Edwards Makes It 2 Straight in Las Vegas

Las Vegas Motor Speedway in Las Vegas on Sunday, March 2, 2008.

The celebration of Carl Edwards' second consecutive victory was short-lived: His winning Ford Fusion failed a post-race inspection at Las Vegas Motor Speedway that could lead to severe penalties for his team.
Carl Edwards arrived here with a hot hand and, as Dale Earnhardt Jr. found out, he was not about to play it safe and fold.

Edwards charged back from an early pit-road penalty and held off Earnhardt on two late restarts Sunday to win the UAW-Dodge 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway for his second consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup Series victory.

Edwards also won the rain-delayed race at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana last week, giving his Roush Fenway Racing team two wins in the season's first three races.

"This is an amazing couple of weeks," said Edwards, 28, who also led the most laps, 86, in the 267-lap race. "I was just trying to hold off Dale at the end."

But Edwards' win came with a potential hitch: In a post-race inspection, officials found that the oil tank in Edwards No. 99 Ford was missing its lid, NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said.

The car will be taken to NASCAR's research and development center in Concord, N.C., for further inspection, said Poston, who disclosed the matter after Edwards and team co-owner Jack Roush held their victory post-race news conferences.

Poston declined to speculate on why the part was missing or whether it could have fallen off.

"If there are any actions to be taken, we'll make that announcement as we normally do next week," he said.

Edwards' crew chief, Bob Osborne, declined to comment pending NASCAR's further review.

It was the ninth victory of Edwards' career and his first at Las Vegas. But Roush Fenway overall has a stellar history here, winning six of the 11 Cup races held at the speedway just north of the Strip.

The victory in front of 153,000 also gave Edwards the early series points lead, the first time he has led the standings since the Missouri native joined the series full time in 2005.

Earnhardt was second in his Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, Edwards teammate Greg Biffle was third and Kevin Harvick fourth in a Chevy prepared by Richard Childress Racing.

"I wanted a shot at Carl, but he was just so strong," Earnhardt said. But Earnhardt, who was 40th in Fontana because of an early crash there, said that "after last week I just needed to get that kind of a [second-place] finish."

The race, which had a track-record 11 caution periods, was decided in the last three laps after Earnhardt's teammate Jeff Gordon was involved in a severe crash.

As the field took the green flag for a restart with five laps left, Edwards led Earnhardt, Kenseth and Gordon. But Earnhardt spun his tires as he accelerated, allowing Kenseth and Gordon to pass him while they moved through the first two turns of the 1.5-mile oval.

As they reached the back straightaway side by side, Kenseth and Gordon touched, causing both to spin out of control. Gordon then slammed into the inside wall with such force that the radiator of his No. 24 Chevy was sent hurtling down the pavement.

Neither driver was injured, but "that's probably the hardest I've ever hit," said Gordon, a four-time Cup champion and 15-year veteran. "I'm OK, but I'm going to be really sore tomorrow."

Gordon hit a section of wall that doesn't yet have what's known as a SAFER barrier, a so-called "soft wall" that further protects drivers by better absorbing the energy of a car crash. The softer walls are widely installed at U.S. tracks but are not universal.

"There shouldn't be gaps anywhere," Biffle said. "There should be SAFER barriers all the way around the inside and the outside of these racetracks."

Kyle Busch, who started from the pole position, led 56 laps early in the race but faded to finish 11th, extending the history of no pole-sitter winning in Las Vegas.

The race ended abruptly, and painfully, for two-time Cup champion Tony Stewart, a teammate of Busch's at Joe Gibbs Racing who also has never won in Las Vegas.

After Stewart had charged into the top five from his 23rd starting spot, his No. 20 Toyota Camry apparently cut a right front tire and slammed into the wall on Lap 107.

"That's the hardest [hit] I've taken in a long time," said Stewart, 36, after he was evaluated at the infield care center and released. Stewart said he still planned to test today at Phoenix International Raceway as scheduled.

Reigning Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, who was trying for his fourth consecutive victory at Las Vegas, instead had a race to forget. The El Cajon, Calif., native struggled all race, seldom cracked the top 25 and finished two laps down in 29th place.

After two days of balmy weather for practice and qualifying, Sunday brought temperatures in the low 60s and gusty winds from the north that caused a stiff head wind for the drivers on the back straightaway.

In addition, this was the first time that NASCAR's new Car of Tomorrow was used at Las Vegas, and many teams had trouble with the handling of their cars. At one point of the race, more than half the 43-car field was one lap down to the leaders.

Technorati : Edwards, Las Vegas, NEWS, SPORTS

NEW PHYSICS AND THE MIND.

Some physicists think that Big Science has kidnapped physics and left the mind and consciousness behind.

1..........What is the mind? And how can physicists, of all people, be the ones to explain consciousness and the mind?

2..........PHYSICS AND THE MIND. The mind and consciousness have been part of physics since the earliest days of quantum physics. Roger Penrose's 1989 The Emperor's New Mind placed the mind and consciousness at the intersection of relativity and quantum physics, and proposed that the mind and consciousness are at the heart of physics' theory of everything.

3..........NEW PHYSICS. Physicists have continued to develop theories that intimately relate to the mind. The best of these theories of physics and the mind also incorporate phenomena of new physics-extra dimensions, entanglement, entropy and information, black holes, tunneling, Bose-Einstein condensates, chaos and complexity, dark matter and dark energy.
4....Count down the Top Ten Hidden Radical Theories of New Physics and the Mind.

MORE.........

The Mind and Physics
The mind has played a role in physics since the earliest days of quantum physics. The Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 featured a debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein about whether the mind and consciousness are (Bohr) or are not (Einstein) part of physics. Einstein's position has dominated mainstream physics for decades, but the battle simmered on for the entire twentieth century.

New Physics
Much of 20th-century physics has proceeded along the reductionist path that seeks quantum gravity at the intersection of the extended lines of quantum physics and relativity.

This reductionist path must always try to force into a stretched standard model the many phenomena of new physics that have been theorized or observed over recent decades:

extra dimensions of space
black holes
dark matter and dark energy
entanglement
tunneling
Bose-Einstein condensates
neutrino mass
radical theses about time and matter

How far can the standard models of particle physics and cosmology be stretched before we see the need for new theory-of-everything paradigms?

A Search Exercise for You
Here's a search exercise for you.

List every phenomenon of new physics that you can think of. Add "consciousness" and "the mind." See what theories of physics you can find.

From this, create your own Top Ten List of Radical Theories of New Physics.

And select your own Number One Theory of New Physics and the Mind.

21st-Century Physics
How many phenomena of new physics does it take to break the standard model?

Are we really getting closer to a theory of everything by reducing our understanding to strings as physics' smallest pieces?

Can psychologists', mathematicians', and physicists' longstanding p-adic models of thought be brought into modern physics?

What optimal mix of new physics phenomena and p-adic models of consciousness have created holistic models of new physics and the mind, the 21st century's theory of everything?

Technorati : LIFESTYLE, MIND, NEWS, PHYSICS

HAPPY BIRTH DAY !!Alexander Graham Bell

HAPPY BIRTH DAY

He taught his father's "visible speech" techniques at Boston University.
Bell recruited Thomas A. Watson in Boston to work on and perfect the telephone.
In 1875 unintelligible voice sounds were transmitted with an early telephone model
physicist, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, 3 March 1847. He is a son of Alexander Melville Bell, mentioned below, and was educated at the Edinburgh high school and Edinburgh University, receiving special training in his father's system for removing impediments in speech. He removed to London in 1867, and entered the University there, but left on account of his health, and went to Canada with his father in 1870. In 1872 he took up his residence in the United States, introducing with success his father's system of deaf-mute instruction, and became professor of vocal physiology in Boston University. He had been interested for many years in the transmission of sound by electricity, and had devised many forms of apparatus for the purpose, but the first public exhibition of his invention was at Philadelphia in 1876. Its complete success has made him wealthy. His invention of the "photophone," in which a vibratory beam of light is substituted for a wire in conveying speech, has also attracted much attention, but has never been practically used. It was first described by him before the American association for the advancement of science in Boston, 27 August 1880.

After the shooting of President Garfield, Professor Bell, together with Sumner Tainter, experimented with an improved form of Hughes's induction balance, and endeavored to find the exact location of the ball, but failed. Professor Bell has put forth the theory that the present system of educating deaf-mutes is wrong, as it tends to restrict them to one another's society, so that marriages between the deaf are common, and therefore the number of deaf-mute children born is on the increase. His latest experiments relate to the recording of speech by means of photographing the vibrations of a jet of water. He is a member of various learned societies, and has published many scientific papers. He has lived for some time in Washington, District of Columbia.

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BELL, Alexander Graham,-----

Alexander Graham Bell might easily have been content with the success of his telephone invention. His many laboratory notebooks demonstrate, however, that he was driven by a genuine and rare intellectual curiosity that kept him regularly searching, striving, and wanting always to learn and to create. He would continue to test out new ideas through a long and productive life. He would explore the realm of communications as well as engage in a great variety of scientific activities involving kites, airplanes, tetrahedral structures, sheep-breeding, artificial respiration, desalinization and water distillation, and hydrofoils.

With the enormous technical and later financial success of his telephone invention, Alexander Graham Bell's future was secure, and he was able to arrange his life so that he could devote himself to his scientific interests. Toward this end, in 1881, he used the $10,000 award for winning France's Volta Prize to set up the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. A believer in scientific teamwork, Bell worked with two associates, his cousin Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter, at the Volta Laboratory. Their experiments soon produced such major improvements in Thomas Edison's phonograph that it became commercially viable. After 1885, when he first visited Nova Scotia, Bell set up another laboratory there at his estate, Beinn Bhreagh (pronounced Ben Vreeah), near Baddeck, where he would assemble other teams of bright young engineers to pursue new and exciting ideas.

Among one of his first innovations after the telephone was the "photophone," a device that enabled sound to be transmitted on a beam of light. Bell and his assistant, Charles Sumner Tainter, developed the photophone using a sensitive selenium crystal and a mirror that would vibrate in response to a sound. In 1881, they successfully sent a photophone message over 200 yards from one building to another. Bell regarded the photophone as "the greatest invention I have ever made; greater than the telephone." Alexander Graham Bell's invention reveals the principle upon which today's laser and fiber optic communication systems are founded, though it would take the development of several modern technologies to realize it fully.
Over the years, Alexander Graham Bell's curiosity would lead him to speculate on the nature of heredity, first among the deaf and later with sheep born with genetic irregularities. His sheep-breeding experiments at Beinn Bhreagh sought to increase the numbers of twin and triplet births. Bell was also willing to attempt inventing under the pressure of daily events, and in 1881 he hastily constructed an electromagnetic device called an induction balance to try and locate a bullet lodged in President Garfield after an assassin had shot him. He later improved this and produced a device called a telephone probe, which would make a telephone receiver click when it touched metal. That same year, Bell's newborn son, Edward, died from respiratory problems, and Bell responded to that tragedy by designing a metal vacuum jacket that would facilitate breathing. This apparatus was a forerunner of the iron lung used in the 1950s to aid polio victims. In addition to inventing the audiometer to detect minor hearing problems and conducting experiments with what today are called energy recycling and alternative fuels, Bell also worked on methods of removing salt from seawater.
However, these interests may be considered minor activities compared to the time and effort he put into the challenge of flight. By the 1890s, Bell had begun experimenting with propellers and kites. His work led him to apply the concept of the tetrahedron (a solid figure with four triangular faces) to kite design as well as to create a new form of architecture. In 1907, four years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk, Bell formed the Aerial Experiment Association with Glenn Curtiss, William "Casey" Baldwin, Thomas Selfridge, and J.A.D. McCurdy, four young engineers whose common goal was to create airborne vehicles. By 1909, the group had produced four powered aircraft, the best of which, the Silver Dart, made the first successful powered flight in Canada on February 23, 1909. Bell spent the last decade of his life improving hydrofoil designs, and in 1919 he and Casey Baldwin built a hydrofoil that set a world water-speed record that was not broken until 1963. Months before he died, Bell told a reporter, "There cannot be mental atrophy in any person who continues to observe, to remember what he observes, and to seek answers for his unceasing hows and whys about things.

EXTRA........

Bell's Telephone
pioneer in the field of telecommunications, Alexander Graham Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He moved to Ontario, and then to the United States, settling in Boston, before beginning his career as an inventor. Throughout his life, Bell had been interested in the education of deaf people. This interest lead him to invent the microphone and, in 1876, his "electrical speech machine," which we now call a telephone. News of his invention quickly spread throughout the country, even throughout Europe. By 1878, Bell had set up the first telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut. By 1884, long distance connections were made between Boston, Massachusetts and New York City.

Bell imagined great uses for his telephone, like this model from the 1920s, but would he ever have imagined telephone lines being used to transmit video images? Since his death in 1922, the telecommunication industry has undergone an amazing revolution. Today, non-hearing people are able to use a special display telephone to communicate. Fiber optics are improving the quality and speed of data transmission. Actually, your ability to access this information relies upon telecommunications technology. Bell's "electrical speech machine" paved the way for the Information Superhighway.

Technorati : Alexander Graham Bell, LIFE, invention, news, telephone invention.