esiegel | April 21, 2015The biggest, most surprising revolution that came along with the development of quantum theory, quantum mechanics and later, quantum field theory, was the overthrowing of the idea of a deterministic Universe, replacing it with a Universe where only a probability distribution of outcomes could be theoretically known, even if you knew all the initial conditions of a system.
Image credit: Institute of Physics (IOP), via http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/apr/16/alice-and-bob-comm….
But one of the most intriguing concepts to come along with this was borne out through Niels Bohr's…
esiegel | April 21, 2015When you look out at the nebulae in the night sky -- especially if you're seeing them with your eye through a telescope for the first time -- you might be in for a big surprise.
Image credit: Chris Spratt of http://www.islandnet.com/.
These faint, fuzzy, extended objects are far dimmer, sparser and more cloud-like than almost anyone expects. Yet thanks to some incredible image processing, assigning colors to different wavelengths and adjusting the contrast, we can make out detailed structures beyond what even your aided eye could ever hope to perceive.
Hubble images of M57 taken at…
esiegel | April 19, 2015“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.” -Carl Sagan
The Universe is filled with a wide variety of stars, planets, galaxies and other optical phenomenon. Despite the fact that there are no such things as green stars, on rare occasions, galaxies themselves appear to be emitting isolated green wisps into intergalactic space.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levay (STScI), with science by NASA, ESA, and W. Keel…
esiegel | April 19, 2015“Exploring this set I certainly never had the feeling of invention. I never had the feeling that my imagination was rich enough to invent all those extraordinary things on discovering them. They were there, even though nobody had seen them before. It’s marvelous, a very simple formula explains all these very complicated things. So the goal of science is starting with a mess, and explaining it with a simple formula, a kind of dream of science.” -Benoit Mandelbrot
Sure, there are things we can say or describe, whether mathematically, physically or in words. But sometimes, you need a lot more…
esiegel | April 18, 2015“Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.” -Laurence J. Peter
This past week was a super busy one on Starts With A Bang, from dark energy to stars to a fabulous book review and more! Just in the last seven days, we’ve looked at:
What if dark energy isn't real? (for Ask Ethan),
The great yogurt tragedy (for our Weekend Diversion),
The cosmic sombrero (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Einstein, Schrödinger, and the story you never heard (a review of Paul Halpern's new book),
What the hell are baryon acoustic oscillations?, and
Is the Universe fine-…
esiegel | April 17, 2015“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” -Terry Pratchett
If you want, you can imagine back in the Universe to a time before it looked anything like ours did. Before there was life, before there were planets, galaxies, stars, or even neutral atoms. Yet going back even to those times, there was still light, and there were still photons.
Image credit: the Cosmic Microwave Background of Penzias and Wilson, via http://astro.kizix.org/decouverte-du-17-mars-2014-sur-le-…
esiegel | April 16, 2015“There is a voice inside of you
That whispers all day long,
‘I feel this is right for me,
I know that this is wrong.’” -Shel Silverstein
It's pretty obvious that the Universe exists in such a way that it admits the possibility of intelligent life arising. After all, we're here, we're intelligent life, and we're in this Universe. So at minimum, the Universe must exist in such a way that it's physically possible for us to have arisen.
Image credit: Chris Cook of http://www.abmedia.com/astro/.
But are there physically interesting things we can learn about the Universe from this line of…
esiegel | April 15, 2015“If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.” -Philip K. Dick
When it comes to measuring the expansion history of the Universe, the concept is simple enough: take something you know about an object, like a mass, a size, or a brightness, then measure what the mass, size or brightness appears to be, and suddenly, you know how far away that object has to be.
Image credit: European Space Agency, NASA, Keren Sharon (Tel-Aviv University) and Eran Ofek (CalTech).
Add in a measurement of the object's redshift, and you can figure out not only what the expansion rate of the…
esiegel | April 14, 2015“I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it.” -Schrödinger
Ever think that if we just pitted enough intelligence at a particular problem, we'd be bound to solve it? That was certainly the approach that two of the greatest minds in history -- Einstein and Schrödinger -- took, when it came to the very nature of our Universe.
Image credit: Benjamin Couprie, Institut International de Physique de Solvay, of the 1927 Solvay Conference.
Yet no amount of intelligence will get you to the solution if you make an assumption about the Universe that isn't consistent with physical…
esiegel | April 13, 2015“Since man, fragment of the universe, is governed by the same laws that preside over the heavens, it is by no means absurd to search there above for the themes of our lives, for those frigid sympathies that participate in our achievements as well as our blunderings.” -Marguerite Yourcenar
Galaxies are everywhere we look in the Universe, clustered together in groups and separated by voids. It stands to reason that if we look beyond the local group, one of those galaxies would have to be the brightest. But the one that is turns out to be most unusual.
Image composite credit: X-ray: NASA/UMass/…
esiegel | April 12, 2015“My love for you would blot out the sun like a cloud made out of yogurt. I hope you brought a spoon.” -Jarod Kintz
There's so much we take for granted in the world, that often we don't appreciate how important sticking together is. Let Robert Plant and Alison Krauss remind you, with their joint song,
Stick With Me Baby.
By the same token, sticking together isn't something that's always desirable.
Image credit: Fox News, via http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2012/03/24/8-uses-for-yogurt-containers/.
Sure, how convenient and simple it is to have something as labor intensive delivered to you in…
esiegel | April 11, 2015“The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact.” -William Hurt
There was so much that happened this past week on Starts With A Bang, from eruptions to bad science reporting to black holes and more, that we couldn't help but share so much with you! Just in the last seven days, we've taken on the following:
Why are all the planets in the same plane? (for Ask Ethan),
An unforgettable time-lapse volcano,
Reverse-pointillist art (for our Weekend Diversion),
The largest star in the Universe (for Mostly Mute Monday),
The LHC made simple,
The…
esiegel | April 11, 2015“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.” -Robert Frost
We've come to believe that we know the fate of the Universe: that dark energy will drive distant galaxies and clusters apart, leaving only the objects that are already gravitationally bound together intact.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Through the use of type Ia supernovae as standard candles, we've been able to trace out the…
esiegel | April 9, 2015“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” -Joseph Campbell
When we look at the centers of galaxies, it's no surprise that there are large black holes there, millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun.
Image credit: Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), Hubble Space Telescope (green), Spitzer Space Telescope (pink), & GALEX (purple).
As we look farther and farther away, and hence farther back in time, we'd expect these masses to be much smaller. But what we find is that we have supermassive black…
esiegel | April 9, 2015“The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it’s scientific truth or historical truth or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based. And if you can’t find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don’t deserve to wear that uniform!” -Captain Picard
The scientific story of the Universe is a remarkable one. All at once, it's exciting, it's the very frontiers of knowledge and discovery, and and it's always going forward. As time goes on, we're continuously discovering new things that surprise us, and it's…
esiegel | April 8, 2015“Let them see that their words can cut you and you’ll never be free of the mockery. If they want to give you a name, take it, make it your own. Then they can’t hurt you with it anymore.” -George R.R. Martin
Well, it's finally happened! After a two year upgrade, the LHC is back in business, running again, colliding protons and set to ramp up to a record-setting 13 TeV collision energy between the two beams!
Image credit: CERN / ATLAS Collaboration, via http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/collisions….
What will we find? How will we find it? And why do we have a…
esiegel | April 6, 2015“The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” -Lao Tzu
With hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, you'd think the largest star we've ever discovered would be in the most intense star-forming regions here, perhaps towards the galactic center. It's a good thought, as we've discovered stars up to 175 solar masses there, but it's wrong.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, ESO, D. Lennon and E. Sabbi (ESA/STScI), J. Anderson, S. E. de Mink, R. van der Marel, T. Sohn, and N. Walborn (STScI), N. Bastian (Excellence Cluster, Munich), L. Bedin (INAF, Padua), E. Bressert (ESO), P. Crowther…
esiegel | April 5, 2015“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” -Pablo Picasso
When you think about representing something physical in an artistic medium, you usually think of starting with a blank canvas and adding to it. Such is the case with musicians, who start with silence and add to it, like Tony Trischka as he plays his remarkable composition,
French Creek / Burning Springs.
But every once in a while, you discover a new form of art, where subtraction -- or even destruction -- is the medium of communication.
Image credit: Jihyun Park, working on a reverse-pointillist masterpiece, via http://…
esiegel | April 4, 2015“It’s tempting to go to the throat of the volcano to get the data, because if you do you’re a hero … It’s a battle between your mind and your emotions. If your emotions win out, you can get yourself in a lot of trouble.” -Ken Wohletz
Back on Monday, I shared with you the incomparable story of volcanic lightning. Little did I know that the night before, Colima volcano in Mexico had just started to erupt.
Image credit: César Cantú.
And another thing I had no way of knowing: world-class astrophotographer César Cantú was there to capture it, taking numerous shots of a spectacular eruption,…
esiegel | April 4, 2015"The simple fact of existence, of being aware that you are aware; this to me is the most astounding fact." -William Hurt
It's amazing how quickly a week can go by, yet equally amazing how much a week can contain. First the first time since we've begun having contributor posts here at Starts With A Bang, we had not one or two, but four of them this week, resulting in one of the most fruitful sets of articles we've ever had. Here's what went down (and what you should catch up on, if you missed anything):
Could you crawl out of a black hole? (for Ask Ethan),
Why cons matter (for our Weekend…