Can Newton laws be proven?   No.
Do we believe in it? Yes we do, because it is consistent within the uncertainty of the measurement of all experiments have been done.
When the boy in the picture below, throws the ball up, he actually moves the Earth for 0.8 x 10^-24 meter.

     Let's say, Newton's third law of motion, "to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”. That is, if the ball in the picture below exerts a force on Earth, then the Earth also exerts an equal and opposite force on the ball.

      Imagine the power of the little kid in the picture below, every time, he throws the ball up, and the Earth is moving way from the ball, and when the ball start falling down, the Earth also falling down towards the ball. What a wonderful concept Newton taught us, the smartest man ever walked on the face of Earth.

Say, the ball has a mass of 1kg falling from a height of 1 meter. According to Newton, the force of attraction between the Earth and the ball is given by the equation:  

F = G * M₁ * M₂ / d^{2
G = gravitational constant = 6.6734 x 10-11 Nm2/kg2
M₁ = Mass of the Earth     = 6 x 1024 kg
M₂ = Mass of the ball        = 1 kg
d   = 1 + 6400000           = 6400001 meter
So, F = 9.8 newton
Acceleration produced by the ball    = F / Mass of the ball = 9.8/1 = 9.8 meter / S2}
Acceleration produced by the Earth = F/Mass of the Earth = 1.63 x 10 ^-24 meter / S²

Distance traveled by the ball = ½ at² =  ½ * 9.81 * 1² = 4.9 meter

Distance traveled by the Earth = ½ at² = ½ * 1.63 x 10 ^-24  * 1²  = 0.8 x 10^-24 meter

^{Every time the boy throw the ball up the earth moves way from the ball for 0.8 x 10-24 meter and when the ball start falling down, the Earth moves 0.8 x 10-24 meter  towards the ball.}

Can we prove it?   No.
Do we believe in it? Yes we do, because it is consistent within the uncertainty of the measurement of all experiments have been done.

• http://hitoshi.berkeley.edu/public_html/susy/susy.html
• http://www.superstringtheory.com/experm/exper4.html
  

Medieval people had Cathedral that moved their souls and eventually they learned how to go to heaven and produced Bishops, Imams, Rabbi or Purohits.

Large Hadrons Collider (LHC) is our modern Cathedral, here we learn not about how to go to heaven but how haven goes!

LHC is truly the proof of transformative potential of human imagination. LHC is the brainchild of 6000 best minds of our time; this is the most exciting period for physicists and scientists since the beginning of the 20th century.

• A new frontier of knowledge will shed light on the unresolved questions of science, through for example -the search for the elusive ‘Higgs boson’ (so called God Particle) to explain the origin of particle mass, For example, proton and neutron weigh 100 times more than the quarks they made of!
  
• Particles that could make up dark matter, super symmetry and
  
• The existence of extra dimensions of space.
  

     We are just trying to understand what happen 13.7 billion years ago just after one trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.
 
    I have one concern remains, if this 8 billion dollar instrument do not answer the 14 billion years old trivial question, what will be the future of physics?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQNpucos9wc

 Random thought I

     In the year 1929, Edwin Hubble made a critical discovery that the universe is expanding. Galaxies are further away are moving faster. Hubble's constant states that it is 0.007% per million years (71km/sec/Mega Parsec), means, that every one million year, all the distance in the universe expand by 0.007% (important! galaxies themselves do not move, the space itself expands at that rate, means new spaces are created all the time).

    According to Hubble's constant, the wall of my living room where I am right now have expanded about 0.13 nano-meter since January 01, 2007 (today is December 29, 2007).

Random thought II

     The most interesting lecture I heard from Richard Feynman....
Listen Here

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that
    All things are made of atoms-little particles that that move    around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.
In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount  of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

Random thoughts III

When the Sun Rises to the West?

      Concorde was the only passenger airliner able to overtake the speed of sound. On certain early evening (just after the sun has set down) transatlantic flights departing from Heathrow or Paris, it was possible to take off at night and catch up with the sun from the cockpit you could see the sun rise to the west (It is like having inversed the rotation of the earth).

The early 1970s were the heroic age of Black Hole research, physicists discovered that, if Einstein was right, Black Holes were not just theoretical constructs, but actually exists in our universe. 
      Probable existence of black holes made a deep impression on Chandra aesthetically as well as scientifically. Chandra was in his sixties when he embarked on black hole research. He was keen to disprove Thomas Huxley's contention that "scientists over 60 do more harm than good."  Chandra in his intellectual stamina, was unique among his contemporary physicists, which combined with his self-disciplined neatness, extraordinary capability of most elaborate mathematical manipulations and remarkably without mistakes. Famous British professor of Cosmology of Cambridge University, Martin Rees in his book Before the Beginning (chapter 5) described:

   "I recall the first time I heard him lecture, at a Cambridge seminar. He presented his mathematics on slides, which he ran through at bewildering speed because each equation was too long to fit on a single slide, and spilled over on to several. He ended his talk with typical disclaimer: You may think I have used a hammer to crack eggs, but I have cracked eggs."

Chandra was 72 when he published his book "The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes (650 pages)", it is a daunting manifestation of his uncommon mathematical fluency. In few chapters of this book, mathematical manipulation is so intense, he adds:

"The reductions that are necessary to go from one step to another are often very elaborate and, on occasion, may require as many as ten, twenty or even fifty pages. In the event that some reader may wish to undertake a careful scrutiny oh the entire development, the author's derivations (in some 600 legal-sized pages and in six additional notebooks) have been deposited in the Joseph Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago." 

Chandra had a lifelong fascination with Newton and his work "Principia", in his 84,  he published detailed study of Newton's work, "Newton's Principia for Common Reader (1995). This was his final work.
Chandra died in August 21, 1995
     

     Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (his associates often call him Chandra) was only 19, when he was on a boat from India to Great Britain to begin his graduate study in physics at Cambridge University, bring back a time, when Cambridge was one of the most intellectually stimulating snake pits in the world.

    At this young age, he made some initial calculation and conceived an idea whose consequences seemed absurd. His idea was, in the lifecycle of a star, if the star is so massive, it was unable to stop collapsing? Chandra concluded, as massive star contracted its gravity would keep increasing until it swallowed itself and disappeared.
         More comfortable with mathematics than wordplay, Chandra (he was then only 24)  made his case at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was viciously attacked by arrogant Arthur Eddington, he used nonsensical and contradictory argument to show that Chandra's findings were invalid. Eddington, a prominent and important astrophysicist of his time insisted that Chandra failed to understand the difference between "standing" and "processing" electron waves. Eddington, probably,  did understand the problem with Blackholes, he stated in that fateful encounter with Chandra, "I think there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way''

      Chandra's finding was quickly recognized as valid by physicists as noteworthy as Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Ralph H. Fowler, and Paul Dirac.

     After he moved to the United States, Chandra and Eddington exchanged cordial letters. When food was rationed in England during World War II, Chandra sent his old adversary, who would soon die of cancer, care packages of rice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1yzH_7NIMg
This is an amazing video at YouTube. A cool demonstration of the Meissner effect, a property that if you put a magnet in close proximity to superconductors, a current is induced. This in turn produces a magnetic field, which has the same polarity as the original field that caused the current. A demonstration kit is available here for $50. This is one of the properties of superconductors most easy to demonstrate and also most dazzling.

"... The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in god in not just wrong but potentially deadly..."

     Read this book with tolerance and patience. Because, religious minded readers may consider that they have found their Satan Incarnate.

    Whatever you faith is, this book won’t leave you unchanged. Read it carefully, to know at last, what is our purpose of life? Are we all really screwed from millennium old superstitious dogmas?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe7yf9GJUfU

- Noted British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on the radio in 1976 that at 9:47 am, a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event, in which Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, would cause a gravitational alignment that would reduce the Earth's gravity. Moore told listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment of the planetary alignment, they would experience a floating sensation. Hundreds of people called in to report feeling the sensation.

- The April 1998 newsletter of New Mexicans for Science and Reason contained an article claiming that the Alabama Legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi to the "Biblical value" of 3.0.

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A Heinlein

Intel recently made a huge breakthrough that keeps Moore's Law intact.
Now Intel is coming back. Intel finally overhauled its obsession, the strategic wrong turn it made years ago by pushing its chips to very high clock speed. That irrational motive was adopted to gain speed at any cost left the company behind its competitors.

Why overclocking was a bad decision?
Current leakage is a very complex phenomenon, one can do a Ph.D. on this topic. As most of readers already know that transistors are nothing but tiny electrical switches like water faucets at our home. These switches are always in one of the two states, ON or OFF. But the problem is, when a transistors is OFF, it's really never OFF, a tiny bit of current is still flowing through the transistor in OFF state, it is like water trickling through a faulty faucet. Now if every faucets in every apartment leaks the same amount, more money will go down the drain in each month without doing any useful works. Obviously as number of transistors increases, leakage of current also increases (1 billion transistor in a single chip is common now a days).

There are other at least 2 factors which contribute to current leakage in the transistors.

- As individual transistor get smaller they also tend to leak more.

- Higher clock speed consumes higher power, it makes CPU hotter, means, more current leakage.
The leakage current is 44% higher in a Pentium III 1.13 Ghz processor than in the Pentium III 1.0 Ghz. This is an example of how upping the clock speed can significantly increase the total leakage current flowing through the chip. This information is available here.

With any real-world workloads ONLY certain regions of the chip (Hot Spots) will be active at any given time, while the other region are inactive and turned OFF. But this active regions drawing almost as much current as inactive region, then the entire chip becomes one BIG hot spot!

Intel introduces 45 nm node with high-K. WoW!

For comparison shake, a 400 of Intel's 45nm transistors (switches) could fit on a surface of single human Red blood cell. Intel is going to use high-K as an insulator that separates it from the channel where current flows. The combination of metal gates and high-K gates dielectric leads to transistors with very low current leakage with record high performance. Intel's co founder Gordon Moore said:
"The implementation of high-k and metal materials marks the biggest change in transistor technology since the introduction of polysilicon gate MOS transistors in the late 1960s".

Pic. Src: Intel

More Reading:
www.intel.com/pressroom
http://download.intel.com/technology/silicon/Press_45nm_106.pdf
www.intel.com/technology/silicon/45nm_technology.htm

                              Weird things that do not make sense.

Weirdness I

This is more than century old observation, in 1881, mathematician Simon Newcomb published a two-page provocative conjecture in the American journal of Mathematics. He reported, that people using the logarithm tables were looking up numbers starting with 1 more often than numbers starting with 2, numbers with first digit 2 more often than 3, and so on. He formalized his observation as follows:

                                        p = log₁₀ (1 + 1/d)
where, p - the probability that the first significant digit is d.
           d - 1, 2,3, ... 9.
The equation states that about 30% of numbers in a table or group will begin with 1. Newcomb described his observation that books of logarithms in the library were quite dirty at the beginning and progressively cleaner throughout. This phenomenon is called The First Digit Phenomenon.

Weirdness II

If we cool down helium to almost absolute zero (-459.67 F), it will liquefy (but unlike other gases, it will NOT freeze). Now, if we spin a bowl of this liquid helium around,  the liquid would remain absolutely stationary in the bowl, no centrifugal effects or friction with the wall of bowl!
            This is probably the most bizarre liquid in nature. It can behave as a so-called superfluid, defying gravity by running up slopes, and squeezing tiny holes that no other liquid could squeeze through.

Weirdness III

Look at the sky with your telescope. The photons arriving at the detectors strapped to your telescope may have set out a billion years ago from a star 10²² km away from you. They have a "choice" of two routes to Earth. They could go one way, they could go the other, or they could mysteriously split up and travel both ways at once. But which route they follow, starting out a billion years ago and  10²² km away seems to depend on weather or not you decided to switch on a Pockels cell attached to the telescope observing the photons!

 Professor John Wheeler says: "...Actually quantum phenomenon are neither wave nor particles but are intrinsically undefined until the moment they are measured".

British philosopher Berkeley was right when he asserted two centuries ago "to be is to be perceived"

Ref:
Schrodinger's kittens and the search for reality - John Gribbin

Often there is a disconnect between intuition and logic. When a mathematician has an intuition without a logic to support it, they call it "Conjecture" or "Hypotheses", many of these conjectures are notoriously resistant to proof by logic. One of the most famous is the Poincaré conjecture. To appreciate this conjecture, one must have some knowledge of differential geometry. However there could be a laymen description of this conjecture (like, we all understand the General Theory of Relativity, even without any knowledge of Tensor Calculus or differential geometry)  which could be depicted as follows:

 Picture: NY Times: Even topologists don’t think this soap film can be made into a sphere.

      What Poincare suggested, "anything" without holes has to be a sphere. Here "anything" means compact or closed, meaning that it has a finite extent; no matter how far you go one direction or another, you can ONLY get so far way before you start coming back, the way you can never get more than 12,500 miles from home on the Earth.

Clay mathematical institute describe the conjecture as follows:

"If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the surface of the apple is "simply connected," but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out to be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since."

      As we can see, with 3-dimensions, it is very hard to detect by sense the overall shape of something. We cannot see where the holes might be, neither we can draw pictures of 3-D spaces. When we envision the surface of an apple, we are really seeing a 2-dimensional object embedded in 3-dimensions. Hence, physicists are still arguing about the overall shape of the universe.

     And finally, It was Russian Mathematician Dr. Perelman (he looks like Rusputin with his long hair and fingernails) broke the logjam. He solved the Poincare Conjecture, he was able to show (he published it in the Internet, not in a Mathematical journal) that singularities were all friendly.
    
    Asked about Dr. Perelman’s pleasures, Dr. Anderson  said that this unworldy person (friendly, shy and no interest in material wealth) talked a lot about hiking in the woods near St. Petersburg (Leningrad) looking for mushrooms. 

Ref:
1. The most significant scientific achievement of the year 2006
http://www.aip.org/isns/reports/2006/021.html
2. The Strange video about Russian Mathematician Dr. Gregory Perelman (He already spurned offers from Princeton University and Stanford University)  
 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4358317729698492024

3. The New York Times, Science Editorial, August 15, 2006

Some links to this mathematics described for the layman are

• Clay Mathematics Institute has a description of the Poincare Conjecture as a Millenium Problem by John Milnor (SUNY Stony Brook).
• Taming the fourth dimension, by B. Schechter, New Scientist, 17 July 2004, Vol 183 No 2456
• CNN: Russian may have solved great math mystery
• Major math problem is believed solved, by S. Begley, Wall Street Journal, Jul. 21, 2006 explains the current Millenium Prize situation.
• The Shapes of Space , by G. P. Collins, Scientific American, 2004 July, pp. 94-103
• Math Fiction: Perelman's Song, by T. Chang, listed on Kasman's Mathematical Fiction website, with an intro by Kasman, to appear in Math Horizons.
• If it looks like a sphere..., by E. Klareich, Science News Online, June 14, 2003, Vol 163, No. 24, p 376.
• Structures of Three Manifolds, for the scientificly inclined audience by S.T. Yau, June 20, 2006.
• A sensationalist article which divides the mathematics community has appeared in the New Yorker. See Hamilton's Response
• Who cares about Poincare?, by Jordan Ellenberg, Slate, Aug 18, 2006, is for the layman
• The Work of Grigori Perelman, talk by John Lott, ICM Presentation, for mathematicians in all areas, nice graphics

1. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3020803111770641453&q=hubble
2. Quite a lucid description .....

     We live in a Newtonian world of Einstein physics ruled by Frankenstein logic. That logic is "Chaos". If you watch a leaf fall from a tree, you see it sway back and forth in the wind as it falls. If you try to calculate its zigzagging path to the ground, you will soon find you can't; it's an impossible task. Scientifically, chaos is defined as extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. For example, start a twig in a stream at one point, and start it at another point only a few inches away, the two path will be completely different.

     Chaos theory is now considered to be one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, ranking alongside quantum theory and the general theory of relativity!

   One of the earliest pioneers of chaos theory was Edward Norton Lorenz. In the early 70s, computers began coming on the market, they were crude and slow compared to today's desktops but good enough for lots of simple calculations. Edward Lorenz a professor of MIT used one of those early computers to model the weather, and what he found surprised him. He discovered that extremely small changes in the initial conditions had a significant effect the weather. It was one of the key breakthrough in chaos theory. This concept is now known as the Butterfly Effect.

     We have grown accustomed to the notion that everything is calculable, and the world is deterministic. But chaos theory showed us that this is not true. Many things appears to be beyond our mathematical models, and this means a Theory of Everything may not exist. Chaos may forbid us from knowing everything.

        It is interesting that Stephen Hawking is considered one of the most widely bought and least read author. I started reading this book about 11 years ago and never finished it, just because it is not interesting reading to me. A Brief History of Time has been translated in 40 plus languages, and sold more than 9 million copies (roughly one copy existed for every 700 people on the planet), it also made Hawking the Galaxy Guru.

      For a non-physicist it is a very useful and frustrating book. Unless one have some prior knowledge of general theory of relativity,  a preliminary knowledge of quantum mechanics and some idea of String Theory, a reader won't be able to follow author. It can take your hours to ponder one page of this books, and years to feel like you understood it. Moreover, there are unnecessarily long complex sentences and written in passive voice (specially in the middle part of the book).

       The most fascinating thing about the book is, "Stephen managed to reach parts of the reading public that no other scientist or science writer ever approached, Albert Einstein included. There must be many people who have read - or attempted to read - only one science book, and that is A Brief History of Time" -The Guardian

The double-slit experiment is the most beautiful experiment in physics. experiment exemplifies the wave-particle duality of light, as well as quantum physics itself. This is the most beautiful experiment in science. This experiment also demonstrates, how web function collapsed under observation.

What is Beauty?
Plato is probably one of the greatest philosophers of all times, if not the greatest. He said, beauty, symmetry, and truth, which are all closer to knowledge than pleasure. As he said, beauty is not easy to define, but something that "slips through and evades us". For this reason, many logic-oriented philosophical approaches tend to divorce and even oppose truth and beauty.

"The quantum-mechanical world is likely to remain counterintuitive to human beings, no matter how well-versed or confident we are in the theory. The double-slit electron-interference experiment brings its reality before our eyes in a dramatic, and materially embodied way. It is therefore likely to remain in the pantheon of beautiful experiments for a long time to come." - journal Physics World (Sept, 2002).

The Double-Slit Experiment:
http://video.google.com:80/videoplay?docid=-4237751840526284618&pr=goog-sl

If you understood this, you would understand quantum physics -- but as Feynman said, "nobody understands quantum mechanics" (The Character of Physical Law, BBC Publications, 1965).

Hydrogen (consists of just one proton and one electron) is by far the most abundant element in the universe, the next most is helium. Hydrogen and helium together accounted for roughly 99.9% of all the atoms in the universe. Simon L Singh proposed in his best selling book "Big Bang", we should update the famous nursery rhyme as follows:

Twinkle, Twinkle  little star,

I don't  wonder what you are;

For by spectroscopic ken,

I know that you're hydrogen;

Twinkle, Twinkle little star,

I don't wonder what you are.

       The mystery of the abundances is very problematic for the supporter of Big Bang. If the universe had evolved from a moment of creation , why had it evolved in such a way as to generate hydrogen and helium rather than gold and platinum?

      First little history, Fritz Zwicky is considered as one of the most brilliant astrophysicist and as well as one of the most unusual personalities of in the 20'th century. He was one of the fiercest critic of the Big Bang model. He had been invited to CalTech in 1925 by the Nobel laureate Robert Millikan. According to one of the many anecdotes told about Zwicky, there is the story that Zwicky had accused Millikan that he, (Millikan) never ever had a good idea. Millikan reportedly had replied: "Well, good, young man, and what about you?" Zwicky: "I have a good idea every two years. Give me a topic, I will give you the idea!".  All of his colleagues were targets of his abuse, and many of them were subjected to his favorite insult -"Spherical Bustard". Just as sphere looks the same from every direction, a Spherical bastard was someone who was  a bastard whatever way you looked at them. He lived in US for over 40 years and kept his Swiss citizenship at all the time.

 Zwicky examined Hubble's data and commented that galaxies are not moving at all and redshifts were caused by galactic gravity draining light of its energy was called the tired light theory. The main problem with this theory was that it was not supported by known laws of physics. A few did join his tired light brigade, however, they were not even deterred by his apprently faulty physics, because Zwicky had an immaculated track record in research of physics (supernovae, neutron stars, dark energy).

Einstein's relativistic time has been verified by experiment. In order to check the Twin Paradox, scientists needed an object with a sort life span that could be measured precisely. The experiment would then attempt to prolong that life span by means of high-speed travel. The subatomic world of particles   physics provided the object. Many subatomic particles are unstable, have build-in obsolescence, and decay after lifetime fixed by nature.

         A convenient example turned out to be muons, heavier cousins of electron. They decay into electrons after a life span of two millionths of a second. An experiment involving the longevity of muons was conducted at CERN (the huge high-energy accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland). In this experiment, muon particles were accelerated to 99.4 percent of the speed of light, while traveling in an orbit 46 feet in a diameter. If the muon particles were unaffected by high speed, a typical muon would make 14-15 trips around the ring before its two - microseconds life expired. In the CERN experiment, a typical particle traveling at speeds close to the speed of light survived long enough to make more than 400 orbits. Its life had been extended nearly thirty-fold, confirming Einstein theory.

                                         Ref: Heisenberg Probably Slept Here...