esiegel | November 9, 2016"Distinguishing the signal from the noise requires both scientific knowledge and self-knowledge." -Nate Silver
When you take a poll, you survey a number of people with an opinion about something in an attempt to predict the behavior of a much larger number of people. If you increase the number of people you poll, your poll uncertainty drops. This reduction in what we call a statistical error will mean your polls reflect the likely outcome better and better, given one assumption. You have to assume that data obtained from the people you’re polling are reflective of a random sample of future…
esiegel | November 8, 2016"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science." -Albert Einstein
When we first began looking for exoplanets, we were expecting that other solar systems would be like ours: with inner, small, rocky worlds and outer, large gas giants. What we found surprised us in a couple of ways. Not only could planets of any size appear anywhere, as they seem to, but the most common mass for a planet was somewhere between two and ten Earth masses, something we don’t have a single example of in our Solar…
esiegel | November 7, 2016"This is the plan. Get your ass to Mars, and go to the Hilton Hotel and flash the fake Brubaker I.D. at the front desk, that's all there is to it." -Hauser, Total Recall
There are many locations on Earth that look like they’d be right at home on another world. While from space, it’s incredibly evidence how different Mars and Earth are when you view the entire world, there are places on Earth that are virtually indistinguishable from our red neighbor.
Do these rocky outcroppings over an eroded, sandy valley occur on Earth or on Mars?
I’ve compiled 10 images that look like they could be from…
esiegel | November 6, 2016"Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose." -Dale Gribble, King of the Hill
Alright, so I know you're all impatient with the most burning Starts With A Bang! question of all: what was Ethan for Halloween? Well, without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to my avatar for the next 12 months: King Triton from Disney's The Little Mermaid!
With that said, I'm already thinking about the next Starts With A Bang podcast (maybe on parallel Universes?) and heading to the finish line of my next book, Treknology, about the real-life science behind the technological advances…
esiegel | November 5, 2016"Two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not yet completely sure about the universe." -Frederick S. Perls, quoting Einstein
The Universe we can see and access is certainly a big place. We see that it goes on for 46 billion light years in all directions, full of stars, galaxies, matter and radiation wherever we look, consistent with an origin in a hot Big Bang. But beyond what we can see, there ought to be more Universe just like our own, originating from either the same Big Bang, or possibly, if inflation is correct, from other Big Bangs at later or earlier times…
esiegel | November 4, 2016"The Universe is very, very big. It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules.
Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever. Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when someone says that their love will never die, it means that their love is not real, for everything that is real dies.
Rule number two: Everything lasts forever." -Craig Ferguson
When you think about the Standard Model of particle physics, you very likely think about all the matter, energy, particles, antiparticles, forces and interactions of the…
esiegel | November 3, 2016"Cosmology is the study of the origin, evolution, and fate of objects in the observable universe. [...] The key to the birth and evolution of such objects lies in the primordial ripples observed through light shining through from the early universe." -Wayne Hu
The Big Bang’s leftover glow -- the cosmic microwave background (CMB) -- is the great cosmic gift that keeps on giving. When it was first discovered in 1965, it validated the Big Bang and taught us that our Universe as-we-know-it had a birthday. When we measured that the CMB looked hotter in one direction and cooler in the opposite, we…
esiegel | November 2, 2016"The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised." -Carl Bernstein
Why is our Moon so unlike every other moon in the Solar System? No other moon is such a large percent of its parent planet’s mass or size; no other moon rotates so far afield of its planet’s rotational axis; no other moon orbits so far out of the planet-Sun plane. Yet our Moon does it all. The giant impact hypothesis might explain why the Moon is made of the same material as Earth,…
esiegel | November 1, 2016"All we know so far is what doesn't work." -Richard Feynman
The past month has seen a slew of papers out highlighting the tension between modified gravity and dark matter. Both recognize the same puzzles and problems with the Universe, and both ideas recognize that either one could be valid. In fact, if you look at the two greatest "crises" in gravity in the 19th century, it's arguable that dark matter (Neptune) solved one, the Uranus problem, while modifying gravity (with Einstein's general relativity) solved the other.
The X-ray (pink) and overall matter (blue) maps of various colliding…
esiegel | October 31, 2016“Cassini is different -- it's a mission of enormous scope and is being conducted in grand style. It is much more sophisticated than Voyager, ... I can't say it's got that flavor of romance, though. Voyager was very romantic. Cassini is spectacular.” -Carolyn Porco
It was a big enough mystery when Saturn’s hexagon was first discovered by going back to archival Voyager data, and then confirmed by Cassini. Over the past 36 years, Saturn’s hexagon has not only persisted, it’s remained completely unchanged in size, extent and speed over that time. An artifact of fluid dynamics and the wind speeds…
esiegel | October 30, 2016“Weightlessness was unbelievable. It's physical euphoria: Nothing about you has any weight. You don't realize that you are weighed down all the time by yourself, and your organs, and your head. Your arms weigh down your shoulders. In space simulation, you get to fly like Superman! You're hanging in the air! It's the coolest thing.” -Mary Roach
As October comes to an end, the nights grow longer (at least in the northern hemisphere) and Halloween approaches. There are wonders all around us, and the need to separate good science from bad. There's plenty in the rear-view mirror, like this month’s…
esiegel | October 29, 2016"This isn't my life anymore, Mulder. I'm done chasing monsters in the dark." -Dana Scully, X-files
One of the most exciting things a scientist can experience is when they look at a sample of data, expecting to not see a particular exciting effect, and yet, something’s there. Immediately, you have to check yourself: what are all the other things it could be? What are the mundane possibilities that could mimic that effect? And what can I do, if anything, to rule them out? Whenever you have a new idea, your main job, first and foremost, is to try and blow the biggest holes in it you possibly can…
esiegel | October 28, 2016“All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.” -Tacitus
Dark matter makes up the overwhelming majority of mass in the Universe. With five times as much of it as there is normal matter, and the fact that it doesn’t emit or absorb light but does interact gravitationally, it might seem like the perfect candidate to form black holes. After all, it’s named “dark matter” to begin with, and black holes are perhaps the darkest form of matter in the whole Universe.
While stars might cluster in the disk and…
esiegel | October 27, 2016"Even if I stumble on to the absolute truth of any aspect of the universe, I will not realise my luck and instead will spend my life trying to find flaws in this understanding - such is the role of a scientist." -Brian Schmidt
Just a few days ago, a new paper was published in the journal Scientific Reports claiming that the evidence for acceleration from Type Ia supernovae was much flimsier than anyone gave it credit for. Rather than living up to the 5-sigma standard for scientific discovery, the authors claimed that there was only marginal, 3-sigma evidence for any sort of acceleration,…
esiegel | October 26, 2016"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof." -J. K. Galbraith
Last month, tensions between dark matter simulations and galactic rotation observations reached a new high. Despite all the successes of dark matter on the largest scales -- for the CMB, for large-scale structure, for gravitational lensing and for galaxy clusters, among others -- the simplest dark matter simulations reproduced unrealistic results for how individual galaxies ought to rotate. Moreover, a team of scientists uncovered a…
esiegel | October 25, 2016"Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us?" -Michael Shermer
One of the problems with the Standard Model of particle physics is known as the hierarchy problem. If you were to calculate the masses of the fundamental particles from first principles, you’d get something on the order of the only natural mass scale that nature provides: the Planck mass, at 10^19 GeV or so. With a lower mass value, the Higgs can account for the smallness of the other masses, but at just 125 GeV, there needs to be some…
esiegel | October 24, 2016"If you look at the field of robotics today, you can say robots have been in the deepest oceans, they've been to Mars, you know? They've been all these places, but they're just now starting to come into your living room. Your living room is the final frontier for robots." -Cynthia Breazeal
Ever since we first began observing Mars up close, there was well-founded speculation that there was a watery past. What appeared to be water-ice features and water-based clouds were abundant, and indirect clues like sedimentary rock, dried-up riverbeds and deposits that appeared to have a watery origin…
esiegel | October 23, 2016"Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision..." -Iain Banks
And while we can't travel back in time at all to change the actions or events of the past, our incomplete knowledge of the past can always be improved as we move forward. This month's Starts With A Bang podcast is one of the most fun of all, as we cover how we went from mere lower limit estimates of how many galaxies are in the Universe to the first true,…
esiegel | October 22, 2016"Do I believe, for example, that by using magic I could fly? No. How would you get around gravity? Impossible. Do I believe that I might be able to project my consciousness into a very, very vivid simulation of flying? Yeah. Yes, I've done that. Yes, that works." -Alan Moore
If you possessed a computer with enough power, you could conceivably simulate the entire Universe. From the inception of the Big Bang, you could compute the positions and momenta of every particle and every interaction over time, across all 13.8 billion years. If your simulation was good enough, you could even account for…
esiegel | October 21, 2016"I know perfectly well that at this moment the whole universe is listening to us, and that every word we say echoes to the remotest star." -Jean Giraudoux
Since the 1930s, humans have been broadcasting radio signals powerful enough to be picked up by a sufficiently advanced alien civilization, even one located many light years away. In 1960, we began monitoring the skies for a similar incoming message, armed with the knowledge that if a civilization were transmitting the same type of signals our radio and TV broadcasts consisted of, we’d be able to unambiguously detect them.
The reach of our…