Archive for the ‘Cosmology’ Category
THROUGH THICK AND THIN
Aramco, the world’s most profitable company, is going to go public. Aramco is the Saudi Arabian oil company. Kinda a big deal, but only superficially. Basically when all is said and done, people who already have more money than they could spend in a dozen lifetimes will be even richer. Most of the world’s stock is already owned by the rich, and it’s just getting worse all the time. The petrodollar is the biggest bubble in history, gonna be loads of fun when it all crashes down. I plan on being long dead by the time that happens; it’s a good plan, it’s realistic, and I’m sticking with it.
I do however plan to stick around for the human return to the Moon. In 2024 if all goes well, though honestly that’s pretty optimistic. I came into this world with the launch of the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. Humans returning to the Moon makes a logical endpoint to my run. And if we haven’t returned to the Moon by 2024, why, I’ll live longer! I always try to have flexibility in my life plans. Makes it more believable when one says “I meant to do that!”
For a bit of a different view on Trump’s current troubles, I recommend this read. I would have to agree with most of it, certainly far closer to the truth than CNN or Fox. I know it must be weird living in a country where the mainstream news narrative is simply a government propaganda organ. In America, we’ve done even better, we have two mainstream medias delivering a propaganda narrative to their respective watchers. Even George Orwell didn’t see this one coming. In any event, I have no idea how Trump’s troubles will turn out, but guaranteed the USA people will get the short end of the stick no matter what happens. Here’s one more good article on our endless wars, depressing.
Less depressing, more fun. The image at the top of the page, a Sailor’s Eyeball. One of the world’s largest single celled organisms. AKA Ventricaria ventricosa, it’s a type of algae. It can grow to the size of, well, an eyeball. And if squished, it just forms multiple eyeballs. Unlike most cells, Ventricaria ventricosa has multiple nuclei. Learn something new every day. For example, I just learned that nucleuses is an acceptable plural form of nucleus. Well, not to my spell checker apparently.
Cosmology has run into a little problem. OK, a big problem. In fact some are calling it a crisis, which is unfortunate. More on that in a second. The problem is that the Universe is expanding much faster than our understanding of the Universe can account for. Hopefully cosmologists and astronomers will figure out why. I say calling it a crisis is unfortunate, because in these days when science and reason are under assault, this is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The cranks and religious science deniers will both use that term to claim that it means all of science is unreliable. If scientists can’t even figure out the basics of the Universe, they might be wrong about everything! And the woo and religious myth come marching in. Hell, the Universe’s extra expansion is probably driven by the ever expanding bubble of hot air and ignorance emanating from Washington.
I think I’m getting more cynical as I get older. Moving right along, no one complained about my Halloween Horror post. Now I have to come up with next year’s, but one thing at a time. I did think of a good post for next April 1st. It involves, cats, DNA, treason, prison, and royalty. Lots of fun. Have a great week everyone.
(Copyright © 2019 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.
(Image: Ventricaria ventricosa Credit: Haplochromis “I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so: I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.”)
Paranormal Watch
I feel almost guilty writing this post. I used to be such a fan of paranormal mysteries. Loch Ness, UFOs, ancient aliens, and other curious little corners of reality. I’m still a fan, but I have grown more skeptical over the years. Sadly this is because I’ve realized that the signal-to-noise ratio is rather low in these areas. Worse, cashing in on the credulous has grown mainstream, and now things like the History Channel are shamelessly spreading paranormal nonsense to make a buck. Still, just because there’s a lot of fraud, poor scholarship, and pseudo-science doesn’t mean it’s all nonsense. A UFO could crash on the White House lawn tomorrow. Not bloody likely, but not impossible. And in the vein of keeping my toe in the paranormal water so to speak, here’s a brief rundown of recent developments on the fringe.
UFOs: OK, the big recent news is that the Russian PM said that if Obama doesn’t come clean about aliens living among us, Russia will. He made the remark in the context of a joke about the Men In Black movies. Some in UFO circles took it seriously. I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Obama’s announcement. Ufology is a very active field, but it mostly concerns itself with blurry videos of lights in the sky. Or anecdotal reports. Nothing with actual evidence. And the field is always rife with some rumor about how all is going to be revealed soon. A peculiar class of belief not limited to ufology by any means. I also did some recent research on Roswell, and it’s not looking good. One of the biggest “researchers” on the case was shown to be a fraud, all of his “discoveries” are suspect, and some main stream ufologists no longer think Roswell involved aliens or an alien craft. Well, crap.
Bigfoot: Oh, the usual crop of blobsquatch videos. There was a claim awhile ago that Bigfoot DNA had been obtained. It’s generally considered to be a hoax at this point. There’s a recording of Bigfoot screeches making the rounds. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying that this is evidence of nothing. Animals make a vast array of sounds, this will more than likely be eventually explained as normal wildlife noise. At this point, well, it’s hard to understand why a bigfoot hasn’t shown up as roadkill. Maybe they are smart enough not to cross roads? In other words they are smarter than people? Wouldn’t that be wild if Bigfoot was the true intelligent species on the planet, and they were just hiding and biding their time until we destroyed ourselves? Stranger things have happened. Sarah Palin for example.
Loch Ness Monster: Exciting news on this front. None less than Megan Fox believes in the Loch Ness Monster! Who is Megan Fox? Damned if I know. That’s about it on the Loch Ness monster. I’m assuming the whole silly thing is dead since I pointed out that no sightings preceding the 1930s is impossible to explain. You can thank me later for clearing this one up.
Baigong Pipes: Someone brought to my attention the Baigong Pipes, supposed iron pipes that predate human civilization by tens of thousands of years. Well, two problems. The first of which is saying someone laid all these pipes, but left no other evidence? That’s a little hard to swallow. Secondly, scientists believe (backed with actual evidence) that the Baigong pipes are natural formations that are created when buried tree trunks get replaced by iron deposits. Examples are found in a number of locations around the world. Scientists would be thrilled to find evidence of ancient alien technology. Think of the research grants and fame and getting laid by cute ancient aliens chicks that would result in. So when scientists say: “Um, no, these are natural formations.” I think we can believe them.
Infinite Universes: It’s long been a popular meme that since there may be infinite universes, then there are infinite versions of each of us on said universes. IE if you got up and decided to wear a blue shirt today, there is a universe where someone identical to you chose to wear a red shirt. Ad infinitum. Well, some scientists (yes, that matters) have taken a look at this idea and pointed out that it is “highly speculative.” In other words, science fiction. For one thing, the idea that our universe is infinite is by no means the accepted scientific view. Secondly, they point out that if there are infinite possibilities for life, then each planet with life could and should be unique. Crap. And I was so hoping to exchange places with a richer me in one of these universes.
Quantum Birds: Well, it turns out that quantum physics may play a role in biology. A big role actually. This is a revolutionary idea, but it is gaining credence as experiments suggest it is the case. It almost certainly plays a role in photosynthesis. It’s also suspected to play a role in small and animal navigation. Research continues, but this could be the “new biology” of the 21st century. It would take me a whole post to explain quantum physics, and even then I might get it wrong. OK, probably would get it wrong, quantum physics is hard to grasp.
“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine – it is stranger than we can imagine.” — J.B.S. Haldane
(The above image is of Saturn taken from the Cassini Orbiter. The Sun is directly behind it. It’s legal to use this image non-commercially. Credit and copyright: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Space Science Institute, Cassini Imaging Team. I chose it because it’s a beautiful spooky image … and an example of the incredible frontiers science is still advancing on. NASA rocks.)
Who Discovered Space?
This was a question posted on Yahoo Answers today, in the Astronomy & Space category. I strongly suspect it was posted as a joke, considering what I know of typical behaviour in Yahoo Answers. The replies to it pretty much bore that out, every reply was some variation of “the first human that gazed up into the sky.” I thought this was fascinating on several levels. Fascinating because all of the people who answered that were full of shit, even though they thought they were making sense. And secondly, because it is an interesting question, do we know who the first person was who realized that the night sky was something akin to what modern science knows it to be?
First, why were the people who thought cavemen discovered space full of it? Simple, cavemen didn’t have our modern knowledge of the Universe, so when they looked up at the night sky, they didn’t have the faintest idea what they were looking at. And they certainly didn’t imagine that the points of light they were seeing were planets or other versions of the Sun, why would they? When learned men started trying to understand what they were looking at, they came up with celestial spheres. These were spheres encircling the Earth with lights embedded in them. They did notice that the planets in the sky moved against the background of other stars, so they decided there were spheres nested inside spheres.
Yet so many people who answered the question assumed that cavemen looked up and comprehended the vast void of space that we now know we are looking at. To me this is a wonderful example of one of human’s greatest weaknesses, people simply assume that other people see the world through their eyes. Most people make this assumption on such an implicit level that they don’t even realize they are doing it. I would actually be curious to know what the people who answered would say if they knew I thought they were full of shit. I would hope that some would agree, and realize they hadn’t thought it through or knew they were giving a flippant answer. Some though would no doubt defend their answer, by one tiresome means or another. What is it with people who can’t admit they are wrong?
Moving right along, who did “discover space?” Copernicus would be one possible answer, he is in fact the fellow that realized that the Sun was at the centre, not the Earth. That’s as far as he got though, Copernicus still thought that the heavens were transparent spheres with lights embedded in them. It may sound silly in to us, but one has to remember than these were people who sincerely believed that there was a creator, a creator who had set this all up for our benefit. So the scientists of the day weren’t so much as looking for naturalistic explanations, they were just trying to understand God’s creation. Tycho Brahe is another one who realized there was a problem with the celestial spheres, he observed that comets apparently passed through them on their journeys to and from the Sun. Still, that’s as far as he got.
No, the real answer is an obscure astronomer named Thomas Digges (1546 – 24 August 1595). He was the first to realize that there were no spheres at all, or at least there was no outermost sphere, that the points in the sky we were seeing were spread throughout a near infinite void. And I mean near infinite, he also realized that what we were seeing in the sky was proof that the Universe was not infinite. How the hell did he come up what that? He reasoned that if the universe was infinite, that any direction we looked there would eventually be a star, and the night sky would be as bright as the daytime sky. It’s called the dark night sky paradox, one of humanity’s first stabs at defining the scope of the cosmos.
In other words, until 1600 or so, people gazing at the night sky might have been amazed at what they were seeing, but they had no clue what they were looking at. They assumed that whatever it was, it was just set and setting for the Earth, a God given backdrop to the play that was humanity. Thomas Digges was apparently the first to grasp that what we were seeing in the night sky was far grander than humans had ever imagined. So the next time the gentle reader is staring up at the night sky and wondering at the vastness of it all, it was Thomas Digges who led the way more than 400 years ago.
An eye blink in human history. Have a great weekend everyone.
(Welcome new and old readers. I hope you enjoyed this post. As of January 2018 I have resumed regular blogging on my new Patreon version of Doug’s Darkworld. Science, history, current events, and posts about a certain president who can hardly go a day without inspiring a blog post.)
(The above image is public domain under US copyright law. It’s actually the work of the esteemed Mr Digges, not only the first translation of Copernicus into English, but the first illustration of the stars as scattered in a void. We don’t apparently have an image of him, but his life’s work lives on. I drink to his vision and his memory, skol Mr Digges!)
What the Hell is That? (Number 2 in a series, if you want to guess, don’t read below the image.)
Yeast cells in a petri dish? Higgs Boson particles in the LHC? Nope, this fascinating image is an infrared view of the exact centre of our galaxy. The image is about one light year wide, and the animation loop covers a period of eight years. And it’s not obvious, but the moving stars are actually orbiting around the yellow cross at the centre of the image. In fact our sun is orbiting around that yellow cross, every orbit taking about 200 million years. That means the Sun is 22 1/2 in galactic years, just a young whippersnapper in it’s prime.
Cool new tunas so far, but it gets cooler. Again, it may not be obvious, but those stars are really moving. Look how slowly the other stars in the image are moving compared to the central stars. The only explanation so far is that they are orbiting something really massive at the yellow cross. In fact calculations show that whatever it is, it masses more than five million Suns! Well, astronomers have a pretty good idea what it is, they think it is a black hole, something that appears to reside at the centre of most if not all galaxies like our Milky Way.
Being a black hole, we can’t see it of course. It only reveals itself in x-rays and the motion of stars orbiting it. Is it eventually going to suck up the entire galaxy? No, more than the Sun is going to suck up the entire Solar System. Well, OK, yes, eventually everything in the Universe will get sucked into black holes. Black holes do slowly decay becasue they emit Hawking radiation, and eventually they will all be gone, there will be no more entropy possible, and the Universe will experience heat death, and be nothing but a near infinite incredibly thin cold near vacuum. That won’t be for about 10100 years though, so it’s safe to say that humanity has far more pressing concerns to worry about.
It’s still amazing to me what we know about our Universe now compare to when I was a kid. And I will continue to share images that amaze me. The black hole at the centre of our galaxy is now in the process of gobbling up a huge cloud of gas, if I can find a good picture of this I will post it.
(Image Credit: A. Eckart (U. Koeln) & R. Genzel (MPE-Garching), SHARP I, NTT, La Silla Obs., ESO It’s basically a NASA image and as such may be used pretty much freely for non-commercial purposes. “It is estimated that 3.71 X 10^10 “first-star-tonight” wishes have been wasted on Venus.” OK, a little astronomer humor there. With emphasis on little, I think it’s safe to say that not many stand up comics got their start in astronomy.)
What is outside the Universe revisited: “There is no God” is now a scientific fact
One of the side effects of trying to write thought provoking blog posts is that often they provoke a lot of thoughts, expressed in the form of comments. And unfortunately I often do not or cannot take the time to address them all properly. Hell, I could write a book on my responses to the comments to the Dyatlov Pass Incident alone, and if someone offers me a pile of money, maybe I will. Anyhow, I digress.
So, someone left this comment on my “What is Outside the Universe” post:
“Perhaps our existence is only the thinking of another.
Perhaps our dimensions being time, space, sound, gravity, light or energy, mass and speed or rate of expansion are the only ones the Creator chooses to contemplate. On the other hand,
If you go back to the idea that existing is a reality painted on a canvas that could be a variety of shapes including a sphere in or outside a parabola and flat or undulating surface that meets itself but always our existence is someplace. bigger, smaller but where?
I think that we are in the imagination of the Grand thinker and where is He? or She or It. Are we being crapped on a stump, floating in beer or piss or in a soap bubble. Will we ever be able to see or know?”
Well, um, yes. That’s the whole point I am trying to make. 400 years ago the idea that science could explain and explore the fundamental nature of reality was laughable. 50 years ago the idea that science could understand the nature and origin of the Big Bang was science fiction. Today scientists are using scientific instruments to peer outside our universe and see what is actually going on. And amazingly enough, what they are seeing is similar to what some philosophers have been saying all long. Our entire universe is a tiny fleck of foam on a storm tossed sea that extends infinitely in all directions, a sea that has been storming forever and will be storming forever.
And this sea contains energy such that we can’t comprehend it. Our entire universe was but a tiny speck of this underlying reality, that’s how “dense” the energy is in the underlying reality “outside” our universe. And our universe is one of an infinite number of universes, in the past and it the future. (Although “past” and “future” have very little meaning outside our universe.) I’m having trouble grasping the idea of infinite myself, but it means that for every decision point in my life, there is a universe where I made a different decision. Doesn’t it? And when one looks about at all the decision points in people’s lives, that’s a lot of universes. Infinite is more than a lot though, right?
The point I am making is that our universe doesn’t appear to have been created by God, it appears to have been a natural consequence of events in the underlying reality. A reality so vast and energetic it has created and will create an infinite number of universes. And science is on the verge of proving this. And no God or other supernatural being is needed to explain any of this. I mean, if God exists, he created a reality that has infinite energy and will create all possible universes and has always been here and always will be here. Clever trick, but there’s no longer anything to explain. “Reality contains infinite energy, exists forever, and creates all possibilities” pretty much covers all possible contingencies.
It may sound mean, but claiming a God is required to explain reality and/or the Big Bang is now logically akin to saying God is required to explain the sunrise. Scientists are probing the nature of reality itself and the origin of our universe, the very same way they learned about the Earth orbiting the Sun and everything since, by logical application of the scientific method and using increasingly sophisticated scientific instruments. Some evidence for this and the existence of other universes is illustrated above. Some cosmologists have detected patterns in the CMB radiation that they claim may be “bruises” caused when our universe impacted other “nearby” universes before the Big Bang. This particular line of inquiry may may not pan out, but it’s only one of many ways scientists are now exploring the very fabric of reality.
We are at a historical junction akin to when Galileo showed the Pope that Jupiter has moons. Some people started to understand it then, that’s one of the reasons they called the Renaissance the “Age of Reason.” And we are coming to the inevitable end of the journey Galileo started with his little telescope. Humans invented God to explain things we couldn’t understand. Well, scientists have now shown that there isn’t anything left that requires a supernatural being to explain. I can’t prove there’s no God, but when someone like the esteemed commenter above says “We can never ultimately know whether we are foam in an infinite stormy sea or bubbles in an infinite glass of beer,” no disrespect intended, but they are talking metaphysics, not cosmology or science.
As far as reality goes, the reality we live in, there is no God. That appears to be a scientific fact now, whether people like it or not.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and is central to illustrating the post. Credit and Copyright: Feeny et. al. And then of course there’s the whole situation where as soon as people came up with a hypothetical supernatural being to explain why the sun shines and the grass grows, some people realized this was a great avenue to manipulate other people, but that’s a topic for another day.)
The Year and the Decade in Review, Short Version: Yikes!
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
And what a year and a decade it’s been. We’ve come a long ways since the odometer rolled over in 2000, and are a decade into a century I could barely imagine when I was a young lad. Even the year 1984 seemed to be in the far future when I was in high school, 2010 might as well have been on Mars. Yet here I am, older, wiser, and in many ways more perplexed than ever by the human condition. Are we an intelligent species? Damned if I know, but I don’t see a whole lot of evidence for it. Yet we muddle through somehow. And we muddled through a lot of stuff this past decade, here, in no particular order, is my take on the whole mess:
9/11. For good or for ill this was a defining moment for the decade. At least in the USA. However, what happens in the USA affects the whole world, so 9/11 was a global event on par with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. What can I say, we needed a Lincoln or a Truman, we had a Bush. Instead of decisive action, like sending the 101st airborne to Afghanistan capture Bin Ladin and his henchmen, Bush gave the green light to every sycophant and crony with an axe to gride, in most cases a pretty corrupt ideological axe. A decade later, trillions of dollars spent, countless lives wasted, foreign nations turned into failed states … and the “War on Terror” is a zombie monster still dragging us down and creating more terror and debt every day. And OBL is still at large, though the government apparently now thinks that searching American’s crotches may bring him to justice. Yeah, this is going to end well.
The Economy. The nineties showed us that having a cool web site address wasn’t the secret to wealth after all. The last decade showed us that banks, real estate offices, and fast food joints aren’t much to base an economy on. Or should have shown us, despite giving endless buckets of cash to the people whose greed crashed the economy in the first place, the American economy is still a disaster and most seem clueless as to its cause. Meanwhile the rest of the world built factories and is muddling through somehow. Yes, there is a connection here. We’ve done what the Spanish Empire did, spent our money on weapons and glitter. How long did the Spanish Empire last anyhow?
Space Exploration. Well, some good news here at least. There have been many amazing discoveries the past decade, we are truly in a golden era of space exploration. American manned space exploration, well, that’s hosed, but robots are the future in space exploration anyhow. Still, three in a row here, three major areas where the USA has lost its way … foreign policy, the economy, and space exploration. What can I say, it wasn’t supposed to turn out like this when I as a kid in the sixties. No Moon Bases, no flying cars, just a pile of debt and a war that is designed to last forever.
Cosmology. It’s also been an amazing decade for cosmologists. It now appears that there are testable theories about the origin of the Big Bang, not to mention the ultimate fate of our Universe. And oddly enough, there is no need for supernatural influence anywhere. The cosmological argument for God is now dead, possibly the biggest development in theology in 400 years. Trust me, this will be a big deal someday.
Other Sciences. From preserved dinosaur soft tissue to Gobeli Tepi, there have been all sorts of scientific advances the past decade. I hardly know where to begin, so I won’t. I don’t think there’s been anything epochal like the invention of the aeroplane or the napkin, but I could be wrong.
The Media. This will be remembered as the decade where the mainstream media completed its transformation into little more than a shopping flyer for corporate and government America. What Free Press remains is on the Internet. Will the Internet be subsumed by the beast, or will true freedom return via the Internet? Beats me, none of the above?
Politics. The US government stopped even pretending to pay attention to the will of the people this decade, and set itself up as the arbiter of what is right. Historically, this rarely ends well. Consider yourselves warned.
Popular Culture. There’s 837 million blogs about popular culture, this isn’t one of them. Prince Philip could be marrying Lady Gaga on Survivor for all I know.
Personal Insights. I’m an atheist now, that’s the big personal development of the decade for me. On a broader level, science is starting to come to a much better understanding of why people believe in absurdities. There’s a lot of absurdities out there, I’d say the widespread belief that the Earth is only a few thousand years old is one of the most prevalent ones. People who believe in absurdities are not stupid or ignorant, there’s a host of evolutionary reasons why people process data in fallacious ways. Will understanding this lead to new ways to enlighten people … or new ways to manipulate them? Stay tuned.
What will the next decade bring? My suspicion is that it’s going to make the past decade look rosy in comparison. As is so often the case, I hope I’m wrong.
I wish everyone who reads this a Happy New Year and Happy New Decade.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. There’s a zillion reasons why its use here doesn’t hurt the copyright holder in any conceivable way, arguably the opposite. It’s Oliphaunts in one of the Lord of the Rings movies. In the Lord of the Rings world, gravity must have been below Earth normal, and possibly with denser air, to allow such things as these giant beasts and flying dragons and such. I chose the image to represent the decade because of its outsized and bizarre violent imagery. That’s certainly the War on Terror and the decade to me, a huge violent Kafkaesque Juggernaut raging violently, mindlessly. Who knows how and where it will end but it’s likely to be a hell of a mess until it does.)
Falling Forever
Another wonderful image courtesy of the Hubble Telescope. This is galaxy NGC 4911, located some 320 million light years away. So that means we are seeing it as it was 320 million years ago. That was the Mississippian period on Earth, so called because the rocks from that area are exposed along the Mississippi River. Earth looked a little different then:
OK, a lot different. No grass, no flowers, no fruit, nothing but ferns and primitive such plants. There were some little lizard like things, animals were just beginning to move onto the land. Lots of bugs and spider like critters. The first flying insects were appearing. The food chain was rather primitive though. Bugs had just barely started eating plants, and other animals hadn’t started at all. Basically bugs eating leaf litter and decayed vegetation were the bottom of the food chain, and other stuff ate them. The oceans were strange too, while there were corals and such we would recognize, crinoids were very common, and trilobites were still around. The only octopus like thing was the nautilus. Lots of fish and sharks though, in fact the sharks then looked about the same as the sharks now. When nature hits a design that works, it keeps it. Although a point to be made is that while those sharks did indeed look very similar to today’s sharks, they did and do continue to evolve, none of the shark species extent then is still around.
On the plus side, there would have been no noxious pests whatsoever. No mosquitos, ticks, parasites, wasps, or anything even remotely unpleasant on land. No plants with thorns either. Just don’t go wading or swimming and everything will be fine. I mention these idyllic facts because according to Stephen Hawking’s most recent pronouncements, time travel is possible. And yes, in layman’s terms, there are paradoxes involved. In reality, no, there aren’t. That’s because whatever happened in the past … already happened. So a person can’t go back into the past and change anything. Even if someone does go back in time and murders their grandfather, all they will do is prove their granny slept around. I know sci fi movies have really muddied people’s thinking about these sorts of things; sadly, for the most part, sci fi movies are to science what cop movies are to real police work. Time travel may be possible, changing the past isn’t. Deal with it.
I digress, the thing about the Hubble image is that NGC 4911 is falling to its doom. OK, well, maybe not its doom, but it is falling into the Coma Cluster, one of the largest assemblages of galaxies in the known Universe. See the faint clouds around it? Those are stars that are being pulled away from NGC 4911 by other nearby galaxies in the cluster. Eventually NGC 4911 will lose its spiral arms, its satellite galaxies, most of its gas, and be converted into a boring yellowish elliptical galaxy. It will no longer be the stunning sight it is now. On the plus side, as the Universe expands, the Coma Cluster will stay together due to gravitational attraction, and even when the rest of the Universe recedes into invisibility, galaxies in the Coma Cluster will still be able to see other galaxies. Our galaxy on the other hand will appear to be sailing in an infinite endless void some 50-100 billion years from now.
The Coma Cluster has some mysteries of its own. It appears to be about 90% made of dark matter. Um, dark matter is stuff astronomers can’t see yet but can tell it’s there because of its gravitational effects on visible matter. I should blog on it sometime, if I ever understand it. This is a higher percentage of dark matter than we usually see in the Universe. And to deepen the mystery, the Coma Cluster has an X-ray source in it that no one can explain. Yes, something, something apparently larger than a galaxy, is kicking out a heck of a lot of X-rays in the Coma Cluster.
My point here, is that this is an image of a spectacular event, an entire galaxy being sucked into one of the most enormous structures in the Universe, where it will be completely transformed into an entirely new type of galaxy. And not only is this epic in scale, I mean “one of the largest structures in the Universe” is about as big as it gets, it is also epic in time. For NGC 4911 has been falling to its fate since before animals crawled out of the sea on Earth, and will still be falling after the Earth is a scorched oceanless desert some billion years from now. Quite a show.
And yet no one has even gotten around to naming NGC 4911? Yes, the Universe is so filled with wonders we can’t even count them all, let alone name them.
(The Hubble image above is more or less Public Domain and is being used, not for profit, legally: Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: K. Cook (LLNL) et al. The image of Earth as it was about 320 million years ago is a public domain image. I wrote this post because it pleased me, I may switch back to that strategy for awhile.)
The Eridanus Void … a Cosmological Conundrum
Well, the readers have spoken. Today’s post will be about a space mystery. Good thing too, Afghanistan is such a depressing subject. And there will be lot’s of time to discuss Afghanistan, as I understand it our new mission there is “We are staying forever.” Still, took me awhile to come up with an appropriate space mystery, most of them seemed so, well, pedestrian. The Phobos Monolith = it’s a rock. Weird dunes on Titan = sometimes the wind there blows in different directions. The face on Jupiter = I just made that up.
Moving right along, the Eridanus Void. A true space mystery. Anf there’s a nice double entrendre there too, because that is exactly what the Eridanus void is, a mysterious space in space. A what now? The Eridanus Void is an area of the Universe about one billion light years across (that’s really big) that appears to contain essentially no matter. No galaxies, no stars, no dust, no nothing. It’s billions of light years from Earth though, so not an easy thing to study. The void was found a few years back when they were looking at the cosmic background radiation. There was this big spot with very little background radiation. Then they compared that to a map of the Universe’s galaxies, and lo and behold there weren’t any there.
So, a big empty spot in space? What’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is that there shouldn’t be a big empty spot in space. It would be like finding part of the Earth’s surface where there was no atmosphere, how could that be? In the chaotic creation and expansion of the Universe shouldn’t there be stuff everywhere? Yes, yes there should. So the Eridanus Void is a problem. However, if this void actually exists, and it’s not completely certain yet, it would be one of the largest structures in the Universe. So it’s an exciting problem to people who get excited about the structure of the Universe.
OK, so, what are the possibilities? The first is that it is just a statistical fluke, and doesn’t really mean anything at all. IE it only appears strange because it is surrounded by more dense areas. Sounds good to me. One of the problems with trying to understand, let alone explain, these sort of cosmological mysteries is that frankly I don’t understand them very well myself, and that is particularly the case with stuff like this. Another possibility that has been proposed is that the void is something called a cosmic texture. If I understand that correctly, a cosmic texture is a defect in space time. Such defects are apparently allowed by theory, but none has ever been observed. I’m not really sure I can or want to understand exactly what that means, but again, if there is a defect in space time, I’m glad it’s billions of light years away.
It’s also been suggested that the void is simply a giant black hole. A billion light year across black hole. Even Captain Picard would have trouble dealing with that. While there doesn’t seem to be any known way such a huge black hole could form, there’s also to known way such a huge void in the Universe could form, so it’s not a completely off the wall suggestion. If I understand this theory, the black hole would have as much mass as the rest of the Universe. And the Universe would in fact be “orbiting” around this black hole. Again, it’s very fortunate that we are nowhere near if this is the case, because then as we speak entire galaxies are being pulled to their doom.
Lastly we come to the most interesting and exotic theory. One Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton, a professor of theoretical physics and cosmology has claimed that the void is the result of quantum entanglement with another Universe, and is empirical proof that parallel universes exists. She sounds like one hell of a smart person, so this theory, though controversial, is apparently testable and mainstream. I can’t really explain what it means, but suffice it to say that she claims the void is a “smudge” left where our universe was in contact with another universe during the first moments of the Universe’s existence. At least I think this is what she means. Apparently if it is a remnant of contact with another universe, there should be another void on the opposite side of the sky. I’m sure scientists are looking as I type.
And that’s all that can be said. Despite all the weird implications, the core mystery is pretty simple. There’s a huge hole in space, and cosmologists and astronomers can’t explain why. Coming next week, who knows, I’m open to suggestion. Have a great weekend everyone.
(The above image of the “cold spot” in the CMB radiation is being used leghally in accordance with it’s creator: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Image credit: Nernom at en.wikipedia Here is the best link I’ve discovered yet on the void, it’s not exactly all over the net. A giant black hole?)
The Ekpyrotic Theory: Looking for God at the End of the Universe
It recently dawned on me why so many religions are so threatened by a few branches of science. It’s because certain branches of science, like SETI, cosmology, evolutionary biology, and astronomy are all basically looking for God. They are looking at the origin of the Universe, and the origin of the human race, and even if they aren’t actually looking for God … this is where God is supposed to be in so many religions. Yes, at the origin of the Universe, we should find this big glowing bearded white guy on a plinth, saying “Let there be light.” Well, there might be, but him and his plinth exist in five to nine dimensional space and don’t look like anything our feeble brains can even conceive of. In any event, this is a background and conclusion post to some of my long promised posts about God and the origin of the Universe and how the Universe created itself. I skip over a lot of details here because they would make the post too long, and more importantly, if people can follow my logic here, it will be far easier to go back and clarify in future posts. Also if it turns out I have made some glaring mistake, best to find out now and correct it later, assuming it can be corrected.
Now, where were we? Nine dimensional God, right. Fortunately there are humans whose brains are nimble enough to think about five to nine dimensional space, cosmologists and mathematicians for one, not to mention nuclear physicists. And they seem to have come up with a pretty good, experimentally verifiable, logical theory about what is on the “other side,” so to speak, of the Big Bang. Things are actually pretty exciting in these rarefied realms of science now, but one wouldn’t know it from the popular press. So anyhow, there seems to be a logical and scientific origin for the Big Bang. And not only was the Big Bang logical, it was also inevitable, it was in fact a natural consequence of the nature of reality itself. The universe we live in is only a slice of reality, a slice created by natural events in background reality. Which has always existed. In other words, if God did indeed create everything, he created a reality where the Big Bang and the creation and evolution of our Universe were natural and inevitable outcomes of the nature of reality.
In other words, if God exists, he created a reality so perfect and self sustaining, that no God is required. In other words, (yeah, will be saying that a lot as I try to understand and explain this,) if the Ekpyrotic Theory pans out … there is nowhere left for God to hide. Now of course this theory doesn’t explain everything, in fact it’s clear now that reality is so complex by definition there will be things we can’t explain, but it does explain how we got here. Reality has always been here, the Big Bang wasn’t the “‘start” of anything, it was just another event in the seething mass of five to nine dimensional quantum reality for lack of a better name. Well, I think cosmologists call it the “bulk” but that’s both singularly tepid, and also inaccurate. There’s incredible things going on “out there,” our universe being only one example.
Now there’s two things with the Ekpyrotic Theory that make it particularly attractive as explaining the origin for the Big Bang. For one thing it eliminates the need for a singularity as the source of the Big Bang. What’s a singularity? Um, it’s where you cram a large amount of mass, say up to a universe, into a dimensionless point. Some trick, eh? Well, no longer needed, since the Ekpyrotic theory says the Universe started as a cosmic string, and that has dimensions. What’s a cosmic string? A topic for another post, trust me. Secondly, the Ekpyrotic Theory does away with the need for the Inflationary Epoch to explain the early hyper fast expansion of the Universe.
So the Ekpyrotic theory, to sum it all up now, not only explains the origin of the Big Bang, it makes the Big Bang Theory an even more elegant and therefore robust theory. And this will all be tested on the Large Hadron Collider, because if one can look at the basic structure of the Universe at a fine enough scale, predictable effects from these proposed “outside the Universe” realities bleed through so to speak. This is what I meant when I said scientists were going to look for God by weighing “tiny pebbles.” Well, no, much smaller than pebbles. Tiny little bits of our reality itself hurled to speeds not seen since the Big Bang. And at this scale things should be effected by forces “outside” of reality. Well, outside of our Universe, a universe that is but a slice of a much greater vaster reality that has always been here.
No God required is my final analysis. At the very least the “Well, everything has to have a creator” argument is demolished. Reality has always been here quietly (well, it’s probably a noisy process in a manner of speaking) spawning universes, ours being just one of an infinite number of them. And if one still wants to believe in God, well, he was clever enough to create a reality that appears to have always existed and doesn’t require the hand of God at any point to work. God’s day of rest so to speak lasts forever. So if you see a big glowing bearded white guy sitting on a beach chair in Cabo with a drink with a tiny umbrella in it, tell him to get back to work. Pretty sure though he’ll just point to his t-shirt which has “Not My Problem Anymore” printed on it.
(The above image may help some understand other dimensions, pictured is a hypercube or tesseract, a cube in four dimensions. A tesseract is to the cube what the cube is to the square. Notice there are eight areas bounded by six sides, eight “cubes” if you will. The one on the interior, the big exterior one that encloses them all, and the six that surround the inner core. All eight of these cubes are exactly the same size and consist of all right angles, but of course we can only draw a poor three dimensional representation of a tesseract in our reality. Oh, it’s a public domain image too. It future posts I will expand on cosmic strings, brane theory, problems with the Big Bang and other supporting elements of the above, if people are interested.)
Artificial Life or Artificial Hype? And the Big Bang Gets Another Boost.
Scientists announced last week the first creation of artificial life in the laboratory. And the media breathlessly reported the news before moving on to other things, since the average human attention span these days seems to be approaching the planck limit. (For the non physicists reading, a Planck Time Unit is the smallest measurable length of time.) When I heard the news my first reaction was … haven’t they already created artificial life, like Geralda Rivera and Glenn Beck? I guess this means that they had mothers and were conceived and born in the usual fashion. Yikes. My second reaction was, hmm, this is sure a headline grabbing story, I wonder how much truth there is to it? I mean now that any big study involving genetics and bioengineering can mean buckets of money for the discoverer, one has to keep an open mind. Remember the announcement of the first cloned human a few years back?
So I looked into it, and this isn’t really a story about artificial life, it’s mostly a story about artificial hype. Yes, once again the media has credulously repeated a story without bothering to do any sort of critical analysis or ask any questions at all apparently. I guess since people will believe anything on TV, they figure it’s not worth the trouble to be even remotely factually accurate? The Weekly World Newsification of the media continues apace.
OK, so what exactly did esteemed scientist Dr Craig Venter do? In sum, he copied the DNA from an existing organism, made a few minor changes in it, and inserted it into a preexisting cell from which the DNA had been removed. Uh huh. This is like making a copy of a computer’s operating system, changing a few files, then sticking it into another computer from which the operating system has been removed, and claiming to have made a whole new type of computer! *blinks* As one might expect, reaction from the scientific community is mixed. While it is a remarkable technical accomplishment, and a step towards the day when bacteria with custom written DNA will be produced, it’s a little premature to call this “synthetic life.”
Moving from the creation of life to the creation of the Universe (how’s that for a segue?) scientists last week announced further evidence for the Big Bang. Well, to be more accurate, they may have explained one of the long standing problems with the Big Bang theory. And that problem is, where is all the antimatter? Antimatter is the opposite of matter, in that the electron has a positive charge, and the proton has a negative charge. In other respects antimatter is normal matter, and one can have antimatter atoms, molecules, and on up to antimatter suns, life, and galaxies. However, when matter and antimatter come into contact, they annihilate each other in an explosion of nuclear dimensions. This is why antimatter is a popular explosive or starship fuel in fiction, a pound of antimatter could power the USA for two days. And while scientists can make small amounts of antimatter, there’s as yet no way to contain it in large quantities for such purposes. Antimatter is used for PET scans though, so it has some use. And other than the tiny ephemeral amounts created by radioactive decay there don’t seem to be any antimatter stars or galaxies floating around, and astronomers have looked for them.
So why is this a problem for the Big Bang theory? Well, according to the theory, when the Universe was expanding and matter formed out of energy, there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Which should have then mutually annihilated, which should have been the end of that. Instead, for some unknown reason, a universe made entirely out of matter came into being, eventually turning into stars, galaxies, and the readers of this blog. Well, the problem has been solved, or at least a solution is in sight. Scientists working at Fermilab and the University of Chicago have discovered that when B-mesons (a subatomic particle) decay, they make about 1% more muons (another subatomic particle) than antimuons. This may not seem like much of a deal, but apparently it’s far more than enough to account for a universe made entirely of matter.
Granted, this discovery hasn’t been integrated with the Big Bang theory yet, and may in fact turn out to be irrelevant. What it does do though is show that on some levels there is a measurable bias towards matter in the Universe, so a solution to the “missing antimatter” problem is possible. This is one of the things the LHC (the Large Hadron Collider) will be looking into if scientists can ever get it up to full power.
So, two promised topics covered already, and it’s only Monday! Sometime during the week I will cover the third, since it’s harder to explain and I want to get it right before being pilloried. Basically cosmologists are starting to understand how the Universe created itself! I threw down the “no God required” clause because this has always been one of the “objections” to the Big Bang theory, the idea that there has to be a creator, since nothing can create itself. I use the word “argument” in quotation marks because it’s not really an argument, since it begs the question. If one can’t have anything without a creator, and if God created the Universe, what created God? Nonetheless, what created the Big Bang is a real scientific question, theological implications aside. And there is now a theory that just might do the trick. Stay tuned.
So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.”
Matthew 13:34-36
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and its use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. Credit and copyright: MotivatedPhotos.com. It’s an illustration of an alternate cosmology, one where the Ceiling Cat God created the Universe. I can’t claim the theory has a whole lot of observational evidence behind it, but it has a certain appeal.)
Doug's Darkworld 