Category: Science

Shortest Day of the Year

Emmanuel Baptist Fellowship Christmas Service

The Sun is directly overhead of the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern Hemisphere during the December Solstice.

The December Solstice occurs when the Sun reaches its most southerly declination of -23.5 degrees. In other words, when the North Pole is tilted furthest – 23.5 degrees – away from the Sun.

via TimeAndDate.com

At 6:03 PM EST last night, our geographic location was the furthermost position away from the sun that it will be until next December. I was lucky enough to be singing Christmas carols with my wife, our girls, and members of our faith community at Emmanuel Baptist Fellowship.

Solstice has long been a sacred day for those of us in the northern hemisphere and marks the “extreme of winter” or Donghzi in Chinese. It happens to coincide with major times of festivals in modern and ancient religions on purpose, as we continue to come to grips with our humanity while wrestling with concepts of existence, death, and faith in times of darkness.

Here’s to the lengthening of days and the spreading of candelight to remind us of the angels of our better natures as our mother planet makes yet another orbit around her own parental star. We are a young and curious species, indeed.

My Interstellar Review (Spoiler Free!)

I was excited to see Interstellar last weekend. I’ve always been impressed with Director Christopher Nolan’s movies and the artistic vision he has brought to everything from Batman to Inception.

It’s hard to write a full review of something as expansive as Interstellar, especially since I’m not a film critic and there are a number of supposed plot twists, surprises, and a “big reveal” at the end that I’m guessing was supposed to move viewers in a Sixth Sense manner. Accordingly, this will be a short review.

Overall, I was disappointed.

The music score was beautiful, the sound (Merianna and I saw the film in its intended IMAX experience) was deafening but very well done and effective. There were grumblings from early reviewers that the awesome (I use that word in its intended case) sound of the movie drowned out dialogue in key parts. Nolan later revealed that was intended. I would argue that’s probably a good thing because the dialogue we are left with is trite and oozes with sappiness that a movie of this intended grandeur should not include. The exception was Murph as a young girl, who was fantastic. The special effects were incredible and definitely kept you engrossed despite all the plot holes (some as big as a black hole) and inconsistencies of actual science as applied in the movie.

Yet, the movie kept trying to be something bigger than it was. It was reaching to be the 2001: A Space Odyssey of our generation. It fails to do that.

Perhaps my disappointment in the movie is my own fault because I love “hard science” sci fi and I’ve seen 2001 too many times. For a casual movie goer who wasn’t a science teacher, it’s probably incredibly moving and scientifically “awesome!”.

I’ve tried to like the movie all week in my head. As a final attempt, Merianna and I watched 2001 last night because of my grumblings about how similar Interstellar tried to be to that classic. 2001 holds up well, in my opinion and is much more of an expansive, intimate, and anxiety causing experience (about our own humanity, about our place in the cosmos, about the still small voices in our head etc). Compared to 2001 and the oblique absence of dialogue or emotions from the humans (HAL 9000 is the most emotive character), Interstellar is closer to Armageddon (I’m sorry).

What really let me down the most about Interstellar besides the cheesy dialogue, the utter ridiculousness of attempting to make love some sort of quasi-scientific force akin to gravity or electromagnetism, the plot leaps (why is the rocket facility that close to the farm??… I could go on and on but don’t want to spoil anything) was the ending. I won’t reveal anything, but it’s terrible.

The first 20 and last 20 minutes of 2001 are dialogue free. There’s only music. It’s moving, strange, and engrossing. Interstellar attempts something similar and when Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) has a similar experience to Dave (from 2001) at the end of the movie, I was impressed. Interstellar reaches its moving crescendo and leaves room to breathe emotionally, visually, and even a little philosophically. I was sure the movie was done and started mentally preparing to try to find our way out in the crowded theater. But Interstellar didn’t end. It kept going. And it sucked for those last 20 painful minutes.

It’s a fun movie. But it could have been so much better had Nolan left room for the audience to explore themselves. For all of its celebration of humanity as a species of explorers, Nolan treats the audience like a group of primates protecting a watering hole on an African savanna rather than an advanced life form. Too many banal chalkboards, whiteboards, sappy conversations, and drippy conversations for me to elevate this movie to where I’d hoped it would be.

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

image

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