The WOW signal

1977 Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope picked up a very unusual signal that has come to be known as the WOW signal. It was extremely strong for cosmic radiation. Further, it was narrow band. Normal cosmic radiation is broadband, that is spread over several frequences, but the WOW signal was confined to a very narrow band.

It has long puzzled astronomers because there is no known source for such a signal. Terrestrial interference was considered and discarded, and other natural possibilities have also not held up.

Naturally an alien source has been a favorite of many. I'm not sure about that, I've watched enough 1950s sci-fi movies to know that aliens are always warning humans to knock-it-off before we create a super weapon that blows up the universe. It could be a declaration of war before they come to Earth to stomp us flatter than a pancake to save the cosmos. You never know.

Anyway, this video purports to have explain a natural cause for the WOW signal. They claim that it clears it all up, but we've heard that before. 

  

The electron microscope

The above video explains the workings of electron microscopes. A beam of emitted electrons is guided and shaped into a focal point by a lens of electromagnets. There can be multiple electromagnet lenses to further focus the beam. Eventually they can narrow it down to resolving individual atoms. It was not clear to me how the image was captured, but then again, most of the details of it all passed well over my head.  

It reminded me of the 1957 movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. In it the hero, Scott Carey, is exposed to a radioactive cloud while out sailing. This causes him to start shrinking a few days later. As he continues to get smaller his shrinkage starts to ruin his marriage (insert your own joke here) and, when word of his condition leaks out, it turns into a media circus. He gets small enough to move into a doll house. Unfortunately for him, his pet cat spots him and decides he would make a tasty appetizer. In escaping the cat, he falls down the stairs into the basement and is too small to climb back up. He monkeys with a mouse trap to get some cheese to eat and is interrupted by a giant spider -- well it is a giant to him -- and has to battle it for the cheese. Below is the ending, where he climbs through a screen and ponders his fate. It is a good, albeit very odd, movie. 

Pythagoras transcends space and time

The genesis of this post was muons. They are created when cosmic rays strike particles in the outer atmosphere. They are extremely short lived (~2 microseconds) and so logic would tell you they should not last long enough to travel the distance from their creation to the Earth's surface. However, since they are traveling at near the speed of light the time dilation and length contraction predicted by relativity comes into play and they can make the journey.

So, what's this traveling at the speed of light business and the relativistic effects that so effect the muons? The above video, inspired by Lewis Carroll Epstein's book Relatively Visualized, gives a nice and simple explanation of it. I did like the enthusiasm of the presenter. 

 

Audio illusions

This is a discussion of how hearing works in certain situations. I was particularly interested in how the ear shape and placement assists in the determination of the direction of a sound.

 

Space clouds and you!

Space isn't entirely empty, there are a lot of loose particles, gas, and plasma spread through it. Interstellar clouds are areas of greater concentrations of that material. There are a number of interstellar clouds in our vicinity of the galaxy. In fact, we are currently moving through the Local Cloud and headed towards the denser G-Cloud which Alpha Centauri is located. Of course, all of this takes millions of years.

Could the passage through interstellar clouds influence the Earth and Solar System?

Also within our vicinity is a ribbon of clumps of denser interstellar medium known as Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds. It is theorized that 3 to 4 million years ago we passed through one of these dense areas. 

The Solar System is protected by the heliosphere. The heliosphere is a bubble of charged particles the Sun emits that buffers the Solar System from interstellar radiation and materials. However, it is believed that the encounter with one of the dense Cold Clouds could collapse the heliosphere significantly and expose the planets, including Earth, to the interstellar medium. There is some geological evidence that this did happen at the time we may have passed through one of the Cold Clouds.

There is then the question as to what, if any, effect this may have had on the Earth? There is a rough correlation between the time of passing through the Cold Cloud and the start of the Ice Ages. Correlation is not causation, but the timing is interesting. If nothing else, the rain of interstellar particles and radiation causing noticeable climate fluctuations seems to be both possible and plausible.

 

Particles and clouds

 

Think of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else could you remember it? 

But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over (which is why you eat, of course). You are not even the same shape as you were then. 

The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. ― Steve Grand

  

We've been here before

Trofim Lysenko

Interviewer: Lastly, why do you want to be a reporter, Kang Seo Jin?

Kang Seo Jin: I believe a reporter can change the world.  I hope to write articles to right the injustices of the world. I want to be the voice for people who are weak. I want to make the world the better place to live in. That is why I want to be a reporter. 

The above is a brief snippet of dialog from the Korean comedy Welcome to Waikiki. Seo Jin is interviewing for a reporter job and she gives a boilerplate answer to why she wants the job. I chose it because it is such a boilerplate answer -- rather than saying she wants to ferret out the facts for the public, she bluntly says she wants to, in effect, engage in social engineering.

That emphasis on a mission of social engineering has long been a de facto aim of both journalism and the soft sciences: psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, etc. Some, myself included, believe it is to the detriment of those disciplines. 

This trend towards social engineering, now joined with the critical race theory hustle, is beginning to assail math and the empirical sciences: chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, etc.  There are calls to inject a social engineering stance into them as well. 

To the social engineering enthusiasts Se Jin's, "I want to make the world a better place to live in" trumps all other arguments. How could such a sentiment be questioned? What could go wrong?

In the 1920's and 30s, due to Stalin's disastrous policy of the collectivization of farms, the Soviet Union was beset by famine and hunger. Trofim Lysenko, the son of a peasant farmer, had studied biology. Lysenko rejected Darwin's theory of natural selection and instead adhered to the by then discredited Lamarckian theory of inherited characteristics. He soon caught Stalin's ear with his theories As Encyclopedia.com described them:

Despite the fact that Lamarck's theory of evolution by acquired characteristics had been widely discarded as a scientific hypothesis, a remarkable set of circumstances allowed Lysenko the opportunity to sweep aside more than 100 years of scientific investigation to advocate a "politically correct" way to enhance agricultural production. When Lysenko promised greater crop yields, a Soviet Central Committee—desperate after the famine in the early 1930s—listened with an attentive ear. The very spirit of Marxist theory, Lysenko claimed, called for a theory of species formation which would entail "revolutionary leaps." Lysenko attacked Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution as a theory of "gradualism." 

At its heart communism is just another form of utopianism.  Stalin believed that by properly ordering society he could social engineer the emergence of the New Soviet Man, a leap forward in human social evolution. Lysenko was also a committed communist and, in his biological theories, he extended the notion of creating a New Man to ordering nature to create better crops as well.

For example, because of Russia's climate, winter and summer wheat crops were a concern. Lysenko believed that by freezing seeds they would get acclimated to the cold and produce greater yields. Further, because they would gain the cold hardiness, their seeds would inherit it as well. Of course, none of that worked. 

However, Stalin continued to support him and in fact Lysenko's notion of science supporting communism spread to other scientific disciples as well. Soon it became dangerous to question him, with many scientists and academics landing in Siberian gulags for doing just that. In the end, Soviet science became ridiculous in its chase of the proper Marxist interpretation of reality. Worse, Mao Zedong also embraced Lysenko's ideas and so they worsened the famines China experienced as well.   

In the end the scientific method is just a process whereby you test your ideas of how things work against reality. Trying to use it to force reality to fit your preconceived notions will always lead you astray. I fear that is the mistake the modern social engineers of the sciences are making today; I fear that in chasing utopia they will find graveyards instead.

Finally, to remind us of the actual tragic cost of Stalin and Lysenko's "I want to make the world a better place to live in" motives, below are two paintings of the starvation by Marchenko Nina.

Mother of the Year 33

The Road of Sorrow

Prentzinger’s Atlas of Astronomy

Click any image to enlarge

These images are from Ludwig Prentzinger’s 1851 Atlas of Astronomy. There were 12 featured plates They were found at Flashbak which has more of the plates.

The Ames Window illusion

A simple example, first done by Adelbert Ames Jr., of how our minds can be fooled by reality. It is such a strong optical illusion that even when explained, and even modified to prove the window's rotation, we still see it as an oscillation. One wonders what else we perceive that is not as it appears, no matter how closely we look. 

 

Welding in space

The above video explains cold welding, a process in which two surfaces of the same metal can adhere to each other in a vacuum. This of course can cause problems in satellites and other space vehicles. The video offers a nice demonstration of how cold welding occurs and discusses some of the issues it causes in the space programs and their solutions. 

  

If the speed of light was at a walking speed

This video is from a YouTube channel called The Action Lab. 

  

Vintage color Scientific American magazine covers

Click any image to enlarge

These covers, and those after the jump, are from the Internet Archive's collection: Scientific American (1845-1909). As well as the covers, the collection allows you to browse the internal pages of the magazines.

Belousov-Zhabotinsky Oscillating Reactions

Above is a video showing a Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillating reaction. An oscillating reaction occurs when parts of the solution periodically change, this leads to the solution not being in equilibrium thermodynamically, which is not normally what is expected. My chemistry knowledge is pretty sketchy so take my explanation with a grain of salt. Follow the previous link for a better explanation.

Below is a video which shows a fellow going through the steps of creating a Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillating reaction. It also sheds light on what it is all about.

A rubber band refrigerator

In above video Ben Krasnow builds a refrigerator using rubber bands as the cooling element. Of course it doesn't provide a lot of cooling, but a thermal imagining camera shows that it does slightly lower the temperature of the chamber. Ben explains the physics behind it all.

Ben's YouTube channel, Applied Science, is well worth a visit. he has a lot of fascinating projects, including a DIY scanning electron microscope, that are all pretty amazing.

Touring the South Pole station

Above is a video of a woman giving a tour of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. My previous knowledge of Antarctic stations came from repeated viewings of John Carpenter's The Thing so suffice it be said I was surprised by how large and, well... how institutional it looked.

I also wondered how much effort it took to build the place. Below are two videos, which are long in run time, showing the early efforts to plant the station and then the work to build the newer station we toured above. All in all, a pretty amazing engineering feat considering the environment it was done in.

Visualizing dinosaurs

Click any image to enlarge

These pictures, and those after the jump, are old drawings of what paleontologists used to think dinosaurs looked like. They tended to be pictured as being dull colored and very lizard like. Today it is believed that they were much more colorful and active. In fact, fossils are now yielding some information on just what those colors were.

The article How do we know what dinosaurs looked like? discusses the evolution of how dinosaurs were pictured through the years. From that article:

When ancient people were faced with strange bones, they did exactly what we do today, and used the best knowledge available to reconstruct the creatures that left them behind. Sometimes this resulted in poor conclusions. The first name assigned in print to any dinosaur remains was the ignominious title of Scrotum humanum – a label given by British physician Richard Brookes to the broken end of a femur in 1763, believing it to be the fossilised testicles of a Biblical giant.

We now know that the leg bone belonged to a Megalosaurus – correctly described as an extinct reptile by William Buckland in 1824. You can’t entirely blame Brookes for his conclusions, as dinosaurs would not be described as a group until 1842. That was when Richard Owen, head of what is now the Natural History Museum, revealed to the world a new class of strange, extinct creatures he called dinosaurs, meaning ‘fearfully great reptiles’. He imagined Iguanodon, Megalosaurus and Hylaeosaurus to be reptiles with legs sprawled out to the sides, with scaly grey or green skin: something like modern lizards or crocodiles.

In 1854 artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created life-sized sculptures of these animals as directed by Owen, and you can still see these on display in Crystal Palace Park in south London. Visit them and you will see they look very different to how we depict dinosaurs today.

Over time, we have come to completely revise our understanding of the appearance of dinosaurs, and much of this began with the description of another American dromaeosaur called Deinonychus in the 1960s. John Ostrom at Yale University made the revolutionary suggestion that this species was a bird-like, fast, warm-blooded pack hunter, and so began the ‘dinosaur renaissance’ of the 1960s and 70s. Ostrom championed the idea that birds were dinosaurs, and was spectacularly vindicated when Sinosauropteryx, the first known feathered dinosaur, was found in China in 1996.

The apple draws the Earth

Newton's Apple Tree (click to enlarge)

The apple tree that dropped the apple that so enlightened Isaac Newton is still alive. That's it above. As entertaining as the common version of the story is, the apple didn't actually bounce off his head. As he recounted to his biographer William Stukeley:

After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank the, under the shade of some apple trees ... he told me, "he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself ... Why should it not go sideways, or upwards, but constantly to the Earth's centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the Earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. If matter thus draws matter, it must be in proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the Earth, as well as the Earth draws the apple."

 

Sound and Water

19th Century Scientific American

These are covers, mainly from the 19th century, of Scientific American. The magazine bills itself as a publication that covers art, science and mechanics, with other subjects occasionally added to the tag line. It is interesting in just how much it does focus on technology, unlike today's Scientific American, which is much more science oriented.

The covers on this page, and those after the jump, are from the Magazine Rack's Scientific American (1845-1909) Collection. If you follow that link you can actually page through the old issues and see all of their content. Be warned, it can be a tremendous time sink.

Chemical reactions

These films are from Envisioning Chemistry, which is part of The Beauty of Science website. Much good stuff at both links.