esiegel | September 26, 2011"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that." -Richard Feynman
Last week, a collaboration of 160 scientists working in Italy wrote a paper claiming that their experiment shows neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. Although I wrote up some initial thoughts on the matter, and there are plenty of other excellent takes, we're ready to go into even deeper…
esiegel | September 24, 2011"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it." -Anais Nin
We're all used to trusting our senses for information about this world. And while there are certainly plenty of illusions that lead us astray, they almost always come up as tricks that our eyes play on us. Take a listen to the Jazz classic by Wes Montgomery,
The Trick Bag,as you prepare yourself for a whole new illusion that involves your ears!
Image credit: Elizabeth Johnston.
You all know how to…
esiegel | September 22, 2011"Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news, which follows its own rules." -Douglas Adams
My inbox is on fire today with messages about this story about neutrinos breaking the speed of light:
What's going on here? A group (a large group, mind you) of physicists known as the OPERA collaboration have made a neutrino beam, and have been studying it for the past few years.
Making a neutrino beam is the easiest type of beam to make, by the way. All you do is shoot a bunch of high-energy particles into the Earth, like so.
Image credit: CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso…
esiegel | September 22, 2011"A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of wonders. A fact will fit every other fact in the universe, and that is how you can tell whether it is or is not a fact. A lie will not fit anything except another lie."
-Robert Green Ingersoll
One of the most amazing facts to comprehend about the Universe is that it actually is comprehensible! A few basic laws, properties and particles, given our current understanding, can take us from a hot, dense, nearly uniform Universe to the complexity of the billions of stars within the billions of galaxies we see today…
esiegel | September 21, 2011"When Columbus lived, people thought that the earth was flat. They believed the Atlantic Ocean to be filled with monsters large enough to devour their ships, and with fearful waterfalls over which their frail vessels would plunge to destruction. Columbus had to fight these foolish beliefs in order to get men to sail with him. He felt sure the earth was round."
-Emma Miler Bolenius, American Schoolbook Author, 1919
One of the most enduring myths that children grow up with is the idea that Columbus was the only one of his time who believed that the Earth was round; everyone else believed it was…
esiegel | September 19, 2011"After all, the universe required ten billion years of evolution before life was even possible; the evolution of the stars and the evolving of new chemical elements in the nuclear furnaces of the stars were indispensable prerequisites for the generation of life." -John Polkinghorne
There are close to a whopping 1028 atoms in your body. And while just over half of them are hydrogen atoms, all the rest of them -- from Lithium to Uranium -- were made inside of stars, and ejected back out into the Universe, where, billions of years later, they made you.
Image credit: Ed Uthman.
In fact, a great…
esiegel | September 17, 2011"When you roll around in the mud with a pig, you both get dirty, and the pig enjoys it." -Old Folk Wisdom
One of the things I've learned over the time I've been blogging is that, no matter what position you take on any issue, whether it's science, politics, religion, morality, or anything else, is that there will be no shortage of people willing to argue against it. Perhaps it's for the best that Jeff Tweedy didn't think of that when he wrote his most excellent song,
How to Fight Loneliness.Because while many issues really are mere differences of opinion, it stirs up intense feelings of…
esiegel | September 16, 2011Daughter, age 7: "Daddy, will the Earth always go around the Sun forever?"
Louis CK: "Well no, at some point the Sun is going to explode."
Daughter: (starts crying)
Louis CK: "Oh honey, this is not going to happen until you and everyone you know has been dead for a very long time."
Daughter: (continues crying)
As you all know, the closest supernova to us in the last quarter-century has recently gone off, currently shining in the faint, but relatively close Pinwheel Galaxy. (And starting tonight, early in the night, those of you with telescopes should go look for it!)
Image credit: Retrieved…
esiegel | September 14, 2011[caption id="attachment_19545" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Image credit: NASA and the James Webb Space Telescope Team."]
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The news has just come in: the United States Senate has decided to fully fund the James Webb Space Telescope, and it should be set to launch in 2018, which is the earliest it can possibly go ahead at this point.
Universe Today has the full story, and reports:
The 2012 fiscal year appropriation bill, marked up today by the Senate, allows for continued funding of the James Webb Space Telescope and support up to a launch in 2018!
...
In addition to…
esiegel | September 14, 2011"We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but is somewhat beauty and poetry." -Maria Mitchell
When you look up at the vastness of the night sky, if you've got few clouds, no Moon and sufficient darkness, you won't merely see thousands of tiny white pinpricks illuminating the black canopy of night.
Image credit: Flickr user kronerda.
Although, on average, stars are white in color, there's a very important reason for that. Our eyes have evolved to see a very narrow set of wavelengths of light, which we know as the visible light spectrum, ranging…
esiegel | September 12, 2011"Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed." -Howard Nemerov
I know many of you are still mad at the night sky because of the full Moon preventing you from seeing the recent, close-by supernova in the Pinwheel Galaxy, at least until the end of the week.
Image credit: Original source unknown, retrieved from the Rose City Astronomers.
With the full Moon brightly illuminating your sky (and filling it with light pollution), only the brightest, most compact objects are visible at most locations on Earth.
But there is one object -- rising…
esiegel | September 10, 2011"O, how glorious would it be to set my heel upon the Pole and turn myself 360 degrees in a second!" -Joseph Banks
This weekend, perhaps more than most, I think we're all going to need something fun, inspiring, and different to enjoy. So I present to you an extremely talented but not well-known Canadian singer/songwriter, Melissa McClelland, and her very memorable song,
Passenger 24.But I've also got one of the most entertaining and impressive things I've ever seen to share with you. Say hello to the incredibly innovative Canadian acrobat, Dominic Lacasse.
You might, at first glance, wonder…
esiegel | September 9, 2011"After your death you will be what you were before your birth." -Arthur Schopenhauer
If only every star's death could be as glorious as a supernova, rocketing anywhere from thousands to millions of Earth-masses out of a star and into interstellar space. When we get one in our galaxy, like we do every few hundred years, the view from Earth can be spectacular.
Video Credit: ESA / Hubble.
The Crab Nebula, above, sprung from a supernova nearly a thousand years ago, in 1054. And while that supernova, and a handful of others since, have been visible from Earth with nothing more than the naked eye…
esiegel | September 8, 2011"A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame somebody else." -John Burroughs
The greatest tool for astronomers of the past 20 years has, without a doubt, been the Hubble Space Telescope.
Image credit: NASA; view from the Space Shuttle.
Since its launch in 1990, it's no stretch to say more scientific knowledge has come out of this telescope than out of any instrument in history. It's taught us what the expansion rate of the Universe is, that the expansion is accelerating, has helped us understand how stars are born, directly imaged the first planets outside of…
esiegel | September 6, 2011"We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown." -Arthur Eddington
Since the dawn of mankind, we've left innumerable footsteps across the lands, as we've traveled far and wide across the globe.
Image credit: Greg Prohl.
But (with very rare exceptions) these footsteps don't last. With winds and/or rains abundant all over Earth, among many other phenomena, it's usually just a brief matter of time until all memory of these footsteps are removed from the shifting landscape.
Image credit: Byron Jorjorian.
But what about a world without winds and rains? What about, in fact, a…
esiegel | September 5, 2011"But I'm also talking about American businessmen doing what they were born to do. Make things. We've stopped making and become a country of consumers. Well, I, for one, am done consuming. And I'm ready to make." -Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock
I don't normally write about what's going on in my personal life, but this is an important development, and it affects what I do here at Starts With A Bang, so here goes.
Most of you know how a career as a physicist is supposed to go, much like any academic/science career. You're supposed to get your degree, go to graduate school and get your Ph.D., work at a…
esiegel | September 3, 2011"As long as one person lives in darkness then it seems to be a responsibility to tell other people." -Bill Hicks
If you've ever been out in the wilderness at night, in a place where it truly gets dark, and where you've got, as the English band Keane would tell you,
Clear Skies,you will find yourself treated to an amazing view of the night sky.
Image credit: Jerry Lodriguss.
On a moonless night, depending on the quality of your darkness, not only is the Milky Way visible, but anywhere from 6,000 up to a maximum of 45,000 naked-eye stars are available to the keenest of observers.
Although,…
esiegel | September 2, 2011"When you make the finding yourself -- even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light -- you'll never forget it." -Carl Sagan
When we talk about dark matter and its alternatives, we are talking about no less a task than explaining the structure of every large object in the Universe. This means every one of the billions of galaxies, including the way they form, merge, and cluster together.
Image credit: Mark Subbarao, Dinoj Surendran, and Randy Landsberg for the SDSS team.
On the largest scales -- where each pixel in the map above represents an entire galaxy -- dark matter blows…
esiegel | August 31, 2011"I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time." -Robert Browning
Like everything else that we know of in the Universe -- galaxies, stars, and planets -- human beings are made out of atoms.
Image credit: J. Roche at Ohio University.
And just like galaxies, stars and planets, over 99.9% of the mass of your body isn't just made up of atoms, it's made out of the nuclei of those atoms.
And if you go inside these atoms, into the heart of them, you'll find that these nuclei are combinations of two simple nucleons: the proton…
esiegel | August 30, 2011"My girl, my girl, don't you lie to me,
tell me where did you sleep last night?
In the pines, in the pines, where the Sun don't ever shine,
I'll shiver the whole night through." -Leadbelly, among many other variations
It's already been a couple of months since I wrote about Global Warming, and was deluged with comments that (to be kind) objected to the scientific consensus that the Earth is getting warmer, and humans are very likely the cause.
So let's just take a look at the basic physics of how a warm object -- like a planet -- stays as warm as it does in a cold environment, like…