esiegel | October 28, 2012"Where there is no imagination there is no horror." -Arthur Conan Doyle
Halloween, for those of you who've been here a while, is my favorite holiday. Every year for the past dozen years now, I've dressed up as whatever I've wanted for Halloween. And -- if you haven't seen the pattern yet -- it's almost always a partially-clothed, revered hero (or villain) from when I was a young child. In case you haven't figured out what character I've chosen for my Halloween costume this year, maybe this piece of music will make it more clear, from the video game
Street Fighter II.
It takes a bit of courage…
esiegel | October 26, 2012"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." -Niels Bohr
What's going to happen next? It's perhaps the most important thing to know if we want to be prepared for practically anything in our lives. And without even thinking about it, most of us are actually very good at this in a huge number of aspects of our lives. For example...
Image credit: Crazy Adventures in Parenting.
I was hungry at work today, and I was prepared for it. Somehow, I knew that I was going to need food throughout the course of the day, and so I was prepared for it by bringing food from home. This…
esiegel | October 24, 2012"The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees" -They Might Be Giants
It's so ingrained in us that the Sun is a nuclear furnace powered by hydrogen atoms fusing into heavier elements that it's difficult to remember that, just 100 years ago, we didn't even know what the Sun was made out of!
Image credit: Landscape Photography by Barney Delaney.
The conventional wisdom at the time, believe it or not, was that the Sun was made out of pretty much the same elements that the Earth is! Although that…
esiegel | October 22, 2012"This nebula had such a resemblance to a comet in its form and brightness that I endeavored to find others, so that astronomers would not confuse these same nebulae with comets just beginning to shine." -Charles Messier
Let's take a journey back in time to when our known Universe was a lot smaller. The only planets discovered were Mercury through Saturn: the naked eye planets. The well-known objects were our Moon, the (naked-eye) planets and their moons, and the stars and the Sun. After those, the only new objects that were routinely hunted in the night sky were those two-tailed recurring…
esiegel | October 21, 2012"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." -Pablo Picasso
People find artistic inspiration from a plethora of different sources, ranging from the very complex to the extremely simple. This weekend, I'd like to share with you one of the most stunning, simple artistic constructions I've ever seen. For some reason, the song I'd like to share with you to take you through it is 1990s rapper Skee-Lo's take on a School House Rock classic,
The Tale of Mr. Morton.
Using…
esiegel | October 20, 2012"I spent every night until four in the morning on my dissertation, until I came to the point when I could not write another word, not even the next letter. I went to bed. Eight o'clock the next morning I was up writing again." -Abraham Pais, physicist
You've been in graduate school for many years now, and you've come a long way. You've completed all of your coursework, formed your Ph.D. thesis committee, passed your preliminary/oral/qualifying examinations, and have done an awful lot of research along the way. There's a glimmer of hope in your heart that maybe -- just maybe -- this will be…
esiegel | October 17, 2012"The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other." -James Smithson
The entirety of the known Universe -- from the smallest constituents of the atoms to the largest superclusters of galaxies -- have more in common than you might think.
Image credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo of http://blog.deepskycolors.com/about.html.
Although the scales differ by some 50 orders of magnitude, the laws that govern the grandest scales of the cosmos are the very same laws that govern the tiniest particles and their interactions with one another on the…
esiegel | October 15, 2012“The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to set a limit to infinite error.” -Bertolt Brecht
One of the most frequent questions I get about the Universe -- as a cosmologist -- isn't quite about the Big Bang in and of itself.
The expansion of the Universe in reverse; image source unknown.
The Big Bang is a remarkable idea, of course, that says that, based on the observations that the Universe is expanding and cooling today, it was hotter, denser, and physically smaller in the past. This gets particularly exciting when we extrapolate very far back in the history of…
esiegel | October 14, 2012"History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again." -Carl Sagan
From the streets and people of our hometown to the nations, planets, stars and galaxies (and beyond) of our Universe, there's an immensity of knowledge to be gained from a single human lifetime, if only we have the courage to let go of our preconceptions and discover it. Laura Viers might tell you that in her own way in her 2005 song,
Galaxies.
But no one is born with this knowledge; it takes hard…
esiegel | October 11, 2012"A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth." -Ernst Mach
Our Sun, like all Sun-like stars, will come to the end of its life someday. All the hydrogen fuel in its core will eventually burn up, and when this happens, the core itself will begin to contract. When temperatures are finally high enough, the end product of hydrogen fusion -- Helium-4 -- will begin to fuse in the contracted core, and the Sun will expand into a Red Giant.
Image credit: Northwestern…
esiegel | October 10, 2012"It's Dr. Evil, I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called "mister," thank you very much." -Dr. Evil, from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Graduate school is hard work, and Ph.D. programs in Physics and Astronomy are some of the most demanding and competitive ones out there. It's well-known that it's incredibly difficult to strike a good work/life balance while you're in graduate school, and that between classes, homework, reading, research, and any teaching or service duties you may have, you cannot expect to spend only 40 hours a week on all of your…
esiegel | October 8, 2012"When I was having that alphabet soup, I never thought that it would pay off." -Vanna White
Ever want an A-to-Z illustrated alphabet of astrophysics? Turns out that -- other than writing your own via Galaxy Zoo -- it doesn't yet exist. So I thought it would be delightful to make one for you... right now!
Image credit: Flickr user Image Editor / 11304375@N07.
A is for Aurora, polar lights fast and slow,
the Sun's hot electrons make the atmosphere glow.
Image credit: Andrew Hamilton of JILA / Colorado, http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/schw.html.
B is for Black hole, a star's…
esiegel | October 7, 2012"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." -Carl Jung
During the daytime, light is plentiful and abundant, and the majority of our waking lives are optimized for that. But more and more of us are active late into the dark hours, when -- as Owen Pallett (formerly Final Fantasy) would tell us -- the last of
Your Light is Spent.
Unfortunately for us, our bodies are accustomed to certain types of light during the day, and expect a different type of night at light.
Image credit: TableTop Studio Ltd or LLC.
Because there's a…
esiegel | October 5, 2012"It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!" -George Gamow
Earlier today, a video (from last month) was released where one of the members of the US House of Representative -- a member who sits on the House Committee for Science, Space and Technology -- proudly proclaimed the following:
"All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the big bang theory; all of that is lies straight from the pit of hell." -Paul Broun
Well, if the Big Bang is a lie from the pit of hell, then the Universe…
esiegel | October 4, 2012“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.” -Joan of Arc
Regardless of what intrinsic differences any person or group of people have from another, everyone deserves to be treated as an individual, afforded the same opportunities to pursue their passions, goals and dreams, and evaluated on the merits of their performance. Although this is not yet the way the world works, I am confident that many strides are consistently being made in the right direction, and I was…
esiegel | October 1, 2012"Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed." -Samuel Johnson
But the stars, as opposed to humans, are born shining, with hundreds (or more) of brothers and sisters, shine ever more brightly over their lifetimes, and die in spectacular fashion. As far as we can tell, here's the past, present and future story of all the Sun-like stars in our galaxy.
Bok Globule Barnard 175; image credit by Jerry Lodriguss of http://www.astropix.com/.
At some point in the far distant past, every star in our galaxy was once no more than a molecular cloud of gas, with gravity attempting…
esiegel | September 30, 2012“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” -Rudyard Kipling
You might not believe it, but when I was a kid, I hated writing. Absolutely hated it. And it wasn't because I didn't have anything to write, or because I didn't enjoy communicating my thoughts, or because I didn't like the written word, because I always enjoyed reading. Perhaps because I was a lefty with bad handwriting, I felt that the entire enterprise of writing was against me.
Image credit: samarth over at MemeCenter.
Of course, that was my issue to work through, and not only do I write all…
esiegel | September 28, 2012"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell
One of the bravest things that was ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope was to find a patch of sky with absolutely nothing in it -- no bright stars, no nebulae, and no known galaxies -- and observe it. Not just for a few minutes, or an hour, or even for a day. But orbit-after-orbit, for a huge amount of time, staring off into the nothingness of empty space, recording image after image of pure darkness.
What would we find, out beyond the limits of what…
esiegel | September 26, 2012"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The great nebular structures stretching across our galaxy are evidence of the birth and deaths of stars, or so I -- an astrophysicist -- have been telling you. But an apparently void region of our sky was discovered to house a nebula so remarkable, that I never would have imagined it could exist in the heavens.
Image credit: a 10-degree field-of-view on the sky, created with Stellarium.
Just a degree or two away from the…
esiegel | September 25, 2012"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." -Albert Einstein
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." -William Arthur Ward
On one side of the room, the interviewer's palms begins to sweat. Although the young man has done his research, his guest is unpredictable. His guest has an agenda, his guest has a polarizing position on a very divisive issue, and his guest may lie or make up facts right there on the spot. The moderator will step aside once the debate commences,…