Click on the image to see it full size. I’m working on a new theme for the blog so that I can include larger format images. It might take some time.

This is pretty much exactly what would happen if William Shatner came ’round to tea at the Prime residence.

So I realized today that I have no really good reason for using Optimus Prime as the subject of so many of these comics (if you can call them that). Perhaps it’s that I see him as the sort of ideal outside observer. An alien not of us, but very sympathetic to us. He likes humans in a way that is not patronizing or insincere. He shows us–the inferior race–a kind of respect that is rare between humans.

Prime is the perfect idealist. His most famous quote (from the comics as well as the various Michael Bay films) was, “Freedom is the right of all sentient beings.” On the one hand, it’s the sort of magnanimous statement that gives a person shivers, especially when uttered by the always earnest Peter Cullen. But it’s also, when one really deconstructs it, astonishingly prejudiced against beings that are less than sentient. Regardless, I’ve always wanted to identify with Optimus Prime and I respected his sage wisdom (and awesome robot-fu) as a child.

Perhaps I use him in so many comics because I happen to own an Optimus Prime action figure myself, which makes it easy to photograph him from any angle I want. Do you know how hard it is to find a photo of William Shatner in the perfect pose?

The subject of ‘Hidden Portals’ was spawned by a headline that I saw on Science Daily. It’s one of those headlines that really plays tricks on a guy like me. I read something like this and I get really excited. I imagine, of course, teleportation (something that would really put GM out of business). And, thus, that’s the idea that I explored in my art project.

But that’s not exactly what’s going on in the article. In fact, the article is further misleading in that, try as I might, it’s difficult to figure out what, exactly, these researchers actually accomplished. Upon further research into the matter, it turns out that what they have created is not an actual, workable prototype of a hidden doorway, but instead have built a functional conceptual model of a doorway that does not permit electromagnetic waves to pass through it, but would allow other entities (say, a person) to pass through. A mirror that you can walk through.

It’s actually really cool. But this is the thing that’s frustrating about science sometimes. They’ve proved that it’s theoretically possible, but they haven’t actually built it yet. My question is, of course, why the hell not?

It’s a curious thing about science. In fact, it’s the critical difference between science and applied science (i.e. technology). What use has a scientist for technology except as a way of furthering our understanding of the world? They’ve proved that it’s possible to build the doorway. In a sense, it doesn’t matter to the pure researcher that it ever actually gets built. For the pure researcher, actually building the device would only be important if it could be used in further research. This might be an oversimplification of the pure researcher, who is, of course, only human, but the point remains.

Technology, like for instance these new metamaterials involved in the creation of the hidden portal is, essentially, a means to an end. And I don’t mean this lightly. “Means to an end” is a concept that bears considerable weight to a philosopher. Technology is a means to an end. And it is nothing more than that. To a scientist, the end is knowledge and understanding. To everyone else, the end is often creature comfort or experiential. We use technology as a means to the end of enhancing our individual lives or the lives of others. Both are perfectly reasonable ways to use technology.

Without letting this become a lecture on ethics, I think I’d like to bring this whole thing full circle.

I’d like to bring this around to what I find so interesting about Optimus Prime. He is, in a sense, a piece of technology. But he is also a sentient being. He is the ideal exemplar of a higher being that treats lower beings with dignity and respect. He is a piece of technology that doesn’t treat humans as a means to an end. They are an end in themselves. To be treated as an end and not a means. That is the true meaning of “freedom,” folks.

Now, if only someone would build some mirror-portals so that I could buy one.

Freiheit ist nicht frei.

I always sort of assumed that the galaxy far, far away (though, to be fair, all galaxies except the Milky Way are “far, far away”) was one of those theoretical galaxies made primarily out of anti-matter. Of course, if you lived in an anti-matter galaxy, you’d simply think of it as matter. To think that the Star Wars galaxy is made out of anti-matter doesn’t explain anything about the Force or anything. It just conjures up some interesting “what if?” scenarios.

Like what if Captain Picard met Luke Skywalker? It just seems to me that a messiah meeting a man of science would definitely be awkward. Though in this case, not for the obvious reasons.

So it’s often the case in science that you have two hypotheses that explain the same phenomenon. This is a good thing in most cases, because it means that there are multiple avenues in which research and experimentation can be conducted. Take, for example, the fact that there are a lot of unexplained gamma rays buzzing around the galaxy in an unexpected and unexplained distribution. It’s a mystery that’s been plaguing astronomers and physicists for some time.

You have two possible explanations for it: it’s either evidence of dark matter (matter that is undetectable and yet makes up the vast majority of the mass in the universe and has only been observed via its gravitational effects) or it’s not. In this case, it’s not. I am not altogether certain if it was an unexpected discovery or if the researchers were specifically testing this positron hypothesis.

I find it interesting because, by itself, the fact that these positrons are being generated in supernovae, flying for millions of years only to annihilate the first time they come into contact with normal matter, is not that significant–though very cool. It solves a nagging mystery that had, up until now, been considered possible evidence for dark matter. But one thing it does do, in the search for dark matter, is narrow the search down.

I’m not sure if this rules out the possibility that Dark Matter is made of Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)–focusing the search on other possible forms that dark matter might take–or if WIMPs are still on the table.

In the end, it’s what you make of it. But dark matter, along with string theory and the Higgs boson, is one of those scientific enigmas that, if solved, would change our understanding of everything. And speaking of string theory, one of its predictions was confirmed and published. Totally sweet.

Singen Sie süße Lieder.

My favorite part about science is the fact that so much of it is, in essence, just for fun. The problem for grant writers must be spinning it so that it sounds like there’s a practical “use-value” for research.

One of the first posts for this blog was about a scene from Also Sprach Zarathustra. Specifically, Nietzsche was making a claim about the value of gold. Now, I had not expected the reaction that this claim would elicit from some of my friends. One friend in particular happens to be a stock trader and professional poker player, a guy who makes his living by understanding the value of money. He argued that gold is not useless because it has exchange-value.

I and other friends argued that there was a fundamental difference between use- and exchange-value. I mean, if gold had a use-value, it wouldn’t be used as currency. Of course, it’s often used today in many industries as a conductor, but that’s beside the point. Nietzsche did not write by electric light, so in his time, the analogy holds, and even to this day, only a tiny percentage of all the gold mined is used for industry. The vast majority of it is locked up in jewelry and hoards.

Of course, the comparison that I was trying to draw at the time relates directly to how scientific research is conducted and the reasons for conducting that research. For instance, a recent discovery has been all over the science news circuit as well as the blogosphere, and it’s kind of a big deal. But the take-away lesson of the story is kind of tricky.

Science always has a sort of “cool factor.” You hear about new a new kind of supernova that was discovered or this new quantum entanglement discovery (links above), and you consume that knowledge immediately. You are joyous. It’s a sort of cathartic experience. I mean, quantum entanglement in a mechanical system! That’s pretty rad, right? But then you ask the average reader of Scientific American what it means in practical terms and you might get a vague answer about quantum computers. Based on this discovery, however, that’s a really long way off. This discovery is cool despite its apparent uselessness. We like this kind of knowledge simply because it’s interesting and satisfies a need deep inside ourselves. A need to know something true about the world that we didn’t know before.

This is why scientists do this kind of research. The scientists working on the project are way more concerned with knowing things than making the world a better place. Or rather, they are trying to make the world a better place through expansion of knowledge because knowledge has an intrinsic value that is not easily defined.

“Hey, dudes, we’ve finally demonstrated quantum entanglement in a mechanical system!”
“Oh, dude, you rock!”
“Yeah, I know right? This is totally sweet in and of itself.”
“Yeah, man, the only thing we’re really interested in is continuing our research in this field!”
“Woo!! Bong rips for all!”

Or something like that. They want more grant money for pure research. But somehow they have to convince the people with the checkbooks that there’s a utilitarian reason for doing this sort of research. Again, some vague claim about computers that are orders of exponentially more powerful, couched in very careful rhetoric that doesn’t actually promise results anytime soon.

I mean, the LHC is the perfect example of this. They’re looking for evidence that the Higgs Boson exists. It might not! And whether it does or not, knowing will be way cooler than not knowing.

Science is not about progress. Science defies progress. Science shatters the myth of progress in many ways, which is why in some situations pure knowledge is not without its consequences. For instance, evolutionary theory defies the very concept of progress.

And so, quantum entanglement has been demonstrated in a mechanical system. This is totally sweet. It has no bearing on our lives, but we are overjoyed to know it. Maybe someday down the road, this knowledge will have use-value, but for the time being, research will continue and we will be happy for it. Because we are so damned curious. Like kittens.

Ciao.

I’m getting married in a couple of months that entails a honeymoon that me and the future missus are planning on spending on the north shore of Lake Superior. A lovely town called Grand Marais. There are bike trails in the area, so, rather than rent bicycles there, we decided to bring our own bikes. This made a bike rack for the old Buick a necessity.

As luck would have it, we received one as a gift recently. While trying to decide whether to install it immediately–the only upside being the pleasure of being seen as the type of people who have a bike rack on the car–or wait till later, I noticed the above label which so intrigued me that I snapped the picture you are now glancing up at with my cellphone.

In case you’re not up on your French or Spanish (or English), the three sentences are informing you of where the rack itself was manufactured. Presumably, if you speak English, it was manufactured in the good old US of A. If you speak Spanish, however, then you be under the impression that it was manufactured in Mexico. But the French could only assume that it was manufactured in China.

To imagine that this exact bike rack’s place of manufacture is wholly dependent on the language that you speak is absurd. So there must be another explanation. I see two possibilities.

On the one hand, perhaps someone screwed up. It’s entirely possible that the person who designed the label got mixed up and the copy-editor didn’t catch the error. Or, what seems more likely, is that the factory that built this bike rack actually exists in some sort of pocket dimension, outside of our objective reality, that happens to have openings into our reality in the US, Mexico, and China. I just find it so unlikely that someone missed this obvious error on the packaging, that this is the only logical conclusion.

The question is, if this company has independently developed the technology to build factories in pocket dimensions, why aren’t they marketing that instead of just building bike racks. The question almost answers itself. They did not, in fact, build the factory. They happened to stumble upon the open rifts to another dimension accidentally and there was already a bike-rack factory there. Perhaps left there by an ancient civilization that had developed dimensional travel technology and presumably enjoyed taking their bicycles with them when they went on road trips.

So all at once, this label is proof of the existence of pocket dimensions, the possibility of accessing them, and the past existence of a great and mighty civilization capable of dimensional travel that, for one reason or another, has long since disappeared without so much as a trace.

Take that, causality.

In 1961, Kennedy said, “Hey, Russia. We saw your Sputnik, and that was cool. But hey, guess what? We’re going to put a dude on the moon. That’s right. That moon.”

And we did. In 1969, Neil Armstrong ambulated in a way that was at once small and giant, once again proving that distance is dependent on perception–without a doubt the most important discovery of the Apollo missions.

So that’s why things like this are really frustrating. Why is it that this so complicated? I would really like it if someone could explain to me why it takes fifteen years to build a nuclear reactor, when Wal-Mart can throw up a store in seven weeks? Is it a question of money? They’ve got the design already. What is it that costs so much?

We used to be able to set a goal and meet it. What went wrong? Is it a matter of money? Motivation? Are we simply not smart enough?

What is this barrier that’s preventing us from cranking out a working tokamak in six months? The design and the technology exist today. If it’s a problem of motivation, perhaps it’s that we don’t have anybody with a forceful enough personality to come out and say, “Here’s how shit’s going down, so listen up.” We need an Alexander. We need a Genghis. We need a freaking Kennedy. And none of the old, red-faced, boring Kennedys. We need the young Kennedy who told us we could land on the moon. Nuclear fusion should be a walk in the park by comparison. I had high hopes for Obama. I’m not seeing the results that I want, but I haven’t given up on him. Yet.

We know that there’s an astonishing amount of money locked up in hydrogen. The math is solid and so is the physics. It’s a given. It’s clean energy. It solves almost all of the energy problems that currently plague us. It’s as abundant as stray cats in Rome.

The deputy director of the project says, “you really need to know whether the major components work. It’s absolutely clear that this is the right approach.” I’m not so sure. But I can see a couple of different perspectives.

It’s entirely likely that this is a situation where we have too many hands in the pot. It’s great to see an international project that brings people together into a unified goal. But when that goal is just a huge, inefficient money sink, then it’s not serving anyone’s needs. My problem is the fact that this is actually something that we need. This needs to happen or we’re all screwed. Fifteen years is too long to wait for a solution to our budding energy crisis. We need it like yesterday.

Maybe it wasn’t Kennedy that was our motivator. Maybe it was the Russians. It was a threat that the Russians were going to beat us to the moon that really kicked the space race into high gear. What we need is the new millennium’s Russia. Terrorism is obviously not it because they’re not strong enough, not pervasive enough, and nobody really takes them seriously. There’s no palpable fear. We need a threat the size of Russia during the Cold War to drive us toward what we’re actually capable of. Alien invasion, maybe?

Perhaps the guy is right. Maybe the fusion project actually is too big to complete without the kind of bureaucratic machine behind this one. If that’s the case, then I have my doubts about whether we’re capable of such a feat. I mean, look at the Large Hadron Collider. It was proposed and approved in 1995. Fourteen years ago, we decided to build it. That means that it was theoretically possible for us to build it fifteen years ago. This means that technology has not improved in that time. It was beset by problems and delays and other nonsense and despite the fact that it was successfully activated, it broke pretty much right away.

If we extrapolate that out, assume that the same level of ineptitude is likely to plague this fusion project, there’s very little hope that this thing will be operational until 2050, far too late to solve any of our energy problems.

Our only option, as far as I can see, is to not hold our breaths on this one. Our current attitude toward goal-setting is pretty loose. In the 60′s we set goals and we met them. We don’t really do that so much anymore. Multiple sources of energy are going to be needed to fill the gaping hole left when oil prices get too high. Solar, wind, and possibly good old fashioned nuclear fission. Fusion is probably going to remain a pipe dream for some time yet.

Bummer.

Phlogiston Theory was an attempt, in the 17th century to rectify a problem in the practice of alchemy. You see, the Greeks believed that there were four elements in nature: earth, air, fire, and water. But when all you have is these four elements and everything in nature is comprised of only these four substances, then how to you explain wood burning and metal rusting? What process is taking place?

Phlogiston Theory throws out air and fire and then states that everything that is combustible contains another element called phlogiston that is liberated during combustion or oxidation. At the time it made perfect sense. When wood burns, it grows smaller and the flames might look like something released from within the wood, and when iron rusts, it crumbles into dust, possibly after having lost whatever held it together in the first place.

Phlogsiton is a massless, colorless, odorless, (etc.) substance. It is a substance completely without identifying qualities. And we know how scientists love things without qualities. It’s a lovely theory because at its outset, it is very tricky to disprove. It took over a hundred years to dethrone it as the dominant theory of combustion. Today we know, of course, that combustion is rapid oxidation of a flammable material and that rust or corrosion is a slower version of the same natural process. In Phlogiston Theory, the fact that iron oxide is heavier than pure iron was reconciled by positing that phlogiston has negative mass!

Hilarious, I know. But is it really so unreasonable?

In the most recent (double!) issue of Analog Magazine, Dr. Don Lincoln speaks out about the ludicrous controversy surrounding the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). His purpose is largely to allay fears that it’s going to destroy the world and generate some interest in the new, tasty bits of knowledge that it might allow us to discover. Throughout the article, he goes into some pretty serious depth about theoretical particle physics and what we know, what we don’t know, what we think we know, and what we want to know about it. In particular, he focuses on two things: the Higgs Boson and gravitons.

I’ll be getting back to phlogiston in a moment, so bear with me.

As you are possibly, there are four forces acting in the universe: the strong, the weak, electromagnetism, and gravity. Since we know that there is a particle associated with the first three (and the strongest) forces, it is theorized that there is a fourth particle called a graviton that is associated with the gravitational force. Now, since gravity is the problem child of the four forces, with very little resemblance to any of its associates, we are bound by the principles of science to test the royal crap out of the theory in an attempt to prove it wrong.

But it’s not so easy.

What I’m saying is, we have to entertain the possibility that the graviton is a phlogiston, which we might, for the moment, define as “something that we make up in order to fill a gap in our current understanding of some subject.”

So how does a phlogiston differ from a hypothesis?

Even more “phlogistic” than the graviton is the Higgs Boson. If it exists, we can pat ourselves on the back for unifying the weak force and electromagnetism (electroweak). In fact, the current Standard Model of particle physics depends on its existence. It’s entirely possible that we are, in essence, making it up to explain the way the world works. Granted, these hypotheses and theories are based on tremendous mountains of verified evidence and extrapolated outward from them, there is still a lot that we don’t know about the world and it’s very possible that whole other models could be constructed that would fit our current data.

Who knows? When the LHC is activated later this year, it might generate data that would topple the Standard Model completely. It seems unlikely, but it’s entirely possible. The point is, the Higgs Boson might not be a phlogiston much longer now that we can actually test it.

Perhaps the most phlogistic of all theories (aside from Phlogiston Theory) is String Theory, and it has to be one of my all time favorites. I ate Brian Green’e book like a hobo eats pork’n'beans! It’s a marvelous theory. “Elegant” is perhaps the best word for it and if the world has any sense of artfulness (think Oscar Wilde, here), then String Theory has to be correct. But is it?

As a side note, it’s interesting how the Higgs Boson theory, the newer theories of gravity, and String Theory all seem to predict extra dimensions.

Anyway, I don’t necessarily mean to say that all theories are phlogistic until they have evidence to support them. Some are definitely going to be more phlogistic than others. Some, like String Theory, are likely to remain phlogistons until we can find some way of observing something tinier than the tiniest thing the human mind can conceive.

In the end, what we must understand about Phlogiston Theory, as a bit of science history, is that it was actually quite reasonable at the time. We must remember that European scientific inquiry for much of the Middle Ages was based on the assumption that the Greeks had got it right. Suddenly, the four elements idea wasn’t holding up, which meant that they were being questioned for the first time since Aristotle. Johann Becher, the scientist who first posited Phlogiston Theory, was engaging in a profoundly scientific act: he posed a hypothesis. Granted, he lacked follow-through, like attempting to test the hypothesis through experimentation, but he revised the Standard Model of the day and, since most philosophers were rationalists (he was, after all, a contemporary of Descartes), experimentation wasn’t necessarily required for a theory to become accepted. In point of fact, while it was technically possible at the time to test the theory, the techniques simply hadn’t been devised yet to test it.

The thing to take home: phlogiston was disproved a lot quicker than the Greeks’ four elements.

So let’s re-define a phlogiston thusly: a theory composed to fill a gap in understanding that is not yet possible to test thoroughly.

And let’s not judge Phlogiston Theory too harshly, because honestly, it was an improvement, but also because we might be assuming a hefty handful of phlogistic nonsense ourselves. Stay skeptical, but continue to indulge the occasional case of whimsy, because you never know just where the solution to some problem might appear. At least phlogiston got people thinking again.

Credit for pointing out Phlogiston Theory to me is owed to my friend, Jessymandias.

Discuss.

You know, climate change is a problem. I once heard an argument against the burning of fossil fuels on the grounds that Earth would become like Venus. And we all know what sort of place Venus is. It’s interesting to think that Mars and Venus are completely opposite in terms of climate and atmospheric conditions, though an article in this month’s Scientific American points out that it’s possible that Mars’s rarefied atmosphere and Venus’s CO₂ insulated greenhouse might have been created by some very similar processes. At the very least, they are both the result of a net loss of gases from their respective atmospheres. The crazy thing the article points out is that eventually Earth is more likely to end up like Venus than Mars. A scorching desert with rivers of molten lead.

Did you know that our atmosphere leaks three kilograms of hydrogen each second? It’s the lightest gas and so it concentrates in the upper atmosphere and just sort of evaporates off, disappearing into space. I did some further research and discovered that all atmospheres are constantly evaporating. Even the Sun is losing mass constantly. Ever consider what the solar wind might consist of? It’s material that’s being ejected off the surface of the sun. Our sun will lose probably .01 percent of its mass from evaporation throughout its main sequence, but there are larger suns that slough off some forty percent of their mass just from generating solar wind.

What I mean to say is, the universe is always in a constant state of flux. Everything is changing constantly. It’s the only thing that’s constant. In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, that flux always tends towards a greater state of disorder or less potential energy.

Let’s say we stopped belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. What would happen? Slowly, over time–about a billion years–the sun is going to get brighter as its main sequence continues. This means that water vapor will not condense and rain back to the Earth’s surface as readily. This will allow that water vapor to decay into hydrogen and oxygen under the force of a brighter sun’s ultraviolet radiation. After another billion years, our oceans will have all dried up and our atmosphere will have a much higher concentration carbon dioxide as hydrogen and oxygen leach off into the ether. Earth becomes another Venus. And that’s it. Earth is finished. Two billion years.

This came as something of a shock to me. I’ve always thought that life on Earth was dependent on the sun continuing to give off energy, feeding our biological economy. I never considered the possibility that the sun itself might be our undoing. I had never thought about our own atmosphere backfiring on us. The sun’s main sequence will last another seven billion years. That’s a lot of time. But if Earth is only habitable for another two, we’ve essentially got a third of that to…what?

I always thought it would be possible that humans might still exist on Earth in three billion years when the Milky Way crashes into Andromeda. I always thought there was a remote possibility (depending, of course, on our own ability to wise up). But there is no such possibility. Two billion years is a very small amount of time, cosmically speaking. But even beyond that event, what is there? Perhaps we find other habitable planets and generate the necessary technology to colonize them?

If the universe is expanding–which may or may not be the case–the second law of thermodynamics means that eventually the entire universe will be cold, lifeless, and dark. When? In a trillion years, our local galaxy cluster will have merged into one huge galaxy. Another trillion years later (again, continuing to assume the existence of dark energy), all other galaxies will have red shifted to the such an extent that they will no longer be detectable.

Star formation ceases at around 100 trillion years.

Slowly, all matter in the universe will be absorbed into black holes. But even black holes do not last forever. Slowly they decay. 10¹⁰⁰ years from now, the last of the black holes will have evaporated to nothing, the tiny particles that they kicked off having dispersed throughout the eternity of space. Then comes the Dark Era.

And this is the thing that gets me. There is going to be crazy shit happening in the universe so long after our two billion years is up, and Earth won’t be here. At least, there won’t be anything worth calling life on Earth to experience it. All we have is these two billion years. So what do we do? It would be nice if we could do as much in that two billion years as possible.

I could turn this into a stump speech for renewable resources, etc. But you’ve heard it all before. I just wanted to put some shit into perspective.

Further reading: Humans Hell Bent on Mass Suicide

Discuss.

One of the biggest evolutionary advantages that humans possess is our ability to use tools. Of course, we’re not the only species to use tools and in some cases, we’re not even the most dexterous with the tools that we do use. However, it seems to the be the case that we are alone in all the animal kingdom when it comes to the extent to which we refine our tools. The ability to use old tools to make better tools is one of our key advantages.

We don’t have claws and teeth worth a damn, so we make knives, swords, and guns. We’re not, on the average, as strong as a tiger, but our weapons and machines make us stronger. Nietzsche said that this was our capacity for simulation (a.k.a. lying). But that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. I merely wanted to illustrate how our tool making and, in particular, our tool refining, is responsible for so much of what we know about the world and, by proxy, what we are able to do in the world.

Imagine what it must have been like to be Galileo. The current accepted cosmic model shows Earth at the center of everything. the vast majority of the sky is utterly stationary (the stars), but there are a few objects that move. The Greeks compared them with the gods. The Romans called one in particular Jupiter. There’s Galileo, using a telescope that he built, taking a gander at Jupiter. What does he see? Three tiny “stars” dwarfed by Jupiter but very close to it. Imagine what the next few days must have been like for him? Night after night, observing these three stars and seeing them move and even disappear. How would you explain it, if everything is supposed to orbit the Earth? Imagine how his heart raced when the only logical hypothesis formed in his mind. Heresy, but true! They orbit Jupiter!

The reason that the Copernican Model of the solar system did not meet immediate success is the fact that his observations were based on measurements only infinitesimally better than those that confirmed a geo-centric solar system. His conclusion was radical because it flew in the face of everything that the Church held dear, but also because it was actually only a little bit better. For it to be politically viable, for the Church to accept it (no matter if scientists agree), you need a damn sight more positive proof than that. Look at the theory of evolution. That’s been demonstrated time and again, but it’s not proof enough for religious folks. It seems that often what it takes is one piece of irrefutable evidence to sway the skeptical. A smoking gun.

The problem, of course, is that there isn’t always one of those just lying around. Just ask a forensics expert.

Instead, what science relies on is a slow and steady progression, a refinement of technique and technology. The tools become incrementally more sophisticated, the measurements just a tiny bit more accurate and over time we are able to construct a picture of what the universe looks like. Galileo saw with this telescope things that we had no way of knowing existed. They might as well not have existed until Galileo spotted them. Not only that, but he was able to make more accurate observations in support of the Copernican Model than Copernicus which is why he, and not Copernicus, is the “Father of Modern Science.”

The strides he made in observational astronomy were monumental. But they pale in comparison to the things we’ve been seeing lately. Two stories caught my eye today. The first is directly related to this idea of incrementally more sensitive equipment. We’ve mapped the background radiation from our perspective. We have an idea of what the universe looked like when it was very, very young. But what will we see if we increase the resolution? As it turns out, the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation might have a fingerprint of sorts embedded in it. Ripples in space-time, kicked up during the Big Bang, might have left a residual polarization in the cosmic radiation. We haven’t had tools sensitive enough to detect this hypothesized “B-mode polarization” yet, but perhaps now we do. And it will change, ever so slightly, our understanding of the early (the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second) universe.

Also on the micro scale, we have accurately measured the atomic mass of some isotopes of certain rare elements. More accurately, scientists have measured the nuclear masses of four specific rare elements. Rare elements like these are difficult to measure because they are rare and because when you do finally get your hands on some, they decay much too quickly to get accurate measurements. But through the use of our ability to continually refine our techniques and build more and more sensitive equipment, scientists have done what might have seemed impossible in Galileo’s day.

I like the quote from the project lead: “As an analogue, think of a scale precise enough to see how your weight changes when you pluck just one hair out of your head.”

How are such subtle changes in mass important? It depends on who you are. The thing is, in the world of science, smaller and smaller changes have bigger and bigger consequences. If some fundamental universal constant–for example, c, the speed of light–were different be as little as a tenth of a percent, the entire nature of the universe would be different. But it also has intrinsic value. The ability to accurately model the universe, to really see, in as much detail as possible, the mechanisms that power the universe, is remarkable and, when it comes down to it, it’s really all that sets us apart from chimps.

Discuss.

The word for the day is bureaucracy. NASA is in the final stages of assembling the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Part of the machine’s purpose is to search for evidence of the existence of anti-matter by reading the cosmic rays. Since not all rays on planet Earth are, by their nature, cosmic, the gadget needs to be mounted on the International Space Station, sort of like a satellite dish bolted to the top of a mobile home. Sort of high-tech white trashy.

The problem with this whole thing? Despite the fact that they are almost done building this thing, there’s no guarantee that it will launch. You see, we only actually have three space shuttles. That’s right. Three. Five were built. Two blew up. The nature of science is such that most projects take a very long time to complete. So this spectrometer project has been going on for a while, but when Columbia disintegrated in 2003, they had to alter the launch schedule. I mean, we have been pushing these ships to the limit. It’s a tough job. They are old! Older than my crappy Beretta and that thing is on its last legs. With only three space-worthy shuttles, that puts the US in a pretty awkward position. The entire world depends on our shuttle program, and the entire fleet (such as it is) is going to be retired next year. It’s pretty sad, honestly. So they finish building the spectrometer and hope that they can launch it.

Part of the AMS’s mission is the search for evidence of anti-matter. And, as anyone who has read a Dan Brown novel knows, anti-matter is pretty tricky stuff. It’s exactly like normal matter except that if it comes into contact with normal matter, both substances “annihilate” which is, they cease to be matter and are transformed into pure energy, mostly in the form of heat. In layman’s terms: big freaking explosion. Pretty cool, huh? The question is, since our galaxy is made of normal matter, is it possible that there are entire galaxies, solar systems, planets, or even intelligent life forms made entirely of anti-matter? It sounds like a plot from a bad comic book, but the fact remains that it’s entirely possible. The crazy of it is, that we could never actually meet these beings because if we tried to shake hands, we would blow each other straight to oblivion.

How much energy is released in one of these explosions? Remember the famous equation, E=mc². You take the mass of the two beings–one made of normal matter, the other, of the anti-variety–and add them together. Probably 180kg, assuming they are about the same size as we. You know, it doesn’t matter, because no matter how much mass they are, you end up multiplying it by c². What does c stand for? The fucking speed of light. That’s right. And you square it, which means that an incredibly huge amount of energy is locked up in matter. But we all knew that, right?

Wouldn’t it be ironic if NASA never got the funding to launch this machine, so we never discovered whether or not there were anti-matter galaxies, and then, say, a few years from now, some amazing energy source is found that allows us to travel between galaxies, and, wouldn’t you know it, the first galaxy that we travel to is made entirely of anti-matter? It could happen, people. It could happen, and won’t we all feel like dorks for not giving NASA their measly two billion dollars?

In other news, soon, the internet will be able to answer all of your questions. Finally! I’m so sick of the internet being totally useless. At long last, I never have to wade through google and wikipedia to find just about any information I could possibly hope for. I jest, of course, this thing looks totally keen.

Last but not least, since I’m a little strapped for time, let’s see if I can toss two stories into one sentence. Soon, you’ll be able to use your brand new, silicon invisibility cloak to avoid spiders that want to inject sperm into you with hypodermic penises. That is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.

Discuss.

Swine flu turned five today. And so maybe it’s strange that I want to talk about extrasolar planets, but that’s what I’m going to do. And while I’m at it, I think it’s important that I outline some of my credentials.

I picked up the January issue of Nature a few weeks ago and this was the cover story.

I am not a scientist by trade. I have a master’s degree in English and undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and English. I have what you might call a vested interest in science and the things it teaches us about the world. Apart from its cool factor, it has an utterly irresistible draw for me. I can’t help myself.

So as I was reading the article in Nature I was struck by how curious the language is. This is a journal for scientists, which, as I’ve stated, I am not. It is written by scientists and for scientists and so it uses a unique dialect of the English language that is known only to scientists. I read it about as well as I read German, which is to say that I can get the gist of just about anything that I read, but the finer details, oftentimes the deeper ramifications, the subtleties often elude me.

So what did I get out of reading the article in the magazine? That scientists had discovered a planet the size of Jupiter, but far more massive that had an eccentric elliptical orbit that brought it incredibly close to its sun so that it rapidly heated up and then slowly cooled off again as it traveled away. It’s an interesting thing to think of and it would be even more interesting to see it in action. Nay, it would be fucking awesome. But I have wondered since I read the article if there’s something I might have missed.

Lo and behold, I came across this in BBC’s science section. As it turns out, I grasped it pretty well. The BBC article, however, has the subtleties spelled out in language that laymen can understand. For instance, it points out that as this planet, HD 80606b, passes close to its star, it is closer than Mercury is to ours. It currently holds the record for most eccentric orbit of all discovered extra-solar planets.

What does this mean? Is this knowledge useful? This is the question that so much of this whole science thing hinges on. It has a cool-factor. That much is obvious. We are literally seeing planets in other solar system these days. That’s intense! And this is where that irresistible draw comes in. I can’t help myself. I consume this knowledge with the appetite of a brown bear in the springtime.

It’s interesting because I also have a subscription to Scientific American, which is a fantastic publication. The thing about Scientific American is that it is for the layman. Scientists don’t necessarily read it. It’s for people like us, enthusiasts who like science, but don’t have PhDs in the sciences.

And just for record, all you people who feel the same way, you are the people that I write for. You are not alone.

Discuss