Not much text here, just a link to a text about a very cool evolution experiment with E. coli bacteria (and any commenter who says that microevolution doesn’t prove macroevolution or such nonsense will get kicked in the shins, very hard).
The machine that will not destroy earth
Philip Plait of badastronomy.com has a couple of posts about the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider (there’s also a podcast and here’s a link to a video about the LHC). The LHC is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (which is abbreviated CERN for historical reasons; CERN is short for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire ) is the worlds largest particle accelerator and quite possibly the largest science experiment ever (you can find the LHC Homepage here).
The LHC is a ring with a circumference of 27 kilometres; it produces two beams of high enery protons that smash into one another. A number of instruments monitor the collision event and analyze the makeup of the resulting debris as the protons break up into smaller particles. The LHC looks for particles that have been predicted by theory (especially for a particle called the Higgs Boson) but have not been observed yet since smaller particle accelerators cannot mobilize enough energy to create the conditions necessary for those particles to exist (edit: I realize that this badly phrased. Make that “exist under observable conditions”).
The LHC is a much more powerful instrument; in fact it uses so much energy that some people think it will destroy the earth by creating a small black hole that will devour the planet. This is rather unlikely for two reasons.
Contrary to Hollywood lore a black hole is not necessarily some kind of all-devouring cosmic vacuum cleaner; how much damage it can actually do depends on it’s mass. A black hole that is created by the collision of some highly accelerated particles will have about the mass of, well, some higly accelerated particles which is not very much. Even if such a mini black hole would be stable – more likely it would evaporate due to the so called Hawking radiation - I guess it would be too small to interact much with the much more massive planet around it (being a singularity the black hole actually has no size; when somebody talks about the size of a black hole he means the size of it’s event horizon). However that’s just my laymens opinion and the possibility seemed real enough for CERN to study the possible danger – which brings us to the second, rather better reason to dismiss the idea that we are doomed due to the LHC: The people who came up with the theories on how and why black holes form are more or less the same people who tell us that it won’t happen in the LHC. I don’t see why anybody should believe them in the first case but not the second.
If there is no threat then why should we (as in “we laypersons”) care about the thing? Um, that’s a bit hard for me to explain; I read enough books to give the impression that I know something about the matter (unless I accidently talk to an astronomer in which case I give the impresson of being a total twit), but I do not actually understand the stuff. Still…
There a a number of things that seem rather fundamental but cannot, at the moment, be explained very well – like, why is gravity so weak when compared to the other fundamental forces, or why do have some particles have mass in the first place. There are some hypotheses to answer these questions and they propose the exististance of certain particles (like the aforementioned Higgs boson). If the LHC produces these particles it promotes these hypotheses to theories and yet another gap will be closed in our understanding of the universe – well, not my understanding obviously, but on behalf of the laymans part of mankind I’m still proud that somebody gets it. If my choices are to go through life like through some kind of video game (you know, “the story sucks but the graphics are incredible”) or to at least try and make some sense from the world around me, and be it by beating the hell out of some innocent protons– well, you read this blog. I think you can guess how I feel about this.
Yes, that’s us
If you want to see something very, very beautiful you should point your browser to this page by the japanese space agency (do’h – broken link is fixed now) . It shows earthrise as seen from the Kaguya space probe that currently orbits the moon. That tiny blue marble that slowly climbs above the moons horizon, that’s us – the whole human habitat from a perspective that makes it look even more fragile.
This is a dumbed down version for the web – the full res video (Kaguya carries a HDTV camera) is apparently available only for teachers and educators on DVD. I hope some day this will be released to the general public.
My time to be a smartarse
P.Z.Myers at the Pharyngula science blog relates a story how 50 indians got blind after looking at the sun while looking for an apparition of the holy virgin Mary. This would be very dumb if it were true.
As a proud reader of Philip Plaits book I have to say this looks like a hoax since looking at the sun does not cause “retinal burns” (unless you do it through a telescope, or during an eclipse, or use a filter that blocks visible light while letting through UV, none of which is mentioned in the linked news article).
Phil Plaits source is astronomer Andrew T. Young, who has a page on the topic at http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/vision/Galileo.html (scroll down to “Naked-eye solar hazards”).
This should neither encourage you to look at the sun nor should it stop you from making fun at the virgin Mary if you feel like it (personally I consider this a waste of time), but it should be a reminder not to easily trust things that you find on the internet.
Live Chat at badastronomy.com
Phil Plait of badastronomy.com is doing a live chat on his website – an experiment that, he says, might turn into a regular feature. I sure hope so and I hope he will do an “european edition” at a time that is a little more convenient for us here (this chat will start at three o’clock in the morning and I don’t think I’ll hold out until then).
And while I’m at it I can just as well plug his books a little – one is already published, it’s called Bad Astronomy (well, what else) and describes 24 common astronomical fallacies, including the beliefs that the Coriolis effect determines the direction that water drains in a bathtub and that planetary alignments can cause disaster on Earth. The author sharply and convincingly dismisses astrology, creationism, and UFO sightings and explains the principles behind basic general concepts (okay, so I copied the blurb from amazon.de).
The second one will be published this year and will be called, if I remember the announcement correctly , “Death from the Sky”. It will describe several way the Earth could possibly (but isn’t likely to, so no worries) be destroyed, and since I happen to do a talk about the end of the world in December I think I will do a little inofficial book promotion for the Bad Astronomer.
Okay, I won’t make it to the chat. I’m off to bed now.
STS-122
Space shuttle Atlantis (STS 122) is scheduled to launch Thursday, Feb 7, after the mission had been repeatedly postponed due to technical problems. Atlantis will carry the Columbus laboratory to the International Space Station which will greatly (finally!) enhance the stations capability to do some actual science.
I hope everything works out this time. I’m a bit of a space enthusiast, so it would be such a perfect birthday present for me.
I am footnote
Yesterday I went to the movies to see “I am Legend”. I love Mathesons novel, so I knew I would be disappointed. But I had at least hoped for some kind of mindless action flick, a dumbed-down version of the original story with cool special effects. The movie was mindless, alright, but in a annoying rather than a fun way.
It was probably not the fault of the leading man. I had seen Will Smith first in Men in Black and had cast him down as a decent Eddy-Murphy stand-in, but had really come to like him after his performance in Ali. Smith makes an excellent Robert Neville; here he is very much a character actor, and at the end of the movie he looks exhausted and even old, an Robinson Crusoe without hope for rescue on his desert island of Manhattan. So, no objections here.
Nor was it the scenery, the desert Manhattan through which the Protagonist stumbles. Of course the movie is in large parts a Quiet Earth-ripoff, with much better production values and a lot less atmosphere. But plagiarism is a form of flattery, plus IaL had some potentially cool monsters thrown in so that was okay also.
(massive spoilers below the fold)
It might help to read some Books besides the Bible
“Intelligent Design” is a fundamentalist religious movement that, despite it’s claims that physics, chemistry, biology, history, archeology etc are all wrong and the world has been created relativly recently by some superbeing (okay, let’s not play games here, they mean the christian god) tries to disguise itself as a science. At the moment most supporters of that idea live in the USA – I sometimes wonder if they have some kind of contest over there like, you know, “who manages to do the most damage to the countries reputation” (at the moment they have a tie between warmongers and religious nutjobs). (more…)
Sixty Days and Counting
Kim Stanley Robinson is a man after my own heart, and the Science in the Capital-Series deals with one of the most important topics of our days, so it’s a bit of a pity that I cannot praise him without reservations. But while the writing here is competent it’s never compelling, and for a book it’s not enough to deal with an important topic (not in fiction anyway), yet I found it not particularly entertaining or inspiring.
Sixty Days and Counting is the closing book in a trilogy about man-made global warming, after Fourty Days of Rain and Fifty Degrees below. The main story is about humanities (that is US-American with the Russians and Chinese on the sidelines) attempt to mitigate the consequences of global warming by large-scale carbon sequestration projects and other terraforming stuff. And then there are a few subplots that do not seem strictly necessary, like about rogue Black Ops and wisdom-dispensing Bhuddist immigrants.
It might be that I missed some important parts though – the books violates quite gratitously what I’ll call for the moment “Eikes law of typesetting” which dicates that italics are strictly for emphasizing words, so don’t use them on whole chapters if you actually want somebody to read them – anybody who can read ten pages of 10 point italics has clearly better eyes than me.
The whole shebang from 40 to 60 is not bad, it’s just that it’s boring, which might as well be a matter of taste, so you might give it a try. As for me I rather watch An Inconvenient Truth on DVD to learn about the global warming thing. But I’m still going to try Robinsons Mars-Trilogy because – did I mention it? – as far as his politics and general Weltanschauung are concerned he seems to be pretty much a man after my own heart.