Astronomy
drorzel | May 9, 2012One final thought on the Big Science/ Space Chronicles stuff from last week. One of the things I found really frustrating about the book, and the whole argument that we ought to be sinking lots of money into manned space missions is that the terms of the argument are so nebulous. This is most obvious when Tyson or other space advocates talk about the need for "inspiring" people, but it shows up even in what ought to be relatively concrete discussions of actual science.
Take, for example, the argument over humans vs. robots. Given the success of the robotic missions to Mars and other bodies,…
drorzel | May 3, 2012I was tremendously disappointed and frustrated by this book.
This is largely my own fault, because I went into it expecting it to be something it's not. Had I read the description more carefully, I might not have had such a strong negative reaction (which was exacerbated by some outside stress when I first started reading it, so I put it aside for a few weeks, until I was less mad in general, and more likely to give it a fair reading). I'm actually somewhat hesitant to write this up at all, for a number of reasons, but after thinking it over a bit, I think I have sensible reasons for being…
drorzel | April 30, 2012I'm about a week late talking about this, but I've mostly resigned myself to not doing really topical blogging these days. Anyway, there was a lot of excitement last week over the announcement that an all-star team of nerd billionaires is planning to do commercial asteroid mining. (The post title is a reference to the Sean Connery movie, not the post-Bloom County comic.) I find it kind of amusing that this made the news while I'm doing retrospective blog posts (the next of which is coming), which have turned up a bunch of old posts where I say skeptical things about space in general. So I…
drorzel | April 4, 2012While reading bits of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Space Chronicles yesterday, I ran across this quote, attributed to "an Assyrian clay tablet from 2800 BC":
Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.
This made me scratch my head for a couple of reasons. I've seen this quote before, but always attributed to Cicero, which sorta-kinda makes sense. Seeing it moved back in time by a few…
drorzel | March 8, 2012Yesterday was a really grueling day, and I'm home with The Pip today, so no substantive blogging. But here's a song about the universe, written and performed by one of my colleagues:
If this becomes the next LHC Rap, remember you heard it here first.
By a weird coincidence, we've been watching our Animaniacs DVD's with SteelyKid, and just a couple of days ago got to this one:
So that's not one, but two songs about the universe. Which ought to be enough to keep you entertained for the day.
drorzel | February 9, 2012In a book that I read recently (either The Cloud Roads or The Serpent Sea-- I finished the first and immediately started the second), as some characters are traveling from one place to another, there's a passing mention that they weren't able to hunt at night because the moon wasn't out and it was too dark. Which sort of bugged me, and I was reminded of it tonight when I took Emmy out for our post-dinner walk-- it's very clear tonight, and a lot of stars were visible, even here in the light-polluted suburbs, but the moon wasn't up yet.
And the thing is, while it's darker when the moon isn't…
drorzel | February 2, 2012As I keep saying in various posts, I'm teaching a class on timekeeping this term, which has included discussion of really primitive timekeeping devices like sundials, as well as a discussion of the importance of timekeeping for navigation. To give students an idea of how this works, I arranged an experimental demonstration, coordinated with Rhett at Dot Physics. We've been trying to do this literally for months, but the weather wouldn't cooperate. Until this past weekend, when we finally managed to make measurements that allow us to do some cutting-edge science. For 200 BC, anyway...
So, what…
drorzel | February 1, 2012I'm using Dava Sobel's Longitude this week in my timekeeping class. The villain of the piece, as it were, is the Reverend Dr. Nevil Maskelyne, who promoted an astronomical method for finding longitude, and played a major role in delaying the payment to John Harrison for his marine chronometers. It's a good story, with lots of science and engineering and politicking.
There's one critical flaw, though, in terms of me teaching this book, which is that I don't really know how to say Maskelyne's name. And even Wikipedia is letting me down, here, by not providing a phonetic rendering of his name.…
drorzel | January 13, 2012I reported on the start of this class last week, and sinc ethen, we've had three more class meetings. Since this whole thing is an experiment, I'll keep reporting on it from time to time (heh). First, though, a quick answer to a request from comments:
I'd like to hear more about your class on time and timekeeping. How well do you think students learn the big ideas about how science works from these classes, as apposed to a more traditional general physics class? How much transfer do you see in students' understanding of the content of this course to understanding of science in general?
The…
drorzel | January 4, 2012As mentioned a few times previously, the class I'm teaching this term is a "Scholars Research Seminar" on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan to post occasional reports on what I'm doing to the blog.
Today was the first day of class, so a good chunk of the time was spent on introducing the basics of the course (my PowerPoint slides, for those who care), and going through one slightly silly example.
The stated learning goals for SRS courses (students should learn how to formulate a research question, find and evaluate…
drorzel | December 23, 2011A week and a half ago, when the advent calendar reached Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, I said that it was the first equation we had seen that wasn't completely correct. Having done our quick swing through quantum physics, the time has come to correct that equation:
If you say "Einstein equation" to a random person on the street, odds are they'll immediatley think of "E=mc2." If you ask a physicist to think of the Einstein equation, though, this is the one they'll think of. This is the Einstein field equation from general relativity, and while it's not as well known as E=mc2, it's…
drorzel | December 5, 2011I'm still getting back up to speed with the blog, as well as the huge backlog of stuff I've read during the past few months when I was too busy to blog. Thus, I am semi-officially proclaiming this Book Review Week. I'll post one review a day of books I was sent by publishers looking for a mention on the blog.
We'll start off with The Manga Guide to the Universe, which is from the same organization that brought us The Manga Guide to Relativity. This one is, as the title suggests, a cartoon introduction to astronomy.
As is standard for the Manga Guide series, this has a framing story involving…
drorzel | November 12, 2011Someone from the American Astronomical Society ran across the Project for Non-Academic Science posts here, and is looking for someone to participate in a career panel at their upcoming meeting in Austin, TX:
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Employment Committee is hosting a panel discussion at our annual AAS winter meeting in Austin on current issues related to the postdoc job market, with a focus on the increase in post-doc type positions without a corresponding growth in potential permanent academic positions. The session will be on Wednesday, January 11th from 10-11:30 am. They are…
drorzel | October 26, 2011
"I work around the clock-- 1043 Planck times per second-- providing the gravitational attraction to hold this galaxy cluster together. And some baryonic cosmologist wants to explain me away as a modification of Newtonian gravity?
"I have been silent for 13.7 billion years, but no more.
"I AM THE 96%"
(Original Pandora Cluster image from NASA)
drorzel | October 4, 2011The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae." Ethan will presumably have a post with about a gigabyte worth of images in it shortly, or if you prefer your information in book form, you can read Richard Panek's The Four Percent Universe, which has lots of detail about what they did, including the rivalry between the different groups. As a bonus, the UK edition has a blurb from yours truly...
But that's not what you really want to know--…
drorzel | September 23, 2011The final sentence of the neutrino paper that everybody is buzzing about:
We deliberately do not attempt any theoretical or phenomenological interpretation of
the results.
From a somewhat older work in physics:
Rationem vero harum gravitatis proprietatum ex phænomenis nondum potui deducere, et hypotheses non fingo. Quicquid enim ex phænomenis non deducitur, hypothesis vocanda est; et hypotheses seu metaphysicae, seu physicae, seu qualitatum occultarum, seu mechanicae, in philosophia experimentali locum non habent. In hac philosophia Propositiones deducuntur ex phaenomenis, et redduntur…
drorzel | August 11, 2011Yesterday was apparently Gender in Science day here, while the theme for today is Tab Clearance-- a couple of shortish posts about things that deserve more than just a Links Dump mention, but don't really cohere into any kind of grand synthesis of deep thoughts, or whatever.
This particular link was prompted by an item in the SF Signal links dump for today, with the title Writing Science Fiction as a Non-Scientist, by Jamie Todd Rubin. that made me blink a little, because it's never really seemed like a science degree was a necessary condition for writing SF. Even within so-called "hard SF,"…
drorzel | August 2, 2011Over Twitter, somebody pointed to this article on astronomy outreach (free PDF from that link), which argues that everybody else should stop trying to be Brian Cox:
I've known Brian for years and worked with him before his celebrity status went supernova. I would love to say "I told you so" to all the TV commissioning editors who rejected my suggestions to use him as a presenter. I suspect Brian fnds it as ironic as I do that TV companies now regularly put out adverts looking for "the next Brian Cox".
As much as I love Brian's work, I don't think we need any more like him at the moment.…
drorzel | July 27, 2011There's a lot of stuff in the news lately about asteroids, what with the Dawn mission orbiting Vesta, and the talk of a manned asteroid mission as a possible future step for NASA. Prompted by this, I'm going to dip into the territory usually occupied by Matt and Rhett, and ask a somewhat silly question:
What size asteroid would you be able to throw a baseball into orbit, a la Bugs Bunny?
(Sadly, probably for copyright reasons, I couldn't quickly find a YouTube video of the cartoon where Bugs throws a baseball all the way around the world. But you can probably picture it, even if you're too…
drorzel | July 27, 2011For the past few years, astronomer and SF author Mike Brotherton has been running the Launch Pad Workshop, a program bringing interested SF authors to Wyoming (where he's on the faculty) to learn about modern astronomy. The idea is to teach writers the real facts about the weird and wonderful things going on in astronomy these days, so they can write better stories about astronomical objects and ideas, and reach a wider audience through fiction. This year's workshop just ended, and Brotherton has links to some of the presentations, and blogs about it from the attendees.
I really like this…