WORMHOLES
I feel like this is a bigger deal than just some Collgehumor video.
Electronic Tattoo Display runs on Blood
Remember getting your mind really blown by new technology?
Clive Thompson on Science Fiction
"If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas."
Have you ever wondered what space smells like? Yeah, me neither.
NASA beams the Beatles into space
NASA broadcast "Across The Universe" into outer space using the Deep Space Network. Asked to comment, Paul McCartney wisely noted, "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens."
The Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) is a $2.3 million project funded by NASA's Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets Program. It's autonomous underwater vehicle designed to swim untethered under ice, creating three-dimensional maps of underwater environments, and ostensibly is a test for exploring Europa, the icy Jovian moon that just might harbor life.
The Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences: as amazing as it sounds.
Literally!
I love it when the New York Times gets all tripped out on science stuff.
Hugest Black Hole Ever Discovered
18 billion times the size of our sun!
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Heaven's Gate: The Interplanetary Internet
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outer space life Archives
This Is Where I Live
Archived From January 26, 2008 (4) Comments
More data as I gather it.
12:02 AM | Permalink | (4) Comments
What's Going On With the Universe?
Archived From December 19, 2007 (4) Comments
The search for a Theory of Everything, which is kind of the unofficial M.O. of the scientific establishment, has always been closely guarded. The elements of profound uncertainty involved with such a quest have always primly clipped, safe from the grubby hands of untrained speculation. Relatively sane, brilliant physicists who err too far in the direction of the fabulous are practically shunned, or at least relegated to different class; those who posit that any variant of string theory might bridge the gap are nominally demoted from "physicists" to "string theorists," a nomenclature that smacks of thinly-veiled condescension.
In recent years, however, the tides have changed, at least to the untrained eye of this untoward layperson.
In November, a non-affiliated renegade physicist with a penchant for year-round surfing and Burning Man baffled the scientific community with a surprisingly cogent theory of everything: a testable hypothesis, which, refreshingly, does not require either highly complex mathematics, or any more than one dimension of time and three of space. It's based on the E8, a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points, generally considered to be the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics. Quoth the surfer in question, Garrett Lisi, "I think our universe is this beautiful shape." A radically simple Theory Of Everything that could shelve once and for all the quivering postulations of String theorists? Strike one.
Furthermore, this month, one of the most prestigious astronomical publications in the world, The Astrophysical Journal, will publish the research of Gerrit Verschuur, who claims that the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite images -- which, since 1992, have served as unfuckwithable empirical evidence of the Big Bang -- depict nearby hydrogen gas clouds in our own galaxy, rather than the structures of the early Universe they are thought to be. A massive paradigm shift that brings us back to square one as far as the origin of the Universe is concerned? Strike two.
There's plenty of contenders vying for strike three. A recent, and much-misunderstood, paper by Laurence Krauss (author, incidentally, of The Physics of Star Trek) of Case Western Reserve University argued that since the Universe originated from a quantum state -- and hence is part of a highly illogical quantum system -- then it's possible that a "probability wave" of reality could be conked out by something as innocuous as an observation. Remember Schroedinger's unfortunate cat? In any case, Krauss' paper ever-so-lightly suggested that a 1998 observation of a supernova, through which scientists deduced the existence of dark matter, could have collapsed a web of probabilities stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, potentially shortening the lifespan of our very universe.
But wait, isn't the Big Bang potentially bunk? Or maybe there's no quantum universe at all; maybe the universe is this glamorous, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern resounding with beautiful and complex symmetries. It's a mess: the quest for a unified front has only led to more and more chaos, illogical syllogisms, and mutually-exclusive theory sets. Meanwhile, astronomers are knee-deep in dark matter, dark energy, new planets, holes in the universe, and ancient textures in the sky.
It seems as though string Theory era has opened the vibrating, 11-dimensional doors to a period of open speculation. We seem to be in the midst of a theoretical free-for-all, a mêlée of ideas, both hackneyed and abstract. Is the scientific establishment really evolving into a multifaceted, fractured, and wildly theoretical community? Are open-source electronic journals and the democratization of information in this self-navigating digital era rending the staid entitlement of science into shreds? Or is it simply the fault of the mainstream press, being more clued in to the hype potential of science than it once was, perhaps enticed by the exoticism of String Theory, the media-savvy of Brian Greene, or the throbbing pulse of the upcoming Mayan apocalypse?
In his 2006 book, "Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Particle Physics," mathematical physicist Peter Woit explains that "particle theory has a long history of being successfully pursued in a somewhat faddish manner...new ideas get a lot of attention, leading in a short period either to significant progress, or, more commonly, to abandonment as the community moves on to the next thing."
Are these recent jabs at the gilded throne of particle physics, as Woit puts it, simply "faddish?" Perhaps string theory's wildly untestable nature has broken this pattern dramatically, thrusting us headlong into an age of uncertainty, an era of radically open scientific discourse, careening along the mandala-like vortices of cosmic shapes or emanating from an uncertain, perhaps quantum, past. Here's hoping, right?
3:00 PM | Permalink | (4) Comments
Heaven's Gate: The Interplanetary Internet
Archived From November 2, 2007 (1) Comments
On March 26th, 1997, 39 people in matching black sweatsuits and Nike sneakers were found dead in a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They were members of a marginal religious group called Heaven's Gate -- a "cult," in the frenzied media parlance of the 90's -- and they had committed suicide, cleanly and methodically, by ingesting large doses of phenobarbital and vodka. Their motive, profoundly misunderstood by pretty much everyone not directly involved with the group, was to hitch a ride to the "Next Level" on a heavenly spacecraft positioned behind the rapidly-approaching Hale-Bopp comet. In a very real sense, they did not believe themselves to be committing suicide; they merely saw themselves as abandoning their fallible physical "vehicles:" a radical extension of a commitment they had spent years developing while living in isolated compounds in Salt Lake City, Denver, and the Dallas Forth-Worth area, before moving to their final resting place in Southern California.
Heaven's Gate is a fascinating group, a religious sect that defies our perceptions of cult-dom in strange and interesting ways. What intrigues me the most about them, however, aside from the controversy and mystique of the suicide, is their complicated relationship to technology. While we all remember the Nike sneakers, what most people don't know about these 38 devotees and their leader, Marshall Applewhite (known to them as "Bo" or "Do"), is that they sustained themselves, financially and socially, by making websites.
From the early 1990s until their deaths, they ran a reasonably profitable web design company called Higher Source, churning out innocuous sites for organizations like the San Diego Polo Club. The Higher Source site (now-defunct, but available on Archive.org if you're feeling industrious) proclaimed -- and this should maybe have been a red "crazies" flag for potential clients -- that "individually and collectively, we have focused on outgrowing the artificial limitations this society has programmed all of us to accept in personal conduct and task efficiency...we can produce at a level of efficiency and quality unequalled in the computer industry." Even more interesting is that although the business was characterized by Heaven's Gate as state of the art, it was, by all accounts, far from cutting-edge.
A technical communications specialist quoted in a 1997 CNN story on the subject put it this way: "They weren't very good Web designers. I don't know what kind of money they were making. They have white outlines on the edges of the text that kind of mooshes it against the background."
When exactly they first became mixed up with computers is unknown, but it must have dated back some years, probably catalyzed by their fascination between emerging communication technologies and space travel. Furthermore, their love of computers became totally absorbed into their idiom and ideology, as well as the way they conceptualized their beliefs. Patricia Goerman's awesome MA thesis, "Heaven's Gate: A Sociological Perspective," delves into this issue in some detail. Goerman points out that in their writings, Heaven's Gate members "discuss their use of 'N.L. (Next Level) Base computer language,' as a way to express their 'higher level' of understanding of Biblical and other ideas as compared with the average human...they say that those who have the same 'computer program' or 'software' will interpret...statement[s] differently than the average human."
It's not surprising that the burgeoning Internet technologies of the mid-1990s could have been so easily adaptable to this kind of cultic mysticism. After all, all great paradigm shifts usually engender some kind of religious sentiment or fervency, either in reactionary fear or evangelical embrace. The web explosion must have seemed like a great harbinger of change, as well as a perfectly suitable -- or alarming -- metaphor for New Age notions of connectivity, to anyone thinking of the big picture.
It seems bitingly ironic that, while the media in the 1990's scoffed at Heaven's Gate's loony dreams of space travel and the Internet, their ideas aren't that far from the truth anymore.
10 years ago, extrapolating the web into the realm of space travel was the rhetoric of purple-shrouded cult members. Now, there is sheer muscle (and brains) behind the development of an interplanetary Internet -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSCS), which includes all the world's space agencies as well as 100 industrial heavy-hitters, and even Vinton Cerf, who invented the Earthbound Internet's TCP/IP protocols.
Of course, there are some huge differences between the 1.0 Internet as Heaven's Gate knew it and the interplanetary Internet -- namely, in terms of its difficulties. On Earth, two computers connected to the Internet can only physically be a few thousand miles apart, tops. So, packets of data shooting along fiber-optic cables at 186,000 miles a second only take a paltry few fractions of a second to get from one computer to another. The delay is so infinitesimally small as to be negligible, no matter how much we complain about the download speed of our Office bittorrents.
But when you factor in distances such as, say, the 38 million miles from Earth to Mars, that same little delay doesn't look so negligible anymore. At this point, we're talking several minutes or even hours for a radio signal to reach a receiving station, assuming the line-of-sight isn't blocked by another satellite, an errant meteor, or some floating space junk. In the foreseeable future, an Interplanetary 'net rigged from NASA's Deep Space Network of antennas to all kinds of microsatellites floating in constellations around the planets just won't be able to duplicate the real-time immediacy of the one we have on Earth.
You may rebut, quite reasonably, "Why in the hell do we need the Internet on Mars? That is still a totally insane notion." That is as fundamental a question, however, as "Why do we need a space program?" and the answers are probably wildly relative to your stance on the issue. Still, one look at the Mars Pathfinder mission (which, coincidentally, was big news only a few months after the Rancho Santa Fe suicides) elucidates the technical need. When NASA sent the first rovers to Mars, they gave us a highly-anticipated, detailed look at a long-mysterious planet. However, data from the Pathfinder trickled back at an excruciating rate of about 300 bits per second -- about 200 times slower than even an average computer with decent Internet on Earth can transfer data.
With the advent of interplanetary Internet protocols, however, researchers at JPL's Mars Network think the transfer rate could eventually get up to about 1 Megabyte (8,288,608 bits) per second, allowing us Earthbound lugs to take virtual trips to Mars and other salient spots in outer space.
If only Applewhite and his crew had waited a few years, they might have been able to visit Hale Bopp without ditching their Earthly vehicles.
6:00 PM | Permalink | (1) Comments
Pale Blue Dot
Archived From September 25, 2007 (5) Comments
To aid in the gestation of a new project, I've been watching a whole lot of Carl Sagan programs.
Namely, the 13-part epic of Cosmos, which remains, to me, the most comprehensive survey of the Universe and our place within it ever presented to the lay public. Sagan's devastating empathy, his respect of the viewer's intelligence, as well as his often outrageously optimistic sense of human community, have never been replicated in television. He shifts deftly from dallies in human history to well-diagrammed explanations of evolution, stressing the clarity and self-evidence of science and framing its longstanding opposition -- organized religion, unenlightened government policy, etc -- as natural and understandable human foibles that we must overcome together.
Modern science programs are usually hosted either by flashy, serious-voiced British actors or anonymous narrators; Sagan, however, takes it all on himself. He never conceals the fact that he's a total nerd, a courduroy-jacketed cosmologist from Brooklyn who gets stoked about watching live Voyager feeds from the JPL labs in Pasadena. Rather, he embraces it, presents himself as a helpful authority, someone genuinely invested in the well-being of the human race, happily taking on the enormous responsibility of educating us.
For an example of the moral themes put forth by Sagan (as well as his close collaborators, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter), witness this, an excerpt from his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. I found this while errantly clicking on Google Video (incidentally, Google Moon?!), and came pretty close to losing it.
3:07 PM | Permalink | (5) Comments
History Of The Universe
Archived From August 25, 2007 (2) Comments
Few things get me as riled up as the human being's lack of perspective: about our place in the "grand scheme of things," about our longevity, or about the kinds of impact -- damaging and otherwise -- that we have on our planet. We seem terrified of massive perspectival shifts, threatened by our own galactic history or the dark matters that astronomers so often bandy about. There is one trope, I've found, however, that can lead laypeople to safely revel in the sheer minisculity of our race: the Condensed History of the Universe. "Imagine that all of time were to take place in one day," the Condensed History posits, before thrusting the lofty events of cosmic time into moderately-paced succession, relegating all of human history -- all of life on Earth, in fact -- into one fleeting second book-ending the last hour of the hypothetical 24. We've all encountered this metaphor, in high-school science textbooks, gallantly curated natural history museums, educational films, or the conversations of our stoner neighbors.
In any case, I've been dabbling with history. Here is a short film of my authorship where not a lot happens until 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang:
The History of the Universe from universe and Vimeo
"Not only are we not at the centre of the cosmos, but we are alien to it: we are a singularity. The Universe is strange for us, we are strange for the Universe."
PRIMO LEVI, "News From the Sky," from Other People's Trades
7:00 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
Super Earth
Archived From April 26, 2007 (7) Comments
Of course, you've already heard.
A team of European astronomers have discovered a planet five times as massive as the Earth orbiting a distant, dim red star known as Gliese 581. I've already started lamenting the proto-future, the first contact with extraterrestrial life, that I imagine my generation -- already so media savvy, so keen to negotiate alternative spaces with their own sets of digital constraints -- will probably just miss out on. I could cry, just weep, thinking about it.
Although most scientific developments of this magnitude -- including the recent discovery of another new planet within our the confines of our own solar system -- leave only blips on the cultural radar, this latest one is being bandied around like it was season 3 of LOST. We know very little about it, of course, considering it was detected like all extrasolar planets initially are: by measuring the infinitesimal gravitational wobble it causes in its home star, in this case, a red dwarf, a star a fraction as bright as our "sun." Our picture of it is not exactly in HD, to say the least.
What has everyone buzzing, however, is that Gliese 581 exists just within the slim parameters necessary for biological life. Not too close, nor too far, from its neighboring star, the planet's surface temperature vacillates inside of a tepid margin conducive to liquid water. The SETI people, chuffed, happy to be quoted about something people are interested in, tell us they've already checked Gliese 581 for signs of a radio signal, twice, to no avail. "We'll try again," they offer, eternally hopeful.
But this is as much as we know, at least until the planet's orbit crosses beams, so to speak, with the light emitted from its home star, in which case the fluctuations in wavelength and light-intensity will give us a few clues about its composition. Despite this profound intangibility, the headlines are all the same; the phrases "new Earth," and "super-Earth" are ubiquitous, while the selling point of the story is the potentially rocky, potentially water-friendly nature of the planet. Rocky, the articles specify, like Earth.
This attitude of immediately referring to the Gliese 581 object as being a "Super Earth" already adheres a first-generation science fiction mythology to something that is, pragmatically, only a faintly-detectable stirring in the gravitational balance of a distant star system. Why are we so eager to symbolically bequeath to Gliese 581 the nominal future of our own planet? Is it because we have no other conception of planetary "life" that we so quickly equate potential life with being inherently Earth-like? Can we not conceive of other modes of existence?
It says a great deal about our lack of imagination that we would throw such a loaded term around outer space; on a cosmic level, we are still conquistadors, feebly imaging ourselves 20 light years away, at home.
12:00 PM | Permalink | (7) Comments
The Intelligent Universe
Archived From April 4, 2007 (0) Comments
James Gardner is part of a new breed of complexity theorists: an armchair philosopher that goes beyond the epistemological, who posits broad, celebratory theories about the nature of the future of the universe. His first book, Biocosm, proposed the "Selfish Biocosm" hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence doesn't emerge in a series of Darwinian accidents, but is hard-wired into the cycle of cosmic creation; it's a really beautiful idea, putting us right at the center of a living, breathing, intelligent universe, which, incidentally, is the title of his newest book.
Dude also rolled with J.P. Sartre in 1967, edited the Yale Law Journal, counts Ray Kurzweil among his colleagues, and was a six-year Oregon State Senator. I also went to elementary school with his son.
Thanks to the good people over at the Willamette Week, I had the opportunity to pursue some really metaphysical, extended e-mail conversations with Jim Gardner, the most interesting of which is featured below. Get deep with me: it's worth it.
Universe: I'm interested in the process of explaining complex scientific ideas to a lay audience. There are moments of great elegance in your book, in terms of how compactly you manage to lay out huge ideas. Is this something you find difficult -- or, as a self-avowed "scientific generalist," does this sort of synthesis come naturally?
Gardner: The composition of both Biocosm and The Intelligent Universe was excruciatingly difficult for me. The two books presented the most daunting set of intellectual challenges I have ever confronted, both in terms of coming to grips with the implications of some very unusual ideas and then communicating those ideas and implications to a lay audience. That being said, there were extraordinary “Aha!” moments I experienced throughout the process of writing both books that were truly exhilarating—moments that more than compensated for all the pain.
Universe: You often cite Ray Kurzweil's ideas of our transhuman or post-biological future. As a writer, what do you think the role of writing -- or more generally, of culture -- will be in a post-biological society? Does the singularity necessarily imply an end to creativity and the arts as we know them, or simply a huge shift?
Gardner: I believe that culture and art will continue to flourish in a post-biological future. That future will build on what has gone before. Indeed, it will represent a fusion of the human and the transhuman. (As you saw in the last part of my book, I disagree with the pessimistic views of Arthur C. Clarke in Childhood’s End.) Because it will vastly expand the realm of intellectual possibilities and the sheer size of available cultural space, the onset of the Singularity should facilitate an immense burst of creativity and give birth to new artistic genres that we can only dimly foresee. Some people believe, for instance, that we are on the verge of a Golden Age of truly artistic video games and that the Shakespeare of this genre may already have been born. I would add that that video-game Shakespeare need not necessarily be a traditional, unaugmented human being.
Universe: Will the Internet survive the technological singularity?
Gardner: Oh yes. Indeed, I believe we are just at the beginning of the transformation of the Internet into a true global nervous system. The increasing pervasiveness of Internet-enabled applications—which will leash humans ever more tightly to machines (think of the Blackberry epidemic) and link machines to machines with humans essentially out of the loop—will propel the whole shebang, at an ever accelerating pace, toward the future that Teilhard de Chardin foresaw.
Universe: I'm sure you've been asked this before, but what (if any) role did spirituality play in the formulation of your Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis? It's a profoundly hopeful way of approaching the Universe.
Gardner: None really. I am not a religious person. I began my quest almost accidentally by attempting to answer what seemed to me to be a very straightforward question: what process could conceivably supply the missing von Neumann elements—elements that von Neumann demonstrated were logically essential for any self-replicating object—in the context of Lee Smolin’s hypothesis of cosmological natural selection. (This is covered in detail in the Complexity essay that is included as an appendix in The Intelligent Universe and is entitled “The Selfish Biocosm: Complexity as Cosmology.”) It was only after I framed the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis that its extraordinary implications slowly began to dawn on me. I certainly did not anticipate them at the beginning of the process of discovery. The whole experience reminds me of graphically displaying a fractal or graphically displaying the results of running cellular automata through millions of iteration. From so simple a beginning—Darwin’s wonderful phrase—endless and totally unsuspected diversity and richness of detail emerges, almost miraculously.
Universe: Your hypothesis is that biological evolution is part and parcel of a cosmic reproductive cycle -- a "coming alive" of the Universe. Does this mean that the human race will evolve to the point of being able to seed our own new "baby universes," as ours was sown before us? If this is the case, then are we created in the image of whatever intelligence seeded us? Does this mean that all extraterrestrial life (if it exists) would resemble us on some profound level?
Gardner: Yes, it is a central tenet of my hypothesis that our distant successors will be capable of seeding new baby universes and endowing them with “cosmic DNA” (i.e., a set of tightly constrained physical constants) that renders the Big Babies bio-friendly, so that the process of cosmic replication can continue indefinitely. An implication of the hypothesis is that our universe was created in the image (metaphorically speaking) of a predecessor universe that possessed that same or very similar “cosmic DNA.” And yes, all extraterrestrial life (if it exists) will have evolved on a common substrate (that cosmic DNA again) and thus will resemble us on some profound level.
Portlanders: James Gardner is reading from The Intelligent Universe at Powell's Technical Books, 33 NW Park Ave, at 7 pm on Monday, April 9. Hit it. It's free.
On an unrelated note: If you're interested in "Free Culture," I just wrote a short piece about Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales' recent talk at Reed College over on Urban Honking's nerd.blog.
12:00 PM | Permalink |
Next Stop Space Elevator
Archived From February 2, 2007 (19) Comments
If we're going to make it in this future of ours, we've got to stop thinking that our planet hangs in some kind of splendid isolation in the dead vapor of empty space. We're part and parcel of a dynamic system, a vast cosmos of activity and, probably, intelligence; though our home planet's life span is limited, the Universe is not going anywhere.
That said, meet the Space Elevator, probably the most revolutionary idea in the history of aeronautics. Why? Because it's exactly what it sounds like. An elevator. To space.
What's so elegant about the space elevator, to me, is that it draws a clean line of connection between our centuries-old conception of "down here" and the newly approachable "up there," or, as Bucky would have it, "in" and "out," respectively. While space shuttles, rockets, and satellites retain a certain abstract quality -- off they blast, in a florid burst of flame and noise, the mechanics of the whole thing still pretty mystical -- the space elevator is concrete, as though humankind were reaching its own tentative arm into the great beyond, an unknown which will, of course, quickly normalize.
Despite its seemingly implausible nature, the space elevator is totally pragmatic, ultimately much cheaper and more economical than the high-energy rigamarole we're currently faced with every time we need to wrest something from the grips of our planet's escape gravity. The method is simple, like most good ideas are: a tether held taut by the inertia of the planet's rotation, spanning from the surface of the Earth to a point beyond geosynchronous orbit, serving as a sort of cosmic freeway, shuttling "lifters" out of the planet's gravity and into orbit. It would be built somewhere near the equator or on a man-made island, capable of shifting coordinates if necessary.
Think about it. No thunderous rocketry. No risky landings. Rockets are so expensive -- and launching them so damn burdensome -- that they will probably always keep the democratization of space travel at bay. So what are we waiting for?
Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps the most ardent and famous promoter of the space elevator, was often asked when he thought the first one might be built. A little flippantly, he noted, "my answer has always been: about 50 years after everyone has stopped laughing. Maybe I should now revise it to 25 years."
Of course, not everyone is laughing. Some companies, such as Liftport Group, based in Bremerton, Washington, are already on it. Confident of the elevator's viability, they're already hard at work developing the ancillary technologies (the robotics, for example, which will form the heart of the lifter) that this paradigm-shattering device will need. Which is what is so stunning about the elevator: we have all the technology to implement it. The only thing missing is a strong enough material to build the tether out of; burgeoning carbon nanotube technology seems to fit the bill. Once we find a way to put the nanotubes, which have a theoretical tensile strength far and above any other man-made material, into practice, we'll have all our ducks in a row.
Brian Dunbar, systems administrator at Liftport, optimistically concedes that space elevator groups are "a little like Goddard in his cabbage patch, knowing that Nell should work - but there is more engineering and study needed before we light that fuse."
Of course, we have the technology to do a lot of things: stem cell research, cloning, a $100 computer...but that doesn't mean that we always do them. In order for a legitimate space elevator project to take shape, a friendly political climate is perhaps even more necessary than carbon nanotubes are. After all, it can be difficult to instill in an administration -- let alone the greater public -- the importance of these kinds of projects. Politicians (and most people) think in the short term, generally unconcerned with what happens 10, 20, or 1,000 years from now. If they didn't, my generation would certainly not be left with the blunder of global warming, nor would we have to agonize so much about the provenance of our food. Galvanizing people into action for something like the space elevator, which, off the bat, does not seem immediately worthwhile, is improbable. Look at what NASA is replacing the Shuttle with, for crying out loud: little rockets that look like the Apollo modules. Are we going forward or what?
As James Gardner, complexity theorist and author of The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos, more elegantly put it, "framing the political debate in a way that will lead to a sustainable political consensus will be as important a determinant of success as the capacity to overcome the formidable technical challenges that confront would-be space elevator builder."
12:56 PM | Permalink | (19) Comments
Apollo 11
Archived From January 30, 2007 (5) Comments
Three incredible, little-known things about the Apollo 11 mission:
1. Although everyone knows what Neil Armstrong said as he hopped out of the landing module, I've always preferred Buzz Aldrin's elegiac phrase, "Beautiful. Beautiful. Magnificent desolation." This leads me to the next point.
2. Aldrin, always the most conceptually approachable of the Apollo 11 astronauts, claims in this interview that he (as well as Collins and Armstrong) observed an unidentified ship traveling alongside theirs, but never said anything about it for fear of being sent back to Earth. The sighting, which was repeated on later Apollo missions, has never been formally acknowledged by NASA, although video of it exists.
3. In the event that the moon-walkers might become stranded on the moon and, by consequence, die there, president Nixon had a funerary speech prepared, entitled "In Event of Moon Disaster." Reading it offers a devastating glimpse at an alternate past. Imagine this as part of our cultural vocabulary: "For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."
11:07 AM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Pluto was born with its moons
Archived From August 24, 2006 (10) Comments
2:34 PM | Permalink | (10) Comments
Pluto's OK, We're OK
Archived From August 20, 2006 (2) Comments
A lot of people, sweetly, have been asking for the Universe(TM) perspective on this "new planets" issue. I've written about itonce before, of course, around the time that the latest new planet discovery really brought the question out into the astronomical limelight. This is, however, a long-standing issue.
For those of you who aren't abreast on this development: the increasingly frequent discovery of astronomical objects larger than Pluto (most of which reside in a belt of icy rocks outside Neptune called the Kuiper Belt) has put into serious question the status of Pluto as a planet. The International Astronomical Union, which convenes regularly to discuss nerd space issues, has, in the midst of its 26th General Assembly, proposed a new definition of the word "planet" which would open up the 9-buddy system to a whole new crew of planets. The new definition is as follows:
A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.
Immediately, this would mean that Pluto's "moon," Charon, would be granted planet status, establishing the pair as the first ever (nominal) double-planet system. The asteroid Ceres and something called UB313 will also join the ranks if this new definition, slated for the General Assembly's vote on the 24th, is approved. Although most astronomers are relieved by this definition, it's probably going rattle everyone a whole lot.
I am, of course, thrilled. Why?
A) A non-governmental, autonomous body of brilliant astronomers convening in one place to discuss and vote on the issue of planets seems to be both kind of "old world" and very progressive.
B) The Solar System -- which has long been just that, a system -- is purely a symbolic entity designed to give us humans a feeling of mastery over the alienating cosmos. It's about time we grew up and dealt with how horrible and huge the universe is. It's totally scary not have the "old boys club" of nine planets around anymore, but it's also exciting. Dr. Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, pointed in a recent NY Times article on the subject that "nature is much richer than our imagination. Life is tough, life is complicated. Get over it."
C) People have always thought of the planets as being somehow separate from Earth, something that I find maddening. Perhaps with this widening of planetary standards we will come to realize our place within the definition. The stars in our night sky are just other suns with other planets around them -- from the point of view of rocks light years away, our sun is just a star. I know everyone knows this, but really: think about it.
D) What an epic time for astrology.
1:34 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
Second New Last New Frontier
Archived From July 12, 2006 (2) Comments
The second in a two-part distillation of a cover story about NASA, politics, and the new power generation that I just finished for the LA Alternative. To get up to speed, see the previous entry.
The CEV -- Ares, or whatever -- is not the first attempt NASA has made to replace its Shuttle fleet with something more appealing to an electorate weaned on the Star Wars movies. The last ten years have seen a lot of blustery attempts at making a "Single Stage to Orbit" craft, that is to say, one which could be completely reusable and would not need expensive and heavy external fuel tanks. An SSTO, theoretically, would look less like a rocket, and more like a plane.
For some time, a Lockheed-Martin project called VentureStar looked to be the future of space travel: a reusable, at first unmanned, Space Plane capable of being launched at one tenth the cost of other systems. A literal plethora of other "X-Plane" prototypes, running the gamut from the very futuristic-sounding NASA X-30, a hypersonic scramjet that can combust conventional rocket fuel at super-sonic speeds, to the Roton SSTO, an aerospike space helicopter, have been pumped as Shuttle replacements. Even Boeing was designing a space plane.
Needless to say, all of these projects invariably ran out of suitable funds to be fully tested, let alone implemented. NASA's oft-heavily layered, procedure-oriented bureaucratic structure (which many critics argue inhibited necessary action in the case of the Columbia disaster) combined with a failing budget and a series of political scandals, hasn't exactly been loosening purse strings, especially not for highly volatile experimental craft. The Bush imperative, however, has re-allocated $11 billion of NASA's budget and wriggled $1 billion more out of Congress to develop an only partially reusable rocket that sticks to a 40 year-old model of aeronautic design.
Meanwhile, independent companies like Mojave-based Scaled Composites have successfully built and flown reusable, sub-orbital space planes. Their largest project, SpaceShipOne (largely funded by Microsoft mogul Paul Allen) set a number of significant firsts: it was the first privately funded aircraft to exceed Mach 2 and Mach 3, exceed 100km altitude and the first privately-funded reusable spacecraft. Incidentally, the Scaled Composites planes, largely designed by SC founder Burt Rutan, use a much safer fuel (rubber and nitrous oxide), are made of lighter materials, and are generally more environmentally friendly and cost-effective than anything NASA has ever done. Following this success, British tycoon Richard Branson has already funded SpaceShipTwo, which, although the cash-strapped Russians have been sending wealthy tourists into space since 1990, will soon send paying passengers into space as part of an enterprise called -- yeah, you guessed it, Virgin Galactic.
Around the time that NASA phases out the Shuttles, Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, will be premiering Kliper, its own version of a manned Space Plane craft. Designed primarily to replace the Russian equivalent of the Shuttle -- the Soyuz -- Kliper will be partly reusable and allegedly capable of gliding into Earth's atmosphere at a much less strenuous angle than the Soyuz currently does, and will (at least theoretically) be used in future lunar and Martian missions.
In light of this space plane free-for-all, it seems even more incomprehensible that NASA should buckle down to work on a craft whose design is purportedly very similar to that of the Apollo launchers. Sure, it's clear that the long reign of the Shuttle is over: fading public interest and the unprecedented rise of non-governmental space travel have irrecoverably tarnished the sex appeal of these dull, fuel-guzzling behemoths. Advances in robotics -- the very successful Mars rovers, for example -- have made huge and cost-effective advances in our knowledge of other planets, while all the Shuttle has had to show for itself recently is a fatal disaster and a ballooning budget. Retiring the Shuttle doesn't seem like a particularly revolutionary idea, nor does it seem like a bad one; but building a new Apollinian rocket? Going back to the moon? Now?
According to NASA, there are plenty of seemingly reasonable justifications for such an undertaking. For one, it would be more cost-efficient in the long run, as most of NASA's millions are sucked up by expensive Earthen rocket launches. Launching craft from a lunar base would require much less fuel, as the escape gravity of the moon is practically negligible. The moon, too, is an ideal site for radio astronomy; telescopes planted on its far side, safe from all the radio waves emitted by our noisy planet, will be able to see deeper into the cosmos. Minerals and ores (methane, for example) caking the moon's surface could be mined by enterprising new generations of astronauts and potentially converted into rocket fuel and as-yet-unknown useful materials. Its barren landscape would be ideal for testing new space technology or conducting experiments too biologically hazardous for Earth (!!!!!).
US astronaut Ed Lu, upon his return from a six-month stint as Science Officer of the International Space Station, wrote in his NASA blog that further manned explorations wouldn't be solely research-based; they would, rather, be "about opening up a new frontier for commerce, trade, and settlement, as well as doing science."
These as-yet-unknown avenues, the Bush Administration has emphasized, will stir the youth of America to pursue careers in science and industry, creating "a new [power] generation of innovators and pioneers."
America could ensure its technological prowess for generations to come! Sounds a little familiar, right?
I don't think anyone could be branded a pinko for saying that the 1969 moon landing came at a time when the US was desperately trying to prove its national superiority. The dominion over the cosmos reaped by this high-tech accomplishment was, as much as anything else, figurative. The moon landing, although an event of global significance, was a profoundly American moment -- a sort of Manifest Destiny over outer space, and a grand slam over the Soviets. We put an American flag on the surface of the moon, for crying out loud: a gesture with nothing but a symbolic purpose. To stray clear of a completely transparent bias, let's say nothing of the phallo-centrism of a rocket's blastoff.
In any case, albeit its outward rationality, a return to the moon engenders one benefit over all: it would remind the entire world that the US flag still juts out of the lunar surface. Of course, the space-scape has changed since 1969: the Soviets are Russians now (and, supposedly, our allies), no one's been to the moon since 1972, and the cosmos has gotten crowded.
A surprising multitude of other countries are now jumping on the space bandwagon. The Chinese, albeit hush-hush as all hell, have already sent people into space and are promising to be on the moon by 2024. Russia recently struck a $900 million defense deal with the Malaysian government in exchange for sending the first Malaysian crew of astronauts into orbit, who, incidentally, will be the first Muslims in space. The Indian lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1 (Sanskrit for, literally, "Moon Craft"), is going to be launched as soon as 2008, and the European Space Agency, with its expansive launch pad in French New Guinea, has plans to undertake manned lunar and Martian missions in the near future. Even South Africa, the site of many NASA satellite tracking bases, has developed a space policy under the presumption that South Africans are "highly dependent" on outer space.
What used to be the sole dominion of the US and the USSR is now being overrun by ambitious international projects and independent, non-governmental commercial space enterprises whose designs and sheer ardor are marking a sea change in the way space travel works. The abstract idea that the US is no longer a space superpower, that NASA's 1969 moon feat is not a big enough placeholder to keep us at the top of the ranks, is becoming more and more concrete.
It doesn't seem surprising, then, that the Bush administration would pick this moment -- we are, after all, in the middle of a very sticky and expensive war -- to premiere a space program that conjures up the peak of this country's cosmic imperial power.
Over 40 years ago, President John F. Kennedy addressed a stadium of 35,000 Houstonians at Rice University and made his now-famous pronouncement that there would be a man on the moon within the decade. 'This country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them,' he said. 'This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space.' What Kennedy meant was that the US was going to conquer the moon in the same way that it conquered the West: absolutely, and without the company of any other major powers. This colonial rhetoric (earlier in the speech, he evoked William Bradford, the Plymouth Bay colony, and the dominion of US satellite technology over that of the Soviets, all in the same breath) was particularly effective in rallying the support of not only that stadium at Rice University, but of the entire country.
Whoever wrote George Bush's 2004 speech clearly did their homework: this problematic but viciously intelligent oratory begins with an allusion to the "spirit of discovery" instilled in this country by Lewis and Clark.
This mimicry of John F. Kennedy may or may not be intentional. Nonetheless, the two speeches are kin in their call to arms, and the way they evoke great former explorers in order to justify future, and seemingly pretty arbitrary, conquests. The Kennedy project, however, was single-minded in a way that made it effective, the catalyst of a potent historical symbol. Whether or not the new Vision for Space Exploration will follow in the jet-trails of the legacy it has angled itself toward remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that this most recent Shuttle voyage marks the end of an important era of space travel.
Hopefully, in this new venture towards the moon, we can retain an understanding of the elegance and awe space exploration can arouse internationally. Although we are easily bogged down by the complexity of life on Earth -- by war, compassion, politics, and borders, -- we must never forget, either, the powerful humility we gain from seeing our tiny planet floating alone in the darkness of the cosmos. It reminds us that, after all, we all live on the same little rock floating through space, regardless of our self-imposed notions of country. This kind of global perspective holds the power to wither all wars, to render redundant all politics.
There is a beautiful paradox inherent in space travel. We audaciously shoot rockets into space partially because we are motivated by a desire for power and technological dominance, or, as is the case with NASA now, to evoke the halcyon days of the Apollo program. However, this same cocksure action can cave in on itself, causing a supernova of a surprising result: it can teach us the value of wonder, and the substance of humility.
12:47 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
First New Last New Frontier
Archived From July 10, 2006 (3) Comments
The following is the first in a two-part distillation of a cover story about NASA, politics, and the new power generation that I just finished for the LA Alternative.
Few Americans think of Cape Canaveral in their day-to-day. They are consumed, not wrongly, by the machineries of life: raising gas prices, magazine subscriptions, college tuition, first dates, dinner plans. Outer space is already an abstract enough concept for humanity to grasp; couple that with a populace that has trouble finding Iraq on a map, and you find yourself with an inevitable general disinterest in space exploration. However, this is all going to change -- if a Bush administration imperative axing the Shuttle program and renewing our efforts to send manned missions to the moon takes off, so to speak, as planned. The future of NASA, now dominated by this program, looks to be driven by the climate of American politics with vigor unseen since the 1960s.
Last Monday, the Space Shuttle Discovery, only the second Shuttle launched into orbit since the ill-fated Columbia tragically disintegrated during re-entry in February of 2003, traveled 250 miles from this stretch of Florida known as the "Space Coast" to dock at the International Space Station. After three years of safety revisions and administrative changes, including the appointment of a new NASA chief administrator, Michael Griffin -- (who seems like a pretty reasonable guy) -- the Shuttle is back on the world stage, returning its seven-person crew to the mundane tasks of extraterrestrial life.
After all this time, it has a lot of catching up to do. The International Space Station -- a joint effort between NASA and the Russian space program Roskosmos -- has been lingering in low-Earth orbit for three years now, manned by a two-person caretaker crew unable to build very much on the Station without the aid of the Shuttle's roomy payload bay, which is largely responsible for the ferrying of manpower and materials to the project. Esoteric Russian Soyuz craft have taken over this duty in the interim, but they are too small to bring up significant new additions. Regardless, the ISS remains a successful collaboration, as far as space projects go, and it shows no sign of flagging.
This is exceptional, considering the gradual decomposition of the Russian space station Mir and the outright failure of the Space Station Freedom, a Reagan project which never, so to speak, got off the ground. As a result of neglect, Mir finished as shrapnel: the gnarled pieces of metal that held it together weren't even salvageable after they crumbled back to Earth. ISS, however, has held together. The difference is inextricably tied to a black and white behemoth born in the belly of the Nixon administration and at the tail end of the Vietnam war as a safer and ostensibly more efficient form of space travel than the bravado of NASA's earlier and much-accomplished Apollo program.
If the rockets and lunar landers of the Apollo era defined NASA's rollicking adolescence and the sheer temerity of the United States during the Cold War -- its desire to break the ice of the unknown, not to mention out-do the Soviets -- then the Shuttle program was perceived as a rational next step towards the normalization of the human presence in a now-somewhat-more-approachable outer space, not to mention one no longer dominated by international competition. The Shuttle has been the symbol of an era marked by at least nominal international cooperation, the gentle giant of a no longer aggressive Space Race.
Its emphasis on efficiency and reusability was brought upon, perhaps, by the new understanding of Earth's fragility garnered by the Apollo program. It was Apollo 8, after all, which brought home the first image of the Earth from space, a highly consequential symbol which arguably stoked the flames of the nascent environmentalism movements of the 1960s.
Although photographing this eagle's eye perspective was an important accomplishment for NASA (and a huge paradigm shift for everyone else on Earth), much of the motivation behind the Shuttle program was budgetary: a reusable ship is cheaper to run than a relatively unstable and ephemeral rocket.
And reusable it was designed to be. On the drawing board, the Shuttle promised to operate like an airliner (a task many independent astro-tourism companies have now taken up) ferrying astronauts and materials up and down through the stratosphere as many as 12 times a year. Although it has operated -- no small feat -- as the world's first reusable crew-carrying spacecraft, its anticipated budget-friendliness never quite panned out. The turnaround process for each Shuttle takes months, and since the loss of crew is a real threat, particularly since the Challenger and Columbia disasters, NASA's primary focus is to return each crew safely to Earth, a priority which conflicts with the project's other goals, namely to launch payloads cheaply.
Furthermore, there aren't very many plan B's if anything on the Shuttle goes awry. Whenever a piece of machinery on, say, the Atlantis, or the Endeavor, is not functioning perfectly, it has to be grounded and inspected meticulously until it works. The result is high labor costs: around 25,000 workers toil in ground-based Shuttle operations a year, garnering the project a $1 billion allowance and the unfortunate nickname of "Penguin" -- a flightless black and white bird.
Despite its setbacks, however, the Shuttle program represents and defines contemporary American attitudes towards space in much the same way that the Apollo program did in the 1960s. The changeover from one program to another -- from the sheer thrust of the rockets to the moderate ferrying of the Shuttles -- was as important a symbolic shift for NASA as it was for our relationship to the unknown. In the 1960's, the cosmos was ours to be penetrated and conquered. Up until very recently, it was ours to ward, to domesticate. The Shuttle, that same fleet of eight nearly identical wardens, has been a mainstay of the US Space program for so long now that we've seemingly forgotten the kind of paradigm shift possible in our attitudes towards space.
Guess what: NASA, on the impetus of a Bush administration program called the new Vision for Space Exploration, is phasing out the old bird.
During a seminally weird press conference in January of 2004, just a year after the Columbia disaster radically reminded the American public of NASA's existence, President Bush dropped the New Vision's rhetorically vague tag line -- "Human beings are headed into the cosmos" -- to an audience of retired Apollo astronauts in tuxedoes and beaming, uniformed, Shuttle crew. Notably, he also mentioned space travel's potential for harnessing "new power generation" (a reference not lost on Prince fans) and continuously called other planets "worlds," betraying what can only be imagined as a thoroughly idiosyncratic understanding of astronomy.
Since this speech, which among other red flags included the appointment of a former Department of Defense secretary to the head of a commission purportedly aimed towards exploration and scientific research, NASA has been working to comply with the series of dramatic goals outlined by the President.
How dramatic? Well, for one, they're retiring the Shuttles after over thirty years of shleppy service and replacing them with a new craft called the Crew Exploration Vehicle, a kind of Apollo rocket redux capable of shooting astronauts back to the moon and, eventually, Mars. The CEV, which NASA just dubbed "Ares," will allegedly hit the tarmac at Cape Canaveral "no later than" 2014. In the New Vision's most controversial move, the CEV is slated to begin running humans back to the dusty surface of the moon by 2020. Mars, which seems as impossible to conquer now as the moon did in 1962, is next.
3:01 PM | Permalink | (3) Comments
Space Semaphores
Archived From June 19, 2006 (2) Comments
The NASA logo dates from 1959 and is commonly referred to as the "meatball" logo. The sphere represents a planet, the stars represent space, the red chevron is a wing representing "aeronautics," which was the latest design craze at the time of the logo's invention. The orbiting spacecraft going around the wing represents orbiting spacecraft. Iconic and simple: the opposite of NASA's bureaucracy!
When the insignia is used in conjunction with other text (as in letterheads, business cars, or for agency or center identification), the font used is always Helvetica Medium or Light, upper and lowercase, flush left and ragged right. Incidentally, does anyone want to buy me this shirt?
The "worm" logo was designed in the mid 70's and was used until 1992. It's been since retired, I guess because it's aged much worse than the "meatball" has, and is now only used on merchandising. It is never used in conjunction with the "meatball." All of the NASA insignia are classified as public domain except the meatball, worm, and official seal. Here is a really great compilation of mission insignia patches. The NASA/Mir 1997 patch is particularly noteworthy, as is the following smattering:
The Space Station Mir insignia is a good example of the Russian Federal Space Agency's (commonly referred to as Roskosmos) staggeringly cryptic designs. Maybe these slashes represent "aeronautics" as the red swoosh in the NASA logo does. Maybe they do not! All of the Russian insignia, especially from the Soviet era, are really great. The US insignia are, on the other hand, so littered with weird pseudo-symbolic bullshit that they are also notable. "This rocket represents a rocket, and these stars represent stars!" Cool, NASA. It's like that story about the US government spending billions on the Fisher Space Pen that writes upside-down, while the Russians just used pencils.
OK, well, the pen cost $2 million, has been around since 1967, and the Russians don't actually use pencils, but whatever.
The International Space Station actually has a series of really good and twee patches, most of which include a Russian flag sort of rainbow-morphing into the US flag set against a backdrop of barren starry sky. I trip out about that kind of design because of its earnest desire to emphasize completely arbitrary notions of country and nationality, which of course mean nothing in space. I wonder how ISS astronauts handle how much the Station stresses its "international" nature, when all their countries look like green blobs from 250 miles away, anyway. This insignia is good, though, because it's so literal. The Russian one is even more amazingly straightforward, as it is just an outline of the ISS on a blue background and has some guys' last names on it.
The classic Apollo Program insignia. The inclusion of a golden idol of Apollo hybridized with the moon gives the whole program a mythic appeal. The implication is that NASA is sending rockets towards the Classical ideal of space exploration, a kind of Platonic form of the moon. Something else I find terrifying about this design is the fact that it bucks our left-to-right notion of linear progression -- the Moonpollo is to the left of the Earth, implying that the movement from Earth to the Moon is a right-to-left one, which is counterintuitive for a society that reads from left-to-right. Does this mean that the Apollo missions are inherently regressive? Maybe it's because Apollo himself is a figure of the distant past to whom we must return in order to progress. Any insight would be appreciated.
Apollo 11. This insignia is pretty epic; the eagle landing on the moon is a nice synthesis of the literal and symbolic as well as a throwback to Neil Armstrong's famous statement "the Eagle has landed," made when the Eagle lunar module first landed on the moon in 1969. Interesting aside: Wally Schirr, commander of the Apollo 7, refused for a moon to be included in his mission's insignia. "Save that for the guys who are going there," he was quoted as saying.
This one was for Space Shuttle Columbia, the first first STS ever launched, in 1981, and the second ever crashed, in 2003. NASA is now about to launch a shuttle for only the second time since the Columbia disaster. The last test flight was sort of dubious and experts have mixed opinions at best about whether the shuttles are still safe to fly. Floridians, keep your eyes peeled on July 1st!
This is kind of a teaser.
3:07 PM | Permalink | (2) Comments
Gravity's Rainbow
Archived From June 16, 2006 (2) Comments
There are, as far as the layman is concerned, two kinds of scientific truth. At one end of the spectrum -- the gamma ray end, if we use the electromagnetic spectrum as a model -- there are the kinds of concepts we associate with science's grand design, the truths which permeate the dark depths of the unknown universe. These are the terrifying, metaphysical truths: unifying cosmic theories, the afterlife, quantum mechanics. Entire disciplines orbit these, while the average person has only a nebulous idea of what they even represent. On the short-wave radio end, there are those forces governing the makeup of our life, things like the atmosphere of planet Earth or the basic laws of physics. A lot of people think they have a firm grip on these truths -- we learn them in grammar school via dinky experiments and chalkboard lectures.
These concepts comfort us, even if we don't particularly understand them. Take gravity, for example. Its effects are easily measured and simple to calculate, yet they are also endlessly convoluted and vague, to the point where gravity's practicality in the everyday almost seems a wondrous coincidence. We all know what gravity does: it keeps us together, keeps our planet in orbit, and keeps the proverbial apple falling onto Newton's head. However, not even the most Nobel-winning physicist could give a fully comprehensible explanation of just how it does all of those things. Albert Einstein pulled the most impressive coup in scientific history by postulating -- without any experimental evidence or theoretical precursors -- that gravity is the product of the warping of the space-time continuum by large objects. As planets and stars move through the cosmos, Einstein suggested, they ripple the very fabric of space, sending off waves of gravity -- much like a swimmer passing through a body of water leaves a wake of ripples.
Great, so gravity is a wave, not a force. Do we have any proof? Surprisingly, no -- for a force (err, wave) which literally permeates every dimension of our universe, gravity is hard to understand and even harder to detect. Gravitational ripples coursing through space are tremendously weak; even those emitted by the violent formation of supernovas are only tiny atom-sized wrinkles by the time they make it to Earth. Although secondary evidence abounds for the existence of these waves -- the shrinking orbits of some pairs of neutron stars can only be explained by a loss of energy through gravitational waves -- direct observation of this phenomenon has long been considered an impossibility. Not even Einstein (who was, to say the least, a dreamer) envisioned a detector which could parse the tiny effects of gravity waves from the other noises bombarding Earth. After all, how in the hell do you separate a microscopic pulse of gravity (one 10-15, to be exact, about the size of an atomic nucleus) from, say, a roar of seismic activity, the pounding of the ocean, or the movement of cars on a nearby freeway? I know that science is basically magic, but come on -- this is one is impossible. For decades, not even the most foolhardy of physicists even saw the point in trying.
That is, of course, until "dark matter" came along. Dark matter (along with dark energy, dark galaxies, and Los Angeles) is a completely mysterious substance now known to make up over 90% of the Universe, which leaves us and our high-falutin' observatories looking mighty stupid. Along with black holes and pretty much everything else that is deemed important in modern astronomy, dark matter cannot be seen with a telescope. The only reason we know it exists is due to a staggering discrepancy between how much the Universe weighs and how much we know it should weigh; the Universe is much, much heavier than the sum of everything we know to exist within it. Hence: something else, something invisible, is omnipresent. Dark matter.
Unless someone devises a way of detecting whatever dark matter emits, research in this all-important domain (one at the gamma ray end, if you will, of the spectrum of scientific truth) will come to a standstill. What astronomers desperately need is machinery that can feel outer space instead of seeing it. Something that could detect, for example, the gravitational ripples emitted by dark matter.
Enter LIGO: the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. The $300 million project, a product of National Science Foundation funding and over 25 years of construction and design, is the most sensitive American gravitational wave detector ever built -- nay, the only American gravitational wave detector ever built. It consists of an absurdist two-part compound, one half of which lies 200 miles from the Pacific in southeastern Washington (the other is in southern Louisiana). Each site is made up of two 2.4 mile-long perpendicular arms and a huge laser interferometer, which splits beams of light and sends them ricocheting back and forth until they lag in speed just enough to announce the presence of a nanoscale gravity beam. Measurements made at the Washington LIGO are cross-referenced with similar measurements taken at the Louisiana LIGO 2,000 miles away.
Friends on the short-wave end of the spectrum, don't worry: I do not understand it either. What is essentially happening at LIGO (where, incidentally, no gravitational waves have yet been detected) is that scientists are using one near-mythic unproven scientific idea to measure something equally fantastical and invisible. It's like using magic and dream-catchers to prove the existence of aliens and crystals, but then again, I'm just on the short-wave end of the spectrum.
12:00 AM | Permalink | (2) Comments
What Am I Up To?
Archived From May 9, 2006 (6) Comments
Re: Video programs Inbox
UNARIUS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE to me
Dear Claire:
We would be most happy to meet with you at the Unarius Center
when you have the opportunity to make the trip from Los Angeles.
We are open from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Saturday.
As you may have discovered on our web site
http://www.unarius.org/, we have classes on Wednesday and
Sunday evenings from 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM
May we suggest that you participate with us online for Sunday
evenings past-life therapy classes that are being audio-streamed
live from about 7 to 9 PM PDT. To listen, go to the Unarius Web
site and click on the link to listen to classes at the top of the
homepage which will take you to the streamlink page with the
direct links to listen to the audio stream of the Sunday classes.
With AOL Instant Messenger, you can e-mail questions that will be
read and answered during the classes
In Light,
Carol Robinson
For the Academy
This is a teaser. The full results of the First Universe Research Expedition to the Unarian Academy of Science will be revealed next week. Blow your minds.
6:13 PM | Permalink | (6) Comments
I am Eagle! I am Eagle!
Archived From April 7, 2006 (4) Comments
In the lucid 1960's, the futurist Stewart Brand began a public campaign for NASA to release a satellite image of the whole Earth taken from space, an image which was at the time only rumored to exist. Brand, forever the "big-picture" thinker, noted that "this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum," would serve both as a potent symbol for humanity and as a firm kick-start for a legitimate environmentalism movement.
With the rapid progress of the Apollo program, NASA eventually did release such an image -- though whether this was due to Brand's haranguing is debatable -- and has been steadily churning out increasingly crystalline photographs of outer space ever since. A quick visit to the NASA online photo archives inevitably leads to a psychedelic visual assault of purple nebulas, sun flares, and mighty cosmic rings, all decked out in surreal dusky pinks and muted greens. It's enough to make one forget how recently we first saw our whole planet -- round, mostly blue, and swampy with clouds -- lying amidst a field of stars and darkness. Further, it seems impossible, now that we have access to such a panoply of space images, to conceive of what it would have been like to see such an image for the first time.
It's hard to imagine living somewhere without knowing what it looks like, although humankind did exactly this for millennia; yet the photograph of Earth from space has become so omnipresent that we can't envision a time before it. This picture, in the relatively short span of time between the 1960's and now, has somehow become devastatingly banal. In iconographic terms, the photograph of Earth has become so ubiquitous, so completely subsumed into popular culture, that we have managed to separate it from what it actually represents. With alarming postmodern flair, I find that I immediately associate this image more with Earth Day t-shirts and children's science projects than with its real correlative -- which is, of course, the very pile of rock on which we all stand.
To a certain extent, that picture of Earth from space is the most important photograph in history. After all, we're all in it, regardless of our self-imposed notions of "country" or "border." It's the ultimate family portrait, and perhaps it is this massiveness -- the literal size of the planet as well as the image's philosophical implications -- which has caused us to quickly, and possibly in self-defense, dull this ideologically threatening image. At this point, not very much can shake us from this unwarranted apathy. Not very much, that is, except being shot into outer space ourselves.
Of course, seeing a photograph of Earth is one thing, but seeing our planet -- the very foundation of all our understanding about existence -- shrink to the size of a pea first-hand is something else entirely. The particularly phlegmatic Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, only the second man in space and the first to be there for more than 24 hours, described the experience of seeing the Earth from space as "a thousand times more beautiful than anything I could have imagined." After orbiting the planet over a dozen times, Titov replied a call from mission control with the elated cry: "I am Eagle! I am Eagle!"
Neil Armstrong, seemingly the master of withering space quotes, once said, "It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."
Although the US Space program alone has logged more than 58 person-years in outer space -- and heaven knows how much time the Russians have been spending up there, considering that their Soyuz ships still hold the record for the most consistently successful human-to-cosmos ferrying -- being acquainted with outer space is still a perfectly rare characteristic for a person to have. Only a smattering of people and dogs, despite how routine low-orbit space travel has become, have ever left the planet. Very few humans, then, can understand Gherman Titov's elation, the feeling of human smallness described by Neil Armstrong, or even the wonder of a first encounter with a photograph of the Earth in its lonely entirety.
Stewart Brand was right. We can't let ourselves forget, no matter how much of a mental trip it is, that the "jewel-like icon" on which we live floats alone in the darkness of the cosmos. Bringing home a photograph of this perspective-shattering reality is one of humanity's most powerful achievements.
9:33 PM | Permalink | (4) Comments
For Love and Comets
Archived From March 7, 2006 (3) Comments
So you think the scientific world is one of cold, hard, facts and impassive objectivity, incapable of bringing tenderness and twee sentimentalism forth into the world? You think that NASA, that behemoth of a governmental organization, spends all its time censoring evolutionary scientists and fucking up stuff on the Hubble telescope? Well, you're right, for the most part!
Right now, however, you are wrong, because NASA has just extracted from the comet particle-embedded aerogel collected by Stardust spacecraft A HEART-SHAPED COMET GEM. The particle is made up of the silicate mineral forsterite, which can found on Earth in gemstones called peridot, but who cares because what a beautiful thing. Go hold hands and look at the stars.
5:39 PM | Permalink | (3) Comments
The Expanding Cosmos
Archived From February 19, 2006 (5) Comments
I've been having a lot of good ideas recently. Some of them are for art installations I'll never be able to do without the assistance of a gallerist, some of them are cool advertising tag-lines like "The Internet: A Window to Someone Else's Computer(tm)," and some of them, like this one, are nebulous concepts that will dance around my brain in a haze until someone literally asks me point-blank, "Hey, Claire, what do you think is the key figurative parallel between science and literature?"
Which is why blogs exist, I guess.
Science writing is difficult, as difficult as literary writing. At its worst, it can become crippled by its own material, which is by definition too steeped in jargon to be communicable; it can hover awkwardly between being too dense for its readership and too simple for its provenance, the scientific community. Good scientific writing, however, builds a little dinghy that steers a clear, straight, and small path through a sea of information, clarifying those incredibly vast and arcane concepts to people who wouldn't intuitively understand them.
Popular science writing contains, however, some essentially literary gestures. Take this example, as cited in Alan Lightman's marvelous compendium, Best Science Writing 2005. For years, students of astronomy (myself only vaguely included) struggled with the concept of an expanding universe without a center. After all, this is a notion which violently bucks against reason. Cosmologists, however, came up with an image -- a metaphor, if you will -- which lightens the load: imagine that the Universe is an expanding balloon, and the stars and objects in space are dots drawn on the surface of this balloon. From any one star's vantage point, all the other objects in space moving away from it, but without any perceivable pattern. The more distant points would appear to be moving faster. Apart from being a devastatingly simple image that conveys more information that entire astronomy textbooks, it is also an elegant metaphor. It accomplishes the same things as the most successful of literary metaphors: a world of feeling and information, the very chaos of the known Universe, in one image.
If only Keats were so altruistic.
10:57 PM | Permalink | (5) Comments
Smashing Plutocracy
Archived From February 14, 2006 (0) Comments
There are a great deal of things in this civilized world of ours which we accept as truth primarily out of laziness or convenience; in fact, it would not be radical to say that our fragile social universe is built upon such precepts. The structure of language, for example, is pretty much arbitrary. So is the practice of putting books vertically on bookshelves, which people did not really invent until two centuries after the arrival of printed matter. The necessity of eating meat? These things are cultural concepts -- they standardize us, and give us a sense of order in a deeply irrational world. Every once in a while, however, something comes along to remind us of just how capricious our taxonomies really are.
The recent discovery by a team of German astronomers of 2003 UB313, a ball of ice and rock hurtling through outer space, has become an unwitting example of such a force for conceptual change. The ice-ball, which was affectionately dubbed Xena by geeks -- errr, scientists -- has turned out to be considerably larger than the planet Pluto. It is, in fact, 30 times wider than the smallest planet in our Solar System.
More interestingly though, it also shares with Pluto pretty much all of the tenuous traits that make the latter a planet in the first place: being large enough to be shaped into a sphere by gravitational force, and being orbitally present on the outskirts of our Solar System. Scientists, faced with this information, are now stuck with an organizational problem -- they can either give Xena planet status (hopefully without its current warrior princess moniker), effectively revising our conception of the word planet, and in suit, our understanding of space; or they can demote Pluto from the Solar System, which would have a similar effect. In either case, we are looking down the barrel of a major paradigm shift.
Whether or not we are aware of it, the astronomical construction of a Solar System -- an organized entity which tidily observes the laws of physics as it hums peaceably in space -- has an iconic status. As children, we were all painstakingly taught, through one mnemonic device (and styrofoam diorama) after another, the firm order of the planets.
Anyone with a primary school education can tell you: nine planets, and nine planets only, the rest being just comets and space dust. Sure, our ninth planet was only discovered in the 1930s, but Pluto still has a firm grip on the cosmological conceptions of many people; I for one always thought of it as the final guardian of our segment of space, the bridge between us and the rest of the cosmos. While I am no scientist, to hear of it being taken away from our hallowed nine; something about it just seems so heretical.
That initial buck against Plutonic reclassification, however, is just an example of how quickly and genially we accept major cultural paradigms, and how such short-sightnedness can always return to freak us out. It was not so long ago, in the 1840s, that astronomers counted no fewer than 11 planets in our solar system. Pluto, too, has only been a planet for close to 80 years. The West has only been using the modern Gregorian calendar since the 1750s, for goodness sake. How quickly a society forgets what it once believed: we happily shed the pre-Pluto universe and moved onto the clear-cut nine planet universe. Now that Xena has come along, we are naturally all aflutter because, as far as we know, Pluto has been our ninth planet for all time.
Because it is the modern tendency to think of time only in terms of cripplingly short increments, it seems we are going to have a harder and harder time accepting and absorbing these kinds of changes, which, as technology frantically develops, are only going to start happening more and more. As a society, we cannot forget so quickly -- nor can we let ourselves be fazed by an altered solar system.
In his excellent book The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, inventor and theorist Stewart Brand puts it into perspective by pointing out that our galaxy rotates once in 220 million years. Earth itself has only been around for about 25 of those rotations, and life on Earth for 19. The human time frame, writes Brand, is narrower than that of life, of the planet, and of galaxies. Just like there was a time before we decided to include Pluto in our Solar System, there was an even longer time before we were even part of it. The galaxy, Pluto included, is far too old for us to talk authoritatively about it with our new science.
Talk about a paradigm shift.
11:27 AM | Permalink |
String Theory, Part Two
Archived From January 28, 2006 (6) Comments
The following is the second in a series of essays about the pragmatism of modern physics. It may be the last, because I am tripping out super-hard about this stuff and kind of want to start thinking about the ocean again. Did you see that scientists just discovered the world's smallest fish?
Anyways, there has been quite a debate recently about String Theory. According to many, the assumptions upon which it is founded are unreliable. I couldn't even tell you what the exact conversation is, but it has something to do with the "alternate universe" aspects of the theory, and how the vast differences between these trouble our hopes for an underpinning and constant "Theory of Everything." Dr. Leonard Susskin, who first postulated the damned thing, is now modifying it in radical ways in order to re-align the existing ideas with this new criticism. He agrees that the Universe's total constancy is a misconception, but posits that this is a fortunate discovery, that we inhabit one of a "landscape" of different universes.
In a really good interview with The New Scientist, Susskin observed: "The great hope was that some deep mathematical principle would determine all the constants of nature, like Newton's constant. But it seems increasingly likely that the constants of nature...vary from place to place....many of the constants have to be just so if intelligent life is to exist. So we live where life is possible. For some physicists this idea is an incredible disappointment. Personally, I don't see it that way. I find it exciting to think that the universe may be much bigger, richer and full of variety than we ever expected. And it doesn't seem so incredibly philosophically radical to think that some things may be environmental."
Which is a very cool thing to say, incidentally.
So why is it that this relatively recent advance in physics remains invisible and undiscussed in popular media, particularly now that it has come into question? I mean: it's definitely a long-shot whack-job theory which only elucidates how abstract physics has become since Newton-times. On that token, however, Intelligent Design should be just as obscure, and yet I can't open a newspaper without seeing the painfully measured pseudo-science which proponents of ID insist on blathering upon the American public. The arguments which comprise String Theory are far more, well, intelligent -- not to mention agreed-upon by the scientific community, for the most part.
Moreover, the idea of living in a hypothetical landscape of multidimensional universes is something which should shatter our conceptions and force us -- in a leap of faith similar to believing in divine creation -- to restructure our place in the world. While the lay public -- myself included -- is still tripping out about the concept of atoms, or even of planets, physicists are rationally inhabiting a way, way, way cooler multiverse and they are not sharing it with us.
Scientists aren't to blame, however; after all, they aren't supposed to be missionaries. The problem, it seems to me, is that unlike most other major topics of media discussion -- art, politics, Paris Hilton's television career -- the sciences in general, and modern theoretical physics in particular, do not have very many pundits. Nor, to that matter, any middlemen between those doing the research and those ultimately affected by it, the world's populace. We don't need physicists and researchers to spread their gospel to us. That would put their hallowed objectivity into question. But we do need somebody else to keep us abreast on whatever the hell it is they are postulating about the Universe these days, because, I, for one, am not opposed to being part of a cool, ultradimensional multiverse: I just want someone to tell me about it.
12:24 PM | Permalink | (6) Comments
String Theory, Part One
Archived From January 19, 2006 (7) Comments
The following blather is the first part in a continuing series of essays addressing the inherent pragmatism of modern physics. Let's call this a "Primer" on String Theory.
So, string theory is in trouble.
For those readers who haven't watched the excellent NOVA special "The Elegant Universe" in the form of streaming Quicktime movies on the PBS website, and hence do not know what is meant by the phrase "string theory:" more power to you. You are exactly in the same place as me on this plane of understanding, and I've spent the last week and a half pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose, poring over endless layman's explanations of the stuff.
There is a little I've managed to infer. I know that the most exciting and relevant thing about string theory is its attempt to consolidate the two existing major theories of modern physics: General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. As they stand, GR and QM contradict one another significantly, making it practically impossible for physicists to explore crucial problems -- the birth of the Universe, for example -- without negating one of these two conceptual pillars. String theory, like Supersymmetry before it, ostensibly brings the two together. Scientists, therefore, consider it a building block for a potential "Theory of Everything," making it a big deal in essentially every conception of the phrase.
String theory supposes, radically, that the Universe is not made up of infinitesimally small particles as we've pretty much always believed, but rather of equally small (in fact, smaller!) pulsating, coiling, psychedelic little strings. In order to make this assumption mathematically, we must imagine a Universe with significantly more dimensions than our three-dimensional minds can conceive of. In this case, the word "dimension" refers to mathematical dimension: as, in a certain sense, time is considered a "fourth" dimension of the known world. We can't see the seven extra dimensions that string theory postulates, because they are outside of the realm of scientific and human understanding. However, we guess that they're everywhere -- even right here, right now. Insane extrapolations of string theory have professors rationally, calmly, informing the lay public that there do, in fact, exist unknown and infinite amounts of parallel universes within grasp of our own, perhaps mere inches away from our noses, that we will never be able to touch.
Obviously the idea of string theory being "in trouble," conceptually, is completely incomprehensible. How can its supposedly solid foundations be shaken, right? It seems to me that the foundations of string theory are already firmly planted in a puddle of dreamcatchers and "Sliders" re-runs. I mean, to most of humanity -- the people, I think, primarily concerned with an ultimate understanding of the universe (UUU) -- a world made of tiny strings is as much a stretch of the imagination as is a world made up of tiny atoms, or of a world created by a divine being, for that matter. I'd take it further: I think that for most people, it is harder to believe in 11 dimensions than it is to believe in God. At least God is like, a dude.
On some level, string theory is completely pragmatic in the sense that it is a truth seemingly embraced entirely for its function -- as a peacemaker for the frustrating rift between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and as an easy (albeit, theoretically, so complex that I imagine only a few luminary people fully understand it) way out of an embarrassing theoretical problem.
NEXT ENTRY: Why is String Theory in trouble? Who is defending it? Are the proponents of Intelligent Design gnashing at the gates now? Isn't it cool to live in a Multiverse?
4:54 PM | Permalink | (7) Comments
Gold-Plated Black Holes
Archived From January 4, 2006 (0) Comments
I have this concept I've been running around with for a while. It's called the "Fourth Grade Nightmare Fantasy." It functions on two basic scales: Microcosmic and Macrocosmic. Both sides of the spectrum, however, share the same basic gesture of being a worst-case scenario situation envisaged by your average ten year old (in this case, myself, but run with it). Microcosmic FGNFs entail things we have all endured: forgetting your memorized poem during the talent segment of the Junior Rose Princess qualifying pageant, for example. Macrocosmic FGNFs, however, are ludicrously misinformed -- and yet staggeringly logical -- conclusions and hypotheses about the universe (Universe) come to by children who are still at the age where they think that hand-building a spaceship is a realistic game plan. You know: What if you fell through a hole in the earth and then went through its core until you started falling up, What if Dinosaurs weren't dead but actually just hiding, What if Scientists could create mini black holes on earth which would then suck up the earth and destroy the universe? The key thing about the Fourth Grade Nightmare Fantasy is that the level of importance and the depth of the implications of both Microcosmic and Macrocosmic FGNFs are completely equivalent in the mind of the fourth-grader. A healthy balance, in my opinion.
However, I've recently found that the ultimate tripped-out science news moments happen when a former Nightmare Fantasy, or something which might as well have been one, is enacted in reality. This happened to me some time ago as I was reading up on the most recent crashings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven Laboratories in Long Island. Physicists there have been colliding stripped-down gold ions at each other at frighteningly close to the speed of light, and have found, in physics-news-dork-parlance, that they "haven't been behaving as expected." They were trying to trounce particles together so hard that they would break down into quarks and somehow become quark-gluon plasma, a super-dense substance allegedly present in the moments after the Biggest Bang. Physicists at the CERN in Switzerland (where, incidentally, my uncle works) nearly accomplished this in 2000. In any case, the physicists at Brookhaven ended up losing the gold ions -- on impact, they would just vanish in these little fireballs that were quickly dubbed by the now-recalcitrant New York Times as "very small black holes." Doomsday!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Any fourth-grader worth their trapper-keeper could conspiratorially inform you that Black Holes, by nature, swallow up everything in their path, only growing in power and strength as they go, like Katamari Damacy or the Blob. Humanity's inherent fear of the amorphous aside, the relativistic collisions at Brookhaven are terrifying on a pure FGNF level. The Brookhaven collider -- a 16 million dollar piece of equipment -- then Long Island, then the United States, the world, then the oceans, then the expanding Universe: all swallowed up by a pulsing, hyper-dense, golden black hole? It's almost as bad as getting caught wetting your pants in grade school by Christina Bushnell, who would immediately rat on you to all the other girls. Scary, right? Scary in a totally unrealistic and crippling way, right?
This is to say, of course these subatomic black holes -- which only exist for the briefest of nano-instants anyway -- are not going to suck up the earth, hidden dinosaurs and all ("Before Brookhaven began its gold collision experiments in 2000, it issued assurances that the experiment could not accidentally create a black hole that would destroy the earth. Laboratory officials say that is still the case."). It is news items like these, however, that awaken the fourth-graders in all of us and send them quivering under their apple juice-soaked lefty desks. The ostensible adults we have turned into are then faced with a hard task: to grab those clammy, grubby hands and thrust them (US, man) back into the real world -- a world sadly void of giant lizards or the potential for galactic apocalypse.
4:22 PM | Permalink |