Gratuitous ramblings from Rob Knop about astronomy, cosmology, virtual worlds, or whatever he feels the need to rant on about
Thanks to Brian Cooksey for the shout out last time I was a contributor to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. I’ve also done today’s podcast, all about astronomical references in Shakespeare’s tragedies… starting with Romeo & Juliet, what with it being Valentines day and all. Go and listen to the podcast!
For your viewing pleasure, I’ve also got a transcript of the podcast here:
Starting today at 2PM PST, I and others will be leading playwriting workshops at the Kira Cafe. The genesis of this idea came from Piet Hutt, one of the directors of the Kira Institute, after I gave an informal talk about what it was like to perform live theater in Second Life. As the mission of Kira is to talk about science in context, he thought it would be neat if we were to try putting on some plays related to science. One recent example is the play “Copenhagen” by Michael Frayn, although myself I am more familiar with “Hapgood” and “Arcadia” by Tom Stoppard.
The discussion evolved, and we decided that perhaps it would be interesting to think about getting people together to talk about writing plays, perhaps very short plays, that explore things related to science— and that are written from the beginning understanding both the advantages and the limitations that come from performing theater in Second Life (as opposed to live on stage).
If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to drop by the Kira Cafe today, and over the next few weeks on Mondays at 2PM SLT, to join us. The Kira Cafe can be found in Second Life at BaikUn (198, 76, 99).
I am currently visiting Colgate University, giving a physics colloquium about dark energy. I’m hosted by my friend Jeff Bary (who’s a first year professor there). Yesterday evening, his class gave presentations about discoveries that they’d researched. A few of the talks touched on the Big Bang. Afterwards, I was sitting around musing with Jeff and the departmental chair, Thomas Balonek. Thom was saying that it’s disingenuous for us to claim that we’re still talking about the Big Bang as it being the same theory that we had all those decades ago. What with the introduction of inflation, cold dark matter, dark energy, it’s changed so much that really it’s not entirely the same theory any more. I argued that the basic picture is the same– the Universe expanded from a very hot, very dense state to its current form– that it warrants having the same name.
I then asked the question: which theory has evolved more, the Big Bang or Biological Evolution? To point a finer point on it, let’s go back to the (say) 1950’s or early 1960’s, when people were arguing about Big Bang vs. Steady State cosmology, before the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, well before the introduction of inflation to solve the flatness and horizon problems. Take what people were talking about then as the Big Bang, and compare to what we talk about today. Has that changed more or less than the Theory of Evolution has changed from what Darwin originally envisaged when he wrote the Origin of the Species?
To be sure, the theory of Evolution is better understood and understood in better detail than the Big Bang theory. They both share the feature that they are theories describing the evolution of a system, not it’s origin (although both the name of the cosmological theory, and the title of the work that started Evolution, both would seem to indicate that they do). We know a whole lot more about both today than we did then. Both have features today that people in the early days couldn’t have anticipated. (I understand the cosmology better, of course, but know, for instance, that DNA and the genetics gives us an actual mechanism for Darwin’s Evolution.)
So, what do you think? Which one has changed more? And is either theory similar enough to what was originally proposed that it deserves the same name, or should we have changed the name by now?
This morning I woke up and had a headache.
I took a couple of Ibuprofen.
Half an hour later, I felt better.
Is chemistry cool, or what?
I’ll be giving a talk entitled: “We Are Starstuff: the Cosmic Origins of the Chemical Elements” as a part of the MICA public talks series. The talk will be at the Galaxy Dome in Spaceport Bravo.
Remember, a Second Life account is free!
Randall Munroe of the fabulous webcomic xkcd has a great logarithmic height poster showing the size of everything from folks all the way up through the edge of the Solar System, on to the radius of the observable Universe. As a logarithmic plot, each gap of the same size vertically on the plot represents a doubling of the distance from the surface of the Earth; this is why he can show things of such vastly different scales as people and the whole Universe in the same plot.
But, wait, I thought you cosmologists kept saying that the Universe was infinite! How can this picture show the whole Universe then?
It doesn’t… it shows the observable Universe. Because the Universe is only 14 billion years old, and the speed of light is finite, we can only see things that are as far away as light has had time to reach us from. There is more Universe beyond that, but the light hasn’t reached us from it yet; the part of the Universe beyond our horizon is not the observable Universe.
But wait… if the Universe is only 14 billion years old, then, we should only be able to see things that are 14 billion light-years away… yet the xkcd pictures says the top of the Universe is 46 billion years away. What’s up with that?
Congress defeated the $700×10^9 bailout bill championed by George Bush. The media are portraying this as a disaster, quoting financial advisors saying that this is a “financial 9/11″ and that boy oh boy are we screwed.
On the other hand, I have to admit on some levels I’m happy to see this. Why?
First of all, this isn’t the financial 9/11. The financial 9/11 was when all the major banks said, “Guys? We’re dead. Please bail us out so our execs can enjoy their golden parachutes without the guilt of a destroyed economy all around us.” What did Congress do after 9/11? Well, too quickly they passed the PATRIOT bill, overwhelmingly voting “yes” because the American people were demanding that we Do Something… even though many (most?) of those voting “yes” on it hadn’t had a chance to know what was in it, never mind think about the implications of it. And the PATRIOT bill was a huge step in dismantling a lot of the basic protections we have against living in a surveillance state.
When there is a crisis, there’s always a push to pass legislation, to Do Something, right away. Sometimes we’re lucky and what is done makes sense. More often, it’s thrashing about in a “ZOMG” reaction. Sometimes, if they are prepared, those with an agenda can push across legislation that would never have been pushed across when calmer heads were able to prevail. This is what happened with the PATRIOT act. According to reports, there’s an oppressive cyberregulation bill waiting in the wings for the “Internet 9/11″ to provide the public sentiment that will allow that to push across.
Probably we need to do something fast to prevent our economy from very quickly imploding. But I’m very nervous about the fast response. I’d like to see us do something right. I’d like to see us recognize that just a bailout without a philosophical shift in the attitudes that led us to this mess would be a huge mistake. I’d like to see us recognize that we’ve done an experiment with deregulation of huge, gigantic companies, and for those who were in favor of such things (which included, at least at times, me) to recognize that, yeah, those ideas have now been shown to be wrong, and sticking to them in spite of the evidence is not rational.
We need more than a band-aid. Yeah, quick action may be needed to keep ourselves out of a horrible depression for the next few years. But we need to think about the next several years, the next few decades, or, heaven forbid, even the next century or two. What we really don’t need is a knee-jerk reaction.. and I fear that that is exactly what the $700B bailout is.
Yesterday (Friday Sep. 26), MICA heard its first Journal Club of the academic year. (We’ve had these before, but it was very slow over the summer.) The talk was Mario Juric from IAS Princeton, talking about mapping density, velocity, and metallicity as a function of spatial position within the Milky Way galaxy, using photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
click for a larger image
There were a few conclusions that came out of this. First, unsurprising to anybody who’s read anything about the structure of the Milky Way, the disk and the halo really are completely separate components. The disk appears to have a vertical (i.e. perpendictular to the plan) gradient of metallicity, whereas the halo has a constant (and lower) metallicity distribution. Some density outliers from the smooth background are there, which were known previously, including the Monocerous Tidal Stream discovered by my friend and one-time collaborator Heidi Newberg
However, there were also some surprises. There’s basically no gradient of metallicity radially along the disk. I had previously been under the impression that the disk had a metallicity gradient, with higher metallicities towards the center. One caveat to this: the data does not include the very center of the plane of the disk, so there may well still be a metallicity gradient within the plane.
I think is fear.
It’s only natural, of course, living in the USA, because our government currently gets us to agree to do things by tapping into our fear. But I’m talking about something more personal. And, it may not really be “fear” as much as “worry”. The whole “what if” thing.
At the most base level, it’s probably the same “what if” so many people share, and some people much more directly than myself. “What if I lose my job?” Then I can’t pay for the house. I can’t pay for health insurance, which my wife and I need (literally in my wife’s case) to survive. I know that the stress of that situation would be killer. I lived for a few years in academia with the near-certain knowledge that I was going to lose my job, and knew the time when it would happen.
Nowadays, I like my job, I like the people I’m working with, I like the day-by-day work of it. I’m a happier person. But underneath all of that is my fear. And, when I see something, or do something stupid, that makes me think that the worry underneath perhaps isn’t as completely irrational as it usually is, it gets very hard, at least for a short period of time, to carry on like a rational human being.
Worrying about the future has always been a week point for me. Before my academia-induced depression turned to basic out-and-out despair, it usually manifested itself as worrying, worrying that would take over my brain and freeze me up from being able to do other things. It still comes back sometimes. And then I kick myself for having done the stupid thing that led me to think that perhaps I really had something to worry about, or for blowing something that I observed out of proportion.
It is kind of sad, though, that all of us in our society, in or out of academia, spend our lives in fear that we have to hang on to whatever income-earning activies we have or else we’re going to be in trouble, unable to meet our responsibilities, unable to survive. That at the base there isn’t a drive to make the world a better place, an appreciation of beauty, a wonderful curiosity, but rather simple personal fear that the bottom is going to drop out and we’re going to be in trouble. No wonder we’re such an on-the-edge society!
Although, truth to tell, I suspect it was worse through most of human history.
All very sad.
Oh, yes. Oh, yes it can.
Watch this:
Gave me chills. An amazing piece of work, all the more so because it’s based on a classic piece of artwork which isn’t the sort of thing that you would think would translate well into a 3d environment with crisp rendering.