universe still lie undiscovered by scientists.

The things I stated in this post (and on this thread), as said earlier, aren't meant to be believed by anyone.

1MILLIONLiGHTS:
Magnetism generally has fascinated me since boyhood.
Its going to be a ground breaking thing in physics. Not the one of Fennel in their " spin ice " material. The true MONOPOLES would revolutionize physics most especially electro magnetism, gravity. It would make one of maxwell's equation Div B= { non-zero} for vacuum conditions.

Sounds fascinating.

How the Physics of Resonance Shapes Reality

The same phenomenon by which an opera singer can shatter a wineglass also underlies the very existence of subatomic particles.

Almost anytime physicists announce that they’ve discovered a new particle, whether it’s the Higgs boson or the recently bagged double-charm tetraquark, what they’ve actually spotted is a small bump rising from an otherwise smooth curve on a plot.

Such a bump is the unmistakable signature of “resonance,” one of the most ubiquitous phenomena in nature.

Resonance underlies aspects of the world as diverse as music, nuclear fusion in dying stars, and even the very existence of subatomic particles.

Here’s how the same effect manifests in such varied settings, from everyday life down to the smallest scales.

In its simplest form, resonance occurs when an object experiences an oscillating force that’s close to one of its “natural” frequencies, at which it easily oscillates.

That objects have natural frequencies “is one of the bedrock properties of both math and the universe,” said Matt Strassler, a particle physicist affiliated with Harvard University who is writing a book about the Higgs boson.

A playground swing is one familiar example: “Knock something like that around, and it will always pick out its resonant frequency automatically,” Strassler said.

Or flick a wineglass and the rim will vibrate a few hundred times per second, producing a characteristic tone as the vibrations transfer to the surrounding air.

A system’s natural frequencies depend on its intrinsic properties: For a flute, for instance, they are the frequencies of sound waves that exactly fit inside its cylindrical geometry.

The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler solved the equation describing a system continuously driven near its resonant frequency in 1739.

He found that the system exhibited “various and wonderful motions,” as he put it in a letter to fellow mathematician Johann Bernoulli, and that, when the system is driven precisely at the resonant frequency, the amplitude of the motion “increases continually and finally grows out to infinity.”

Driving a system too hard at the right frequency can have dramatic effects: A trained singer, for instance, can shatter a glass with a sustained note at its resonant frequency.

A bridge resonating with the footsteps of marching soldiers can collapse. But more often, energy loss, which Euler’s analysis neglected, prevents the motion of a physical system from growing unchecked.

If the singer sings the note quietly, vibrations in the glass will grow at first, but larger vibrations cause more energy to radiate outward as sound waves than before, so eventually a balance will be achieved that results in vibrations with constant amplitude.

Now suppose the singer starts with a low note and continuously glides up in pitch.

As the singer sweeps past the frequency at which the wineglass resonates, the sound momentarily grows much louder.

This enhancement arises because the sound waves arrive at the glass in sync with vibrations that are already present, just as pushing on a swing at the right time can amplify its initial motion.

A plot of the sound amplitude as a function of frequency would trace out a curve with a pronounced bump around the resonant frequency, one that’s strikingly similar to the bumps heralding particle discoveries.

In both cases, the bump’s width reflects how lossy the system is, indicating, for instance, how long a glass rings after it is struck once, or how long a particle exists before it decays.

But why do particles behave like humming wineglasses? At the turn of the 20th century, resonance was understood to be a property of vibrating and oscillating systems.

Particles, which travel in straight lines and scatter like billiard balls, seemed far removed from this branch of physics.

The development of quantum mechanics showed otherwise.

Experiments indicated that light, which had been thought of as an electromagnetic wave, sometimes behaves like a particle: a “photon,” which possesses an amount of energy proportional to the frequency of the associated wave.

Meanwhile, matter particles like electrons sometimes exhibit wavelike behavior with the same relation between frequency and energy.

In 1925, inspired by this correspondence, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger derived an equation for the hydrogen atom whose solutions are waves oscillating at a set of natural frequencies, much like the solutions to equations governing the acoustics of wind instruments.

Each solution to Schrödinger’s equation represents a­­ possible state of the atom’s orbiting electron.

The electron can hop up to a higher-energy state by absorbing a photon whose frequency makes up the difference between the two states’ natural frequencies.

Blast the vacuum of empty space hard enough at the right frequency, and out will pop a bunch of particles.

Such transitions are themselves a form of resonance: Just like a wine glass, an atom only absorbs energy from waves with specific frequencies, and it can also shed energy by emitting waves with those same frequencies.

(When excited at precisely the right frequency, certain atoms will oscillate for more than 10 quadrillion cycles before releasing their energy as photons — extremely sharp atomic resonances that form the basis for the world’s most precise atomic clocks.)

Quantum theory revealed that the structure of atoms, no less than the structure of symphonies, is intimately tied to resonance. Electrons bound to atoms are a little like sound waves trapped inside flutes.

As for the atomic nuclei, further advances in the 1930s showed that many kinds of atomic nuclei only exist in the universe today because of resonance.

Resonant transitions are critical to the nuclear fusion reactions that transmute one type of atomic nucleus into another.

The most celebrated of these nuclear resonances enables the fusion of three helium nuclei into one carbon nucleus. Without this, stars would not be capable of producing carbon or heavier elements, and life as we know it would not be possible.

But the roots of resonance in fundamental physics lie deeper. In the late 1920s physicists began to develop a powerful mathematical framework known as quantum field theory that remains the language of particle physics to this day.

In quantum field theory, the universe’s truly elementary entities are fields that fill all space. Particles are localized, resonant excitations of these fields, vibrating like springs in an infinite mattress.

The frequencies at which quantum fields prefer to vibrate stem from fundamental constants whose origins remain obscure; these frequencies in turn determine the masses of the corresponding particles.

Blast the vacuum of empty space hard enough at the right frequency, and out will pop a bunch of particles.

In this sense, resonance is responsible for the very existence of particles. It has also increasingly become the workhorse of experimental particle physics.

When measuring how often specific combinations of particles are produced in high-energy collisions, physicists see pronounced peaks in the detection rate as they vary the collision energy: new manifestations of the universal resonance curve.

“As with the wineglass, you’re sweeping through a system that wants to resonate,” said Strassler. “You’ll make anything vibrate that can.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, physicists saw many more peaks than they had expected, and at first nobody knew quite what to make of them. Many of the bumps were very broad, suggesting the existence of particles that stuck around for barely more than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

Unlike more familiar particles that can be detected directly, these newcomers could only be observed through the process of resonance.

Physicists later appreciated that these new ephemeral particles were fundamentally no different from protons and neutrons, save for their short lifetimes.

Even so, short-lived particles are often simply referred to as “resonances” — a testament to a phenomenon that has played a surprisingly central role in expanding our understanding of the world.

Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-physics-of-resonance-shapes-reality-20220126/

1MILLIONLiGHTS:
Let's talk a little about MAGNETIC MONOPOLES. Traditional Dipole magnets have a NORTH POLE and a SOUTH POLED linked together by their fields. From Physics standpoint the poles cannot exists seperately. But scientists have hypothesized that they could, thus named MAGNETIC MONOPOLES but do they exist? Past experimental results have not being so encouraging. Or are scientists just searching for nothing? What could be the mystery behind the hypothesized magnetic monopoles?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv9cwWpjbXo

Why do monopoles fascinate you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apkLyf1UyVM

EXPLORING BLACK HOLES: WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?

Black holes are extremely dense pockets of matter, objects of such incredible mass and miniscule volume that they drastically warp the fabric of space-time.

Anything that passes too close, from a wandering star to a photon of light, gets captured. Most black holes are the condensed remnants of a massive star, the collapsed core that remains following an explosive supernova.

However, the black hole family tree has several branches, from tiny structures on par with a human cell to enormous giants billions of times more massive than our sun.

Primordial black holes
Formed from the condensation of raw materials in the early cosmos, primordial black holes emerged soon after the Big Bang.

Most were extremely tiny, and while those with the lowest-mass have likely evaporated, primordial black holes with larger masses may still exist - though even those have remained undetected.

Stellar-mass black holes
The most common black holes form as the result of a supernova, the catastrophic death of a massive star.

Most stellar-mass black holes are roughly five to ten times more massive than our sun, but NSF's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected several with masses up to 100 times that of our sun.

Intermediate-mass black holes
In the mass range between stellar-mass and supermassive blackholes - that is hundreds to hundreds-of-thousands of solar masses - are intermediate-mass black holes.

Astronomers have spotted evidence for a handful of candidates, but none have been conclusively detected.

Theorists believe there are three scenarios for their formation: They could be primordial black holes, they might have formed in environments dense with stars, or they formed from mergers of stellar-mass black holes.

Supermassive black holes
Supermassive black holes have masses ranging from millions to billions of solar masses and appear to be in the center of almost all galaxies.

An important area of modern astrophysics is determining how supermassive black holes came to be: Were they formed with such high masses, or did their mass build up over time?

The NSF-funded Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project is attempting to capture an image of a black hole, setting its sights on two supermassive black holes, one in the center of the galaxy Messier 87 and the other in our Milky Way.

HOW ARE BLACK HOLES STUDIED?
Black holes have long inspired the imagination yet challenged discovery.

However, from a combination of theory and observation, scientists now know much about these objects and how they form, and can even see how they impact their surroundings.

So, how does one study a region of space that is defined by being invisible?

Theorists can calculate properties of black holes based on their understanding of the universe, and such discoveries have come from a range of great thinkers, from Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking to Kip Thorne. However, despite being so powerful, it's hard to see something that does not emit photons, let alone traps any light that passes by.

Now, nearly a century after scientists suggested black holes might exist, the world now has tools to see them in action.

Using powerful observatories on Earth, astronomers can see the jets of plasma that black holes spew into space, detect the ripples in space-time from black holes colliding, and may soon even peer at the disc of disrupted mass and energy that surrounds the black hole's event horizon, the edge beyond which nothing can escape.

Source: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/blackholes/

Rotating Black Holes Could Make Hyperspace Travel Finally Within Reach

One of the most cherished science fiction scenarios is using a black hole as a portal to another dimension or time or universe. That fantasy may be closer to reality than previously imagined.

Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in the universe.

They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity — which happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point yielding an object with infinite density.

This dense and hot singularity punches a hole in the fabric of spacetime itself, possibly opening up an opportunity for hyperspace travel.

That is, a short cut through spacetime allowing for travel over cosmic scale distances in a short period.

Researchers previously thought that any spacecraft attempting to use a black hole as a portal of this type would have to reckon with nature at its worst.

The hot and dense singularity would cause the spacecraft to endure a sequence of increasingly uncomfortable tidal stretching and squeezing before being completely vaporized.

FLYING THROUGH A BLACK HOLE

My team at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a colleague at Georgia Gwinnett College have shown that all black holes are not created equal.

If the black hole like Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our own galaxy, is large and rotating, then the outlook for a spacecraft changes dramatically.

That’s because the singularity that a spacecraft would have to contend with is very gentle and could allow for a very peaceful passage.

The reason this is possible is that the relevant singularity inside a rotating black hole is technically “weak,” and thus does not damage objects that interact with it.

At first, this fact may seem counterintuitive. But one can think of it as analogous to the common experience of quickly passing one’s finger through a candle’s near 2,000-degree flame without getting burned.

My colleague Lior Burko and I have been investigating the physics of black holes for over two decades.

In 2016, my Ph.D. student, Caroline Mallary, inspired by Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film Interstellar, set out to test if Cooper (Matthew McConaughey’s character) could survive his fall deep into Gargantua — a fictional, supermassive, rapidly rotating black hole some 100 million times the mass of our sun.

Interstellar was based on a book written by Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne and Gargantua’s physical properties are central to the plot of this Hollywood movie.

Building on work done by physicist Amos Ori two decades prior, and armed with her strong computational skills, Mallary built a computer model that would capture most of the essential physical effects on a spacecraft, or any large object, falling into a large, rotating black hole like Sagittarius A*.

NOT EVEN A BUMPY RIDE?

What she discovered is that under all conditions an object falling into a rotating black hole would not experience infinitely large effects upon passage through the hole’s so-called inner horizon singularity.

This is the singularity that an object entering a rotating black hole cannot maneuver around or avoid.

Not only that, under the right circumstances, these effects may be negligibly small, allowing for a rather comfortable passage through the singularity.

In fact, there may be no noticeable effects on the falling object at all. This increases the feasibility of using large, rotating black holes as portals for hyperspace travel.

Mallary also discovered a feature that was not fully appreciated before: the fact that the effects of the singularity in the context of a rotating black hole would result in rapidly increasing cycles of stretching and squeezing on the spacecraft.

But for very large black holes like Gargantua, the strength of this effect would be very small. So, the spacecraft and any individuals on board would not detect it.

The crucial point is that these effects do not increase without bound; in fact, they stay finite, even though the stresses on the spacecraft tend to grow indefinitely as it approaches the black hole.

There are a few important simplifying assumptions and resulting caveats in the context of Mallary’s model.

The main assumption is that the black hole under consideration is completely isolated and thus not subject to constant disturbances by a source such as another star in its vicinity or even any falling radiation.

While this assumption allows important simplifications, it is worth noting that most black holes are surrounded by cosmic material — dust, gas, radiation.

Therefore, a natural extension of Mallary’s work would be to perform a similar study in the context of a more realistic astrophysical black hole.

Mallary’s approach of using a computer simulation to examine the effects of a black hole on an object is very common in the field of black hole physics.

Needless to say, we do not have the capability of performing real experiments in or near black holes yet, so scientists resort to theory and simulations to develop an understanding, by making predictions and new discoveries.

Source: https://www.inverse.com/article/52410-rotating-black-holes-may-serve-as-gentle-portals-for-hyperspace-travel

LordReed:
I haven't read your posts on this matter. In summary, who are these higher beings?

The answer you seek is in my earlier post you quoted.

KnownUnknown:
[s]I understand your ray of light soul is disturbed.
Your waves, frequencies, and energies are discombobulated. You need to go recharge by taping into the frequency of the higher beings and perambulating through their oscillations.

Mr. Physicist who described a single photon as “ray of light”.

Let me go admire my Nobel Prize[/s].

Your posts have been noted and duly discarded.

Some comments here show the deplorable state of Nigeria's education sector, especially STEM.

These ignorant commeters obviously know next to nothing about string theories and superstring theories, and the eminent physicists in various parts of the world (including Nobel laureate Roger Penrose) that support some of the ideas I explained above must all be quacks.

Lols. This country really has a long way to go with this bunch of arrogantly ignorant people.

Interesting

Lols. That ignorant, silly mofo is better ignored.

HardMirror:
look who Is talking about basic knowledge of physics. Lol. You are a joke my friend. You have posted nothing that shows you even know what physics is. Mystism is not physics

You're arrogantly ignorant. That mystism only exists in your head, is not a word in a standard dictionary.

Typing nonsense with confidence

HardMirror:
deep indeed. Mr mystic physics

Maybe when you learn the correct spelling of mysticism that's only an idea in your head, I would take you seriously.

HardMirror:
you talk about nonsensical posts? Look at what you are posting here mr physicists. Lol. You are just like the typical nigerian christian doctors that chant WE CARE, GOD HEALs. Overly carried away by they thoughts and excitment of mysticism that you fail to see your argument has nothing to do with history or science but assumptions. Show me the one single thing that shows the egyptians had access to anything extraordinary, were the pyramids made out of any advanced materials? Have we discovered any high tech machine in egypt or what?

They applied themselves to mathematics and science, but all they still achieved are primitive.

Tell me one good reason why I should waste my precious time proving anything to you when you don't even have basic knowledge of Physics.

Like I said earlier, I didn't state those things up there for anyone to believe them.

HardMirror:
you talk as if all physicists support your nonsense. It is just a few of you. Most do not agree with you nonsense and for good reasons. Stop making it seem you have irrefutable backing for your stupidity

Lols. Mention where I said all physicists support these ideas.

I see your problem is deeper than I thought.

HardMirror:
they are clear enough. Now I understand why otems writings were interesting to you. Take time and research the arguments against your mystic ideologies. That is what I do. If you did into my old topics here. There was a time I was fascinated about the mysteries of ancient egypt. I created a thread on it. But the more I studied it the more I realized there was nothing to be overly excited about. Ancient egypt no doubt was advanced in it's time, but they remain primitive and overly spiritual mythical just as most other cultures of it's time.
Nothing to be excited about

The problem is your ignorance about fundamental concepts in Physics, and then you're even arrogantly ignorant, commenting about Otem's writings when you don't even have the book.

Only an unreasonable person comments about a book he doesn't have.