Yes, I know Orphan Red took the Mensa test and passed never took the test myself and I have some doubts on it now. But these test basic knowledge like wood association, math skills, pattern recognition and some logic . They do not test knowledge for a specific area like physics, biology, or video editing. Some of her videos go on for hours and I have seen one that with a time stamped for over 6 hours, no I not watch those, not even if I was paid. Also if she wants people to take her seriously put down the wine and do wee bit more research.
The first part of this video she goes on about the symbols on the American dollar bill and the connections to the Freemasons. First any argument that goes into using Freemasons as a basis should be just thrown because it is essentially built off of ignorance. To start off there are Freemasons and stone masons. Stone masons are the ones that go around building and fixing walls out of stone and there are the Freemasons. I have to say my grandfather, his brothers were or are Freemasons, it is a family tradition but I did not join because you have to believe in a supreme being to become a member and my thoughts on the subject are complicated. Other qualifications is that you have to be male, over the age of 21 and be in good standing in the community. I also helped set dinners for the local lodges and received a couple of pounds of bacon that were leftover after breakfasts they hosted. They started off because nobles noticed that stone masons could pass borders easier so they took the symbols of the stonemasons. But what the Freemasons, they are a good man who use the symbols of stone masons in a secret society, they are a number of positions that each member holds, that are change once a year, I have been two of these and have them video tape somewhere. The highest position is master of the lodge and after so many years and passing tests everybody gets this post for a year at least. After that you can if you want to go thru one of two rights the Scottish or York right, the Scottish has 32 steps and the York right and after that you can become a Shriner, nowadays you can just go start to being Shriner but is expensive. Yes the group that everyone loves to hate is the first step helping children. Then she goes into the Illuminati which is another of the every conspiracy theorists favorite secret groups. There was an Illuminati in the 18th century Bavaria but this was during a time when there a lot of secret societies. Most of them probably existed because some people wanted change but the government at the time was either a king or a church and they did not want change and they probably started stories that these secret groups were doing all kinds of evil things and the stories got inflated over time.
Now to the symbols on the one dollar. The first one is the all knowing eye in the pyramid, this is actually a christian symbol of providence or god keeping an eye on the young country. Then she goes on about the thirteen levels in the pyramid and says of add another that is upside down you get one of 26 levels and this what is suppose to the symbol on the bill because it represents the Star of David. (not going into some of logic that get her there) Then she the 26 layers represent 26 stadia which was an a measure of distance used by the Greeks, 26 stadia come out to be about three miles which she claims is limit to how far a human eye can see but I know I can see the Andromeda galaxy some three light years away.
Then she goes into how the eye works. First thing the eye has over 7 million cone cells and over 120 million rod cells, the cones are the one that see color, There are 3 types of cones cells that a receptive to certain wavelengths. Rod cells are a lot more sensitive to light than the cones and generally are the ones used to see in dim light like at night. But all these receptors are over an area of just over 1000 mm 2 with about 10,000 rods per square mm so the resolution is much better than the blobbly image she uses to describe what we see. She states that we can only see things as long as there is at least one receptor being firing, not really. The resolution to how small we can see is dependent on the aperture or opening size of what is observing the object, the smallest angular size of an object seen is given by θ=1.22*diameter/wavelength in rads which one rad being 57.29 degrees, so with a big telescope we see smaller objects than with the human eye. Plus the flat earthers have proved that the Earth is round as seen in the video in the last post.
I am reading one of the best science fiction novels ever written ever and written by Carl Sagan called Contact, it was also made into a movie. The only copy of the movie I had was on VHS, it the VCR ate it. The subject it covers is SETI or the Search for Extra-Terrestrial intelligence, some call it Contacting Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence or Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. A question that comes up is SETI science. A few myths to get thru before we really get started. SETI does not deal with UFO’s, alien autopsies or alien encounters, some SETI scientist do get calls about these things but deal with them in skeptical way. There is no one SETI program ran by the government, there is the SETI institute but that is a private group funded by donations and endowments. The famous SETI@home project was done by the University of Berkeley thru their own SETI investigations. SETI is not just pointing radio telescopes in the sky to hope to find a signal coming to Earth, this is one part of it thou.
We might live in an unique place of the universe where we can study situations where life thrived, where it might of been at one point, where it came about with out the need of energy input from the sun, or under kilometers of ice. We live on a planet were life is almost everywhere there are a few places that most of the time is too dry of life but when water does get to these regions life does come about. There is life under kilometers of water where life gets the energy from thermal vents and the chemicals coming out of the vents. There is life in the water around geysers that is hotter then the boiling point. There are the moons like Europa, Enceladus and Titan. Europa and Enceladus have oceans under kilometers of ice that are larger than the all the oceans of Earth. The cores of these moons are heated up by tidal forces pushing and pulling the cores and creating heat by friction also there might be radioactive decay of elements in the core. There is the moon of Saturn Titan where it rains hydrocarbons and the rocks are water ice. Under the surface there might pools of liquid water like lava on Earth were the organic compounds might have a place to react with on another. And even further out in the solar system under the surface of Pluto where there might be an ocean of water under the surface and there are organic compounds on the surface. Closer to Earth we have an example of where life might of started but failed is Mars. Mars in the past might of had life on it in the distant past, there is signs that liquid water was on the surface and that there might be a salty lake or ocean under the surface. The current theory that Mars had some version of plate tectonics but slowed down and stopped over time which stopped the recycling of carbon dioxide which kept the heat to keep the water liquid. So Mars might a good example of what is needed from the geology of the planet to keep life going.
Another way to investigate where life might show up is to look for planets where life might be. Nowadays planets around other stars is common place but this a relativity new in astronomy. It really has been only quarter of a century since exoplanets have been around. The thing with a lot of these planets is that they are either too close to the parent star, too big, too far from the star or the parent star creates too much radiation for life to develop on the planet. One way to determine if life could develop was to determine if the planet has in the habitable zone or sometimes called the Goldilocks zone because it would be just right for life. To do this the general equation that is used is
R=(L/(4*π*σT4))1/2
where R is the distance form the star, T is temperature at the planet usually around 300 K which is about 0 C and the L is the luminosity which is how much energy the star gives off. There is usually a range where planets might exist around each star because there could be atmospheres that could hold in heat to keep planets further from the star to stay warm enough..But there some these larger planets might have moons that might have an icy outside and an oceans underneath. Also using radio astronomy you can detect molecules in clouds of dust and gas called nebula, molecules like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, if you cook these are released during the process.
There are some people who think we are alone in the universe. Sometimes the like to use the Fermi paradox. This states that if there are aliens why haven’t they been there, but we don’t know if they want to met us in the first place. There is the Drake equation that is used to determine how many civilizations are in the universe.
N=RsfpnefhfIfcL
Where N is the number of civilizations in the galaxy, Rs is the rate of star formation, fp the n umber of planets around the star, ne the number of Earths around the star,fh the number of habitable planets around the star, fI the number that become intelligent, fcthe number that become intelligent enough to communicate, L the lifetime of the species. Along with the probability of finding life in the universe it also tells us where we have to improve of our knowledge to now how many civilizations are out there. There was a study last year were a group ran a simulation with what we know now and find there is no chance of another civilization. This was flawed because we really don’t what is put there. Another approach I think would be better would be is go on a star by star basis, taking into factors like where the planets are located, the type of star, what part the of the star’s life cycle that is in, are there moons around the planets and other factors.
So is SETI science, for sure it is like modelling what happens inside a star or modelling the sub-atomic world using String Theory. But all these have to based off the real world just saying it works out mathematically does not mean it exists. SETI helps us try to answer one of the big questions humanity has had since its early days “Are We Alone?”.
This is a history of early development of stellar modelling and the personality conflicts between some of the scientists that developed what has become termed the standard model. The two main characters in the story are Arthur Eddington and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar or for most of the rest of essay Chandra. The two of them couldn’t have had different backgrounds. Chandra grew up in an upper middle-class family in India during the Raj, this was when India was being ruled by England. His father worked in the accounts of the railway which was part if the civil service which at the time was held high regard at the time in India. His family taught Chandra and education was considered a high priority. By the time he was 19 he had finished his masters at Presidency College in Madras and was off to England by a long boat and train journey. Eddington was born into a family of Quakers in the lake district and his father died when was about 2 and his mother moved to down the coast from Bristol to earn a living to raise two kids Arthur and his sister. Eddingtons’ family couldn’t afford him to send him to boarding school, the just could afford to pay for him to go there for the day, he had to use a borrowed three inch telescope to explore the night sky. He went to Owens College now Manchester University, he later went to Trinity college where he got his masters and doctorate. He succeeded George Darwin as Plumian professorship and director of the Cambridge observatory. Also Eddington didn’t keep most of his private communications and most were destroyed soon after his death, some of circles he was in would be considered criminal because of what they did in their private lives and there were rumors that he might be that way also but no proof.
Some background on what was known about what was thought about how stars are formed. In the late 1800’s at the Harvard observatory many underpaid woman students were hired to organize 50,000 stars by their spectra. They were eventually classified into the categories O,B,A,F,G,K,M the most used way that is taught to remember this is Oh Be A Fine Girl/Guy Kiss Me, and recently the L and Y classifications for brown dwarfs. O Class stars had the hottest surface temperatures, the spectra gives the temperature, at 30,000 K while M class tend to be 3000 K or lower. Then Russel in Princeton and Hertzberg in Holland independently decided to plot the spectra type and temperature vs absolute magnitude and luminosity. Absolute magnitude is how bright the star will be if at a distance of 10 parsecs from the observer. When done this with the hotter temperatures descending from left to right there is diagonal from upper left to lower right, this is the main sequence and there is a diagonal line coming from the upper right to a main sequence line and these are the giants. But when the HR diagram came out there was on star that was a lot dimmer and cooler then it should be and that was σ4 Eridani B and later Sirius B which was found to have only a radius of about 18,000 km compared the Sun of 695,000 km and a density of 61,000 g/cm3, the temperature of of Sirius B was 1000 K with the Sun at 5700 K. At the the time the model that was dominate was Lord Kelvins that stars contracted smaller and smaller and gave off heat and light. Eddington that the there could be interactions on the atomic or subatomic. In 1920 a physical chemist at Trinity, Aston, decided to measure the difference between an alpha particle and the 4 parts that make the alpha particle, that is two protons and two neutrons. He found there was a small mass difference of 0.80 of 1 percent. Eddington used the ideal gas law to model the giant stars but he had to make certain assumptions, they didn’t how much of each element there was in a star just what kind of elements there were which meant he had to guess at the opacity or how clear the star was, but Saha had figured that most of a star was made from hydrogen. After the war, Fowler decided to take into account effects from the new field of quantum mechanics. He figured that when a star collapse gravity can only go so far because no two elections can have the same quantum state when a star is reaches this limit the star stops collapses. Chandra took this further and took into account the theory of special relativity into effect and found there was a limit to this if the star is left with a mass of more than 1.4 solar masses it could possibly shrink further. This is where Eddington had issues and attack Chandra on this for years. Also in the USSR Lev Landau also was doing similar research but found a limit of 1.5 solar masses, and actually in some circles was referred to as the Landau limit for years. Landau sent copies to a Russian journal, an English Journal and to Niels Bohr to keep his name in circulation but it not help him stay from Stalins bad side. On trumped up charges he was sent to a MKVD work camp for years, he wasn’t the same afterwards.
In 1932 the neutron was found in Cavendish labs, Chandra who was there and many other astrophysicists at the time did not see how this would apply to their field. One astrophysicists at the then small California Institute of Technology, now famous as CalTech. His last name Zwicky, he is also famous for figuring out that the outer parts of the galaxy rotate slowly then they should and coming up dark matter, but he also someone people really didn’t like working with because you be called a spherical bastard, a bastard form all directions, I know a few. Zwicky was working shortly working Baade on what they coined as supernova. Stars are generally unstable with with gravity holding them together and radiation pressure trying to push them apart so some lose a bit of mass now and then in outburst and over time lose something one percent of their mass over their lifetimes. But sometimes these stars lose 90 percent of their mass in a giant explosion. In 1054 Chinese and North American native groups documented a star in the night sky that wasn’t there before, it was a supernova in the constellation that was named Tauris the bull by the Greeks. The supernova happened some 6500 yrs ago , 5500 light-years away. Today it is known as the crab nebula because it looks kind of like a crab in with arms going in all directions. Gamow in a Russian travelling thru Europe at the time came up how the atoms came together, with a couple of students. The particles inside the nucleus are like balls in a bowl going up and down the sides of the bowl. Most of the time they do not have energy to travel beyond the lip of the bowl. But the particles in the bowl can act as waves and just leave out the side of the bowl, this is what is referred to as quantum tunnelling. Gamow hired a couple of students out of a lab to figure how fusion worked. Before hydrogen was know to be the dominate element in stars they figured the opposite of the atom breaking apart would be easier done with smaller nuclei. The Gamow returned to the USSR, didn’t like the climate and got him and his wife invited to conference outside of the USSR. After that he went George Washington University and never went back. Gamow thought a star only burned hydrogen during its lifetime. Chandra and Schronberg decided to investigate further, Chandra wasn’t as an expert on nuclear fusion in stars as Schronberg. The star would ‘burn’ the hydrogen until it used up about 10 percent of the star and the helium ash fall into the core, then if the star was under 1.4 solar masses it would just become a white dwarf, if it was larger than that and lost enough mass to be under the 1.4 Chandrasekhar limit it would then again become a white dwarf star. If it was larger than the 1.4 solar masses it under 8 solar masses, the fusion of hydrogen would stop and gravity would make the star contract. This contraction would make the heat the core and cause helium fusion to happen again. The heat from the core would cause the star to expand to about the orbit of the Earth, the sun has enough fuel not to do this for another 5 billion years. If the star was bugger than 8 times the sun the star would collapse and then the star would fuse carbon and eventually leave a white dwarf star of carbon and oxygen. After the war saw a lot of advancements in astrophysics and physics one of which was the use of computers, which came about during the war to crack codes and develop the atomic bomb. One of the first to use the computer was John Wheeler at the Institute of Advance Studies in Princeton. Wheeler decided to work out what happened to stars larger than 8 solar masses. For the first 10 million years they would burn hydrogen, then the core would collapse and burn helium for a million years. The core would collapse again until carbon fusion would start for 600 hundred years, then core would collapse until it was hot enough to fuse oxygen for 6 months. After that silicon in a day into iron, iron doesn’t give off energy so the process stops there. The star collapses and collapse until the energy of gravity squeezes most of the free electrons into the protons creating neutrons, at the end this the star ejects most of it matter into space creating elements in a flash called a supernova. If the star was rotating before the super nova it would spin faster and faster as the radius decreased the magnetic field would increase to 10 million times it original strength which causes a beam of particles to come out of it at either end, if it is lined so we can detect on Earth we call these objects pulsars. In 1967 Jocelyn Bell at the Jodrell radio observatory detected the first one, many others have been detected including in the heart of the crab nebula. More important Chandra was right and Eddington was wrong.
Now enter the heavy weight of the last stages of a stars life and probably the most famous, heck there have been a couple of movies named after it, the black hole. In 1915 Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, this dealt with how large masses, space and time interacted with one another. Since it was published in wartime and England was fighting Germany and her allies it was hard to get a copy but Eddington did thru connections in neutral Holland. Since he was a Quaker and their against violence he was almost certainly going to a camp. But thru friends he worked out a deal where he would travel to the southern hemispheres in 1919 because their was going to be a solar eclipse. During the eclipse the light from a star would bend around the sun and it would look like it was in a different position, which it did, well there is some people argue otherwise. Also a copy of Einsteins theory made it the German-Russian front. There a physicist by the name of Schwarzschild was in the German artillery. He how small an object has to be to have a strong enough gravity can’t even escape, known forever as the Schwarzschild radius (I wish they used his first name Karl), for the Sun it is 2 miles and for the average human it is smaller than a proton. Oppenheimer and his group before the Second World found once a star collapses beyond this point it you won’t be able to see it anymore. This solution only was applicable to none spinning black holes for spinning back holes another solution was figured by Kerr in New Zealend after WWII. Also after WWII, in the early fifties when modelling was
still in its infancy a team started out to figure out what happened at the moment of a super nova. This was Colgate and White. They started to research what was going in the core at the moment of collapse and in the super nova. In 1970 the Uhuru satellite was launched from Kenya, the name meaning freedom in Swahili. This was an x-ray detecting satellite and found signals in the direction of Cygnus called Cygnus X-1, later on the Apollo 15 mission they actually measure for longer periods and proved it was there. There was a blue giant some 30 times the mass of the sun orbited by a non visible companion of 7 solar masses, much larger than neutron star a 2-3 solar masses. There was a famous bet between Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose whether or not it was a black hole, and eventually was to be determined to be a black hole. Another discovery was small zones of intense radiation, these objects thought to be stars at first but later found to be way too powerful to be stars were first called quasi-stellar objects and eventually quasars. They were found to be jets of material being ejected from the poles of distant ancient galaxies. As material gets close to a black hole the curvature of space time makes the material follow a circular path. The material collides into each and heats it to a point were it gets ionized. This creates a magnetic field and material flows thru magnetic field and gets thrown out through the poles.
In 1983 at the age or nearly the age of 70 Chandra got awarded a noble prize. He got for his work for his work on white dwarfs at the beginning of his career, he was kind of disappointed because he wished was some of his most recent work. Every 5 years or so he tended to switch research topics, he covered things like general relativity, black hole physics, and some work on the hydrogen bomb for the USA. Since 1936 he was in the states, at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay WI, part of the University of Chicago and was there until in 1951. Him and his wife bought a small house just a few house form the observatory. He received racism from some of the staff at the main campus of the university and elsewhere in the states. When WWII came about he tried to work on the Manhattan project but because he was still an Indian citizenship it really was too late for him to do much on it but he did help Teller work on the hydrogen bomb. Him and his wife never had any children, they tried but it never worked out. He kept in touch with Milne and actually invited to the states for a visit where Milne met his second wife on a steamer on the back to England. Milne had the same work he had as during the First World War calculating ballistics under the same person. Milne second wife committed suicide mostly people figure because she got into Europe just as the Nazis were invading, first she was in Italy and then France just a few days before they invaded and it was an ordeal to stay on step ahead. Milne died of a heart attack on his way to give a talk when he was only 44. Eddington and Chandra did correspond frequently despite Eddington’s constantly tearing Chandra’s work apart. Chandra during the war even sent Eddington several parcels of rice to help with the food rationing in England at the time. Eddington died before the war was over from stomach cancer. In the Early fifties he started to do more and more work at the main campus of the university and worked with Fermi on a couple of papers. In 1951 him and his wife became American citizens this upset his father who hoped he would return to India, but conflicts with his Raman who was a physicists made his mind to stay in US. He eventually moved to Chicago and eventually worked in what is now called the Fermi Institute which was part of the department of physics. He worked there until 1980 when officially retired and worked from grant money. In 1995 he did of heart attack, he did not want to wake his wife so he drove himself to the university’s clinic and died a few hours later. He was very selective of his Ph.D students and could be like Eddington at times, at the Fermi Institute every professor had his own chair in a conference room and was a bit like Sheldon Cooper on the Big Bang about it. But he was also supportive to his students in private and had a good sense of humor. In 1999 Nasa launched the Chandra X-ray telescope to investigate sources of x-rays like black holes and quasars, his wife was actually there when it was launched.
This is a brief summary, yeah over 3000 words brief. And there is a lot more in the more in the book. And yes an analogy or two.
I will be using a couple of terms like AU which is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, and MJ for the mass of Jupiter, these are the units which are used when discussing the orbits of planets around other stars, while for the ones discussed here. The mass of Jupiter is about a thousandth that of the Sun.
Since early times people have looked up the night sky and they noticed most of stars stayed in place relative to one another and a five moved relative to the rest. The Greeks called these planets after their word for wanderer and give them the names Mercury, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. Hipparchus measured the positions of these objects over time 600 years before the common era and 400 years later Ptolemy took the measurements and came up with a system of circles and smaller circles inside them to predict where these objects would be in the future. Then about 1700 years later Nicholas Copernicus switched the Earth in the middle of the movement and placed the Sun there. Then Tycho Brahe measured the movement of Mars but still thought the Earth was the center of the universe, then he passed and eventually his assistant Kepler used the data to plot the orbit Mars. He tried to make it a circular orbit around the Sun but he gave up his assumptions and he found that it had an elliptical orbit, a slightly circle that is stretched out a bit. A couple hundred years later Herschel found the plant Uranus the first new planet to be discovered since ancient times. Also around the same time Laplace and Kant thought the solar system was formed from a nebula and condensed down to the Sun and the planets. In 1847 Johannes Galle beat English astronomers to finding Neptune. Neptune was predicted Adams and La Verrier because Uranus was not behaving the way it should. The last planet to be found was Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 (This was demoted to a minor planet).And then…
Then came the story of Barnard’s star and Peter van de Kamp. Barnard’s star was discovered by a photographer and amateur astronomy who was hired by the Lick observatory because he had a knack of finding comets. He took an image of several stars in the constellation Ophiuchus in 1894 and 22 years later in 1916 took an image of the region and found that one star jump ahead of the others, also it was found to be only 6 light years away so the little star was studied a lot. Stars create their own energy and light by nuclear fusion and are lot more massive then planets, plus planets just reflect light from a star so planets are lot harder to find then stars. When a planet or bits around a star it pulls on the star slightly the heavier planet more an effect it has on the parent star. The course of the star will change from a straight path to more like one like the path of a dog walker with a bunch of big dogs. This method was first used to find stars around other stars, this is called the astrometric method. In 1844 Wilhelm Bessel predicted that there was a star around Sirius and 18 years later an American telescope maker Alvin Clark found Sirius B a white dwarf, a star the size of Earth but the mass of the sun. Peter van de Kamp started his study of Barnard’s star in 1937 when started to work at Swarthmore college at the Sproul observatory there, in 1938 he became director there. By 1944 he was ready to make announcement, he found an object about 6 percent the mass of the Sun. Also a year before one of his colleagues at the Sproul observatory announce that he found a planet around 61 Cygnus with a mass about 16 MJ. Also Reuyl and Holmberg found a planet around 70 Ophiuchus with a mass of 10 MJ working at the McCormick observatory. In 1963 after more observations van de Kamp announced that Barnard’s Star had a planet of 1.7 MJ about 4.4 AU from the star. Then five years later with 500 more observations he found to be 1.6 MJ at 4.5 AU. The problem of with the planet it had a highly elliptical orbit, so to save the planet he made it into 2 planets one at 2.8 AU with a mass 0.8 MJand another 1.1 MJ at 4.5 AU. In 1972 Black came up with a solution that there could be 2 or 3 planets orbiting in different planes around the star. But there was a bigger issue with van de Kamps planets a colleague at Swarthmore was measuring plates from the observatory of star Gleise 793 with a new automated plate reader at the Naval observatory in Washington. He found that Gleise 793 had the exact same movement as Barnard’s Star this meant that Gleise 793 had planets, there some unseen force connecting the two, or there was a fault in the observations. It was found that there was a fault in the telescope that was taken care of during an upgrade in 1949 and there was a fault in the photographic plates that were being used. So it looked like there was no planets because no one else could verify the existence of the first three candidates. Peter van de Kamp kept arguing there were planets around Barnard’s star until his death in 1995.
There have been three theories on how the solar system formed. There was the Laplace-Kant formation theory that the solar system was formed from a collapsing spinning gas and dust. There was a theory that came about in the 1900’s from Moulton at the University of Chicago had and that a star came nearby and pulled material from the sun and the planets formed from that. There was the theory that was brought about by Hans Alfven a nobel laureate in the field of electro-magnetism, he thought the material for planet formation was collected by the magnetic field of the sun gathered the material to form the planets. Alfven eventually came the nebula theory but still thought magnetic fields played a greater effect then thought. The reason the tidal theory of Moulton’s held sway was because in the nebula theory the sun rotates a lot slower than it should because in the early solar system should have spinning a lot faster than today, but it was pointed out that gas could escape the solar system and take some of the momentum. Plus the planets needed a lot more metals than the sun had. so the tidal thoery went to the wastebasket. The next major advancement was by K.E Edgeworth who thought the planets came about by the planets being formed by planetesimals. But the major work came from the the Soviet Union, by Schmidt and Safronov. Schmidt in his early days was a leading scientist in the USSR like leading an exploration to arctic and for a while was more of a bureaucrat than scientist. But Germany attacked the USSR and because of his German background he last favor by Stalin. He eventually started an institute on the outskirts of Moscow and eventually Safronov came to work with him. Safronov took the development of the planets into stages. First he ignored the Sun in the center of the nebula. The first stage was that the small particles went into the center of the disk, for the first 1000 years these small particles combined into objects about the size of marbles. The next few orbits about ten years these objects combined into clouds of objects about the size of small asteroids. Then when the objects would form bigger objects about 16 km gravity wasn’t really a factor in forming. The planet Earth would take about 100 million years to form. The gas giants would take an additional phase After the got to about 1 Earth mass they would and the excess hydrogen and helium was being blown out of inner solar system they would gather the gas to form the outer layers of these planets. The major problem came about the formation of Uranus and Neptune, under this scheme it take 100 billion years for them to form, and ad hoc solution of adding more material out there to form these two planets. A few years after Safronov work came out Wetherill at UCLA in 1972 decided to do a number of computer models based off of Safronov work, Safronov did have access to computers while doing his work he did all his research by hand. Wetherill decided to focus on the last two stages He started at the stage of the particles being the size of marbles and he used a statistical method so he he had to do a number of runs to see what would happen. He found that small planets would form near the star two Earth sized and two smaller sized planets. Eventually the solar wind was worked in and it slowed the speed at which the particles were moving into the center. Earth and Venus have more circular orbit because the were hit by a lot of massive objects from different directions, while Mars and Mercury have more eccentric orbits because they did not receive as many collisions. When the IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite) was launched it first had to calibrated. This was done by imaging a stars that was thought to be well known Vega (Alpha Lyrae) but there was an excess in the infrared spectrum. Also Eplison Eridani, and Beta Pictoris were found to be have this excess. On Earth an astronomer was using a cornograph (a disk put in the middle of the scope to block the light) and found that Beta Pictoris had a couple of spikes of dust sticking out of either side of the star indicating a dust ring. Also IRAS found disks around other stars that confirmed the viscosity version of the accretion disk.
Then came the brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs are objects that lay part way between stars and planets. They can not do the same fusion process that stars use but some of the heavier ones cane use a fusion that uses lithium as catalyst, stars when they start fusing material they destroy their lithium so this has become a test for star or brown dwarf but this was not available in first few years. The term brown dwarf was termed by Jill Tarter now of the SETI institute, she came up with the term because she didn’t like the term of black star or black dwarf because it was already in use for black holes, red dwarf was used for small stars so brown seemed like a good color to call them. If you ever read the book Contact or watched the movie the character of Ellie Arroway was based off of her. The first models by several people including the author came up with projected models of 2-80 MJ later the lower limit was raised to 17 MJ. Just like planets they can be hard to find.
A couple of the first candidates came from a list of 12 faint stars Van Briesbroeck (VB 1-12). One study was done by Donald McCarthy using a technique called speckle spectroscopy. This was done by taking up to 10000 images of a system, he found VB8 had a 10 MJ object then he thought had a mass of 3-10 MJ with a orbital distance of just larger than Jupiter’s so had an orbital period in the decades. And got the name VB 8 B (Capital letters for stars and lower case for planets). A couple of french astronomers tried to repeat the observations in Chile but could not find either it. The next brown dwarf candidate found was around HD 114762 found by David Latham. This was discovered the spectroscopic method. In this method you measure the wavelength of light that is emitted from the star. When the companion is behind the main star it pulls the star backwards and slows the star and since light has a fixed speed the wavelength most change. The light appears redder and then when the object is in front of the star the light appears bluer. Latham found an object of at least 11 MJ. The next major announcement was in 1987 when William Forrest found 9 brown dwarfs in the Tauri star formation area, they looked around 27 T Tauri stars, this a region of star formation so the brown dwarfs would be still have a lot of heat and easier to detect.
The next set of exoplanets were discovered around pulsars. This was a very unusual place to find exoplanets like finding me in a gym unusual. Pulsars are the leftovers of a large star runs out of material to consume. There is a balance between gravity forcing material downward and the energy created from the fusion in the core. Stars about ten times the Sun when they collapse finally the material is so compacted protons and electrons are squeezed together to form neutrons so the entire star is composed of neutrons. Stars that get to this stage are called neutron stars. They spin and send out a pulse usually in the radio but sometimes in the visible and theses are called pulsars. The usually spin with such regular pattern that when they were first found they were thought of been created by little green man so for a short time there was the notation LGM. The reason that finding a planet around such an object is unlikely is because anything that was around the planet should of been vaporized during the explosion. Pulsar names come in the form of PSR plus the coordinates of the object. The fist object that was thought to be a planet around a pulsar was found Andrew Lyne from the Jodrell bank in England around PSR1829-10 with a mass of 10 earth masses, but it wasn’t a planet around the pulsar he found but Earth, they didn’t take into account they were on Earth going around the Sun. In 1990 Wolsczan using the Arecibo radio observatory found two planets around PSR1257+12 1500 lyrs from Earth with periods of 98 and 67 days.
In 1995 the universe changed two Swiss astronomers using the 1.93 meter Haute-Provence observatory found the first exoplanet around the star 51 Pegasi with a period of 4.23 days with a mass of about that of Jupiter. Such a short period meant it was close to the Sun and it was one of the first of the hot Jupiters. They were able to bet the Americans to this discovery because the Americans were assuming longer periods so they were holding off their processing. As soon as the news was out one American team used the Lick observatory to verify and found it as well. Then the floodgates were opened it eventually became planet of the week club.
About a third of the book deals with the politics and bureaucracy working in the scientific world and working for NASA. Such as referring the paper Mayor and Queloz about there discovery of the first planet around 51 Pegasi. Since Boss was a member and a leader of groups to advise NASA on how the search for exoplanets. The space interferometry mission has been delayed indefinitely or cancelled which was what was being discussed. They has been Kepler which was a space telescope that focused on a small region in Cygnus to find planets, it had a problem in one of the gyroscopes and redirected to another spot before it could find another Earth but found a few thousand exoplanet candidates. There is also TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Space Survey) which looks at a different regions to find planets passing in front of stars for other observatories to follow up on. I would just like to add a couple of personal notes, I first learned about the discovery of exoplanets from my grandfather. We were travelling from Fredericton to home during March break during my last year at the first university I attended. He saw a Nova episode describing the discovery of the first planets. This is a good book to describe how the planets are found and the history of early planet hunting.
Looking for Earths:The Race to Find New Solar Systems by Alan Boss
I will be using a couple of terms like AU which is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, and MJ for the mass of Jupiter, these are the units which are used when discussing the orbits of planets around other stars, while for the ones discussed here. The mass of Jupiter is about a thousandth that of the Sun.
Since early times people have looked up the night sky and they noticed most of stars stayed in place relative to one another and a five moved relative to the rest. The Greeks called these planets after their word for wanderer and give them the names Mercury, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. Hipparchus measured the positions of these objects over time 600 years before the common era and 400 years later Ptolemy took the measurements and came up with a system of circles and smaller circles inside them to predict where these objects would be in the future. Then about 1700 years later Nicholas Copernicus switched the Earth in the middle of the movement and placed the Sun there. Then Tycho Brahe measured the movement of Mars but still thought the Earth was the center of the universe, then he passed and eventually his assistant Kepler used the data to plot the orbit Mars. He tried to make it a circular orbit around the Sun but he gave up his assumptions and he found that it had an elliptical orbit, a slightly circle that is stretched out a bit. A couple hundred years later Herschel found the plant Uranus the first new planet to be discovered since ancient times. Also around the same time Laplace and Kant thought the solar system was formed from a nebula and condensed down to the Sun and the planets. In 1847 Johannes Galle beat English astronomers to finding Neptune. Neptune was predicted Adams and La Verrier because Uranus was not behaving the way it should. The last planet to be found was Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 (This was demoted to a minor planet).And then…
Then came the story of Barnard’s star and Peter van de Kamp. Barnard’s star was discovered by a photographer and amateur astronomy who was hired by the Lick observatory because he had a knack of finding comets. He took an image of several stars in the constellation Ophiuchus in 1894 and 22 years later in 1916 took an image of the region and found that one star jump ahead of the others, also it was found to be only 6 light years away so the little star was studied a lot. Stars create their own energy and light by nuclear fusion and are lot more massive then planets, plus planets just reflect light from a star so planets are lot harder to find then stars. When a planet or bits around a star it pulls on the star slightly the heavier planet more an effect it has on the parent star. The course of the star will change from a straight path to more like one like the path of a dog walker with a bunch of big dogs. This method was first used to find stars around other stars, this is called the astrometric method. In 1844 Wilhelm Bessel predicted that there was a star around Sirius and 18 years later an American telescope maker Alvin Clark found Sirius B a white dwarf, a star the size of Earth but the mass of the sun. Peter van de Kamp started his study of Barnard’s star in 1937 when started to work at Swarthmore college at the Sproul observatory there, in 1938 he became director there. By 1944 he was ready to make announcement, he found an object about 6 percent the mass of the Sun. Also a year before one of his colleagues at the Sproul observatory announce that he found a planet around 61 Cygnus with a mass about 16 MJ. Also Reuyl and Holmberg found a planet around 70 Ophiuchus with a mass of 10 MJ working at the McCormick observatory. In 1963 after more observations van de Kamp announced that Barnard’s Star had a planet of 1.7 MJ about 4.4 AU from the star. Then five years later with 500 more observations he found to be 1.6 MJ at 4.5 AU. The problem of with the planet it had a highly elliptical orbit, so to save the planet he made it into 2 planets one at 2.8 AU with a mass 0.8 MJand another 1.1 MJ at 4.5 AU. In 1972 Black came up with a solution that there could be 2 or 3 planets orbiting in different planes around the star. But there was a bigger issue with van de Kamps planets a colleague at Swarthmore was measuring plates from the observatory of star Gleise 793 with a new automated plate reader at the Naval observatory in Washington. He found that Gleise 793 had the exact same movement as Barnard’s Star this meant that Gleise 793 had planets, there some unseen force connecting the two, or there was a fault in the observations. It was found that there was a fault in the telescope that was taken care of during an upgrade in 1949 and there was a fault in the photographic plates that were being used. So it looked like there was no planets because no one else could verify the existence of the first three candidates. Peter van de Kamp kept arguing there were planets around Barnard’s star until his death in 1995.
There have been three theories on how the solar system formed. There was the Laplace-Kant formation theory that the solar system was formed from a collapsing spinning gas and dust. There was a theory that came about in the 1900’s from Moulton at the University of Chicago had and that a star came nearby and pulled material from the sun and the planets formed from that. There was the theory that was brought about by Hans Alfven a nobel laureate in the field of electro-magnetism, he thought the material for planet formation was collected by the magnetic field of the sun gathered the material to form the planets. Alfven eventually came the nebula theory but still thought magnetic fields played a greater effect then thought. The reason the tidal theory of Moulton’s held sway was because in the nebula theory the sun rotates a lot slower than it should because in the early solar system should have spinning a lot faster than today, but it was pointed out that gas could escape the solar system and take some of the momentum. Plus the planets needed a lot more metals than the sun had. so the tidal thoery went to the wastebasket. The next major advancement was by K.E Edgeworth who thought the planets came about by the planets being formed by planetesimals. But the major work came from the the Soviet Union, by Schmidt and Safronov. Schmidt in his early days was a leading scientist in the USSR like leading an exploration to arctic and for a while was more of a bureaucrat than scientist. But Germany attacked the USSR and because of his German background he last favor by Stalin. He eventually started an institute on the outskirts of Moscow and eventually Safronov came to work with him. Safronov took the development of the planets into stages. First he ignored the Sun in the center of the nebula. The first stage was that the small particles went into the center of the disk, for the first 1000 years these small particles combined into objects about the size of marbles. The next few orbits about ten years these objects combined into clouds of objects about the size of small asteroids. Then when the objects would form bigger objects about 16 km gravity wasn’t really a factor in forming. The planet Earth would take about 100 million years to form. The gas giants would take an additional phase After the got to about 1 Earth mass they would and the excess hydrogen and helium was being blown out of inner solar system they would gather the gas to form the outer layers of these planets. The major problem came about the formation of Uranus and Neptune, under this scheme it take 100 billion years for them to form, and ad hoc solution of adding more material out there to form these two planets. A few years after Safronov work came out Wetherill at UCLA in 1972 decided to do a number of computer models based off of Safronov work, Safronov did have access to computers while doing his work he did all his research by hand. Wetherill decided to focus on the last two stages He started at the stage of the particles being the size of marbles and he used a statistical method so he he had to do a number of runs to see what would happen. He found that small planets would form near the star two Earth sized and two smaller sized planets.
This book deals with the science and history of the teleportation. Of course to most minds when you hear teleportation you think about the transporters in Star Trek. But this is not the first time that there people came up with the idea of a person being in place and then another, ancient mystics and christian saints were said to aport at one moment being in one city and the next moment be in a city hundreds of kilometers away. When Science Fiction came along teleportation came along to help the explorers get around, chiefly from the space spaceship in orbit to the landing on the planet or in another ship. The teleporter or transpoorter in Star Trek came about because it was either was too expensive to show a shuttle to go down to the planet or other ship or it was taking a longer time then scheduled build the first episode. Eventually the fans pointed out this impossible you need something to deal the Heisenberg uncertainly principle so by the second series The Next Generation they came up with the Heisenberg compensators to deal with this.
The reason you would need Heisenberg compensators in the first place is things one the quantum realm don’t act in the same way things on our scale do. One of the first clues was found just over a century ago when radioactivity was discovered. Some atoms are unstable and breakdown over time and by several different process. The three main types are Alpha, Beta and Gamma. Alpha is the largest being 2 protons and 2 neutrons and was the first one found. The second is Beta this happens when atoms have too many neutrons to be stable and a neutron breaks down to a proton, an election or anti-electron and a neutrino and energy. Gamma radiation happens when an atom has too much energy and emits a high energy photon. X-ray radiation that is used in doctors and dentist offices are when high energy electrons travel thru a dense substance and the interactions emit photons in German this was originally described as bremmsstrahlung or braking radiation. The thing about the processes is that you can’t go and say this one or that one will go thru the process but you can say is how half the atoms of an element or versions of the element or isotopes will go thru the process, this term is called the half-life of the element. Also in the Heisenberg was working with Bohr on the position and momentum of elections travelling the the nucleus of the atom and they were using a type of math called matrix algebra, in this type of math systems of equations were put into blocks that look like squares or rectangles and process like adding, subtraction, multiplication and division. When multiplying two systems or blocks of numbers it does work like regular multiplication like in ordinary math AB=BA but in matrix math AB does not equal BA. This led to the result of pq-qp=ih/4π, where p is the position, is the momentum and h is Planck constant. This led to the formula of ΔxΔp≥h/4π, delta x being the position and delta p being the momentum, which means the better you know the position the more uncertain you know the momentum, so no matter you can only be certain of value and uncertain of the other. At the same time Schrodinger, yes the one of the cat thought experiment, came up with a formula that represent the probability of the particle of being in one spot based off of the research of De Broglie, who found that particles have a wave quantity to them. The probability function usually is represented by the symbol Ψ and has the value of i which has the value of -1 so for it represent anything real it has to be squared. This went to the Copenhagen Interpretation which was you don’t know the exact state of a system until it interacted with something else and collapses into something certain. There is another view called the multiple worlds, which states every time that a particle interacts another universe is created for each probability the system had.
Almost as soon as soon as quantum theory came out Einstein had problems with it such as the probabilistic nature of the particles and the famous line “ God does not play dice with the universe.” was coined. Another feature Einstein did not like was a quantity called entanglement came about. Two particles can be entangled with each other meaning that if one has spin up and the other has a spin of down. Einstein-Polodsty-Rosen came with an experiment to show the flaw in this, you entangle two particles A and B. You place A in one room and B in another room. You measure A and this should change its state, how would B know what state to be in. Bohr wrote back saying that the original state of A and B was (A up B down)+(A down B up). A french physicists name Aspect experiment with photons. Photons don’t have spin but they have a what is called polarization. Light is a wave one part is an a change in an electric field and the other part is a change in the magnetic field. The electric field can up and down, side to side or other alignments. If you have a pair of polarized sun glasses they block all the light not aligned in the same direction as the filter on the glasses, if you get a second pair and turn them 90 degrees to the first pair to the first then most of the light will be filtered out. In the experiment a light is passed thru a calcium crystal. An electron is excited and then it settles back down into a lower energy state but it does this in two steps and emits two photons that are entangled. These photons are sent down two different paths and measured and the polarization was the opposite proving that entanglement was real..
The first experiment to see if the teleportation of the information of a particle was possible shined a light thru a crystal that produced two photons A and B. These two are sent in two different directions and the light is reflected back into the crystal and two more photons are emitted C and D. C is jut used to tell the detector that it is ready. A and D are entangled and B waits for the information. This experiment only works 25 % of the time because what are called bell states. A particle does just spin in one direction but in a combination of different directions and this experiment could only send one. Another experiment tried to get rid of this by entangling two photons and then entangling one of the photons with another and the other is now entangled to the third particle.
Another application of this strangeness is quantum computing. A particle can exist in two different states at once and thus do two different calculations at once and 2 can do 4 calculations the relationship is q=2n where n is the number of particles and q is the number of calculations. This could be useful for computing large systems or even figuring out quantum systems. The first experiment down this road was done by LaFlamme at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He used NMR or nuclear magnetic resonance, atoms with an odd number of protons have a moment of inertia, in NMR or in the medical field MRI a giant magnet forces them into alignment, some might vibrate and move out of alignment and radio pulses are used to keep them in alignment. LaFlamme used the chemical ClCHCCl2. He used the molecule to perform a simple logic gate calculation and it worked. Several other researchers expanded on this experiment to encode up to 7 qubits (quantum bits) but up to the the publication of the book that is as far as it has gone.
Teleportation as stated above was always a device in science fiction to get around some issues. In the book he tells a bit of a science fiction story about how teleportation changes the world and how peoples lives will be changed because of it. Unless a lot of issues are dealt with it will probably won’t come about. Maybe string theory or multiple dimensions would be direction to explore. I can see it maybe if you had a restaurant or a factory on Earth and someone in space wanted to eat your food and make one of your products, using a pattern to replicate your food or product, but 3-D printing will probably be a more likely avenue. Quantum computing hasn’t take over the world like predicted in the book but it was writing before smart phones took over as peoples computing devices. Plus there are issues such as there is no real way to save data or transmit data. A lot of people probably don’t want to download their word processor or computer game every time they need to use it. It will be great for security and for some really complicated calculations.
Today big news was released and not that I actually shovelled part of the driveway even thou it will melt soon. The Really big news was that a black hole was imagined. A black hole is a region of space where the gravity is so intense that not even light can escape the region. Usually a star a round 10 times that of the Sun collapses and the matter is compressed to point. Black holes are usually have an accretion disk that is formed by matter falling into the black hole. If the the black hole and accretion disk is spinning a magnetic field is generated because the particles falling into the black hole lose electrons, this magnetic field can force charged particles to shoot out 90 degrees to the accretion disk. What is seen in the image is the light that is being bent around the black hole at about 2.6 times the radius of the event horizon, the mass of the black hole in question is about 6.5 billion solar masses.
The galaxy that the black hole that was imaged in was M87. The M comes from the a catalogue Of the french astronomer Charles Messier who found around 110 objects he called nebula or clouds, he kept track of these objects because he was searching for comets and did not want to be confused in the future. Later these were found to be a host of objects like galaxies, planetary nebula and actual nebulae. M87 is what is called an elliptical galaxy which means it does not have the spiral structure like our own, it located 53 million light years away in the constellation of Virgo, it is estimated to have about a trillion stars with a estimated mass of 2.400 billion solar masses.
The technique used to get the image of the black hole is what is called interferometry. This is adding the light or signal from many telescopes to be added into making an image that has a finer detail then just one, so instead of one small telescope you can add information form multiple scopes from the South Pole, South America. Hawaii and North America, Europe to make one the size of the Earth. . Radio is the region of the light spectrum is used because the waves are much longer in the meter to longer wavelength region than the optical region which is a the billionth of a meter region.
For a good part of the video she explains why she thinks the human eye can’t see at a distance and therefore the Earth is not round. What she discusses is the boat over the horizon. As a a boat goes over the horizon the bottom of the boat disappears first then the rest of boat slowly goes over the horizon. Then she goes on how things get smaller as they get further away from the observer. What she describes is what astronomers call angular resolution. As an object get further away they occupy a smaller part of our retina, the part of eye in the back that detects light. The formula to find the smallest angular resolution is angle=1.22*(wavelength/diameter of object observing). So if you had something with a bigger lens it would be able to see the object like any camera even the PX-90 that gets used a lot by flat earthers. Also she talks about the blind spot on the retina, this regions forms because the optic nerve is attached to the back of the eye and the retina cannot grow in that area so they are are no rod and cone cells to detect the light. She goes on saying the mind just fills in the center with what it thinks should be there. The brain does process the image but it does not just make things up, watching tv, driving or playing sports would be impossible to do if it did. The brain gets a lot overlapping information from each eye and processes into one image. My eyesight is that one eye is far sighted and the other is near sighted so if I don’t wear glasses I can get headaches. Scientist even the past did not think this was the only reason the Earth was round, one other source of evidence was eclipses. When a lunar eclipse happens the Earth casts a shadow on the moon. People eventually notice that the shadow had a curved shape no matter where on Earth they are and realized what was casting the shadow must be round and therefore the Earth was round
You get love when they debunk themselves.
Now since she brings up how far the eye can see and that is no difference between the stars in space and on Earth lets go thru a few things. The first method used to determine how far away things were was what is called parallax. It is when you view an object from two different angles to determine the distance. You can measure some objects from the ground by just doing from two points fairly spread out points. But when the Earth was found it to be going around the Sun it was measured at opposite points in it orbit. The distance from the Earth to sun was said to be 1 astronomical unit a(AU) and if the angle measured was determined to be 1 sec the distance is said to be one parsec (parallax second), one parsec is about 3.26 ly. How far is a light year it is 3.0*108m/s* 365days*24 hours a day*60mins an hour* 60 sec in a min or 9.46 *1015m or far away. Light does decrease over distance it decreases in what is called an inverse square if light starts off at 1000 lumens in 10 m it decreases to 10 lumens. But stars produce a lot of light it is proportional t o to the 4 th power of the temperature. The most far thing I can see is the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) which is 2.5 light years away. Ok it is a faint object on dark sky and I have be in a dark spot in the fall but it is visible by the naked eye.
One thing she is confused about and is mentioned in at least a couple times in different videos Is “why is sky blue?”. She thinks the sky acts like a giant prism that bends the light at different angles and blue is bent to be closes to the Earth. This is not how it works, light is made out of different wavelengths, red being the longest and blue being the shortest. Red light passes right over the molecules in the atmosphere while blue light hits the molecules and scatters all over the place, this is called Rayleigh scattering.
Now let us talk about particles. There are three families of fermion particles of four particles each family contains a neutrino, two quarks and an electron or variant of the electron. A quark is a subatomic particle there are 6 quark particles called up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. Since quarks were discovered after the electron and the proton and whole charges were assigned on a first come first serve basis quarks are give partial charges of -1/3 and 2/3. Quarks are what make protons and neutrons 3 quarks in each of them, for the proton it has two up and one down an up with a charge of 2/3 and a down has a -1/3. a neutron is two down and an up. The quarks are held together by the strong force particles called gluons, they come in what is referred as colors (not really colors but just a name) of red, green and blue. Another particle in each family is a flavor of a neutrino, a neutrino can be so small as be mass less (I wish that worked for me) but the other two versions might have mass these two are called Tau neutrino and muon neutrino. There is a flavor of the electron in each family the election the Tau and the muon. Soon after the electron was discovered it was found to have magnetic properties and thru Maxwell equations a moving electric charge has a magnetic field, for the electron to have the magnetic properties it must be spinning always, this quality was called spin. Most particles have a spin, the force carrying bosons have a spin of multiple hole numbers like 0,1,2, the fermions have a spin of multiples of 1/2. Along with all the normal matter particles there are the antiparticles which have the same mass and spin but there charge is the opposite so an electron anti-particle is the positron. When particles and anti-particles come into contact they eliminate each other completely just producing energy. Plus there is what is called supersymmetry which gives more particles the election partner in that theory is called the selectron.
String theory came about during the 60’s a physicist in Switzerland was trying to figure out the strong force. He applied a certain math function to it and it starting giving results that matched the results but over time more experiments showed some flaws in the theory and it was put on the shelf for a while. But in the equations eventually showed that there was a mass less spin 0 particle that matched what was expected for the graviton. So in the ’80s a new wave of research came about.
But what is String Theory. Imagine all the particles in the universe are tiny strings like a guitar or piano strings. Some strings vibrate with a high frequency and others are much lower and if you change the frequency you can change the particle from a photon to an electron or a quark. At present we can not do this because the energy required to do so is so much more then what we came produce.The first strings only included the bosons but for it to work as a theory the fermions had to included and after that they were referred as superstrings. Soon after relativity came out Kaluza and Klein thought that the three spatial dimensions weren’t enough so the came up with another dimension. This dimension is actual about a Planck length or about 10-42 m is a loop or cylinder. After a while string theorists came up with more dimensions up to 5 other dimensions to get the vibrations to represent the different properties of the particles. Eventually another dimension came out of the maths as one the dimensions turned into two dimensions like a string turning into a band. The shape that comes out of these dimensions remind of phrase from Doctor Who, Timey wimey, wibbley wobbley. The strings if they are loops and not open ended strings they can wind around the dimensions. At the moment there are 6 different versions of string theory that have been discovered, if you include a version called supergravity.
At the moment there is no real way of testing these theories to see if they are actually a scientific theory. There is one way we can test whether one theory is valid and that is Hawking Radiation. In the near vacuum of space pairs of particles come in and out of existence all the time, these are called virtual particles. If this happens near the event horizon of black hole one of the particles may go into the black hole and they other one escapes off into deep space. If there are more of these interactions it means that energy binding these particles together is lower then if there were fewer of these interactions would give a clue to which theory is correct.
What does this to everyday life, nothing much at least for now. It might be able to solve some of the questions that bug physicists and astrophysicists. One might be is explaining what is going inside a black hole because might be warped in the membrane of space time and isolates from the universe. Also another it might solve is stuff like entanglement. Particles seem to have a partner that if the spin is said to be up another will be down and if the first particle has a spin of down the other changes to be up, no matter how far about they are . String theory might come up with a particle that could transmit this information across the cosmos thru these tiny dimensions. Math is a tool that is used to express all this, the math I know are like the tools to build rough objects and the math the string theorists us are the tools to make fine furniture. There was a TV series that is based off of this book and was very good and cane still be found online and I if you are interested in this subject both the book and show are recommended.
This speech started the decade long race to the moon between the Americans and the Soviet Union. The series deals with the American program which started with the Mercury program, then Gemini and finally Apollo. This series was produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg after they made Apollo 13 which was about the failed mission to the moon but a successful return of three astronauts. They also did a similar thing after Saving Private Ryan came out with Band of Brothers, both really recommended. The set that I have is 5 DVD set, the first 4 have 3 episodes each and the final one is a special features DVD including a behind the scenes feature. In the feature there are interviews of the technical experts, Dave Scott, Gemini and Apollo astronaut, Jim Lovell Gemini and Apollo astronaut, been in space 4 times, twice to orbit the moon (I think there some frequent flyer programs that were glad they weren’t around then,) and Gunter Wendt Launch Pad leader during the Apollo program. Plus Tom Hanks is some what of an expert because he has built things like the back packs that the astronauts used. Also a lot of the props in the series were the actual things used during the space race. The simulators, control panels and manuals were the ones used by the astronauts. The detail in the modules were so exact that the astronauts remembered them in the same spot as when they were doing it 50 years ago. Also the actors contacted the astronauts they portrayed often and there was a story that one astronaut asked the actor over so dinner the first time that episode aired.
During the interviews you hear several stories about where some of the actors were during the landing like Bryan Cranston who was in store by a bank of TV’s at the time saw everyone stop everything thing they were doing at the time. Or Gunter saying he thought about being stow-away in one of the missions and saying, “What are they going to do when get back fire you.” Their are the actors telling of stories of how they tried to be astronauts, like Cranston saying he jump off the roof of his house with a parachute. Or another actor who as a kid built a cardboard rocketship and slide it down the staircase of his house (I would imagine a lot stuff like this going in the ’70’s). Dave Foley who plays Alan Bean, says he saw as not only just the Americans but humans as a species going to the moon.
The rest of disk 5 has the trailers for the TV series, the above speech and several things like a history of the moon, the astronauts and a few other features.
It has been 47 years since there has been a human on the moon but it looks like there a new race to the moon. The new race is between the Americans (with the Canadians and other partners), the Chinese, the Indians and maybe the forming space agency in Africa. Maybe this is what we need to drive interest in going to space is some competition. Hopefully this will be a friendly competition to the Moon and to the rest of space, there is plenty of it out there, I hear new space is being created each day.
