esiegel | July 25, 2017"Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
The enterprise of science is one of the most misunderstood in all of society. Some view it as its own religion; others view it as a political ideology gussied up in smart-sounding clothes; still others view it as open to interpretation. But science is none of those things, and is rather the full suite of knowledge humanity has accumulated along with our process of discovery, investigation, and ongoing hard work.
Astronaut candidates Tyler N. (Nick) Hague, Andrew R. Morgan and Nicole A…
esiegel | July 24, 2017“Some people think that the truth can be hidden with a little cover-up and decoration. But as time goes by, what is true is revealed, and what is fake fades away.” -Ismail Haniyeh
Have you ever seen some beautiful, breathtaking, awe-inspiring pictures of the Universe, with what appears to be a too-good-to-be-true view? While there are some real, spectacular pictures out there, there are even more pictures claiming to be something other than what they are. Oftentimes, nature’s most beautiful sights are captured earnestly, and then ruined by someone sharing out a fake version, passing it off as…
esiegel | July 23, 2017"I have never gone out of fashion. And do you know why? Because I never sought it. When you don't seek it, it's always with you." -Bonnie Tyler
Well folks, it's summer, and that means a lot of things for a lot of people, including for me! So, some fun announcements:
I have an official pre-release poster! Image credit: Quarto Publishing.
My new book, Treknology, is coming out soon and I'm big into preparing for that right now! The design is finalized, I should be getting my first preview copy this coming week, and I've just gotten my tickets to attend the official Star Trek convention in…
esiegel | July 22, 2017"Weakness of character is the only defect which cannot be amended." -Francois de La Rochefoucauld
So, you’d like to ruin the fabric of your space, would you? Similar to tying a knot in it, stitching it up with some poorly-run shenanigans, running a two-dimensional membrane through it (like a hole in a sponge), etc., it’s possible to put a topological defect in the fabric of space itself. This isn’t just a mathematical possibility, but a physical one: if you break a symmetry in just the right way, monopoles, strings, domain walls, or textures could be produced on a cosmic scale.
The…
esiegel | July 21, 2017“If I had to describe myself to an alien I’d say I was bigger than the average human, enjoy a drink or two with a good meal and have a bigger head than most. I’d also say I’m really handsome — especially if they were a female alien.” -Dwayne Johnson
The Earth, to the best of our knowledge, is the only inhabited world we have. The ingredients for life may be everywhere, from asteroids to nebulae to exoplanets and more, but so far, only Earth is confirmed to have life. While Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars at the right distance for liquid water on their surface might seem like the best…
esiegel | July 20, 2017"Lord of Light! Come to us in our darkness. We offer you these false gods. Take them and cast your light upon us. For the night is dark and full of terrors." -Melisandre, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice
Imagine a world where you know that winter is coming, but you don’t know when, or for how long, or how severe it will be. Sounds like fiction, doesn’t it? In our own solar system, where planets orbit a single star in elliptical, well-separated orbits, this is extraordinarily unlikely. But if a binary giant planet existed in the habitable zone, and a world like Earth orbited both of…
esiegel | July 19, 2017"We really expect the mission to be transformational. This is the capstone of the original visits to the planets. It takes us 4 billion miles away and 4 billion years back in time." -Alan Stern
When the Hubble Space Telescope discovered additional moons of Pluto, beyond Charon, it was speculated that New Horizons might find more. After all, objects more than ten times as far away as Hydra, Pluto’s outermost moon, would still be in stable orbits. Yet, with five inner moons and nothing beyond, not even diffuse rings, the spacecraft came up empty.
This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space…
esiegel | July 18, 2017"The design of the universe...is very magnificent and shouldn’t be taken for granted." -Charles W. Misner
One of the more puzzling aspects of our Universe is that, no matter which direction we look in, no matter how far away we check, its properties appear to be practically identical. This is surprising, since no signal can reach from one disconnected region to another, and yet the Universe behaves as if everything began from the same initial state. We refer to this as the horizon problem.
If these three different regions of space never had time to thermalize, share information or transmit…
esiegel | July 17, 2017“Having totality means being capable of following 'what is,' because 'what is' is constantly moving and constantly changing. If one is anchored to a particular view, one will not be able to follow the swift movement of 'what is.'” -Bruce Lee
If you’ve never seen a total solar eclipse before, you’ve likely heard about many of the features to look for, like the sky darkening during the day, the Sun disappearing, and the solar corona and, occasionally, stars becoming visible during the day. But if you take an enhanced view, either with binoculars, a telescope, or photography, so much more…
esiegel | July 16, 2017“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.” -Isaac Asimov
Just like every week, we've had a slew of new stories to share with you here on Starts With A Bang! It's been great fun to put these stories together, to share a new corner of the Universe with you, and to explore what's going on at the frontiers of science together. Want to take a look at everything that' happened, in case you missed anything? Let's take a look:
How close are we to a theory of everything? (for Ask Ethan),
Jupiter's Great Red Spot gets its first-…
esiegel | July 15, 2017"It would be great some day to have astronauts in a rover on Mars. But just about anyone except an oil company executive would say its more important to have 50 million solar powered vehicles in the United States." -Brad Sherman
Is terraforming a real possibility for Mars? It seems like one of the most inhospitable places we could have asked for: cold, small, barren, devoid of liquid water, with only a thin atmosphere, and with soil that’s toxic to terrestrial lifeforms. Yet Mars was once a wet, thriving planet, teeming with all the potential for life that an early Earth once possessed.
A…
esiegel | July 14, 2017“Gamow was fantastic in his ideas. He was right, he was wrong. More often wrong than right. Always interesting; … and when his idea was not wrong it was not only right, it was new.” -Edward Teller
100 years ago, our conception of the Universe was so small it's almost laughable. We still were mired in Newtonian thought, conceiving only of the stars within our own Milky Way, with a Universe that was perceived as static and unchanging, and where the stars which made it up perhaps even lived forever. Yet today, we have a Universe that's expanding, cooling, full of dark matter and dark energy, and…
esiegel | July 13, 2017"The discovery of deuterium and the marked differences in the physical and chemical properties of hydrogen and deuterium, together with an efficient method for the separation of these isotopes, have opened an interesting field of research in several of the major branches of science." -Harold Urey
By time the first few minutes of the Big Bang are over, the Universe has formed all the elements it’s ever going to form until the first stars are born. At that point, the Universe is made out of 75% hydrogen and 25% helium, with only tiny, trace amounts of other isotopes and elements like deuterium…
esiegel | July 12, 2017
“Jupiter instead cooled down below the threshold for fusion, but it maintained enough heat and mass and pressure to cram atoms very close together, to the point they stop behaving like the atoms we recognize on earth. Inside Jupiter, they enter a limbo of possibility between chemical and nuclear reactions, where planet-sized diamonds and oily hydrogen metal seem plausible.” -Sam Kean
On Monday, July 10th, the Juno spacecraft reached Perijove, or its closest approach to Jupiter, for the seventh time. Reaching a minimum elevation of only 3,500 km (2,200 miles), it found its images distorted…
esiegel | July 12, 2017"There would be no Star Trek unless there were transporter malfunctions." -LeVar Burton
Since way before even Star Trek, the idea of teleportation was featured in Shakespeare, The Arabian Nights, and even the Jewish Talmud. To disappear at one location and reappear at another has long been a science-fiction dream of humanity, but science has, thus far, declared it to be impossible. Nevertheless, there are some quantum technologies that are progressing that may, at least, enable the teleportation of the information encoding any system.
If two particles are entangled, they have complementary…
esiegel | July 11, 2017"In the current cosmological model, only the three lightest elements were created in the first few minutes after the Big Bang; all other elements were produced later in stars." -Fumagalli, O'Meara and Prochaska, 2011
When it was first conceived, the idea of the Big Bang was spectacular for the fact that it made three incredibly distinct predictions, ranging from the largest scales down to the smallest. As we looked from million to billions of light years away, we should find that the Universe expands at a rate that changes depending on what’s in it; there should be a leftover, uniform glow in…
esiegel | July 10, 2017"Juno will peer hundreds of miles downward into the atmosphere with its microwave radiometer, which passively senses heat coming from within the planet. This capability will enable Juno to reveal the deep structure of the Great Red Spot, along with other prominent Jovian features, such as the colorful cloud bands." -Tricia Talbert
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one of the enduring mysteries and wonders of our Solar System. The spot was first identified back in 1665, was unseen for over 100 years between 1713 and 1830, and has been continuously observed ever since. The hurricane-like winds exceed…
esiegel | July 9, 2017“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” -Abraham Lincoln
As you've come to expect, it's been another fantastic week of science here on Starts With A Bang!? There's a chance I'll be in Las Vegas next month for the official Star Trek convention, and in addition to all we're doing, there's a chance that there will be a new YouTube video series coming out that features me and the fusion of sci-fi/fantasy with science. Sounds fun? You bet it does! Also, for those of you in and around Portland, OR, join me at 2 PM at the Oregon Historical Society today to catch my…
esiegel | July 8, 2017"Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard." -Robert Jackson
Ever since we began uncovering the laws of nature, humanity has looked for a way to simplify them. We attempt to create an overarching framework that encapsulates all the different particles, interactions, forces, and concepts into a single, unified, simpler structure. From this, then, we can derive all the non-fundamental laws and rules, obtaining the complex Universe we see today.
The idea of…
esiegel | July 7, 2017“Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.” -Alfred A. Montapert
So you’re passing by a black hole in a massive, fast-moving spaceship, and you want to do an experiment: you tether a small mass outside of the ship and let it fall into the black hole, just allowing it the tiniest bit inside, while your ship takes off to try and escape. If you can keep the tether from breaking and your ship from getting stretched apart, what’s going to happen?
Even something as massive as a star, if brought too close to a black hole, will find itself stretched-and-compressed into a…