Cosmology
catdynamics | June 18, 2014Day two of the New Frontiers wrap-up conference. This is a slow liveblog with more cosmology and life in the universe. Yesterday's summary is here
A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose "Big Questions" in some areas of science.
This is a slow liveblog - part II will be tomorrow with more cosmology and life in the universe
Seed funding was provided to 20 investigators and small groups to start exploratory research, and, now, it is time to say what they found.
This follows up from the New Frontiers kick-off conference back in 2012.
We start the…
catdynamics | June 17, 2014A couple of years ago, the Templeton Foundation funded the New Frontiers program to pose "Big Questions" in some areas of science.
This is a slow liveblog - part II will be tomorrow with more cosmology and life in the universe
Seed funding was provided to 20 investigators and small groups to start exploratory research, and, now, it is time to say what they found.
This follows up from the New Frontiers kick-off conference back in 2012.
The New Frontiers conference to report the hint of the beginning of the draft of the answers is under way... most of the investigators and about half of the…
esiegel | November 9, 2013"One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today." -Dale Carnegie
Our new Ask Ethan segment has been really popular, and the questions and suggestions keep pouring in. It's your Universe too, and if there's something you want to know about it, you should ask! (So keep it up!) This week's question is one of the biggest of them all, and it comes courtesy of John L. Ferri, who asks,
I have a difficult time…
esiegel | August 16, 2013"On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise." -Paul Ricoeur
Ask anyone who's looked up at a dark sky on a clear, moonless night, and you'll immediately hear tales about how incomprehensibly vast the Universe is.
Image credit: Randy Halverson, flickr user dakotalapse, from http://dakotalapse.com/.
But what you're looking at isn't much of the Universe at all. In fact, practically every point of light you see, including the vast swath of stars too dim to individually resolve, comes from…
catdynamics | July 18, 2013Simon White Director of Max Planck Institut für Astrophysik giving today's Physics Colloquium at ACP on the Planck Results
Likely to be interesting, hence the semi-liveblog.
Starts with description of the collaboration and historical perspective; Penzias and Wilson, COBE and WMAP
Cute ESA video showing Planck science
Even better ESA video explaining stuff
Very good description of baryon acoustic oscillations and polarization.
Quick glimpse of stacked and normalized Planck measurements of tangential/radial polarization of cold/hot spots at ~ 1 degree scales.
Nice animation blinking weak…
esiegel | May 29, 2013"The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal." -Aleister Crowley
But the Universe itself experiences continual growth, constant change, and new experiences all the time, and it does so spontaneously.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
And yet, the better we understand our Universe -- what the laws are that govern it, what particles inhabit it, and what it looked/behaved like farther and farther…
esiegel | May 8, 2013"No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now." -Alan Watts
"They do not see what lies ahead, when Sun has faded and Moon is dead." -J.R.R. Tolkien
One of the most amazing facts about the Universe is that, despite only having spent a few hundred years studying the fundamental constituents and forces of what makes us up, humanity has been able to accurately figure out just what all this actually is.
Image credit: ESO / S. Brunier.
The laws of nature are almost completely understood in a few, very important senses. We know that our Universe is about…
esiegel | April 19, 2013"Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang." -Alan Guth
So you finally understand it. The Big Bang tells us that the Universe was hotter, denser, and expanding at a faster rate in the past.
Image credit: original source unknown.
The farther back we go, the closer together everything was, the higher in temperature (and shorter in wavelength) all the radiation was, and -- of course -- the younger the Universe was.
Image credit: Ned Wright (possibly Will Kinney, too), via http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu…
esiegel | March 21, 2013"Much later, when I discussed the problem with Einstein, he remarked that the introduction of the cosmological term was the biggest blunder he ever made in his life. But this “blunder,” rejected by Einstein, is still sometimes used by cosmologists even today, and the cosmological constant denoted by the Greek letter Λ rears its ugly head again and again and again." -George Gamow, the father of the Big Bang model
The Big Bang -- the prediction that the Universe started from a hot, dense, rapidly expanding state -- tells us where our cold, star-and-galaxy-rich, slowly expanding Universe full of…
esiegel | March 20, 2013"Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view." -Max Planck
Tomorrow morning, at 8 AM my time, the press conference that cosmologists have spent the past decade waiting for will finally happen, and the Planck satellite -- the most powerful satellite ever to measure the leftover radiation from the Big Bang -- will finally unveil its results about the origin and composition of the Universe.
Image credit: ESA / LFI and HFI Consortia.
They've figured out how to subtract the…
esiegel | March 6, 2013"The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out - there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Here you are, a human being, a grand Universe of atoms that have organized themselves into simple monomers, assembled together into giant macromolecules, which in turn comprise the organelles that make up your cells. And here you are, a collection of around 75 trillion specialized cells, organized in such a way as to make up you.
Image credit: J. Roche at Ohio University.
But at your core, you are still just…
cwhyte | February 7, 2013Particle collisions aren't the easiest thing in the world to explain, but one of our physicists took this challenge to the extreme. In another Ten Hundred Words of Science submission, Brookhaven Lab physicist Paul Sorenson explains his work studying quark-gluon plasma with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.
Where I work, we slam together small things to break them into even smaller things until we have the smallest things possible. This is how we know what matter is made of. We gave names to the smallest things in matter like “up”, “down”, “strange”, “top”, and “bottom”. Each of those…
esiegel | January 18, 2013"The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries." -Carl Sagan
If you looked out at the planets in the Solar System orbiting our Sun, you'd expect that if you know where they are right now and how quickly they're moving, you can figure out exactly where they're going to be at any time-and-date arbitrarily far into the future. That's the great power that comes…
esiegel | January 11, 2013"Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it." - Samuel Johnson
I have a six-sided die. I'm going to roll it ten times, and record each roll. And when I'm done, I'm going to have an incredibly rare, bet-you-can't-reproduce-it result!
Image credit: random.org's dice roller.
Look at that! Ten rolls of a six-sided die, and I got: 3, 2, 3, 5, 5, 5, 4, 1, 4, and 3! What a glorious, odds-defying sequence of events!
In fact, if you took a fair six-sided die and rolled it ten times, you'd have less than a 1-in-60,000,000 chance of…
esiegel | December 16, 2012"The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination. It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it." -Richard Feynman
What did you think about, wonder about, and dream about the first time you saw the true magnificence of the night sky? Did you wonder about planets orbiting each of the thousands of points of light you saw? Did you think about the possibilities of rocky worlds with liquid water, of life, and even of intelligent aliens? Or did you perhaps think on even larger scales, about what stars…
esiegel | December 14, 2012"And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make." -Paul McCartney
Every once in a while, I throw the chance out there (on facebook, twitter, or google+) to ask me whatever questions you want. Yesterday, for some insane reason, I invited people across all three platforms to ask me whatever they liked, with a dual promise that I'd not only answer them, but that the best ones would receive a free "The Year In Space" calendar for 2013, courtesy of the Planetary Society.
Image credit: The Planetary Society.
So I got a ton of questions, and now I'll do my best to answer them as…
esiegel | October 31, 2012"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad
Despite the wondrous, luminous sights of the night sky, we've learned that normal matter -- protons, neutrons, electrons and the like -- make up only 4% of the total energy in the Universe.
Image credit: Large Suite of Dark Matter Simulations (LasDamas) simulation; Vanderbilt.
The galaxies and clusters of galaxies lighting up…
catdynamics | October 4, 2012The New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology program included 21 awards for essays by high school and university students on the Big Questions.
The winners are:
Student Essay Competition
College Essay Winners
First Prize
Yong Wei Chong Gabrielle, Wellesley College,
"A Letter to My Dearest Newborn Baby Brother"
Second Prizes
Karl Haislmaier, George Mason University,
"The Emergence of Complexity in the Universe as Viewed from a Holistic Perspective"
Patrick Olden, University of St. Andrews,
"How can we know the complex?"
Third Prizes
Annette Hein, Casper College,
"The Observer's Eye: Human…
catdynamics | October 4, 2012The New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology program has
announced its Award winners!
The $4+ million in awards went to 20 scientists studying Big Questions on fundamental issues and 21 high school and university student essay prize winners.
The awards will be presented at a conference at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia next week.
The program is funded by the Templeton Foundation as part of its celebration of the centennial of the birth of its founder, John Templeton.
The topics solicited for the Big Questions were very interesting:
What was the earliest state of the universe?
What…
esiegel | August 31, 2012"The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening it, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal. Nevermore will time seem short or long, and cares will never again fall heavily on you, but gently and kindly as gifts from heaven." -John Muir, on Glacier National Park
It's always hard to tear yourself away from your day-to-day life, from the things you work hard at building, and remember that there's a whole wide world -- and a whole Universe -- to experience and enjoy. Perhaps the best times in my life involve going off to explore some new and, at…