Saturday, September 8, 2012
Outer Space ... Science ...
After two political conventions in two weeks, it seems like a good time for a diversion, a look into the world of 21st Century physics. I’d like to share some recent developments of interest (they interest me, anyway!). These papers have not gained as much public attention as the recent confirmation of the Higgs boson or the controversy over possible faster-than-light neutrinos from last year. But I myself believe they have a lot of potential in defining or altering what the physicists will teach future generations about how our Universe works.
The first item regards a recent experiment involving the decay pattern of sub-atomic particles called B mesons. As you probably know, there are only a handful of stable particles which make up the stuff that we experience in our regular lives; i.e., mixtures of top and bottom quarks arranged as protons and neutrons, along with electrons and the ghostly neutrinos. There are many, many other kinds of particles, but they only exist for a tiny fraction of a second and usually only manifest themselves in rare circumstances involving very high energy levels (as are created in research particle accelerators). B mesons are such a particle.
Even though exotic particles like the B meson are not typical, physicists can still » continue reading …
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Current Affairs ... Outer Space ...
The press recently marked the passing of the first man to walk on the moon, astronaut Neil Armstrong. Ah, another famous figure from my youth has gone to the great round-up out in the blue. And another reminder is had that life is not to be taken for granted.
The RealClearScience web site published a tribute to Mr. Armstrong just after his passing, making the point that he probably saved the Apollo 11 mission from being aborted or even failing tragically during the last minute when the lunar module approached the moon’s surface. As the story goes, the “LEM” (lunar excursion module) with Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin was off course a bit and was heading towards a rather rocky and dangerous landing spot. Armstrong decided to over-ride the computer controls and pilot the craft himself, which required him to fly horizontally over the moon’s surface, looking for a nice flat spot to land. This maneuver used up a lot of fuel, such that the LEM was less than a minute from running on fumes (which it basically doesn’t do). But Armstrong stayed cool and finally found his spot, and the rest was history.
Not long after reaching the moon, Armstrong took the first walk on lunar soil. It obviously was a moment for the history books, and Armstrong had a good line prepared for the moment. As his boots hit the lunar dust, Mr. Armstrong spoke into his helmet microphone “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. It was a big moment (recall the scenes of CBS News anchorman Walter Chronkite being flabbergasted and losing his words), and this line sounded really good. Only later on did anyone think about what Armstrong had actually said. Man . . . mankind . . . what’s the difference? One small step for humanity, one giant leap for humanity? What’s this, a Zen koan or something?
No, Armstrong was trying to contrast how his stepping off the LEM platform was physically just » continue reading …
Monday, August 27, 2012
Economics/Business ... Outer Space ... Politics ...
With the Republican convention underway, I gave some thought to an economist’s kind of question — i.e., how much money is spent each year on politics; how much of our national economic wealth goes into “electioneering”. I did a quick search and got a couple of ballpark answers. One article cites a study of national political costs in the 2008 and 2012 election years; for all elections, from the local school board all the way up to the White House, the predicted total cost of campaigning for votes in 2012 is $9.84 billion, versus $6.98 billion in 2008.
Hmm, a 41% jump, well in excess of the net inflation rate and net GDP growth rate for that period. Another study concluded that the nationwide cost of election politics in the Congressional mid-term election years was $4 billion in 2010 versus $2.85 billion in 2006. Which was also a 40% jump over 4 years. Wow, politics is definitely a growth industry, even in the midst of a “great recession”!
And this doesn’t count the cost of another form of political influence, the more indirect technique of political lobbying. I’m sure that if you piled on all the money spent by corporations, unions and other big interest groups (e.g. trial lawyers) for “access” to our leaders on the state and national level, you could pile another billion or two on to these totals.
Oh wait, here’s a web site for that! In 2006, the nationwide total spent » continue reading …
Sunday, August 5, 2012
Outer Space ... Technology ...
The “space race” ain’t what it used to be in the USA. In the glory years of the 1960s and 70s, the USA put men on the moon and sent up the first orbiting space stations. But over the next 30 years, the dangerous-but-not-very-inspiring Space Shuttle soaked up most of the dwindling resources available for “exo-atmospheric” exploration, and ultimately left us at a dead end. For now, the only way for Americans to get into space is by hitching a ride aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle (although NASA is working with Boeing, SpaceX and some other firms to get American manned vehicles back into earth orbit sometime before 2020 . . . or so they hope).
However, during these years, the USA had not done so badly in terms of sending increasingly sophisticated robot probes and vehicles to the planet next door, i.e. Mars. We’ve managed to get about 2 out of every 3 Mars missions successfully to the red planet, whether in orbit or to the surface via parachutes and rockets or bouncing air-bags. Now we’re kicking it up a notch with the Curiosity rover, a mission set to make a landing attempt in a few hours (around 1:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, Aug 6), eight months after launch from Cape Canaveral. This baby is almost 5 times the size of previous scientific rovers, and will be a scientific lab on wheels. It will move more than twice as fast as the Sojourner and 5 times the Opportunity, and have twice as many scientific instruments on board to probe the Martian surface. Sounds great, makes you almost proud once again of the American space program.
But one problem . . . first this thing has to land first, using a wacky “sky hook” arrangement » continue reading …
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Outer Space ... Science ...
It’s April, and spring is in the air here in New Jersey. But during the winter months just past, the air of metaphysical mystery created by a particle physics experiment that seemingly clocked neutrino particles moving faster than light has been blown to the four winds. In the early months of this year, a review of that experiment along with the initial results of further experiments have put the mainline physicists back in control. The speed of light remains the absolute limit to all transactions and interactions in the universe. (Well, any interaction that conveys information, anyway; quantum entanglement experiments indicate that there are faster than light effects, but they can’t pass relevant information through spacetime any faster than a ray of light could; the hyper-luminal effects can only be known retroactively).
So much for all the excitement that was created in the press by the notion that Einstein and all the other smarty-pants physicists out there haven’t really mastered the eternal mysteries after all. Ah, but just when all the New Age and Old Age mystagogues (the ‘Old Age’ ones being Baby Boom spiritual seekers — like me!!) had lost hope of besting the boffins regarding the ultimate secrets of creation, spring comes along and new scientific mysteries are in the air; this time regarding dark matter.
In a nutshell, astrophysicists observed some time ago that some wacky stuff was happening with many of the galaxies out there » continue reading …
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Outer Space ...
I see that not everyone has given up on the “WOW Signal“, a narrow-band electomagnetic radio signal from the sky that was picked up in 1977 by the on-going Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence project. This search has been going intermittently since the early 1960s, in both the USA and Russia. For the most part, nothing interesting has been found coming in from the stars beyond a lot of static. But on August 15, 1977, a signal was picked up by some radio dishes at Ohio State University that seemed to have been the real deal, an organized radio signal originating in a distant star system. Unfortunately, no one was monitoring the equipment full-time, and by the time the technicians saw the read-out for the WOW signal, it was too late. They tried pointing another antenna at the spot in the sky where the WOW signal appeared to come from, but it was gone. (Actually, another antenna came into range a few minutes later that day; but failed to pick up anything unusual.)
I thought that the whole subject had been debunked and forgotten; i.e., the signal must have been a glitch, or something from we earthlings. It was likely just another observation flaw. But not everyone gave up as quickly as me. There’s a short but interesting interview on The Atlantic web site with an amateur astronomy buff named Robert Gray who thinks that the signal could have been the real thing, some sort of signal sent intentionally by a technological civilization many light years away. Mr. Gray recently published a book on the topic, “The Elusive Wow“.
Two caveats here, of course. First, the signal might still be debunked as a mistake or human artifact » continue reading …
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Outer Space ... Politics ...
On this final day of 2011, I wanted to share some things I read recently on the topic of whether there are life-forms in the universe beyond planet earth (i.e., “extraterrestrial life”), and if so, whether there is intelligent, sentient life akin to what we homo sapiens believe that we experience. And finally, what might this mean for our life together here on earth, i.e. on whether we (and any other possible civilization in the Universe) are truly intelligent and sentient, or just a disaster waiting to happen.
As to the first question, the astrophysicists seem quite confident that there are other living things out there. Continued studies regarding the adaptability of microbes to extreme conditions on earth indicate that there could even be some kind of bacteria or fungus fairly close by, on a moon of Saturn or Jupiter, or perhaps even on Mars, buried somewhere under the red soil. Given the recent success of the Kepler “exoplanet observer” satellite in finding far-away planets that are relatively earth-like in size, composition and distance from their own sun, it’s a good bet that there’s plenty of slime mold out there.
The question gets a bit more tricky when you ask whether there are intelligent, self-conscious life forms which communicate and organize themselves into social structures, out on » continue reading …
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Outer Space ... Politics ...
So, Newt Gingrich is drawing fire for his vision of setting up a lunar base, presumably sometime during the 8 years that he would be President. This lunar base would mine some stuff on the moon for use here on earth (i.e., before 2020). Well, I give Mr. Gingrich credit for thinking big, thinking really high tech. But something about the reality of science, technology and economics often seems to get in the way of those “high frontier” dreams about manned space exploration. Right now, the USA is pretty much out of that business. We just can’t afford it at the moment, and the economy won’t be booming again for quite some time. That mountain of debt that we and the Europeans face won’t go away any time soon.
But if things do somehow turn around in the next 5 years, it would not be impossible for the USA to work toward a return to the moon, with the eventual goal of setting up some sort of small colony for longer-term habitation. Actually, this will probably come off as an international partnership between China, India, Russia and us, assuming that we can all learn to get along well enough to pull off something so complex.
As such, Newt’s dream of a lunar colony really isn’t any more radical than G W Bush’s goal of returning to the moon by the third decade of the new century. It’s just that » continue reading …
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Outer Space ... Science ...
A lot of people, both inside and outside the scientific community, got riled up back in September by the results of a recent study on neutrino particles purporting to show them moving just a bit faster than light speed. Of course, that would violate a key tenant of Einstein’s relativity physics, i.e. the ban against anything with mass achieving light speed, and against anything with or without mass going faster (and able to covey any sort of real information — as neutrinos could). A lot of intelligent non-science folk got interested, hoping that something with deep mystical or philosophical implications was in the works here.
However, from what I’ve seen from a variety of sources, the science folk have the situation under control. There’s plenty of past evidence showing that neutrinos can’t and don’t violate light speed, and also plenty of reasons why the study in question was deceiving. It will take some months to straighten it out, but the boffins seem confident that the whole thing will blow over soon. Sorry, nothing to see here, metaphysically speaking.
But something else is going on in the world of sub-atomic particles and forces that could be just as troubling, even though it hasn’t gained much attention from the public. The reason for that is because it involves the “fine structure constant” of atoms. » continue reading …
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Outer Space ... Spirituality ...
It turns out that many of the US astronauts who have been up in the Freedom space station for several months have had vision problems. About one third have reported some level of vision impairment after coming home. Most have gotten better over time, but NASA is worried that more permanent damage would be done on a very long space mission, such as a trip to explore Mars.
Likewise, it turns out that 36 astronauts who were on “high radiation missions”, including the Apollo moon astronauts, experienced cataract problems. This was due to their heightened exposure to cosmic rays and other particles from the Sun and from space, given that they spent time beyond the earth’s magnetic shielding. (The space station astronaut problems stem more from brain fluid shifts caused by prolonged weightlessness — they are in low orbit and aren’t as severely exposed to radiation).
But interestingly enough, the deep space missions had another type of “vision” effect — vision in a spiritual sense. It turns out that » continue reading …