Category Archives: science

Distractions in the Dark

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Well, you’ve probably guessed that I’ve been somewhat distracted for several days. In fact, my main focus for the past week has really been on computer issues, frustratingly. I’ll give you the blow by blow later, I hope, but the last couple of days have been the most frustrating of all, and so I’ve not been dealing with much else, including blogging. Part of that is actual logistics – some of the things I wanted to post are on the afflicted computer – and some just the sheer annoyance of not having solved the issues driving me to do something totally non-computer related like going for a hike or seeing a movie.

So tonight i think I have a new theory – well, hypothesis- of what’s wrong, after a good deal of the day spent on detective work. It is a conjecture that is supported only by […] Click to continue reading this post →

Bowled Over

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One of the Phoenix images that has most captivated has been the one that shows the rest of the background of that startling image of the parachute part of the landing phase that was taken by the Reconnaissance orbiter’s HiRiSE camera. I showed it a few days ago here, and it is amazing, for all the reasons I said back then and more. I’m still buzzed by the idea that we have cameras from another craft photographing the landing of a new craft. Well, a while later, the mission released the photo showing the larger backdrop to that image. There’s the (giant 10 km) Heimdall crater in the background! (See the little inset bottom left showing where the previous image focussed; credit: NASA/JPL).

Phoenix landing on Mars with Heimdall crater in background

Rather dramatic, wouldn’t you agree? It’s not really as close to the crater as it […] Click to continue reading this post →

Colbert Report: Science – What’s the Big Deal?

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brian greene on colbert brian greene on colbert brian greene on colbert brian greene on colbert

Brian Greene, theoretical physicist and one of the founders of the World Science Festival in New York (May 28th – June 1st), talked to Stephen Colbert about the excitement of science, and how the festival will give people a chance to see lots of fun exhibits and chat with scientists to find out about the wonderful “adventure story” (nicely put) that is science. He manages to do this pretty well, between giggles generated by sharp fun-poking from Colbert.

There’s the festival, large-breasted alien robots (their words), some fun quips about […]

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It Might as Well be String

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title banner from a Goodies spoof documentary about string

A reader asked for more string. You can see my reply here. Not being one to deny the punters entirely, title banner from a Goodies spoof documentary about stringI’ll pass on some clips from a 70s British TV comedy show, about string. It was a popular show called “The Goodies”. Some of you might remember them. Well, they did an entire episode with the title “It might as well be string”, and although the clips (below) are out of context and even with not knowing the characters and so forth (I don’t) there are some amusing bits here and there, if you turn it around to poke harmless fun at those of us who work on string theory decades later – It’s all about a PR/Advertising campaign for string!

There’s the string song, the “documentary” about string (best to gloss over the oh-so-funny “smelly Arab” remarks and accompanying laughter), the excellent samples from the […] Click to continue reading this post →

Photo Finish

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Marvellous. It is good to get the chance to use the word in its most basic sense, and fully mean it. You know how there’s a lot of reliance on artist’s impressions to depict aspects of space missions (such as landing) that we can’t get photos of because, well, there’s nothing else there to take the photo (unlike the movies and TV)? Well look at this:

Phoenix lander in the act of landing, using its parachute to slow down during the \"seven minutes of terror\". Photo by High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA\'s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
It may not look like much to some, but I’m really impressed with this. It is a first. It is the Phoenix lander during the act of landing during the “Seven Minutes of Terror” yesterday! NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was in the right position to take a […] Click to continue reading this post →

She Stuck The Landing!!!

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16:56 or so: Yep. That was a tense seven minutes. But it is over and they are getting signals. I watched the live feed from the JPL control room. Wow. Who knew this could be so exciting from so far away?! Anybody else watch it?

  phoenix_control_room_celebrations   phoenix_control_room_celebrations  phoenix_control_room_celebrations

-cvj

P.S. Yes, with my choice of title, I’m clearly practicing for the commentary on the Olympic gymnastics… Click to continue reading this post →

Seven Minutes of Terror

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Phoenix Lander making a soft landing on Mars - depiction by JPL artist Corby Waste

The phoenix lander making (we all hope) a soft landing on Mars – Artist’s depiction by JPL Mars program artist Corby Waste

Remember the launch of the Phoenix spacecraft last summer? I mentioned it in earlier posts (including talking about the mural for it – see here and here) and Phil did a lovely post on the launch here. Have a look at the mission website. Here is a space.com article that gives an update on the mission so far.

Well, today’s the day it approaches and (it is hoped) lands on Mars!! So, the landing. The landing, the landing the landing. It’s all about the landing. The craft has to slow down from 12500 miles per hour to make a soft landing on the surface. In a matter of […] Click to continue reading this post →

Catch a Falling Star

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Ok… A dying star. Here’s the before and after shot (images from the NASA Swift team):

supernovae 2007uy and 2008d

An the amazing thing is that they were able to watch and record the events in real time! The galaxy hosting the explosion was already under study because of an earlier supernova. This is wonderful, of course, and a big deal is made in various news articles about how great it is that this is the first time that a supernovae event was caught in real time from an earlier hint from an X-ray emission signature… Except that it seems that it isn’t!!! I do find it a tad annoying/puzzling that in a few seconds I was able to find pretty much the same sort of news announcement from two years ago. Does the press think that the members of general public are stupid, or have no memory? (I don’t yet have time to re-read both articles carefully, so I imagine this is maybe much better (it is rather closer), and there were more telescopes recording, and maybe from earlier, in a wider spectrum, and so forth, but not to mention the earlier event at all, as though a big news story was not made of it back then, is strange. (Perhaps the finding was discredited?) I did a blog post mentioning it entitled “When Stars Go Bang”, and you can link from there to a BBC news article for example of the coverage.)

Anyway, back to the excitement. We must not take away from the joy of discovery: From […] Click to continue reading this post →

Fault

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cracks in ground (drying mud) at Death ValleyOh boy. Not what I really want to read just before going to bed. I’m likely to have dreams of falling into giant cracks* that open up under you no matter where you run. Did you have those when you were a child? I did. That one, and a slightly different version that involved a volcano, where….

Oh, wait. Back to the point. A report has come out with carefully researched projections from geophysicists and […] Click to continue reading this post →

Mountain Astronomy Party!

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Mount Wilson 60 inch telescopeI was at an unusual and splendid event on Saturday. My friend and colleague, the writer Aimee Bender, organized a group of 25 of us to go to the top of Mount Wilson and spend the evening, mostly sitting in the dark, right up to well after midnight! What were we doing? Astronomy. We had the Mount Wilson Observatory’s 60 inch telescope entirely at our disposal!! This is not any old 60 inch telescope – it is one of the historic telescopes that’s up there, used since the early part of the 20th Century to discover things about our galaxy and beyond. (See also a post I did about the 100 inch, and the hike you can do up the mountain to see the site. [Update: Note – For this trip, we drove up, carpooling!])

Shelley giving information during the Mount Wilson observing sessionAimee had reserved the space well in advance, and we had a guide and a telescope operator (the excellent Shelley Bonus and Arbi Karapetian, respectively), and we brought food, which was spread out on a large table alongside vats of coffee and hot water supplied by the observatory.

This is an excellent way to spend an evening. Shelley is informative and enthusiastic, and does a great job of selecting various objects to be viewed (she also takes requests!) and giving lots of information and anecdotes about them, and much else besides. Arbi was also a gold mine of information.

The party was of 24 non-scientists (there were a lot of writers of various types, for example – poets, screenwriters, novellists, experts in poetry and literature and language…) and one physicist. As the latter, I tried to remain undercover, so as not to […] Click to continue reading this post →

We Interrupt This Broadcast…

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One of my favourite topics to think about, since I was very young, is the effect that direct contact with intelligent alien life would have on our society. It would be transformative, I think, whether it be initially seen as for good or ill. Of course, most imaginings of such an event usually considers the “ill” aspect. I was chatting about the issue recently with a friend of mine while hiking the other day and then I recalled that I forgot to do a blog post on last week’s Sunday night radio listening, part of which was about just this very topic!

war of the worlds tripod illustrationThe show was in two parts (both good… more on the second later) and the first was a 1994 recreation of the classic War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938. You know the one, I hope… It was a CBS radio broadcast by the Mercury Theater company, masterminded and led by Orson Welles, and was a Howard Koch radio adaptation of the 1898 H. G. Wells novel. As you may know, the radio show created a huge panic among the listening audiences at the time, brought on by a combination of the relative newness of the medium (it was done in the style of a series of on-the-scene breathless news reports) and the general atmosphere in world politics at the time. (There’s a rather good Wikipedia collection of information about it here.)

All of this puts me in a nostalgic mood, since during some of my school days I loved that War of the Worlds rock musical concept album by Jeff Wayne from 1978 (I knew of it only in the early to middle 80s), with a star-studded cast of musicians (Justin Hayward, Phil Lynott, Julie Covington, David Essex and Chris Thompson), and the wonderful voice of Richard Burton as the main protagonist (a journalist). Anybody else remember that? From so many listenings to it, I used to be able to sing along to every note and word of that album! Probably still can, even though I’ve not heard it in so long. Altogether now – Uuuu-Laaaa!!!, or Come on Thun-der-child!!… Here’s a Wikipedia link.

Anyway, I highly recommend the recreation of the broadcast. Find an hour and curl up next to your computer and pretend it’s a warm old valve radio. Leonard Nimoy plays […] Click to continue reading this post →

Pauli’s Other Principle

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Do you know about Pauli’s Other Principle? One statement of it is:

Fermions are discovered in the US, whereas bosons are discovered in Europe.

(In case you don’t know, it is useful to classify particles according to whether they come with integer (0, 1,2,…) multiples of a basic unit of spin, or half-integer (1/2, 3/2,…) multiples. Fermions include the electron and the quarks, bosons include the photon and the gluons…)

Jester at Resonaances examines the striking evidence for the Principle in modern particle physics, and examines some of the predictions that follow from it. It was clear from the principle, for example, that the SSC (Superconducting Super-Collider) in […] Click to continue reading this post →

Good Company

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Brian May. Photo from: http://www.guitar-poll.com/BM.phpHey, guess who was at Griffith Observatory recently? Brian May! He’s that astrophysicist who took some time off to play (excellent) guitar and compose songs in the band called Queen. Ring any bells? (I found the nice photo here.) So why was he in town? Well, a slightly giggly (but always great) Madeline Brand (of the NPR program “Day To Day”) went along to interview him, and you can listen to the interview here, and read a transcript, as well as see extracts from him book (written with Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott), charmingly and blatantly (but knowingly?) unrealistically called “Bang! The Complete History of the Universe”. I actually looked through it in a bookstore the other day – looks rather nice. Wonderfully produced and I read some well-written passages, so might be worth picking up if you’re looking for a fresh read about the universe.

As a side note, I was a huge fan of his during my middle to late teenage years and early 20s, and […] Click to continue reading this post →