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VaulTimes explores the history of cinema and its major influences of culture, technology, language, literature and science. J. Cherryh, Arthur C. S. G.

VaulTimes explores the history of cinema and its major influences of culture, technology, language, literature and science and identifies the accomplishments of individuals within the industry through its “Spotlight On . . .” series. Its goal is to educate viewers and readers of all ages of the history of cinema, to outline its cultural impact, to draw parallels from the nostalgic to the present-d

ay cinema, to highlight advancing techniques of telling a story, and to periodically analyze a series of movies or individuals involved in making movies. Cinema (film, movies) came into existence during the latter half of the 19th century, especially after the end of the American Civil War, and was influenced by the increasing technological developments, changes and applications of photographic methodology and equipment and the need to develop a form of mass entertainment that would capture the attention of the ever-increasing population centers of the United States, that would document, for future use, the live action of life all around us. The major influences of cinema can be characterized as culture, technology, language, literature and science. Cinema is a form of storytelling directly related to language and literature that mainly utilizes the auditory and visual senses. The aromatic sense was explored through avant-garde development during the 1960s. The senses of taste and touch have been developed through “physical” forms entertainment related to the ancient Greeks, but not directly with cinema as its present technology exists today. The cultural impact of cinema has produced a wealth of useful information available from older and present day movies produced world-wide. Many of these movies represent a historical significance of a prior time, reflecting the thinking and attitudes of that time. They are a snapshot of the political, scientific, historical, religious and socio-economic events that has shaped our history. The subject matter of cinema embraces the breadth and depth of human imagination, but there are traditional categories that can be identified: Action, comedy, drama, natural science, natural history and documentary just to name a few broad subjects. There are many parallels from the nostalgic to present-day cinema. For example, take the science fiction (sci-fi) genre. Sample any number of outer space-oriented science fiction movies produced during the 1930s, at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s. Compared to the increasingly advanced states of rocket science, space exploration and astrophysics that exists today, these early works will make us smile or laugh as to the crudeness and unscientific approach to what we now know. But, what was once science fiction at one time, many times become science fact at a later time. Most of the movies are based wholly, or in part, on written classics from monumental literary icons of the past to the unknown, but equally important, authors of our time [such authors as Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov, Francis Bacon, Greg Bear, James Bliss, Ben Bova, Ray Bradbury, Anthony Burgess, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Orson Scott Card, Terry Carr, C. Clark, Michael Crichton, Lester del Rey, Philip K. Dick, Arthur Conan Doyle, Greg Egan, Philip Jose Farmer, Alan Dean Foster, Harry Harrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, L. Ron Hubbard, Aldous Huxley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, C. Lewis, Herman Melville, Larry Niven, George Orwell, Frederick Pohl, Edgar Allan Poe, Carl Sagan, Mary Shelley, Robert Silverberg, Clifford D. Simak, Theodore Sturgeon, Jules Vern, H. Wells, and Roger Zelazny, just to name a few of the hundreds of authors in this genre]. What is interesting, is, if you see a movie based on a classical work, and the movie makes an impact on you, you’ll probably want to read the original work. And the same applies to reading an original work and learning later that it has been made into a movie. Reading books and watching movies complement each other. Science fiction is just one genre to pursue. There are many others: action, adventure, business, comedy, historical, horror, legal, medical, military, natural science, police, political, psychological, religious, sports, and westerns. And, there are many subgroups to pursue: aliens, animals, apocalyptic future, astrophysics, drug culture, martial arts, mutants, silent, terrorism, time travel, vampires, and zombies. The list is almost endless. There are many examples of a single subject being made into a variety of different movies over a period of time. Take for example the subject of “Wyatt Earp” and the “OK Corral”. Compare the 1957 “Gunfight At The OK Corral”, 1993 “Tombstone” and 1994 “Wyatt Earp”. Each movie is very entertaining, is well directed, displays superior acting, demonstrates exceptional editing and producing, has wonderful music, are very different from each other, where one is in black and white and the other two are in color. But there is one thing that all three share: They are historically very inaccurate. Even so, they are very pleasurable to watch, and for some, to watch many times without becoming tiresome. Technology has had a major impact on the cinematic industry. Compare, for example, the 1954 “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” with the 2007 “30,000 Leagues Under The Sea.” Both movies are based on the work of the French author Jules Verne: The 1954 version is all staged work with props; the 2007 version is heavily made with computer generated imagery (CGI). From time to time, there will be articles exploring acting styles, historical perspective of certain well-known directors, the future development of remakes, sequels, prequels, and series and a comparison of movies to TV series. Even though there have been a large number of trash movies created that are not worth your time to watch, or your money to buy, there are a large number of movies that are wonderfully directed, acted, produced and edited that you will enjoy time and time again. Eventually, there will be a Vaultimes Library of movies made available through our store. Look for future announcements.

15/02/2016

‘Hamilton’ proves Washington was ‘a man for the ages’

One of the most dramatic moments in “Hamilton: The Musical” is the entry of Gen. George Washington as the American rebels suddenly face 32,000 British troops in New York Harbor.

It’s not just his dramatic, staccato lines (“We’re outgunned. Outmanned. Outnumbered. Outplanned”), but the fact that Christopher Jackson, the guy playing him, is black.

This is part of what makes the show so magical — its forthright “cultural appropriation” of America’s Founders for all of today’s Americans.

George Washington truly belongs to us all now — it’s why the nation is celebrating his birthday today.

Yes: “Presidents Day” is officially still Washington’s Birthday, though no longer always honored on Feb. 22, his actual birth date.

And what was most remarkable about Washington was (to riff off a fellow whose birthday we celebrated last month) the content of his character.

Richard Brookhiser rescued this view of Washington in his landmark 1997 book, “Founding Father.” Hidden behind myth, written off by revisionists as just another dead, white, male slave-owner,
Washington was in fact a man for the ages.

Born a Virginia aristocrat, he carefully cultivated his virtues — self-control, moderation, civility; his strengths physical and moral — to become the most widely admired presence first in the 13 colonies, then in the new nation.

He created two American institutions.

First was the army, which he commanded from 1775 to 1783, shaping a collection of untrained and undisciplined ragtag soldiers into a fighting force that defeated the world’s superpower, Great Britain.

He also set the future course of the US government itself. Presiding over its first years from 1789 to 1797, he understood he was setting precedents that had to last — even as many disagreed on what precise form that government should take.

Yet his importance goes far beyond his résumé. It was Washington who emphasized that America was a republic when he rebuked those who wanted a monarchy or an exalted president. Likewise, he set the precedent for presidential limits by refusing entreaties that he accept a third term.

“Washington’s last service to his country was to stop serving,” writes Brookhiser.

And he was the only slaveholding founder to free his slaves, albeit in his will.

For all these reasons and more, there was no dissent when Henry Lee famously described Washington in death as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

Unlike other notable presidents — Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR, JFK, Reagan — Washington left no memorable lines which we continue to quote today.

But, as Brookhiser tells us, “His life still has the power to inspire anyone who studies it.” Give it a try.

15/02/2016

This election is beginning to look a lot like 2008

This year is the third presidential election of 2008.

Oh, sure, it’s 2016. But the financial cataclysm and economic near-depression that slammed us eight years ago haunts us still.

But this time, it’s the leading Democrat who’s getting tripped up by it, not the leading Republican.

The conventional wisdom of the 2008 election is that Barack Obama won because he was just such a special candidate: a black man with a compelling personal story and an uplifting message of hope who inspired record turnout among minorities and young people.

That’s true.

But what’s also true is that the market meltdown of September 2008 obliterated any Republican’s chances.

Like it or not, it was true and it still is: George W. Bush was president when people’s mothers called them in a panic and asked them if they should take their money out of Citibank.

Nine million people began to lose their jobs. Corporate executives called Treasury officials begging for cash to meet payroll.

It didn’t help that John McCain ran back to Washington in a fluster, “suspending” his campaign and trying to delay a debate.

Meanwhile, Obama had already given one level-headed economic speech months before. Introduced by Mayor Mike Bloomberg in downtown Manhattan that March, he called for “a shift in the culture of our financial institutions and our regulatory agencies.”

And in the crisis, he kept his cool. Six weeks later, he made history.

Fast-forward to 2012. Republicans’ strategy was the Reagan strategy: are you better off now than you were four years ago?

People obviously weren’t.

Yet this tack failed. Why?

People could see with their own eyes that Obama hadn’t caused the mess, and that no one could have made it disappear in four years.
Americans had spent the decade before Obama came into office borrowing way more money than they could ever afford to pay back. If you look at the stats, they had spent nearly three decades doing that — back to the Reagan years, when wage growth for the working and middle class stalled out.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney missed chance after chance to try to blunt the fact that in most people’s eyes, he came from the same industry that had stripped middle America of its jobs. He could have said he’d use his insider knowledge to fix this broken industry.

But he didn’t. He never seemed to know he had a problem.

Now, it’s 2016.

The leading Republican is a guy who forces banks to their knees when his casinos go bankrupt.

People like this.

And who has the big 2008 problem? Hillary Clinton.

As everyone knows, Hillary took $675,000 from Goldman Sachs for three speeches.

But this isn’t Hillary’s biggest problem. She could fix this in an instant, by giving the money back, or by giving it to people — maybe in Florida! — who lost their homes and their jobs after 2008.

She could say that after having spent the past months talking to people young and old, she understands in a way she didn’t before how deeply the financial crisis affected the country.

She’s learned — and changed.

This isn’t hard.

And she should release the transcripts from those speeches. No, it won’t help her — it’ll only demonstrate that she got paid to say, at best, nothing. She should do it though, because if she doesn’t, someone else well.

This, too, isn’t hard.

But Hillary can’t do that because she — and her advisers — don’t understand that this is an enduring problem. She seems to think that Bernie Sanders created this climate, not that millions of young voters created him.

And when Sanders says Wall Street’s business model is based on fraud, the establishment titters.

Even Clinton doesn’t seem to grasp that to most people, this is a perfectly moderate statement. Just last week, Morgan Stanley paid a $3.2 billion fine stemming from pre-2008 . . . fraud.

Hillary may squeeze through the primary, as Romney did. But she’ll be weak.

If she wins, it’s only because voters are finally over 2008 — and eight years later, that’s still a risky bet to make.

15/02/2016

The true meaning of Justice Scalia

When Justice Antonin Scalia joined the Supreme Court in 1986, I was in his first group of law clerks. Many conversations started out with the justice asking a clerk’s views on something or other. After the clerk spoke for a while, Justice Scalia would often respond, “That can’t possibly be right. What about the Smith case?” or “what about section 203(b) of the statute?” or “what about the First Amendment?”

One key to being an effective clerk was understanding what this meant. It didn’t mean, “You’re an idiot for even suggesting such a thing.” It meant “Argue with me. Tell me why your view is right and I’m wrong.”

One of the underappreciated facts about Justice Scalia, you see, is that he was a New Yorker. He grew up in Queens. New Yorkers are considerably more prone than most other Americans to say what’s on their mind. But they’re not trying to end a conversation, they’re trying to start one. Because of course New Yorkers love to argue.

There was more to Justice Scalia’s “that can’t possibly be right” than just love of argument, though.

Many years later, I’d get the occasional call from a recent law graduate getting ready to interview for a clerkship with Justice Scalia asking my advice. I’d warn the caller about the coming questions and “that can’t be right” or “that’s all wrong” response from the justice, mention the New Yorker thing — then explain the deeper purpose I thought this type of response served.

Above all, Justice Scalia wanted his clerks to feel comfortable arguing with him because he wanted us to feel comfortable telling him if we thought he was making a mistake.

So he wanted his clerks to be in the habit of defending our views (if they were defensible). Shrinking violets or diplomats or flatterers who’d wilt or be overly deferential, rather than standing up to him if they thought he was wrong, wouldn’t help him get the case or the law right.

And he was remarkably open to reconsidering his own views whenever he got a good argument from one of us.

Which brings us to what truly made him a great justice — namely, the point of all these arguments.

Justice Scalia was one of the greatest legal thinkers, analysts and writers ever to sit on the high court, and also a warm, generous man with a wonderful sense of humor — occasionally, perhaps, just a little too good.

Yet his most important and enduring contribution was to re-establish the view that the Constitution is a form of law — that its meaning, like that of other legal texts, is knowable, that understanding its meaning starts with reading what it says, and that it’s the job of judges to read it, figure it out and follow it.

Back when Justice Scalia first joined the high court, law-school professors and justices almost uniformly believed no person of even ordinary intelligence could hold such a naïve view. Rather, they proclaimed that the Constitution’s meaning was largely indeterminate, that the justices themselves created its meaning.

Justice Scalia changed this dramatically. When one of the nation’s most powerful intellects, and one of the greatest writers to ever sit on the Supreme Court, took the view that the Constitution was a law, when he made arguments based on the Constitution’s original meaning — and when he demolished arguments based on other considerations — the impact was huge.

It changed the entire legal conversation.

The idea that the Constitution and other laws are knowable and binding on judges and justices is the foundation for rescuing the entire legal and constitutional enterprise. Because if the Constitution or other laws have no intrinsic meaning and are just whatever the judges say they are, how can anyone follow them? And why should we?

All of us who worked with Justice Scalia — his clerks, his friends and colleagues on the court — are mourning our loss. But as we do so, we should reflect on his crucial legacy: reviving for the modern era a way to understand the Constitution that takes it seriously as a legal document. Like the republic the Constitution’s Framers gave us, this legacy is ours — if we can keep it.

15/02/2016

How Jefferson tried to take down Washington

George Washington’s standing in the American pantheon will be secured as long as the United States endures — today is Presidents Day, after all, on which we observe Washington’s birthday. Yet some of his colleagues tried to prevent this.

In one of America’s earliest cases of the politics of personal destruction, Thomas Jefferson and his supporters aimed their fire at Alexander Hamilton as a proxy for the Washington administration. It was Jefferson’s way of recognizing the near-impossibility of ruining Washington’s reputation while still hoping to knock him down a few pegs.

Jefferson had his work cut out for him: Only Abraham Lincoln comes close to contesting Washington’s hold at the top of those perennial polls of presidential greatness that tend to appear each Presidents Day. Without Washington, the American Revolution would have likely failed, as would the process of drafting and ratifying the Constitution.

Nor would the new government have survived without the stewardship of a trusted and respected president.

Other than the 83-year-old Benjamin Franklin, there was no national figure in 1789 who was recognizable to all Americans and could forge a sense of national identity. Washington was, as the cliché goes, the indispensable man.

Though he owned slaves, Washington eventually recognized that the “peculiar institution” was a blot on the nation’s conscience and was quoted as saying he would join the northern cause should the union dissolve over the issue. Additionally, the energetic national institutions launched by Washington, in concert with his Caribbean-born sidekick Hamilton, helped place slavery on the path to extinction.

These efforts were ferociously opposed by Jefferson and James Madison, partly because they considered the “bastard” at Washington’s side to be un-American. In their view, Hamilton was a closet monarchist who sought to force the people to kowtow to the 1 percent. This was conspiratorial fantasy, but elements of this fantasy persist to this day.

Both Washington and Hamilton were ambitious men, but their ambition was of the noblest kind.

And while they came from two different worlds, they shared some important qualities: They faced the violence and hardship of war with courage; they embodied a Herculean work ethic; they were persistent; they had a sober understanding of human nature and were resistant to the siren call of utopianism.

And they both learned the hard way that Thomas Jefferson couldn’t be trusted.

Washington and Hamilton were American nationalists whose nationalism was forged on the field of battle. They saw up close and personal the deprivations the American army experienced at the hands of an incompetent Congress, and they were on the receiving end of a system where parochially inclined states withheld desperately needed supplies and manpower as long as the war was not in their backyard.

While Washington has been celebrated throughout our history, Hamilton’s reputation has had its ups and downs. Prior to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s successful Broadway musical and Ron Chernow’s popular biography, Hamilton was something of a nonentity, known only as the guy on the $10 bill who was killed in a duel.

Worse yet, Jefferson and his ideological heirs succeeded in portraying Hamilton as a monarchist or a British agent with a fondness for plutocrats. The problem with this account was that Hamilton was Washington’s protégé, and that either made Washington a co-conspirator with the un-American Hamilton or, best-case scenario, a slow-witted dupe manipulated by a wily immigrant.

The Jeffersonians opted for the latter interpretation for a time, but ultimately concluded, as Jefferson himself put it, that Washington, like Hamilton, had become a w***e for England.

Without George Washington, Alexander Hamilton would have spent his days practicing law in Manhattan, living a life of relative obscurity, which for him would have been a fate worse than death.

Which is why, upon hearing of Washington’s death, Hamilton referred to Washington as an aegis (a shield or protector) for him.

Together, these two men created a strong union that would belatedly eradicate slavery and “Jim Crow,” thereby securing the blessings of liberty for all of their fellow citizens, and they launched the United States on the path to becoming a superpower that helped defeat fascism and Communism.

This unlikely duo was the indispensable alliance of the American founding, and they offer a lesson in these fractious times that a devotion to the common good can overcome trivial differences that too often pit Americans against one another.

13/12/2015

New Stimulus Program Surrenders Your Savings to the Banks

By Damon Geller

We’ve had two epic market collapses in the last 15 years. In response, the Fed desperately tried to prop up the markets by severely cutting interest rates. Cutting rates to zero badly devalued the U.S. currency, sent us spiraling into record debt, and killed savers by lowering the savings rate to zero. But with the global economy still on terribly shaky ground and interest rates already at zero, do the gov’t & banks have any ammo left? Shockingly, yes.

Central banks already have plans to impose negative interest rates – in other words, you get taxed on your savings! And in order to prevent you and me from storing our money in cash and avoiding the savings tax, the gov’t & banks advance toward the real end game: abolish cash altogether and force us all into the digital world controlled by the gov’t & banks. Luckily, there’s still one way to escape the tyranny.
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Step 1: Tax Your Savings

damon_geller_authorWhen economic conditions worsen, world banks react by reducing interest rates in order to stimulate the economy. But there comes a point when those central banks run out of room to cut, because interest rates are already at zero. So the answer for world banks is to impose negative interest rates. This means that instead of getting interest on your savings, you actually PAY BANKS to keep your savings on deposit. In other words, you pay tax on your savings. So you actually LOSE MONEY every day you keep your money in the bank.
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So, what would any reasonable person do when the bank steals their savings every single day? Pull their money out of the bank, of course! Physical paper money provides the check against negative interest rates, because if the bank takes your savings, you can simply withdraw your funds and hoard cash. Furthermore, when you inevitably lose faith in the banking system, physical paper money allows you to pull your savings out of the bank before the bank collapses.

Step 2: Abolish Cash

But if you think pulling money out of the bank is going to be so easy, think again. Willem Buiter, the Global Chief Economist for Citi, has now come up with an answer to prevent you from pulling your money out of the bank: abolish cash entirely! You read that right. The Global Chief Economist from one of the largest banking institutions in the world is now telling the gov’t & banks to abolish the use and private storage of YOUR cash. And guess what? The gov’t & banks are following orders.

The Banks Declare War on Your Cash

Government & banks around the world are taking swift action to abolish the use and storage of cash:
•JPMorgan Chase recently informed customers that the bank will no longer allow cash to be stored in safety deposit boxes.
•Chase instituted a new policy which “restricts borrowers from using cash to make payments on credit cards, mortgages, equity lines, and auto loans.”
•The Justice Department has ordered bank employees to consider calling the police on customers who withdraw $5,000 dollars or more.
•HSBC is now interrogating its account holders in the UK on how they earn and spend their money as well as restricting cash withdrawals for customers.
•Banks in the U.S. are making it harder for customers to withdraw and deposit cash, with Chase imposing new capital controls that mandate identification for cash deposits and ban cash being deposited into another person’s account.
•Chase banned international wire transfers while restricting cash activity for business customers (both deposits and withdrawals).
•The French government announced it will restrict French citizens from making cash payments over €1,000 euros.
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The Gov’t Seizes Your Cash

As the U.S. spirals toward insolvency due to massive over-spending and Fed money-printing, the U.S. government is pulling out all the stops to gain access to your money – no matter where it is across the globe.

First, the government started seizing citizen bank accounts with no due process.

Then, the IRS threatened foreign nations and financial institutions across the globe to turn over your private data and financial accounts, with the threat of financial warfare if they don’t comply.

And now, the Department of Justice and local police have started seizing cash from innocent citizens. That’s right, the executive branch of government has been aggressively taking citizens cash without due process of law.
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So in short, your ability to take your savings out of banks and storing it in cash is coming to an end. And even if you do take possession of your savings in cash, how secure do you feel when the government comes knocking on your door asking about your stockpile of cash?

If our government is going to these lengths to track down your money and even confiscate citizen savings without due process, isn’t it much easier to track and control digital accounts than cash? Yes. So how does the government remedy this challenge? Join the banks in a war against cash.

Convert Your Savings into Gold & Silver

Do you want to remain vulnerable to the whims of government & banks, or do you want to fully protect your savings & retirement? To get true protection, there’s one asset class that sits outside the system, is completely private, and cannot be tracked and controlled by the government or banks: physical gold & silver.

Physical gold & silver have been the world’s greatest wealth protectors for over 5,000 years, shielding citizens from government & banking collapse during the worst crises in history. And physical gold & silver cannot be instantly seized with the stroke of a keyboard. So invest in gold & silver now, before you have nothing left to protect.

13/12/2015

Did U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch Just Let Slip Obama’s Agenda In Wake of Terror Attack?

Following the San Bernardino terror attack, liberals have wasted no time politicizing the tragedy. Holding steadfast to the belief that no good crisis should ever go to waste, the knee-jerk responses to the tragedy by each of the Democrat presidential candidates as well as the president himself have been to call for stricter gun control measures.

But no response has been more telling than that of Attorney General Loretta Lynch. At a press conference regarding the terror attack, Lynch told reporters,

“We’re at the point where these issues have come together really like never before in law enforcement thought and in our nation’s history and it gives us a wonderful opportunity and a wonderful moment to really make significant change.”

At least she was being honest. She and the president are on the same page when it comes to wanting to use the tragedy of a terror attack as leverage to restrict the Second Amendment rights of law abiding Americans.

Lynch later attended a Muslim Advocates’ dinner where she told the crowd that her “greatest fear” is the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric” in America. She then vowed to prosecute anyone found participating in violence inspiring speech.

“The fear that you have just mentioned is in fact my greatest fear as a prosecutor, as someone who is sworn to the protection of all of the American people, which is that the rhetoric will be accompanied by acts of violence,” she said.

“Now obviously this is a country that is based on free speech, but when it edges towards violence, when we see the potential for someone lifting that mantle of anti-Muslim rhetoric—or, as we saw after 9/11, violence directed at individuals who may not even be Muslims but perceived to be Muslims, and they will suffer just as much—when we see that we will take action,” said Lynch.

After touting the numbers of “investigations into acts of anti-Muslim hatred” and “bigoted actions” against Muslims launched by her DOJ, Lynch suggested the Constitution does not protect “actions predicated on violent talk” and pledged to prosecute those responsible for such actions.

“I think it’s important that as we again talk about the importance of free speech we make it clear that actions predicated on violent talk are not America,” said Lynch. “They are not who we are, they are not what we do, and they will be prosecuted.”

Lynch assured the Muslim group that “we stand with you” and that the Justice Department would work to protect Muslims from violence and discrimination.

12/12/2015

Electron "Lifespan" is at Least 5 Quintillion Times the Age of the Universe

According to George Dvorsky, writing for Particle Physics on December 11, 2015, basic physics suggests that electrons are essentially immortal. A fascinating experiment recently failed to overthrow this fundamental assumption. But the effort has produced a revised minimum lifespan for electrons: 60,000 yottayears, which is — get this — about five-quintillion times the current age of the Universe.
That’s a Yotta Years
An electron is the lightest subatomic particle that carries a negative electric charge. It has no known components, which is why it’s considered to be a basic building block of the universe, or an elementary particle.
An international research team working on the Borexino experiment in Italy were looking for signs of electrons decaying into lighter particles, but as expected, they came up short. This is actually a good thing because it affirms what physicists have suspected for a long time. Had they found evidence that electrons decay into photons and neutrinos — even lower-mass elementary particles — it would violate the conservation of electrical charge. Such a discovery would suggest an entirely new physics beyond the Standard Model.
But the research team did manage to come up with the most accurate measurement yet of the “lifetime” of electrons. Their calculations suggest that a particle present today will still be around in 66,000 yottayears (6.6 × 1028years), which, as Physics World puts it, “is about five-quintillion times the current age of the universe.” The details of this work now appears at the science journal Physical Review Letters.
An article in APS Physics explains how the scientists came up with such an extreme figure:
Borexino consists of a shell of petroleum-based liquid that lights up when a neutrino, a nearly massless neutral particle, knocks an electron loose from one of the liquid’s atoms. The detector’s roughly 2000 photomultipliers then amplify and sense the emitted light. [The] researchers calculated the sensitivity of the detector to photons produced via hypothetical electron decays into a photon and a neutrino...They then looked for photon “events” above this background with energies near 256 kilo-electron-volts, an energy corresponding to half the electron rest mass.
After looking at 408 days’ worth of data, they found....nothing. But they did manage to determine a mean electron lifetime.
A New Lower Bound
Now, this doesn’t imply that electrons will live that long. First, the Universe probably won’t exist by then. And even if it’s still around — say after a Big Rip scenario — the fundamental properties of particles like electrons will likely be entirely different.
Second, and more to the point, the new measurements move up the previously estimated lower bound on electron “longevity.” The new figure is 100 times greater than the previous lower limit, which was determined in a similar experiment back in 1998. Put another way, if such a reaction occurs, it must happen less than once every 6.6 × 1028 years.
No Signs of Decay
The reason for the hideously long lifespan has to do with the fact that scientists cannot be completely certain that electrons are immune to decay. The observations made by the Borexino researchers — or rather the lack of observations — suggests that, because we haven’t seen electrons decay by now, their lifespans must be at least as large as the new calculations suggest.
Sean Carroll, a research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology, explained it to Gizmodo in an email:
Decay is very natural in particle physics; heavier particles tend to decay into lighter ones. A neutron left all by itself, for example, will decay into a proton, an electron, and an anti-neutrino in just a few minutes. It’s just the elementary-particle version of the decay of a radioactive nucleus like uranium.
But there are some things that seem to never happen, which we describe by conservation laws. For example, the total electric charge doesn’t change. Also the “baryon number” (total number of protons plus neutrons, minus the number of anti-protons plus anti-neutrons), and the “lepton number” (electrons plus neutrinos, minus their antiparticles). Notice this is satisfied by the neutron decay. Before decay we have one neutron, which is charge = 0, baryon number = 1, and lepton number = 0. Afterwards it is also charge = 0 (proton = +1, electron = -1, anti-neutrino = 0), baryon number = 1 (proton = 1, electron and anti-neutrino = 0), and lepton number = 0 (proton = 0, electron = 1, anti-neutrino = -1).
Baryon and lepton number have never been seen to change in any experiment — doing so would be Nobel-Prize-worthy — but on theoretical grounds we think they possibly could change, and probably did in the early universe. (That would help explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the current universe.)
But nobody expects charge to change, which is a more robustly conserved quantity.
“It would be one of the most surprising things ever if electric charge was not conserved,” said Carroll. “That’s why everyone thinks electrons don’t decay.”
Carroll said the only particles that are lighter than electrons are electrically neutral: neutrinos, photons, gluons, gravitons. If there were other light charged particles, we should have detected them by now. This suggests there’s nothing for the electron to decay into.
“But we should still look! It’s a lottery ticket — very unlikely that you will find anything, but if you do, you get rich,” said Carroll. “Sadly, they didn’t find anything, but null results are an important part of good science.”

22/11/2015

PSA: If anyone has read an article on actress Betty White passing away today, it's all a hoax produced & published by Empire News. If you read their article, in the last third, they're taking about Betty White "dyeing" her hair. This might seem malicious at first, but it is happening all the time to many different people by different organizations. In Miss White's case, this will be the 7th or 8th time she has "passed away".

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