The First Age

Name: Danika Zayed

Age: 29

Origin: Chicago, IL

Current: Moscow

Occupation: Theoretical astrophysicist

Appearance: brunette with big brown eyes and a wide smile. Average height and healthy build and weight. Danika has an average sense of style and wears classic, tasteful pieces.

Goddess reborn: Sumerian goddess of knowledge, wisdom, writing, and the heavens, Nisaba

Biography:

Danika Zayed is an American physicist from Chicago, IL who studies string theory, dark theory, and quantum mechanics. She describes herself as a proud Chicago public schools alumna. She completed her undergraduate studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her graduate work at the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science in Munich and is a new faculty member in the department of theoretical physics at Moscow State University. She is best known for her contribution to the Illustris project.

Danika was born in 2017 and raised by her parents from a wealthy suburb outside Chicago, IL. In 2023, she enrolled in the Edison Regional Gifted Center and graduated high school from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in 2034, the last remaining public school for the gifted in the state.

Before she focused on energy theory, Danika did fellowship research every summer of high school at the labs of the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA) located in Hanover, Germany at the Albert Einstein Institute, the home of the first gravitational wave observatory in space. She was 14 years old during her first summer fellowship there, but was forced to leave three days early due to illness. When she returned the next summer, her research exploded with new findings. Her mentors were baffled by her innovative inquiries into particle physics, especially investigating dark matter, dark energy, dark particles, and a term coined by her, dark flows. She had a standing invitation to return to the Institute for a doctoral program upon completing her undergraduate studies back in the United States, an invitation she eventually accepted. Her dissertation research focused on an original concept where she postulated a new force of nature and how this fifth force, made up of dark waves, was studied using similar principles to studying gravitational waves, a body of work called the Illustris project.

As a toddler she developed at an average pace, although she had an affable and warm personality, including a big sense of humor.

Her parents had Danika's name on a wait list for the private Gifted School before she was even born. There, her intellect blossomed. Creativity was encouraged through a style more closely resembling play and self paced study than anything from the traditional academic classroom settings. She fell in love with astronomy and earth science, and spent many nights up past dark to look at the stars through her telescope. She even had a white cat named Milky Way. By the 2020's, the American space exploration programs were all pretty much defunded; no NASA space camp anymore. So Danika's parents looked abroad. Programs in the CCD were more plentiful and stable, but highly competitive-especially for foreigners. Danika was wait-listed the summer she was 8 years old. It was fortunate she was able to go, because the experience was integral to her acceptance to a fellowship program later in high school.

Despite her academic aptitude for math and science, Danika maintained a cheerful, outgoing personality. She was well-liked, and rarely involved in typical schoolgirl drama. She was was never ill, either, or missed any classes because of infection. Even when measles went through the school, she didn't catch it, and she had to have been exposed. The only time she was sick was during the summers in Munich, but even those episodes passed.

Her easy going nature persisted through college. Even in graduate school, she wasn't a complete stranger to the Munich club scene. A girl had to have her down time after all.

Despite her friendly personality, Danika has little experience with serious relationships. She had a few dates and went to prom, but a steady boyfriend was absent. Men probably found her intellect and charm to be intimidating, or she was too naive to know when she was being flirted with.

As a result, most of her social life takes place is shallow in the club scene or restricted to professional relationships at work. She's been in Moscow for a year now. In the last few months, the Illustri project was finally published, reviewed, and accepted in the field as evidence for a new fundamental force of nature.

*****

Illustris project

Dark energy is thought to be very homogeneous, not very dense and is not known to interact through any of the fundamental forces other than gravity.

Dark energy can have such a profound effect on the universe, making up 68% of universal density, only because it uniformly fills otherwise empty space. The two leading models are a cosmological constant and quintessence. Both models include the common characteristic that dark energy must have negative pressure.

The simplest explanation for dark energy is that it is simply the "cost of having space": that is, a volume of space has some intrinsic, fundamental energy. This is the cosmological constant, sometimes called Lambda (hence Lambda-CDM model) after the Greek letter Λ, the symbol used to represent this quantity mathematically (and usually multiplied by gamma Γ. Since energy and mass are related by E = mc2, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that this energy will have a gravitational effect. It is sometimes called a vacuum energy because it is the energy density of empty vacuum. In fact, most theories of particle physics predict vacuum fluctuationsthat would give the vacuum this sort of energy.

A major outstanding problem is that most quantum field theories predict a huge cosmological constant from the energy of the quantum vacuum, more than 100 orders of magnitude too large. This would need to be cancelled almost, but not exactly, by an equally large term of the opposite sign. Mathematically, this opposite constant is represented by the Greek letter iota ι multiplied by Nu, Ν.

Although dark energy lacks mass, it is not transient, and interacts with dark matter through wave-like streams called dark flows.

When the two black holes collided in deep space, scientists celebrated the successful discovery of gravitational waves. It was recently postulated by Danika that the black hole binary was the signature of dark matter. What followed in the publication were five pages of annotated mathematical equations showing how she considered the mass of the two objects as a point of departure, suggesting that these objects could be part of the mysterious substance known to make up about 85 percent of the mass of the universe.

As a result, she has suggested that dark matter might not be made of extremely high-mass heavy fermions, but low-mass light bosons instead, on the order of one tenth of a billion of one-billionth of one billionth the mass of an electron.

The difference between fermions and bosons is that a fermion cannot occupy the same state at the same time as another fermion. As an analogy, a state is like a seat, and two or more fermions cannot sit in the same seat simultaneously. In contrast, two or more bosons can occupy the same state at the same time, and can therefore clump into so-called Bose-Einstein condensates that act like single blobs. She found that these condensates full of dark matter are composed of waves.

*****

In 2015, a team of physicists published a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters with more than 1,000 contributing authors. As you might expect, this paper was of monumental historical importance: After a century of waiting, physicists finally confirmed the existence of gravitational waves. In so doing, they’ve confirmed the last major prediction of Einstein’s theory of general relativity and, they believe, offered a way forward for the study of black holes. This observation, catchily dubbed GW150914, looks to astronomers like the start of a whole new day for astrophysics.

But there were always other implications of the theory that were more difficult to test. In particular, if Einstein’s theory is accurate then we should observe that gravity “moves” at the speed of light. To illustrate this, there’s an old thought experiment: What would happen if the Sun popped out of existence right now, in an instant? Would the Earth fly off into space immediately, or would there be some delay as the planet continued to orbit an empty point while the information about the change in gravity propagated outward at the speed of light? The answer is the latter: The sharp, expanding interface between Sun-exists gravity and Sun-doesn’t-exit gravity is a gravitational wave (not a gravity wave).

But of course, stars don’t really pop in and out of existence like that. In principle, everything with mass causes gravitational waves — my fingers waving over my keyboard is technically making them — but unless we have unimaginably massive objects doing unimaginably violent things, they’re too small to have the slightest hope of detection. Physicists came up with a number of astronomical events which they hoped would satisfy both of the following conditions:

a) Must feature large and chaotic enough movements of mass to create detectable gravitational waves
b) Must actually exist

The best candidate was the at-that-point-unobserved phenomenon of a binary black hole, in which two black holes approach each other and eventually merge. Though it’s possible they could simply hit head-on, smash directly into one another and merge that way, it’s far more likely that they will miss and begin to orbit one another and circle inward to eventually meet in the middle. As they spiral inward, their velocity will increase until, for the last portion of the process, they are moving as quickly as half the speed of light.

Let’s take a moment just to appreciate what it is we’re talking about here. According to the LIGO team, the black holes involved in this collision were 29 times and 36 times heavier than our Sun, respectively. Each one is a singularity, a body so massive that it has actually torn space-time and bent the laws of physics until they no longer truly apply. By the end, these sucking, invisible monsters can orbit one another in a matter of milliseconds.

As they wrench around one another at such speeds, the black holes violently compress and distort spacetime. If it were possible to get close to them without being physically torn apart by the gravitational forces, we would go through some truly unimaginable loops and squiggles in time. To an outside observer, we would seem to move jerkily through time, moving irrationally from ultra-fast-forward to ultra-slow-mo and back again as we quite literally rode the gravitational waves. From our own perspective, however, we would be cruising forward with a uniform rate of time.

When singularities dance at relativistic speeds, the resulting gravitational waves could have enough energy for detection in our own solar system. That was the inspiration for a number of projects, including the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). LIGO’s two L-shaped antennae are some 1,900 miles apart, one held in in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Both are enormous in their own right, with each arm stretching about 2.5 miles outward through protective concrete tunnels.

At the end of each L-arm lies a highly sensitive mirror that is affected by changes in gravitational potential. Their tiny adjustments can change the length of the tunnel by less than a thousandth the width of a proton, as observed by the laser in their laser interferometer. They can even feed the antennae data to an audio visualizer so they can easily hear spikes in the data as changes in pitch. As heard below, by the time it reaches the Earth, the incredible destructive power of a gravitational wave sounds like a diminutive little ping.

But the detection didn’t play out as quickly as it was supposed to. GW150914 was actually observed while the only two operational LIGO detectors were still in “engineering mode,” getting tested for the beginning of real work later in the month. It’s a good thing they were, since on September 14, 2015, before the first official day of operations, LIGO detected a gravitational wave. It took five months to verify and publish the results — which means you should be wondering what else the LIGO detectors might already have observed that the team has yet to get ready for publication.

So, gravitational waves exist. That not only confirms Einstein’s relativity, but it has the potential to help advance black hole science as well. The black holes don’t just send out waves when spinning, but also after they’ve merged. The process of melding into a single spherical unit doesn’t happen instantly, and as the two singularities ripple and shift, mass moves around in the new super black hole violently enough to make a whole new set of detectable waves. It’s these waves that could be a boon to black hole scientists, who have all kinds of predictions about exactly what sorts of characteristics they ought to have.

This is an important point: Detecting a gravitational wave is a fundamentally different sort of astronomy than detecting a ray of visible light. Rather than looking at particles or large objects moving through space, gravity science looks at the medium of the universe itself. That means it could offer insight into previously impossible areas of study — like the interior of a black hole. Black holes refuse to offer any data in the form of light, but they of all objects can’t avoid causing ripples in spacetime. It’s a bit like deep-sea fish with exterior nodes for detecting shockwaves in the water; even when there’s no light available to collect, disturbances in the medium that surrounds us can still offer vital information about the universe.

So, what we have here is not just a confirmation of gravitational waves, not just a window into black hole collisions, but a proof that we have at our disposal a whole new form of astronomy. Any insight these readings eventually offer into the black holes will be minimal next to the simple fact that these readings offer any insight into a black hole. That’s a truly revolutionary thing, and it shows that we might one day be able to use gravity itself to study everything from galactic collisions to dark matter.

Going forward, we’ve got to remember that the LIGO experiment is really only part of the larger world of gravitational wave science. It detects so-called high-frequency gravitational waves — but there should also be low-frequency gravitational waves, and to capture those the ESA recently finished an incredibly ambitious project called the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA). eLISA is to be a constellation of three satellites arranged in an equilateral triangle over 600,000 miles to a side, and put these satellites into perfect free fall around the Sun. If the free fall is indeed flawless, then any detectable differences in the movements of the satellites should be due to differences in the force of gravity acting upon them. If a low frequency gravitational wave passes over this area of space, eLISA should be able to reflect this.

What we really saw with the discovery of gravitational waves was the start of a new era in astronomy. With the current eLISA project online, entire careers have shifted to study the impending gathering of data.

But in another sense it’s incredibly hopeful, as it offers a way past seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and toward seemingly unattainable truths about our universe.

Dark matter is a new type of particle, one that interacts very weakly with all the known forces of the universe and is mostly only detectable via the gravitational pull it exerts. However, what kind of particle dark matter consists of remains unknown.

There are two known types of particles in the universe, fermions and bosons. Fermions include particles such as protons, neutrons and electrons, while bosons include particles such as the photons that make up the universe.

One of the fundamental challenges of researching dark matter is our inability to detect it. While it constitutes an estimated 27% of all the estimated mass and energy in the observable universe, it doesn’t interact with any type of electromagnetic radiation. Scientists have worked for decades to try and find direct evidence of dark matter’s existence, but to little avail. After its last, 20-month run, the Large Underground Xenon at Zeplin (LUX-Zeplin) dark matter experiment team reported that they had failed to detect any of the particles they were looking for.

But with the emergence of forces manipulated by the human mind, all we know about theoretical physics has changed.

A fifth fundamental force, perhaps discovered as part of the search for dark matter, has been reported in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters by senior author Danika Zayed. The results still need further analysis, but they represent a step forward for an idea that has caused several months of controversy in open-source journals, and which is potentially momentous enough that it’s making physicists’ imaginations run wild. Interactions across the universe are supposed to be governed by gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces; so what’s this about a fifth force?

The group of physicists led by Zayed went looking for something called the “dark photon,” which is a theorized carrier of the electromagnetic force for dark matter — we know dark matter doesn’t emit regular photons, but maybe it emits its own version. The team started looking in certain radioactive decay products by firing protons at thin targets of lithium-7, which created unstable beryllium-8 nuclei that quickly decayed. These decay products should produce electrons-positron pairs, and the Standard Model says that (for some reason) we should see fewer of these pairs as the electron and positron in each pair are emitted at a wider angle than expected.

This team found that there was an unusually large number of pairs with angles around 140º, creating a bump in their graph of pair-frequency versus emission angle. They quickly ruled out the possibility that this was being caused by decay of any known particle, and it clearly wasn’t a dark photon. So that left two possibilities: It was a mistake, or some totally new sort of particle. The team believes the bump corresponds to a previously unknown particle that’s being emitted from the unstable beryllium atoms and quickly decaying into an electron-positron pair with the observed angle of incidence. They found that this new particle should be about 30 times heavier than an electron, or about 17 MeV (megaelectronvolts).

Her original paper received little attention until a review by extraneous physicists. These scientists looked at the data and came to the conclusion that it didn’t contradict any known theory — meaning that while it is unknown, there’s also no reason to believe this new particle couldn’t exist. She claims that the particle is a boson, that it is not a mass-carrying particle, and that it doesn’t carry any of the four known forces. In principle, this implies that the particle is thus a force carrier for a force beyond the four currently known to exist.

This new force is odd. It interacts only over extremely short distances, a few atomic nuclei at most, and affects only electrons and neutrons. It’s being classified as a “protophobic X boson” where “protophobic” refers to the lack of interaction with protons, and the X literally means “unknown.” Most importantly, its energy level is low enough that it should be able to be created in a wide variety of labs around the world.

What might this mysterious new particle mean? Beyond blowing up the Standard Model, there’s hope that the newly discovered force might act as a bridge between the light and “dark” worlds. There’s no real indication of that, and it’s mostly wishful thinking. But the protophobic nature of the particle could be a key to the different interactions it would need to have with normal matter and dark matter, respectively. Such a dark force would be useful in revealing the nature of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), the theorized mass-carrying particle that makes up dark matter. And it’s distinct from the dark photon, which would be the hypothetical electromagnetic force carrier for dark matter. The senior author intends to use their results in combination with techniques used to study gravitational waves to investigate the dark photon and dark wave, too, further advancing understanding of the material that makes up the majority of the mass in the universe.

Notes:

•Danika can only channel in the lab, and is at her best when conducting experiments.

•The dark energy she studies is the Source.

•The dark flow she studies is the One Power.

•The dark particles (boson) is emitted by the One Power.

•The Bose-Einstein condensates are weaves.

•The cosmological constant Λ•Γ. has an equal and opposite constant ι•Ν to counter its magnitude so that their net cancels each other out. This is the mathematical representation of saidin and saidar.

Probably not protocol to post in a bio....but this is flipping genius.

Haha. Thanks!

We need to do an RP together soon!