esiegel | October 2, 2010Mission control: You need to bend your knees a little more. Keep your head down.
Alan Shepard: I'm... wearing a space suit.
Mission control: Just trying to help.
Apollo 14, the third crew ever to land on the Moon, pulled one of the most iconic stunts of all time.
Along with Stuart Roosa (left) and Edgar Mitchel (right), commander Alan Shepard (center) became the first man to golf on another planet.
His famous quote, after hitting the ball squarely, was:
Miles and miles and miles.
But take a look at the video itself. It sure doesn't seem like that ball would've gone miles and miles and miles…
esiegel | September 29, 2010"Goldilocks was hungry. She tasted the porridge from the first bowl.
'This porridge is too hot!' she exclaimed.
So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl.
'This porridge is too cold,' she said.
So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge.
'Ahhh, this porridge is just right,' she said happily and she ate it all up." -Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Life as we know it on Earth all makes great use of one particular molecule in one particular phase:
Liquid water! Having a liquid phase to water requires an atmosphere with enough pressure (and something with even 1% of Earth's atmosphere will…
esiegel | September 27, 2010"I know all about neutrinos, and my friend here knows about everything else in astrophysics." -John Bahcall
Neutrinos are the most poorly understood particles in the standard model. Remember the standard model?
The standard model of elementary particles tells us what the fundamental constituents of matter and forces are in our Universe. We have the force carriers -- photons, gluons, W's and Z's, and the Higgs -- that are responsible for every force in the Universe except gravity. We've got the six quarks (up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top), that are responsible for the proton, the…
esiegel | September 26, 2010"You lost your way
I tried to find it for you
A brighter day to clear your name
The thing is where you are and
Where you're going is the same" -Storyhill
Those of you who've been listening to the songs I post each weekend may remember this week's band, Storyhill. (They have a new album out, BTW.) Here's a great song of theirs for you to listen to,
Give Up The Ghost.And this weekend, I do give it up. A recent XKCD comic accuses physicists of being incredibly annoying in the following fashion:
Ahem.
Well, I never...
Oh, wait. The most famous bit of work I've ever done here at Starts With A…
esiegel | September 24, 2010"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar." -Drew Carey
When you think of a galaxy, you probably think of a bright, dense core with huge, swirling outstretched spiral arms. Something, perhaps, like the Silverado Galaxy, below.
And while there are many galaxies like this, it isn't most of them! Oh, sure, most galaxies do have spiral arms, but they have something else, too. The Southern Pinwheel galaxy's got it,
the gorgeous NGC 1672's got it,
as does NGC 1300, which is directly face-on to us,
and some…
esiegel | September 23, 2010"But now it's gettin' late
And the moon is climbin' high.
I want to celebrate
See it shinin' in your eye." -Neil Young
The full Moon, beautiful as it is, isn't really all that rare!
Once every 29-30 days, the Moon returns to a completely full phase, where the entire "day side" of the Moon (the side lit up by the Sun) faces Earth.
In fact, our word "month" is named after the Moon, and -- unsurprisingly -- each of our 12 months has a special name for its full Moon. And traditionally, September's Moon, which typically (but not always) is the Moon closest to the Autumnal Equinox (for those of…
esiegel | September 22, 2010"Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules." -Douglas Adams
Every once in a while, a star in our own galaxy can do something to surprise us. Over in the constellation of the Unicorn lived a quiet, run-of-the-mill star named V838 Monocerotis. But in early 2002, it brightened incredibly rapidly, and the before-and-after pictures were rather astonishing.
What was initially thought to be a nova turned out to be much, much more fascinating by time the Hubble Space telescope got around to looking at it in May of 2002.
Warning: what you'…
esiegel | September 19, 2010"On the chess-board lies and hypocrisy do not survive long." -Emanuel Lasker
Along with art, music, math, and sports, it's well known that the game of Chess is one of the best activities a child can engage in to develop their mind. I can think of no better song than Kings and Queens by Loudon Wainwright III to lead you through this article, so here's a great little live version of it:
Kings and QueensAs someone who learned chess at age 5 and continues to play as an adult, I am positive that chess offers some things that almost no other competition does.
First off, chess is always a…
esiegel | September 17, 2010"I feel the earth move under my feet
I feel the sky tumbling down
I feel my heart start to trembling
Whenever you're around" -Carole King
I had so much fun earlier this week telling you about how we know that the heliocentric model is better than the geocentric one, that I thought I'd go a little farther down that rabbit-hole. You see, the first astronomical thing that any living creature likely notices is that, as seen from Earth, the Sun rises in the East each day and sets in the West.
(I don't want to hear it from you kids at the poles, either!)
The Sun, as it were, appears to move in…
esiegel | September 15, 2010"It doesn't matter what temperature the room is, it's always room temperature."
-Steven Wright
Far and away, one of the greatest things the Universe has ever created are dense clusters of galaxies!
The Coma Cluster, shown above, is a classic example of one of these colossal objects. (And as always, click on it for the huge version.) These giant clusters of galaxies contain over 1,000 galaxies that are Milky Way-sized or bigger, and span a few tens of millions of light years across space.
Compare that with our paltry local group of galaxies, where we have exactly two galaxies Milky Way-sized…
esiegel | September 13, 2010"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei
While practically every scientist (and 79% of Americans) accept that the Earth and the other planets go around the Sun, it isn't quite everyone. In fact, a number of people have recently pointed out the following conference to me.
That's right, this November, a group of people are going to get together and try to put together as convincing an argument as possible for geocentrism, or the model that the Sun (and all the other planets)…
esiegel | September 12, 2010"Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is; for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows." -Socrates
This weekend, I'm pleased to bring you a song by Wizz Jones, a British singer-songwriter who's been at it for over 50 years, yet who most people have never heard of. Have a listen to one of my favorite songs of his, about a man who returns from World War II and never quite makes peace with what happened.
Wizz Jones - Burma StarAnd one of the things that we need to make peace with, wherever any of us goes, is that…
esiegel | September 10, 2010"Consideration of particle emission from black holes would seem to suggest that God not only plays dice, but also sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen." -Stephen Hawking
Last week, I wrote about how high-energy cosmic rays strike Earth's atmosphere and wind up bombarding everything on Earth's surface with super-fast moving particles, some of which are even unstable!
In passing, I mentioned that these cosmic rays (mostly protons) come from a variety of sources, such as the Sun, neutron stars, supernova remnants, the centers of galaxies, and (everyone's favorite) black holes.
(…
esiegel | September 8, 2010"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return." -Unknown
Someone showed me a picture yesterday, and my initial reaction was simply, "WOW!" See for yourself:
But, as a physicist, I look at something like this and I immediately need to figure out what's going on here.
First off, you notice that this is clearly some type of fighter jet, being photographed from below with the Sun illuminating it from above. A little google-fu reveals that the silhouette matches that of an F-22…
esiegel | September 7, 2010"I saw for the first time the earth's shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. . . the feelings which filled me I can express with one word--joy." -Yuri Gagarin
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to do any type of heavy lifting, and the most extreme example of this is lifting something all the way up off of the Earth, out of the atmosphere, and into space!
And once you're up there, at least 300 km above the Earth's surface, the sights you've got are bound to…
esiegel | September 5, 2010"Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing." -Mark Knopfler
There are a whole bunch of great songs in the world, great for a myriad of different things. Some are great for dancing, others for jamming out to, still others for just relaxing and listening to, and then there are the ones that I love to blast while I drive. But it's extraordinarily rare to find one…
esiegel | September 3, 2010"We have been forced to admit for the first time in history not only the possibility but the fact of the growth and decay of the elements of matter. With radium and with uranium we do not see anything but the decay. And yet, somewhere, somehow, it is almost certain that these elements must be continuously forming. They are probably being put together now in the laboratory of the stars. ... Can we ever learn to control the process. Why not? Only research can tell." -Robert Millikan
Ah, energy, if only you were free, limitless, and easily accessible. If you were, we could do anything we wanted…
esiegel | September 1, 2010They will see us waving from such great heights
"Come down now," they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away
"Come down now," but we'll stay. -The Postal Service
It isn't the weekend, but I'd feel terrible showing you these pictures without giving you the right song to take you through it, so here's Iron & Wine's cover of a great song by The Postal Service:
Such Great Heights.Back in the early 1970s, the United States sent the first spacecraft, successfully, towards Mercury, the innermost planet of our Solar System. Before losing its functionality, Mariner 10 managed to…
esiegel | August 30, 2010"The whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent." -Douglas Adams
As many of you know, if you take a whole bunch of mass, and you've got nothing going on except gravity, it's going to gravitationally collapse. And if atoms, nuclei, pressure, and nuclear reactions don't (or can't) prevent that gravitational collapse from running away, you're going to wind up with a black hole.
But last week, I told you that if you took all the matter in the Universe and shaped it into a cylinder, you'd actually wind up with a huge cylinder of solid matter, as big…
esiegel | August 29, 2010They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up. -Martin Niemöller
Most of you reading this know me. How you know me may vary; some of you know me as a scientist, some as a science writer, as a professor, or maybe just a friend or acquaintance. But before I was any of those things, I was born a citizen of the United…