World important news by Katia

Nobel salutes the slow unlocking of the universe’s secrets

By Richard Panek The views expressed are his own. For the first time in history our species has begun to answer some of the eternal questions about the universe: Where did it come from? Where is it going? We’re able to do so in part because of the discovery that is being recognized by this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics. Before Galileo published the first discoveries he made with a primitive telescope, in 1610, cosmology—the study of the structure and evolution of the universe—was equal parts speculation and superstition. Even the subsequent, centuries-long discoveries of new planets, new moons, new stars, and new galaxies didn’t address the evolution of the universe. Not until Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that, on a cosmic scale, galaxies appear to be receding from one another, carried along by the expansion of space itself, did the universe begin to acquire a narrative—a story that changes over time. Even then theorists split into two camps: those who posited a universe that emerged in a “big bang,” and those who preferred a universe poised in a “steady state” through the continuous creation of matter. And there the theoretical divide, as theoretical divides must do in the absence of evidence, rested. That evidence arrived in 1964, with the discovery of a remnant radiation that matched a prediction of the Big Bang theory. The answer to the question of where the universe had come from was beginning to find its answer—and cosmology was beginning its passage from metaphysics to physics, from speculation to science. And what of the fate of the universe? Throughout the 1990s, two international teams of scientists raced each other to find out the answer. They reasoned that if the universe is expanding, and all the matter in the universe is attracting all the other matter in the universe through gravity, then the cumulative gravitational drag of all that matter on all that other matter would be slowing the expansion. The question was, How much? So much that the universe will eventually stretch as far as it can go, reverse direction, and collapse back on itself? Or so little that the universe will keep cruising, more and more slowly, until it reaches a virtual standstill? By studying a form of exploding star called a Type Ia supernova at distances as much as half the way back to the beginning of the universe, however, these rival teams found that the expansion is behaving in a way they hadn’t anticipated. It’s speeding up. The leaders of the two teams, Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt, and the lead author of the Schmidt team’s discovery paper, Adam Riess, share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for that counterintuitive conclusion, which the two teams reached independently in 1998. But knowing that something is accelerating the expansion of the universe doesn’t tell us what that “something” is. What component of the universe could possibly be capable of overpowering the effects of gravity on a cosmic scale? Until they can find out, scientists have given it a placeholder name, “dark energy.” That term in turn mimics “dark matter,” a discovery that entered mainstream astronomy in the 1970s. Despite these shrugging monikers, dark matter and dark energy aren’t the speculative indulgences of cosmologists in ivory towers. The relic radiation from the Big Bang—technically, the cosmic microwave background—is in effect a baby picture of the universe. Everything the universe will evolve into is right there, in the contours and temperature variations of that radiation. Examine that radiation on a fine enough scale and you’ll see what the universe is made of, which is exactly what scientists have repeatedly done over the past decade, until they have refined the proportions with mind-bending precision: 72.8 percent dark energy and 22.7 percent dark matter, leaving only 4.5 percent the kind of stuff we’d always assumed was the universe in its entirety—stars, planets, galaxies, you, me. The news that for thousands of years astronomy and physics have been missing most of the universe, however, doesn’t disappoint astronomers and physicists. As Perlmutter once told me, “I have the impression that most people don’t realize that what got physicists into physics usually is not the desire to understand what we already know but the desire to catch the universe in the act of doing really bizarre things.” And for a physicist, it doesn’t get much more bizarre than dark energy. To solve the mystery of what nearly the entire universe is made of will likely require a recalibration of Newton and Einstein, if not the long-awaited nuptials of general relativity and quantum mechanics. The problem of dark energy, a theorist once said to me, “is the most profound in all of science.” The implications for philosophy, however, are no less profound. The discovery of dark energy gives us a strong clue as to what the fate of the universe will be—eternal expansion. But it also forces us to rethink what we mean by the word “universe”—a concept we last had to rethink on such a fundamental level back when Galileo walked into his garden in Padua and pointed a “tube of long seeing” at the night sky. It’s 1610 all over again.

Don’t expect euro rescue design at G20 talks-Canada

Besides dealing with Europe and slow growth, one of the components of the G20 plan will be to boost demand, with exchange rate flexibility being part of that. The official said Finance Minister Jim Flaherty would emphasize that when he meets Chinese Finance Minister Xie Xuren in Paris.

US mortgage bankers grapple with consumer outrage

* Industry coping with new regulationsBy Joe RauchCHICAGO, Oct 11 (Reuters) - U.S. mortgage bankers attending an industry conference in Chicago this week received something they did not originally bargain for — a heavy dose of the consumer anger against the financial system that has boiled into protest rallies across the country.The Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual conference in Chicago this week coincided with a protest march against joblessness and income inequality that drew about 3,000 demonstrators to downtown Chicago on Monday evening.And while many of the attendees of the MBA event, which ends on Wednesday, say they sympathize with the protesters, others think their industry is being used as a scapegoat for deeper economic woes.To some mortgage executives, the message is clear: the industry is under siege. “I think anyone who thinks we aren’t under siege is kidding themselves,” said one bank executive as he watched anti-banker protests outside the conference on Monday along with other participants who snapped pictures.Four years after the U.S. housing bubble burst, mortgage banking executives say their business is under attack from angry homeowners and lawmakers who view the industry as the culprit behind the 2007-2009 financial crisis and subsequent recession.Some mortgage bankers said the public criticism has begun to intrude on their personal lives.One former senior industry executive, who declined to be named, said he was confronted at a recent charity event.”A woman asked me how I could sleep at night, and (said) she was glad that Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns failed,” the executive said. When asked how often he is confronted, he said it happens “all the time.”Others believe their industry has become a scapegoat, and that they are being punished for loose lending practices that that have long since been rectified.”We’re easy to blame,” said Hank Cunningham, president of Greensboro, North Carolina-based Cunningham & Co, a mortgage banking company.TRUST DEFICITThroughout the first two days of the conference, attendees said they sympathized with the millions of U.S. borrowers who face foreclosure and, in light of the protests, the MBA issued a statement that amounted to a mea culpa.”We all recognize that our industry faces a trust deficit with policymakers and the public and that people in our industry contributed to the events that led to the financial crisis,” it said.Easy lending terms helped many Americans stretch to buy homes and a plunge in home prices has left more than a quarter of borrowers in homes worth less then their mortgages.With the nation’s unemployment rate stuck above 9 percent, banks are coping with millions of delinquent home loans, and the total number of foreclosed homes is also in the millions.In August alone, there were 228,098 default notices, scheduled auctions, or bank repossessions on U.S. properties, according to RealtyTrac, a real estate research firm.The sour housing market was the backdrop to the protest on the conference’s doorstep on Monday which drew a few hundred participants pushing for foreclosure relief and calling for the ouster Bank of America Corp CEO Brian Moynihan and JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO Jamie Dimon, among others.During an afternoon question-and-answer session, two protesters who had managed to get into the conference asked Wells Fargo & Co home loans president Michael Heid how he could sleep at night. Heid said the adversarial questioning reminded him of testifying before Congress.MBA Chief Executive David Stevens said he understood the protesters’ frustrations, and he recalled that after graduating from college he had participated in a protest against a nuclear weapons production plant in Colorado and was arrested.But he said the industry and its critics must work together to fix the housing market. “You’re not getting anywhere to rebuild this economy simply by yelling outside, that’s the unfortunate reality,” he said.Indeed, in his opening remarks at the conference, Stevens struck a tough tone, saying the trade group was “on the war front fighting” against new industry rules, including those included in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law put in place last year in an effort to try to prevent future crises.