esiegel | June 13, 2015"You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space." -Johnny Cash
This past week at Starts With A Bang saw quite a lot go down, and you were with me for all of it, including one of the toughest posts (as far as being out of my area-of-expertise) I've ever written. Here's what we've covered, in case you missed anything:
Does quantum gravity need string theory? (for Ask Ethan),
More to learn (about my June 22…
esiegel | June 12, 2015“Nothing is lost… Everything is transformed.” -Michael Ende
If you take all the kinetic motion out of a system, and have all the particles that make it up perfectly at rest, somehow even overcoming intrinsic quantum effects, you'd reach absolute zero, the theoretically lowest temperature of all. But what about the other direction? Is there a limit to how hot something can theoretically get?
Image credit: A.Greg; Wikimedia Commons user Greg L.
You might think not, that while things like molecules, atoms, protons and even matter will break down at high enough temperatures, you can always…
esiegel | June 11, 2015“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.” –Marcus Aurelius
There are four known fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. But while we often speak of gravitation as an attractive force between masses (or anything with energy), of the electric force as charged particles attracting or repelling, of quarks and gluons attracting one another and keeping nuclei bound together, we describe…
esiegel | June 10, 2015“When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.” -Niels Bohr
Shortly after the Big Bang, the first nuclear fusion reactions occurred in the Universe, filling it with hydrogen, helium, and little else. Billions of years later, huge numbers of stars have lived and died, creating copious amounts of heavy elements, running the full gamut of the periodic table.
Image credit: Theodore Gray, via http://theodoregray.com/periodictable/Posters/index.posters.html.
After all this time, hydrogen is…
esiegel | June 10, 2015Although physicists are well-known for their quirky personalities, the in-joke among ourselves is our extremely nerdy sense of humor, telling jokes about our field, our equations, and of course, the legends in our field. These range from the subtle (Schrodinger walks into a bar, and also he doesn't), to the mischievous (Heisenberg gets pulled over by a police car. "Do you know how fast you were going?" "I have no idea, officer, but I know exactly where I am!"), and beyond.
Image credit: Courtesy of peterdsmith.com.
But one of the field's most iconic personas -- Niels Bohr -- inspired a…
esiegel | June 9, 2015If we want to understand the Universe at a fundamental level -- all the forces on all scales -- the biggest obstacle facing us is to come up with a correct, consistent, testable and verifiable theory of quantum gravity. To no one's great surprise, we're not quite there yet.
Image credit: Lee Smolin's book at Amazon.
In 2001, Lee Smolin -- one of the leading thinkers in quantum gravity -- made the bold prediction that,
“We shall have the basic framework of the quantum theory of gravity by 2010, 2015 at the outside.”
While we're not at all there yet, it's still fascinating in its own right…
esiegel | June 7, 2015“The wonder is, not that the field of the stars is so vast, but that man has measured it.” -Anatole France
Wherever large, dense collections of cool gas gather together under the force of their own gravity, new stars are bound to form. Every galaxy goes through peaks and lulls in star formation, yet at any given time, one star cluster will always be the largest and most massive.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team.
Discovered only in the 1960s due to its location in the galactic plane, Westerlund 2 holds…
esiegel | June 7, 2015“There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.” -Jiddu Krishnamurti
If you want to learn something -- whether it's abstract or concrete, solving a problem or creating something -- that you don't already know, it often involves ridding yourself of your preconceptions of how such a thing ought to work. Often, it outright involves unlearning or overriding something you previously thought was true. Have a listen to Ray Lamontagne, as he…
esiegel | June 6, 2015"Men who wish to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details." -Heraclitus
This past week at Starts With A Bang put on quite a show, and you -- as always -- didn't disappoint. If you missed anything, here's what went on:
Learning to chill (a guest post from Paul Halpern),
Does a black hole have a shape? (a fascinating Astroquizzical from Jillian Scudder),
Muons, relativity & a new record? (for Ask Ethan),
Keep the Universe going (introducing our Patreon, for our Weekend Diversion),
Sunsets from space (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Pluto's unique moons, and
What would…
esiegel | June 5, 2015“I just think too many nice things have happened in string theory for it to be all wrong. Humans do not understand it very well, but I just don’t believe there is a big cosmic conspiracy that created this incredible thing that has nothing to do with the real world.” -Edward Witten
It's a difficult fact to accept: our two most fundamental theories that describe reality, General Relativity for gravitation and the Standard Model / Quantum Field Theory for the other three forces, are fundamentally incompatible with one another. When an electron moves through a double slit, for example, its…
esiegel | June 4, 2015They say ‘A flat ocean is an ocean of trouble. And an ocean of waves… can also be trouble.’ So, it’s like, that balance. You know, it’s that great Oriental way of thinking, you know, they think they’ve tricked you, and then, they have.” -Nigel Tufnel
When you travel towards an object like a moon, planet or star, the closer you get, the larger it appears. Halve the distance and its angular size doubles; reduce the distance to a quarter and it appears four times as large. But for black holes, their gravitation is so strong that relation no longer holds as you approach the event horizon.
Image…
esiegel | June 3, 2015“Movin’ right along.
You take it, you know best.
Hey, I’ve never seen the Sun come up in the West?” -The Muppet Movie
Few things in this world are as regular as sunrise and sunset. With the application of a little physics, you can predict exactly where and when the sun will rise or set from any location on Earth. Thus far, every world in our Solar System -- planet, moon and asteroid -- has had the exact same experience as us.
Image credit: NASA Ames / Dana Berry, of the LADEE spacecraft.
But out in the Kuiper belt, Pluto is different. The only known world in the Solar System where a…
esiegel | June 1, 2015“Lost — yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.” -Horace Mann
The beauty of a sunset (or sunrise) is rare and unique, happening but once a day for those of us on Earth. But aboard a spacecraft like the ISS, these are sights that happen sixteen times a day.
Image credit: NASA / Karen Nyberg / ISS Expedition 36/37.
And while we're used to dramatic, slow sunsets where it takes between two and three minutes simply for the Sun's disk to drop below the horizon, it takes mere seconds…
esiegel | May 31, 2015“The universe is big, its vast and complicated, and ridiculous. And sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles. And that’s the theory. 900 years, never seen one yet, but this would do me.” -Steven Moffat
They say that the best things in life are free, and I'm a firm believer in that. In fact, that's part of the reason I think the stories I'm always telling -- about the Universe, how it is, how we know it, and how it came to be -- should be free as well. But I'm not going to lie: in terms of effort, time, energy, and (for my contributors) money, telling…
esiegel | May 30, 2015"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own." -Georg C. Lichtenberg
There was so much action on Starts With A Bang this week, from darkness to the brightest lights, that it's going to be a bear choosing what to highlight from the comments. Here's what this past week saw:
The Universe's dark ages (for Ask Ethan),
The logic that stumped Brooklyn Nine-Nine (for our Weekend Diversion),
The largest eruption in the known Universe (for Mostly Mute Monday),
How to travel faster than light without really trying (a great piece from Brian Koberlein),
Will the LHC be…
esiegel | May 29, 2015“One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it’s unstable all around you.” -Tom Stoppard
You might best know Einstein for E=mc^2, but I would argue that the far greater contribution was the development of relativity. Think about the following: if you strike the upper atmosphere with a cosmic ray, you produce a whole host of particles, including muons. Despite having a mean lifetime of just 2.2 microseconds, and the speed of light being 300,000 km/s, those muons can reach the ground!
Image credit: Pierre Auger Observatory, via http://…
esiegel | May 29, 2015Does a black hole have a shape? Is there a front and back or side view? Does it look the same from all vantage points?
When you think about a black hole, you very likely think about a large amount of mass, pulled towards a central location by the tremendous force of gravity. It's not all that different from our own Sun, which is the largest mass in town. Some 300,000 times as massive as Earth, despite its rotation, the Sun is almost perfectly spherical, differing by less than 0.0001%.
Image credit: Gary Palmer, July 2005, using a violet calcium-K filter.
While black holes themselves may be…
esiegel | May 29, 2015The heat death of the Universe is the idea that increasing entropy will eventually cause the Universe to arrive at a uniformly, maximally disordered state. Every piece of evidence we have points towards our unfortunate, inevitable trending towards that end, with every burning star, every gravitational merger, and even every breath we, ourselves, take.
Image credit: the Carnot Cycle, courtesy of NASA.
Yet even while we head towards this fate, it may be possible for intelligence in an artificial form to continue in the Universe for an extraordinarily long time: possibly for as long as a…
esiegel | May 28, 2015“Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate. One thing at least is certain, light has weight. One thing is certain and the rest debate. Light rays, when near the Sun, do not go straight.” -Arthur Eddington
While we know full well today that Newtonian gravity is just an approximation to a more correct theory of gravity, you've got to remember that for over 200 years, it was unchallenged as the science that explained the entire Universe. When a simple puzzle -- the orbital mechanics of just one of the planets -- failed to line up with its predictions, it was assumed there was a problem with the…
esiegel | May 28, 2015“Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we’ve ever known.” –Ronald Reagan
Three years ago, Sally Ride -- the first American woman in space -- died of pancreatic cancer. This past week would have been her 64th birthday; she left us far too soon. It's easy, when we look back on her life, to consider what she accomplished, the barriers she broke, and who she was as a person and as a professional.
Image credit: Newsweek magazine.
But there's a legacy she left behind that's…