Category: Science

Inflationary Theory Confirmation and Human Nature

That humans have confirmed the Higgs boson and much of the underpinnings of the inflationary nature of the universe shortly after the Big Bang (gravity waves!) in the last two years (not to mention other advances in biological, psychological and sociological sciences) in a time of scientific budget cuts and anti-scientific thinking in our country gives me great hope for our species in this still young century.

We’re explorers, and these understandings of the universe around us leads us to greater deeds here on earth with the right guidance. Or to put it another selfish way, every dollar we put into science leads to many many more in return.

While we are capable of disastrous and terrible actions, we’re also capable of learning from our past and correcting our path as a species. Here’s to our better natures in this incredible time of human exploration…

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

Inflation has been the workhorse of cosmology for 35 years, though many, including Dr. Guth, wondered whether it could ever be proved.

If corroborated, Dr. Kovac’s work will stand as a landmark in science comparable to the recent discovery of dark energy pushing the universe apart, or of the Big Bang itself. It would open vast realms of time and space and energy to science and speculation.

via Detection of Waves in Space Buttresses Landmark Theory of Big Bang – NYTimes.com.

Decomposers and Radiation

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Chilling to see the results of Chernobyl still working themselves out in the natural world…

“Apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed when we first encountered them,” says Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, and lead author of the study. “It was striking, given that in the forests where I live, a fallen tree is mostly sawdust after a decade of lying on the ground.”

Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly: Smithsonian Magazine

Is Our Universe a Computer Simulation?

I never get tired of reading articles pondering whether our universe is a computer simulation / hologram.

Now we just need the Ancient Aliens guy to explain how trans-dimensional mice created the original computer to figure out the question with the answer of 42…

As cosmic particles fly through the universe, they lose energy and change direction and spread out across a spectrum of energy values. There’s a known limit to how much energy those particles have, though, and Beane and his colleagues have calculated that this seemingly arbitrary cliff in the spectrum is consistent with the kind of boundary that you’d find if there was an underlying lattice governing the limits of a simulator. It should also, if present, scatter the particles in a certain way as they come up against it, and we should be able to investigate whether that’s the case. 

via Cosmic rays offer clue our universe could be a computer simulation Wired UK.

4D Star Collapse Lead to Our Universe?

Here’s your Monday afternoon mind-bender…

It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions.

via Did a hyper-black hole spawn the Universe? : Nature News & Comment.

Happy 30th Birthday to the Internet

Vint Cerf writes a great post about how the modern-day internet (no, not Facebook and Twitter and TMZ.com) came to be during a tumultuous switchover in 1983:

Marking the birth of the modern-day Internet | Official Google Blog: “In an attempt to solve this, Robert Kahn and I developed a new computer communication protocol designed specifically to support connection among different packet-switched networks. We called it TCP, short for ‘Transmission Control Protocol,’ and in 1974 we published a paper about it in IEEE Transactions on Communications: ‘A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.’ Later, to better handle the transmission of real-time data, including voice, we split TCP into two parts, one of which we called ‘Internet Protocol,’ or IP for short. The two protocols combined were nicknamed TCP/IP.”

Happy Holidays from a Point of Pale Light

One of my favorite pages on Wikipedia (and yes, our planet is going to get real interesting in a few hundred thousand years):

Timeline of the far future – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Due to its northward movement along the San Andreas Fault, the Californian coast begins to be subducted into the Aleutian Trench. Africa will have collided with Eurasia, closing the Mediterranean Basin and creating a mountain range similar to the Himalayas.”

My 7th grade students frequently ask me how humanity will do with the sun going supernova and all in about 5 billion years. I remind them we’ve got bigger problems much much sooner than that (climate change, rising sea levels, gamma ray bursts, meteorite strikes etc).

Carl Sagan was, as usual, spot on about our pale blue dot. So let’s do the best we can with the time/space we have, while we can.

via Kottke.org

I Want to Go to Mars

Where is Carl Sagan when we need him?

Are Those Spidery Black Things On Mars Dangerous? (Maybe) : Krulwich Wonders… : NPR: “‘If you were there,’ says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, ‘you’d be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice. All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air.’ The ground below would be rumbling. You’d feel it in your space boots.”

Split Open and Melt

crescit cum commercio civitas?

Arctic ice cap set for record-breaking summer melt session | Ars Technica: “While predictions of a total melt during the summer months and its potentially devastating effects on the planet have many worried (Serreze says the rapid melting may have contributed to severe storms in the US in recent years), commercial enterprises are busily jumping at the opportunity to open shop in the Northern Passage. China sent its first vessel along the Arctic route in August, trimming its usual route length by 40 percent, while Germany and Russia are already established players.”