Yearly Archives: 2011

Witness Tree Wines

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My daughter, Cate, is in Oregon learning about viniculture and the wonders of the wine making process at Witness Tree Vineyards.  SHe finds it amazing, the recognition of the grapes, the percentage of sugar versus water, and all the rest still to come.  Check out their website to learn more about their wines:

 

Witness Tree Vineyard is a small producer of premium quality Pinot Noir and Chardonnay made entirely from grapes grown on our 100-acre estate. As winegrowers, we believe that only by tending our own vines can we produce the finest wines. Low yields in the vineyard and minimal handling in the winery allow us to create wines of depth, elegance, concentration, and character. They are the ultimate expression of the earth from which they were born.

Witness Tree Vineyard is owned by Dennis & Carolyn Devine. The Devines are originally from the Midwest, but have lived throughout the country during Dennis’ career as a clinical researcher in the pharmaceutical industry. Carolyn serves as President and Business Manager. Witness Tree is located in the Eola Hills, northwest of Salem, an area recognizedas one of Oregon’s premier growing regions.

 Witness Tree
for more, go to:    http://www.witnesstreevineyard.com   (and don’t forget to mention Cate)med for an ancient oak which towers over the vineyard – it was designated a surveyor’s landmark in 1854 – Witness Tree is dedicated to the production of exemplary estate – bottled Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Dennis and Carolyn Devine welcome you to our tasting room.

New York City Protests

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Thousands of protesters fill NYC’s Times Square

By CHRIS HAWLEY – Associated Press 

NEW YORK (AP) — Thousands of demonstrators protesting corporate greed filled Times Square on Saturday night, mixing with gawkers, Broadway showgoers, tourists and police to create a chaotic scene in the midst of Manhattan.

“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” protesters chanted from within police barricades. Police, some in riot gear and mounted on horses, tried to push them out of the square and onto the sidewalks in an attempt to funnel the crowds away.

Sandy Peterson of Salt Lake City, who was in Times Square after seeing “The Book of Mormon” musical on Broadway, got caught up in the disorder.

“We’re getting out of here before this gets ugly,” she said.

Sandra Fox, 69, of Baton Rouge, La., stood, confused, on 46th Street with a ticket for “Anything Goes” in her hand as riot police pushed a knot of about 200 shouting protesters toward her.

“I think it’s horrible what they’re doing,” she said of the protesters. “These people need to go get jobs.”

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators had marched north through Manhattan from Washington Square Park earlier in the afternoon. Once in Times Square, they held a rally for several hours before dispersing. Over the course of the day, more than 70 people were arrested.

Police spokesman Paul Browne said 42 people were arrested in Times Square on Saturday night after being warned repeatedly to disperse, and three others were arrested while trying to take down police barriers.

Two police officers were injured during the protest and had to be hospitalized. One suffered a head injury, the other a foot injury, Browne said.

Five people wearing masks were arrested earlier in the day. It wasn’t immediately clear what charges, if any, they may face.

Two dozen people were arrested on charges of criminal trespass Saturday morning when demonstrators entered a Citibank bank branch near Washington Square Park and refused to leave, police said. One protester also was arrested on a charge of resisting arrest.

Citibank said in a statement that police asked the branch to close until the protesters could be taken away. “One person asked to close an account and was accommodated,” Citibank said.

Earlier in the day, demonstrators paraded to a Chase bank branch, banging drums, blowing horns and carrying signs decrying corporate greed. Marchers throughout the country emulated them in protests that ranged from about 50 people in Jackson, Miss., to about 2,000 in the larger city of Pittsburgh.

“Banks got bailed out. We got sold out,” the crowd of as many as 1,000 in Manhattan chanted. A few protesters went inside the bank to close their accounts, but the group didn’t stop other customers from getting inside or seek to blockade the business.

Police told the marchers to stay on the sidewalk, and the demonstration appeared to be fairly orderly as it wound through downtown streets.

Overseas, violence broke out in Rome, where police fired tear gas and water cannons at some protesters who broke away from the main demonstration, smashing shop and bank windows, torching cars and hurling bottles. Dozens were injured.

Tens of thousands nicknamed “the indignant” marched in cities across Europe, as the protests that began in New York linked up with long-running demonstrations against government cost-cutting and failed financial policies in Europe. Protesters also turned out in Australia and Asia.

Across the Atlantic, hundreds protested in the heart of Toronto’s financial district. Some of the protesters announced plans to camp out indefinitely in St. James Park. Protests were also held in other cities across Canada from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Vancouver, British Columbia.

In the U.S., among the demonstrators in New York withdrawing their money from Chase was Lily Paulina, 29, an organizer with the United Auto Workers union who lives in Brooklyn. She said she was taking her money out because she was upset that JPMorgan Chase was making billions, while its customers struggled with bank fees and home foreclosures.

“Chase bank is making tons of money off of everyone … while people in the working class are fighting just to keep a living wage in their neighborhood,” she said.

Other demonstrations in the city Saturday included an anti-war march to mark the 10th anniversary of the Afghanistan War.

Among the people participating in that march was Sergio Jimenez, 25, who said he quit his job in Texas to come to New York to protest.

“These wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were all based on lies,” Jimenez said. “And if we’re such an intelligent country, we should figure out other ways to respond to terror, instead of with terror.”

Elsewhere in the country, nearly 1,500 gathered Saturday for a march past banks in downtown Orlando. About 50 people met in a park in downtown Jackson, Miss., carrying signs calling for “Health Care Not Warfare.”

Some made more considerable commitments to try to get their voices heard. Nearly 200 spent a cold night in tents in Grand Circus Park in Detroit, donning gloves, scarves and heavy coats to keep warm, said Helen Stockton, a 34-year-old certified midwife from Ypsilanti, and plan to remain there “as long as it takes to effect change.”

“It’s easy to ignore us,” Stockton said. Then she referred to the financial institutions, saying, “But we are not going to ignore them. Every shiver in our bones reminds us of why we are here.”

just remember, oftentimes the truth exists between the lines……………………

“Debris” of Elenin to Pass Earth Sunday

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comet elenin mattiazzo fading imagery

 
Amateur astronomer Michael Mattiazzo of Castlemaine, Australia caught these two images of comet Elenin on Aug. 19 (left) and Sept. 6, 2011. The images show a rapid dimming in the comet, possibly hinting at its disintegration.
CREDIT: Michael Mattiazzo

 

Debris of ‘Doomsday’ Comet Elenin to Pass by Earth Sunday

Mike Wall, SPACE.com Senior Writer
Date: 14 October 2011 Time: 12:21 PM ET

The moment long feared by conspiracy theorists is nearly upon us: The “doomsday comet” Elenin will make its closest approach to Earth Sunday (Oct. 16). Or what’s left of it will, anyway.

Comet Elenin started breaking up in August after being blasted by a huge solar storm, and a close pass by the sun on Sept. 10 apparently finished it off, astronomers say. So what will cruise within 22 million miles (35.4 million kilometers) of our planet Sunday is likely to be a stream of debris rather than a completely intact comet.

And the leftovers of Elenin won’t return for 12,000 years, astronomers say

“Folks are having trouble finding it, so I think it’s probably dead and gone,” said astronomer Don Yeomans of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

That means it probably won’t present much of a skywatching show Sunday, scientists have said.

The doomsday comet

Elenin’s apparent demise may come as a relief to some folks, since apocalyptic rumors circulating on the Internet portrayed the comet as a major threat to Earth.

One theory claimed Elenin would set off havoc on Earth after aligning with other heavenly bodies, spurring massive earthquakes and tsunamis. Another held that Elenin was not a comet at all, but in fact a rogue planet called Nibiru that would bring about the end times on Earth. After all, the comet’s name could be taken as a spooky acronym: “Extinction-Level Event: Nibiru Is Nigh.”

Those ideas were pure nonsense, Yeomans said.

“Elenin was a second-rate, wimpy little comet that never should have been noted for anything, really,” he told SPACE.com. “It was not even a bright one.”

Elenin’s remains will not be the only objects about to make their closest pass of Earth. One day after the Elenin flyby, the small asteroid 2009 TM8 will zip close by. Like Elenin, it poses no risk of striking our home planet.

Asteroid 2009 TM8 is about 21 feet (6.4 meters) wide and the size of a schoolbus. It will come within 212,000 miles of Earth  –  just inside the orbit of the moon  –  when it zips by on Monday morning (Oct. 17).

Say goodbye to Elenin

Elenin was named after its discoverer, Russian amateur astronomer Leonid Elenin, who spotted it in December 2010. Before the icy wanderer broke up, its nucleus was likely 2 to 3 miles (3 to 5 km) in diameter, scientists say.

Elenin never posed any threat to life on Earth, Yeomans said. It was far too small to exert any appreciable influence on our planet unless it managed to hit us.

“Just driving to work every day in my subcompact car is going to have far more of a gravitational effect on Earth than this comet ever will,” Yeomans said.

Elenin’s supposed connection to earthquakes was just a correlation, and a weak one at that, he added. Relatively strong earthquakes occur every day somewhere on Earth, so it’s easy — but not statistically valid — to blame some of them on the comet’s changing position.

Yeomans views the frenzy over Elenin as a product of the Internet age, which allows loud and often uninformed voices to drown out the rather more prosaic results that scientists publish in peer-reviewed journals.

“It’s a snowball effect on the Web,” Yeomans said. “You get one or two folks who make an outrageous claim, and a bunch of others pile on. Some folks are actually making a living this way.”

to read more, go to:    http://www.livescience.com/16550-doomsday-comet-elenin-earth-flyby-sunday.html

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Original Language as Yoda-Talk

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The Original Human Language Like Yoda Sounded
Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer
Date: 13 October 2011 Time: 04:08 PM ET
Yoda credit: Lucasfilm. Background credit: Gunawan Kartapranata | Creative Commons

Many linguists believe all human languages derived from a single tongue spoken in East Africa around 50,000 years ago. They’ve found clues scattered throughout the vocabularies and grammars of the world as to how that original “proto-human language” might have sounded. New research suggests that it sounded somewhat like the speech of Yoda, the tiny green Jedi from “Star Wars.”

There are various word orders used in the languages of the world. Some, like English, use subject-verb-object (SVO) ordering, as in the sentence “I like you.” Others, such as Latin, use subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering, as in “I you like.” In rare cases, OSV, OVS, VOS and VSO are used. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Merritt Ruhlen and Murray Gell-Mann, co-directors of the Santa Fe Institute Program on the Evolution of Human Languages, argue that the original language used SOV ordering (“I you like”).

“This language would have been spoken by a small East African population who seemingly invented fully modern language and then spread around the world, replacing everyone else,” Ruhlen told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience

The researchers came to their conclusion after creating a language family tree, which shows the historical relationships between all the languages of the world. For example, all the Romance languages (Italian, Rumanian, French, Spanish) derive from Latin, which was spoken in Rome 2,000 years ago; that Latin family is itself a branch of an even larger tree, whose other branches include Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Indic and others. Together, all those languages make up the Indo-European language family, which fits like a puzzle piece with all the other language families in the world. [What’s the Hardest Language to Learn?]

“These families — all families — are identified by finding words in a set of languages that are similar to each other but not found elsewhere,” Ruhlen explained in an email.

In the language family tree, Ruhlen and Gell-Mann discovered a distinct pattern in how word orders change as languages branch off from their mother tongues. “What we found was that the distribution of the six possible word orders did not vary randomly. … Rather, the distribution of these six types was highly structured, and the paths of linguistic change in word order were clear,” Ruhlen said.

Out of the 2,000 modern languages that fit in the family tree, the researchers found that more than half are SOV languages. The ones that are SVO, OVS and OSV all derive directly from SOV languages — never the other way around. For example, French, which is SVO, derives from Latin, which is SOV.

Furthermore, languages that are VSO and VOS always derive from SVO languages. Thus, all languages descend from an original SOV word order  –  “which leads to the conclusion that the word order in the language from which all modern languages derive must have been SOV,” Ruhlen wrote.

Was it just an accident that the mother of all mother tongues was probably SOV, rather than one of the other five possibilities? The researchers think not. Predating Ruhlen’s and Gell-Mann’s work, Tom Givon, a linguist at the University of Oregon, argued that SOV had to have been the first word order, based on how children learn language. He found that the SOV word ordering seems to come most naturally to humans.

to read more, go to:    http://www.livescience.com/16541-original-human-language-yoda-sounded.html

Sooo, Maybe October 21 Will be the End of the World…If not, then wait ’til next weel

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Mark Your Calendars: End of World Coming Oct. 21, Camping Says

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 14 October 2011 Time: 05:20 PM ET
Rapture
Radio preacher Harold Camping predicted that May 12, 2011 would mark the beginning of the end of the world
CREDIT: Karl Tate, TechMediaNetwork

The radio preacher who predicted Judgment Day on May 21 has not backed down from his claims that the end of the world is near, despite the lack of a Rapture or world-devastating earthquakes leading up to the doomsday.

In an announcement on his Family Radio Network website, Harold Camping stands by his earlier predictions that the world will end on Friday, Oct. 21. Originally, Camping had predicted hourly earthquakes and God’s judgment on May 21, to be followed by months of torment on Earth for those individuals left behind. Using numerical codes extracted from the Bible, Camping set thedate for the end of everything for Oct. 21.

When May 21 came and went without fanfare, Camping revised his story. The “earthquakes” he had predicted did occur, he writes on his website in a post titled “What Happened on May 21?” — only instead of shaking the Earth, God shook mankind “with fear.” Likewise, although no one was raptured, God is no longer saving souls, Camping writes.

“What really happened this past May 21st?” Camping wrote. “What really happened is that God accomplished exactly what He wanted to happen.”

Camping, who suffered a stroke in June and is now at home recuperating, also said in an audio message on his site that the end on Oct. 21 will come quietly.

It’s not unusual for failed doomsday predictors to claim that their prophecies were true, just slightly misunderstood.

“Most often, the answer given by the group is that the prophecy is true, but the interpretation was wrong,” Concordia University professor of religion Lorenzo DiTommaso told LiveScienceduring Camping’s rush of publicity in May.

The modern Seventh-Day Adventist church, for example, got its start as a splinter group of Baptist preacher William Miller, who predicted the end of the world on Oct. 22, 1844. In the post-doomsday letdown, Miller’s followers struggled to explain what went wrong. The group that would become the Seventh-Day Adventists concluded that on that day, Jesus had shifted his location in heaven in preparation to return to Earth.

Other groups have also survived failed predictions of Armageddon. The Jehovah’s Witnesses made specific predictions about the apocalypse until the early 1990s, when they switched to more vague prophecies. A 1950s doomsday cult known as The Seekers actually bragged to the media after their end-of-the-world prediction failed, saying that their devotion had saved humanity.

Believing in the end of the world even without evidence may seem strange, but sociologists say that a belief in doomsday gives followers a clear sense of the world and their place in it. Others have suggested that apocalyptic worldviews stem from the overwhelming feeling that one’s problems are too big, and, as such, the only possible solution is a clean slate. Over the past 40 to 50 years these doomsday beliefs have increased, according to DiTommaso, though not all “believers” are as extreme as Camping.

to read more, go to:   http://www.livescience.com/16561-mark-calendars-world-coming-oct-21-camping.html

Strong Earthquake-Amur Region of Russia

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Very strong shallow dangerous earthquake in Amur area, Russia – many aftershocks are reported

Last update: October 14, 2011 at 2:03 pm by By 

arthquake overview : A 5.9 magnitude strong earthquake hit Amurskaya Oblast, Russia. The hypocenter was located at 13.8 km depth. The epicenter was close to Skovordino a town with over 10,000 inhabitants.

 

 

Village and landscape in the earthquake area – image courtesy Tanya Konchik

UPDATE 10:54 UTC : We have found no evidence yet of serious damage and/or injuries

UPDATE: Authorities are talking about “awave of aftershocks“. People walking in the streets of Chita said that “The buildings were moving objects“.

UPDATE: The power supply was temporarily down because of the failure of 2 power substations at Bam. 4 hours 25 minutes later evrything was back to normal.

UPDATE: The earthquake has been calledAmur earthquake by local authorities.

UPDATE:  According to experts, the epicenter of the earthquake was located 7 km east of the village Tahtamygda Skovorodinsky district, 134 km southwest of Tynda

UPDATE:  * The power supply has been fixed, however as they expect new tremors, delays are expected.
* PAGER has updated the shaking damage estimate to be around $2-3 million (median estimate) .

UPDATE: The Russian Ministry for Emergency operations  reports that :  the  earthquake occurred in the Amur region, some 20 km from Skovorodino, the end point of the current 600,000 barrels/day ESPO pipeline where crude is loaded into railroad tanks for further transportation to Kozmino. Workers who are inspecting the pipeline have not yet reported any damage yet.

Norma Gentile on Time & Creation

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Time and Creation

By Norma Gentile

I sat down to write and asked what one message would be most useful to share. I had asked this after inviting Archangel Michael into the room. To my surprise it was Mary Magdalene who identified herself to me and who then began to help me form thoughts. Below is a transcript of what was shared with me.

Time is an illusion. You have been told this, and some of you have had the experience of stepping beyond your agreed upon definition of time as linear. If you consider that time may bend itself, much as you can turn your face to one side and allow your body to remain stationary, facing forward, so too can time be at once both linear and non-linear.

Your hearts are not linear. Your soul is not linear. Your bodies are not made to function solely within a linear timeline. Only one of many types of thought processes within your minds can conceive of things in a linear manner. To use a metaphor from you current life: the linear timeline that you refer to is a result of one program among a multitude of software programs that your brains agreed to have installed within it.

Why is this important?

Because at this point in time your ability to utilize many other ways of reasoning that include other aspects of who you are (your heart, your soul, your spiritual network of helpers and your physical body) are being called upon. They are being called by the changes of the cosmic winds to step into your awareness and offer their own unique counsel.

You are not alone. But for thousands of years you have let your brain function as if it were all alone. You have believed that your very consciousness resided in that lovely round globe which rests upon the upper portion of your torso; but what of the remainder of your body? If indeed it were only your brain that held your consciousness, then there would be no need to animate your body. However, it is the loving presence of your consciousness that brings life-force into your entire body.

The bucket is empty without water. So too your body is a vessel waiting to be filled by you. Thinking merely identifies that the bucket exists. Actively engaging in your body fills it with water.

Let us address the issue of linear and non-linear time.

Consider this metaphor: Time is the action of moving the bucket to fill it with water. In order to fill a bucket with water one usually must turn the bucket to dip it into water. Turning the bucket on its side and filling it with water means allows the bucket to enter the water. Here the water is linear time, and the bucket represents your ability to bend time and let the bending of time enter into and pass through linear time.

This metaphor represents how linear and non-linear time interpenetrate each other and co-exist within your reality. In this moment those of us who are Spiritual Teachers place a great importance upon your understanding of time as a result of where your thoughts originate from. Not just the thoughts of your head, but the reasoning process and resulting thoughts that travel through your entire physical body create your experience of time.

Thinking with aspects of yourself that include your body, your soul, your spiritual support network and your heart allow you to access the multitude of software programs within you that create non-linear time. Thinking as you have been taught to think, with your head, limits you to experiencing time only in its linear form.

When you exist in linear time you are limited to creating within linear time and in a linear fashion. When you think using all of who you are, you access the possibilities of creating outside of linear creation. This means engaging the thought process with your heart, your soul, your spiritual network of helpers and your physical body.

And it is not we of the Spiritual Realms who hold the key to how you experience time. You alone are the guardians of your own time. When you choose to follow the principles of time in its linear form, you continue to think within the limitations of the physical brain. The bucket is defined but empty of water.

As you explore your entire body, and how thought moves through your body as well as your soul and those Beings of Consciousness who comprise your spiritual support team, you open yourself to experiencing the other manners in which time expresses itself in your dimension.

For now, notice when time seems to stand still. And when it passes quickly. Notice how your body feels and how you experience yourself in relationship to your Spiritual support team and your soul. All these give subtle clues about what you are doing and what you are not doing

Why is learning to experience non-linear time important?

When you experience non-linear time you are in a position to create your reality in a non-linear fashion. Have you ever wondered why your world has seemingly developed so much maturity (in some ways) in the past 500 years? It is because various humans have, for a moment here and there, stumbled into experiencing themselves as comprising wholly their soul, heart, body and spiritual team members.

And these moments of non-linear time and creation, like the bucket, have been dipped into the water of your ongoing linear creation. Those things which were created in a non-linear fashion were brought into your linear reality and filled with your linear reality. Much like the bucket was filled with water.

We said at the start that your thought identifies the bucket. And your active engagement in the world fills it with water. Now we would add that the quality of your thought is now able to change the water in the bucket from reflecting linear creation principles to reflecting non-linear creation possibilities. You are now a participant in the generation of non-linear reality and hence creation.

 

About Norma Gentile

Norma Gentile

 

Norma Gentile, sound shaman, is a natural intuitive and channel for Mary, Archangel Michael and the Hathors. She maintains a private healing practice, offering sessions in English and Spanish, as well as singing healing concerts and teaching workshops. Her CD of live sound healings, Songs of Spirit, is available in the Maat Shop. To see and hear her sound healings, articles and podcasts at her website www.healingchants.com.

from:    http://www.spiritofmaat.com/oct11/time_and_creation.html

Rejected Ben & Jerry’s Flavors

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More Rejected Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Flavors (PICTURES)

The Huffington Post First Posted: 10/12/11 03:19 PM ET   Updated: 10/12/11 03:52 PM ET

Earlier this year, Jimmy Fallon was bestowed the highest honor that a popular ice cream franchise can bestow: his very own Ben & Jerry’s flavor.

Soon after, we had some fun coming up with what we’d imagine are “rejected” Ben & Jerry’s flavors, including tributes to Justin Beiber, Snooki and Muammar Gaddafi, and asked our readers to make their own.

Since then, we’ve seen more ridiculous Ben & Jerry’s flavors than we could even dream up. One real one being “Schweddy Balls,” a callback to a classic Alec Baldwin “SNL” sketch, and one fake “Arrested Development” themed flavor we only wish was real.

So we figured, why stop there? We added a few more flavors (including some excellent submissions from you, our dear readers) and are looking for more would-be “rejected” Ben & Jerry’s flavors to add to the mix.

to see the rest of the slideshow, and have your own opportunity to create a flavor, go to:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/12/more-rejected-ben-jerrys-flavors_n_1007178.html#s249595&title=Mama_Grizzly_Crunch

 

 

Cracking the Genome of the Black Death

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Scientists crack Black Death’s genetic code

By Kate KellandPosted 2011/10/12 at 2:23 pm EDT

LONDON, Oct. 12, 2011 (Reuters) — Scientists have mapped out the entire genetic map of the Black Death, a 14th century bubonic plague that killed 50 million Europeans in one of the most devastating epidemics in history.

A Wayson stain of the Yersinia pestis bacterium, responsible for the plague that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. REUTERS/CDC

The work, which involved extracting and purifying DNA from the remains of Black death victims buried in London’s “plague pits,” is the first time scientists have been able to draft a reconstructed genome of any ancient pathogen.

Their result — a full draft of the entire Black Death genome — should allow researchers to track changes in the disease’s evolution and virulence, and lead to better understanding of modern-day infectious diseases.

Building on previous research which showed that a specific variant of the Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) bacterium was responsible for the plague that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, a team of German, Canadian and American scientists went on to “capture” and sequence the entire genome of the disease.

“The genomic data show that this bacterial strain, or variant, is the ancestor of all modern plagues we have today worldwide. Every outbreak across the globe today stems from a descendant of the medieval plague,” said Hendrik Poinar, of Canada’s McMaster University, who worked with the team.

“With a better understanding of the evolution of this deadly pathogen, we are entering a new era of research into infectious disease.”

Major technical advances in DNA recovery and sequencing have dramatically expanded the scope of genetic analysis of ancient specimens, opening up new ways of trying to understand emerging and re-emerging infections.

Experts say the direct descendants of the same bubonic plague still exist today, killing around 2,000 people a year.

A virulent strain of E. coli bacteria which caused a deadly outbreak of infections in Germany and France earlier this year was also found to contain DNA sequences from plague bacteria.

to read more, go to:    http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre79b5d2-us-plague-genome/

Temporal Cloak Tested

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Erasing History? Temporal Cloaks Adjust Light’s Throttle to Hide an Event in Time

ScienceDaily (Oct. 13, 2011) — Researchers from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., have demonstrated for the first time that it’s possible to cloak a singular event in time, creating what has been described as a “history editor.” In a feat of Einstein-inspired physics, Moti Fridman and his colleagues sent a beam of light traveling down an optical fiber and through a pair of so-called “time lenses.” Between these two lenses, the researchers were able to briefly create a small bubble, or gap, in the flow of light. During that fleetingly brief moment, lasting only the tiniest fraction of a second, the gap functioned like a temporal hole, concealing the fact that a brief burst of light ever occurred.

By sending a beam of light down an optical fiber and through a pair of “time lenses”, researchers have demonstrated for the first time that it’s possible to cloak a singular event in time. (Credit: © 555images / Fotolia)

The team is presenting their findings at the Optical Society’s (OSA) Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics (FiO) 2011 (http://www.frontiersinoptics.com/), taking place in San Jose, Calif. next week.

Their ingenious system, which is the first physical demonstration of a phenomenon originally described theoretically a year ago by Martin McCall and his colleagues at Imperial College London in the Journal of Optics, relies on the ability to use short intense pulses of light to alter the speed of light as it travels through optical materials, in this case an optical fiber. (In a vacuum, light maintains its predetermined speed limit of 180,000 miles per second.) As the beam passes through a split-time lens (a silicon device originally designed to speed up data transfer), it accelerates near the center and slows down along the edges, causing it to balloon out toward the edges, leaving a dead zone around which the light waves curve. A similar lens a little farther along the path produces the exact but opposite velocity adjustments, resetting the speeds and reproducing the original shape and appearance of the light rays.

To test the performance of their temporal cloak, the researchers created pulses of light directly between the two lenses. The pulses repeated like clockwork at a rate of 41 kilohertz. When the cloak was off, the researchers were able to detect a steady beat. By switching on the temporal cloak, which was synchronized with the light pulses, all signs that these events ever took place were erased from the data stream.

to read more, go to:    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111012113554.htm