esiegel | July 26, 2011"Birth and death; we all move between these two unknowns." -Bryant H. McGill
One of the most remarkable consequences of the Big Bang is that the Universe as we know it -- full of planets, stars, galaxies and life -- hasn't been around forever! Because the Universe is expanding and cooling, it was hotter, denser, and more compact in the past.
Image credit: SciencePhotoLibrary.
But these things that fill the Universe today weren't there in the very early stages of the Universe; they took time.
Gravity needed many millions of years to collapse these slightly overdense regions to a point where…
esiegel | July 24, 2011"Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you." -Oscar Wilde
For those of you who don't typically listen to soul singers, you may want to have a listen to this. There's always something about live performances that bring out their best, and so this weekend I present to you,
I Heard Love Is Blind.To those of you who don't recognize the voice or the song, I hope you at least recognize the talent and the quality of what you're listening to.
Because that's Amy Winehouse. That's live, off of her debut album, Frank,…
esiegel | July 21, 2011"A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective." -Edward Teller
The idea of black holes has gone from a curious thought experiment to a theoretical likelihood to a near-certainty -- with thousands of known candidates -- in a very short time.
Image credit: NASA/Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital.
But never before have we been able to image a black hole directly; all we have are artists' renditions of what they might look like.
And for the first time ever…
esiegel | July 20, 2011"Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles." -Bill Gates
Energy is one of the most important topics facing our modern, industrialized civilization. What sources we get it from, what we use it for, and how we deal with the waste from its production are paramount to the future of our species on Earth.
Yet in many ways, energy is one of the most poorly understood quantities in all of physics. To help you better…
esiegel | July 18, 2011"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive." -C. S. Lewis
Many of you are a little bit skeptical that I talk about things like the History of the Universe, Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy like they are absolute certainties. After all, isn't it true that there are an awful lot of assumptions that we make in order for these things to be true?
Image credit: NASA.
Absolutely!
That's right, I admit it. We make assumptions when we come up…
esiegel | July 17, 2011"A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long." -e. e. cummings
While the rest of the United States gets swept over by a heat wave, the weekend here in Portland, OR gives us an all-too-familiar sight.
But I have found the diversion (for myself, at least) for the rainy weekend. I'm listening to The Detroit Cobras' version (they're a cover band) of the soul classic,
It's Raining.And what is it I've found for entertainment? My favorite old nintendo games, available (at last!) to play online in…
esiegel | July 14, 2011"At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed." -Edwin Hubble
It still boggles my mind that a scant 100 years ago, many of the greatest astronomers and physicists of the day still thought that the Milky Way was the only galaxy in the entire Universe. It wasn't until the 1920s that Edwin Hubble definitively showed that the great Andromeda Nebula was actually a separate galaxy from our own.
Image credit: Rogelio…
esiegel | July 13, 2011"Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune." -Noam Chomsky
Except back before it was discovered, the very idea of Neptune... well... sounded like it was from Neptune!
Image credit: Voyager 2, NASA.
The planets out to Saturn are visible with the naked eye, and have been known since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. While the telescope was first invented in the early 1600s, it wasn't until 1781, nearly 200 years later, that the next planet -- Uranus (above) -- was discovered.
But…
esiegel | July 12, 2011"Sometimes I don't want to see the puppeteers,
sometimes I just want to see the magic therein,
and sometimes I just want to pry open the atoms
and know why they spin." -Glen Sutton
But it isn't just the atoms -- the minuscule building blocks of matter -- that spin. It's also the individual galaxies, collections of some mind-boggling number (like 1068) of atoms, that spin.
Image credit: Jean-Charles Cuillandre, Giovanni Anselmi and the CFHT.
Messier 95, above, is just one such example. But how did these galaxies get to be this way?
To answer this question, we have to go all the way back to…
esiegel | July 10, 2011"In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults." -Thomas Szasz
Some of the email I get, periodically, asks me if there are any science books or TV shows that I recommend. (When a particularly good one comes across my radar, I let you know.) But a more unusual request I recently received was if there were any books or TV shows that I recommended for kids.
For me -- personally…
esiegel | July 8, 2011"Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once." -Henry David Thoreau
The night sky is our greatest glimpse of what lies out there, beyond our own world, in the expanse of space we know as our Universe.
Image credit: European Southern Observatory.
With our naked eyes, we are able to see a few thousand stars, the Moon, five planets, the Milky Way and a few other nebulous "clouds" or "fuzzballs." And with just our naked eyes alone, we could learn some remarkable things about the Universe, including the basic structure of our Solar System…
esiegel | July 6, 2011Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? -Richard Feynman
Ahh, the stars that make up our galaxy, and the galaxies that make up our Universe. It's the simple power of the humble atom -- the protons, neutrons, and electrons that are the building blocks of everything on our world -- that powers all the stars and galaxies in the Universe.
Image credit: Antoine Vergara Astrophotography.
But it didn't need to be this way! Why is it that all the stars in our galaxy,…
esiegel | July 5, 2011"Through space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; through thought I comprehend the world." -Blaise Pascal
Whether you have or haven't seen the xkcd webcomic, height (or my old post referencing it), one of the things that I can't imagine not fascinating you is what you see the farther "up" you look.
So what I'm going to do is start off in the vicinity of Earth and go "up" by approximately a factor of 100 every time. Let's begin.
Ahh, outer space. Looking down at the Earth from a distance, what would you see? Well, other than the planet itself, you'd see the (literally…
esiegel | July 3, 2011"Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it." -The Simpsons
For those of you who aren't from the U.S. or U.K., this coming Monday is the day that my nation celebrates the birth of its independence. This date, of course, as Aimee Mann will sing to you, is the
4th Of July.And the most common way to celebrate our Independence Day? Fireworks.
How do they work? That sounds like a question for science! (Inspired by Janet Stemwedel's article from 2007, as well as a recent article over at Scientific American.)
You start with three simple ingredients: sulfur, charcoal…
esiegel | July 1, 2011"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough." -Niels Bohr
You know who Einstein is, I'm sure. The E=mc2 guy, the speed of light guy, and -- perhaps most prestigiously -- as the inventor of the best theory of gravity that we have: general relativity.
One of the notable things about gravity -- which is also true of all of Einstein's theories -- is that it's completely deterministic.
What does that word mean, deterministic, to a physicist?
It means that…
esiegel | June 29, 2011"Electricity can be dangerous. My nephew tried to stick a penny into a plug. Whoever said a penny doesn't go far didn't see him shoot across that floor. I told him he was grounded." -Tim Allen
I know what you're thinking. "Of course I know what static electricity is!" Oh, really? Let's go through the basics.
You've all (hopefully) gotten to play with a Van de Graaff Generator at some point. It's one of the simplest electricity demonstrations there is. You stand on something like a milk crate, touch your hands to the generator, have someone turn it on, and your hair (for those of you with…
esiegel | June 27, 2011"Doubt, indulged and cherished, is in danger of becoming denial; but if honest, and bent on thorough investigation, it may soon lead to full establishment of the truth." -Ambrose Bierce
About a week and a half ago, I wrote an article called The Power of Theory In Science, where I mentioned the Big Bang, Evolution, and Global Warming as some of the leading scientific theories describing a variety of natural phenomena.
Image credit: Rhys Taylor, Cardiff University.
And while no one took issue with my assertion that the Big Bang and Evolution were the best scientific theories describing (…
esiegel | June 26, 2011"Everything that's realistic has some sort of ugliness in it. Even a flower is ugly when it wilts, a bird when it seeks its prey, the ocean when it becomes violent." -Sharon Tate
For those of you who miss the folksy songs of summer I so often post (but not lately), I have you covered this week. If you've never heard of the band Girlyman, consider this an easy introduction to them, as I'm happy to present you, this weekend, with their song,
Bird On The Wire.But if you're anything like I am, you may have been distracted, recently, by a far more entertaining set of birds. Yes, I refer you to the…
esiegel | June 22, 2011"[I]f there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning." -C.S. Lewis
(For readers Mu and Bjoern.)
I've told you the entire history of the Universe, from before the Big Bang into the far distant future, and yet many of you noticed there was a conspicuous missing piece to the story: dark matter.
Living in halos around our galaxies and clusters, dark matter, at present, makes up 23% of the energy density of the Universe. This makes it second in overall importance to dark energy, which has become important…
esiegel | June 20, 2011"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." -Sylvia Plath
A few weeks ago, I told you about a science writing contest going on over at 3 Quarks Daily, open to all areas of science writing.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that one of my posts made the finals. Well, this morning, I woke up to find that the winners were announced! Without further ado, who were they?
Top Quark (First prize): my former scibling, SciCurious, for her article, Serotonin and Sexual…