Spirals, very small and very big

I must write about some coincidences, that look rather peculiar - vortices.
First in a very small scale, then in a big scale. It reminds me of microcosmos and macrocosmos, and the holographic principle.

First in microscale, bacteria.
Swimming Bacteria Stir Up Fluid, from American Physics News Graphics, 2004.



The above picture shows a bacteria-induced fluid convection pattern in a half-inch-diameter fluid drop, viewed from above



The above picture shows the vector field of bacterial velocities at the bottom of a drop hanging from the bottom of a petri dish, at high magnification, with prominent regions of circulation evident.

(Images and captions courtesy Raymond Goldstein and colleagues, University of Arizona.)Reported by: Dombrowski et al., Physical Review Letters.

Spiral Waves Break Hearts



Cardiac cells, when grown as a sheet of tissue, often exhibit spiral waves of electrical activity after two days in culture (see movie). Such spiral waves, which have been associated with abnormal rhythms in human hearts, may be a precursor to fatal cardiac rhythms such as ventricular fibrillation.



As the coupling in a heterogeneous excitable medium is reduced, three different types of behavior are encountered: plane waves propagate without breaking up, plane waves break up into spiral waves, and plane waves block. Blocking communication between the cardiac cells with a drug called heptanol (an agent that reduces the electrical coupling between cells) causes the spiral waves to break up into even more troublesome smaller spirals. Spiral wave breakup is believed to be a cause of ventricular fibrillation in human hearts(see movie).

A simulation closely reproduces the results of the above heptanol experiment. The model consists of cells irregularly distributed in space which are coupled to neighboring cells depending on their distance from each other. Shows the effect of reducing the size of the neighborhood of cell-cell interaction. For large neighborhoods, the wavefront is smooth. For small neighborhoods, the wavefront breaks into many small spiral waves.

Additional information at Gil Bub's website. With movies.

Reported by: Gil Bub, Alvin Shrier, and Leon Glass, Physical Review Letters, 4 Feb 2002.

A lengthy description of spirals in Gil Bub's thesis. Regrettably he uses the HH-model for the nerve pulse. A soliton-model should give a better picture.

Our Milky way is also a big spiral. But here I take an example in hurricanes. The question has always been, what is in the eye? In Milky Way a gigantic black hole? In a hurricane's eye is calmy weather. Why? Something like a black hole?

Hurricanes and tornadoes.
Then i saw a good video of a hurricane. New NASA research is providing clues about how air within and around the eye provides energy to help fuel the storm. This video combines simulation and observational data to illustrate the phenomenon.
The term hurricane is derived from Huracan, the name of a Mayan storm god. Over its lifetime, one of these massive storms can release as much energy as a million Hiroshima nuclear bombs.

Far enough from the equator - typically at latitudes of more than 10° - the Coriolis force associated with the rotation of the Earth sets the massive weather system spinning, with winds spiralling in towards the centre. Hurricanes can also contain very tall clouds called hot towers that stretch up to the ceiling of the troposphere. Hurricanes can continue to grow in size and ferocity as long as they are over warm waters.

NASA GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio
Hurricane Hot Towers

Hot towers achieve a fast movement of the air upwards. And the eye is not totally round and centred. That will do the difference. Definitely worth to see.

In the eyewall, warm air spirals upward, creating the hurricane's strongest winds. The speed of the winds in the eyewall is related to the diameter of the eye. Just as ice skaters spin faster when they pull their arms in, a hurricane's winds blow faster if its eye is small. If the eye widens, the winds decrease.

There is something with the tornados and the hurricanes, something with the energy I don't understand. Superconductionlike or solitonic? Let's look at Wikipedia.

The most intense of all atmospheric phenomena, tornadoes come in many shapes and sizes but are typically in the form of a visible condensation funnel, whose narrow end touches the earth and is often encircled by a cloud of debris and dust. For a vortex to be classified as a tornado, it must be in contact with both the ground and the cloud base. The winds of the tornado vortex and of constituent turbulent eddies, as well as airflow interaction with the surface and debris, contribute to the sounds. Funnel clouds also produce sounds. Funnel clouds and small tornadoes are reported as whistling, whining, humming, or the buzzing of innumerable bees or electricity, or more or less harmonic, whereas many tornadoes are reported as a continuous, deep rumbling, or an irregular sound of "noise".



Since many tornadoes are audible only in very close proximity, sound is not reliable warning of a tornado. And, any strong, damaging wind, even a severe hail volley or continuous thunder in a thunderstorm may produce a roaring sound. Tornadoes also produce identifiable inaudible infrasonic signatures and a detectable seismic signature.Tornadoes emit on the electromagnetic spectrum, with sferics and E-field effects. Lightning activity often decreases as a tornado reaches the surface. Electromagnetics and lightning have little or nothing to do directly with what drives tornadoes (tornadoes are basically a thermodynamic phenomenon), although there are likely connections with the storm and environment affecting both phenomena.

Fair weather waterspouts are less severe but far more common, and are similar to dust devils and landspouts.

What about the black hole?
A black hole is born when an object becomes unable to withstand the compressing force of its own gravity. Many objects (including our Earth and Sun) will never become black holes. Their gravity is not sufficient to overpower the atomic and nuclear forces of their interiors, which resist compression. But in more massive objects, gravity ultimately wins.

Stellar-mass black holes are born with a bang. They form when a very massive star (at least 25 times heavier than our Sun) runs out of nuclear fuel. The star then explodes as a supernova. What remains is a black hole, usually only a few times heavier than our Sun since the explosion has blown much of the stellar material away. - Oh, so many unclear things. Nuclear fuel is elemental particles. Dark matter is not the same at the center and outwards. Is it the dark matter that runs out?

The problem is that we don't know what gravity is. Can it be compared to pressure, as in low pressure weather forming hurricanes?

In supersymmetry, every fermion has a so-called "superpartner" which is a boson, and every boson has a fermion superpartner. Supersymmetry may also be able to explain the nature of dark matter. Finding the Higgs boson will be seen as a priority for the new LHC and Atlas, because it is fundamental to a complete understanding of matter. The theory is that all particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field, called the Higgs field, which is carried by the Higgs boson. Some physicists have made an even more startling prediction about the LHC: that it is energetic enough to create mini-black holes. Mini-black holes are being created around us anyway.



Gas that falls into a black hole settles into a so-called accretion disk. Friction and magnetic fields in the disk cause the gas to heat and emit X-rays. Supermassive black holes can grow by consuming gas and dust from disks, as from a disk of dust and gas in the galaxy NGC 7052.



Magnetic fields near a spinning black hole can propel electrons outward in a jet along the rotation axis. The electrons produce bright radio waves.



Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy. They are whirling at a speed of one million miles per hour—about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way. Even stranger, the galaxies are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, and so may have evolved over billions of years into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today. How galaxies grew so much in the past 10 billion years is an active area of research, and understanding the dynamics in these young compact galaxies is a key piece of evidence in eventually solving this puzzle.

There is a theory explaining this, TGD. And look at how a tornado get more speed, by narrowing the circular diameter.

The same function is probably also behind our receptors. Think of them as mini black holes :-) That is quantum biology.