tagged w/ Galileo
-
Philadelphia Inquirer...
.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Evolution Under a Temperamental Sun
By Faye Flam
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
.
You didn’t need to be a solar physicist to be riveted by the “solar storm” that sent a blast of charged particles our way this month. That particular flare-up fizzled, but in the long term, the sun’s temper is worthy of our attention.
Our sun changes, and living things adapt or die.
Our planet circled a very different star when life first emerged on Earth some four billion years ago. The sun was dimmer and cooler, but more violent, sending deadly blasts of X-rays as well as particles that would have lit up the skies with spectacular auroras.
The displays would have been visible worldwide, but probably had no spectators, since life needed to stay deep underwater or buried inside minerals to survive until the sun calmed down.
For most of human history no one realized that the sun was fickle, breaking out in spots, flares, and eruptions, and would eventually kill all life on our planet.
“It was a huge part of Western culture that the heavens were forever and unchanging,” said University of Michigan astronomer Fred Adams, who has written books on the beginning of the universe and the end.
Galileo was the first to see spots on the sun, which did not ingratiate him with the church. Even Einstein was influenced by the cultural bias toward unchanging heavens, Adams said, altering his theory of general relativity to work in a static universe. Soon after he published his theory, Edwin Hubble showed the universe was in fact expanding.
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that people realized the sun was running on nuclear fusion, and that when its fuel started to run low, the sun would die a violent death, blowing up into an enormous red giant.
For those concerned that the Mayans have forecast the end of the world this year, the astronomers’ threat of more solar storms may seem even more ominous.
It’s true we’re moving into a stormy season that should last into 2013, but this happens every 11 years, said Douglas Duncan, an astronomer at the University of Colorado and director of the Fiske Planetarium. Astronomers still don’t know why solar storms come in cycles or why it takes 11 years, he said. Duncan has catalogued similar cycles on other stars, and learned that sunspots and solar storms come in cycles all over the galaxy.
The cycles vary in length depending on a star’s age — the cycles lengthening as stars get older.
During the peaks, or solar maxima, the spots on the sun increase, and the sun bursts with flares and storms. The sun always sends us a solar wind of protons and electrons, but during a solar storm, these shoot out in gusts. When the particles reach Earth, they light up molecules in our atmosphere as if it were a giant fluorescent bulb.
The effects on Earth are more dramatic if the gusts are released on a direct path to Earth, as scientists thought happened earlier this month. That would be unlikely to affect human health directly, but it could have disabled satellites, particularly ones that channel GPS signals.
When Duncan was comparing sunspot cycles on different stars, he said he got a call from Carl Sagan wanting to know how solar activity might influence the course of life on Earth. That, Duncan said, would take an expert on our planet’s early history.
We humans couldn’t have tolerated the ultraviolet radiation and X-rays that pummeled our planet during life’s early history. About three billion to four billion years ago, the UV intensity was between 8 and 20 times what we have now, said geochemist Stephen Mojzsis of the Université Claude Bernard in Lyon, France. So for several billion years, life survived protected by water. As the sun cooled down and oxygen began to rise with the advent of blue-green algae, he said, life expanded to fill up the land as soon as it became habitable.
The sun was also cooler and was red rather than yellow, and we may carry an evolutionary fossil of that time in our eyes, he said. On the early Earth, microbes that were just starting to use photosynthesis began manufacturing a pigment called rhodopsin, which is good for absorbing red light. As the sun became yellow, the ability to make rhodopsin persisted, though different organisms used it for other purposes.
We use it in our retinas for night vision.
The sun was also 30 percent dimmer in the distant past, said Mojzsis. If it dimmed that much now, the Earth would freeze solid, but on the early Earth, different configurations of land masses and a different atmospheric chemistry kept the oceans liquid under such a cool sun.
The sun is getting hotter because it’s fusing hydrogen into the heavier element helium. That’s causing the sun to get denser and the nuclear fusion that powers it to become more efficient.
Scientists estimate that in 500 million to 1.5 billion years, the sun will be hot enough to wipe out all life on Earth. Moving to Mars would only postpone the apocalypse.
Our neighbor, Alpha Centauri, shines in a brighter, more bluish light because it’s older and hotter than our sun. If it had any habitable planets, they are now burnt to a crisp, said Mojzsis.
In an additional five billion years, the sun will start to run out of fuel, and before it dies, it will expel its outer layers, becoming a red giant. Astronomers used to assume that the sun would swallow our planet, said Duncan, but more recent calculations show it will expand to just about the size of Earth’s orbit. Either way, it will broil us.
As for those pessimists who worry about the Mayan predictions, Duncan said he’s looked into the matter and the ancient civilization didn’t really predict the world would end this year. Mayans did create an advanced calendar that was so good they extended it many centuries into the future. It just happened to end with 2012.
.Philadelphia Inquirer...
.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Evolution Under a... more
-
-
Aristotle: Prime Ministers Questions, the logic of Aristotle were interested much more than the truth. We also have a clearer image of what he was doing, if we say that he was not interested in the reality. Truth itself also contains what is true by accident or by chance, and Aristotle was all worried about how to avoid such a truth. His concern was not to identify any formal conclusion, but avoid the sophistry and the case is not lying, but also exploit the various ways in which something is right that Aristotle intends to use the various ways in which the case is called the 2nd.Aristotle: Prime Ministers Questions, the logic of Aristotle were interested much more... more
-
-
nflove
-
added this
-
1 year ago
- |
-
Today, a struggle is taking place in Great Britain between prejudice and science. The Conservatives have attacked a major scientist and are attempting to humiliate him through a trial-by-tabloid of dogma versus science.
Today in Britain, the tabloids are unfolding yet another case of scientific inquisition. In the Information Age, the Tabloid Editor has replaced the Papal Inquisitor. Instead of astronomy, the field of pharmacology is the latest battleground between the forces of fundamentalist orthodoxy and the scientific community.
Targeting Dr. Les Iversen, a scientist with impeccable credentials and the Chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, The Mail on Sunday published a sensationalist diatribe against the scientific analysis of drugs that would abolish the entire field of drug reform. The slanted story pointed out that Dr. Iversen published a book about the medical uses of marijuana, The Science of Marijuana, and is an advisor to the Beckley Foundation, a scientific research organization that has established the gold standard for objective analysis of existing drug laws with the publication of The Global Cannabis Commission Report of 2008 that called for sweeping drug reform.
Read the full article at http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/04/09/galileo-2010-the-new-inquisition/Today, a struggle is taking place in Great Britain between prejudice and science. The... more
-
-
Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again and will soon be put on display, an Italian museum director said Friday.
Three fingers, a vertebra and a tooth were removed from the astronomer's body by admirers in 1737, 95 years after his death, as his corpse was being moved from a storage place to a monumental tomb — opposite that of Michelangelo, in Santa Croce Basilica in Florence.
One of the fingers was recovered soon afterward and is now part of the collection of the Museum of the History of Science, in Florence. The vertebra has been kept at the University of Padua, where Galileo taught for years.
But the tooth and two fingers from the scientist's right hand — the thumb and middle finger — were kept by one of the admirers, an Italian marquis, and later enclosed in a container that was passed on from generation to generation in the same family, Paolo Galluzzi, the museum's director, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gRS62d-Qje8wzCER846eqN6krsOwD9C3GVCO0Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine... more
-
-
really amazing composite image of the Milky Way released by NASA. They combined infra red, visible, and x-ray images taken by Spitzer, Hubble, and Chandra to create one beautiful image to commemorate the 400 years since 1609, when Galileo looked up.
Source: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/milkyway_heart.htmlreally amazing composite image of the Milky Way released by NASA. They combined infra... more
-
-
By studying this hole in the atmosphere of Jupiter, which was caused by a huge asteroid the size of Earth hitting it, scientists have determined that life on Earth may have been caused by asteroids.
According to these scientists, the water and greenhouse gases brought by the asteroids and spread into what has become the atmosphere after the collisions is what allowed Earth to block the radiation from the sun, which was much stronger back then, and foster life.
In addition, the scientists are led to believe that the Earth is much older than previously thought:
"New evidence is changing our understanding of Earth's origins. Known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, researchers say the showers of cosmic rock that pummeled Earth 3.9 billion years ago may have fostered life on Earth, not annihilated it. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports."
Link provides a great, short video that explains it. Jordan Maxwell doesn't sound so crazy after all.By studying this hole in the atmosphere of Jupiter, which was caused by a huge... more
-
-
Whatever you may believe or think of this book and movie, the music score to both The DaVinci Code and now Angels and Demons is very uplifting and mysterious and complements the mood of the film. For me, I am looking forward to seeing how the book has been brought to the screen. To think that the age old battle between science and religion was about to be ended by science finding the "God particle" is very intriguing even if only part of a fictional novel.Whatever you may believe or think of this book and movie, the music score to both The... more
-
-
A temperature-telling device created back in the early 1660s by the Italian inventor Galileo, available today as an attractive desk or shelf ornament that is as beautiful as it is functional.A temperature-telling device created back in the early 1660s by the Italian inventor... more
-
-
Classic Quotes by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Italian Astronomer
The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.
--------------------
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
--------------------
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
--------------------
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
--------------------
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Doubt is the father of invention.
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.Classic Quotes by Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) Italian Astronomer
The Bible shows... more
-
-
Ever heard of Thomas Harriot? The English astronmer was the first man to view the moon through a telescope. Galileo did it in December 1609, but there are records showing Harriot drew images of the Moon several months before. To celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, Harriot's 400-year-old maps will be on display this summer.Ever heard of Thomas Harriot? The English astronmer was the first man to view the moon... more
-
-
VATICAN CITY: Galileo Galilei is going from heretic to hero.
The Vatican is recasting the most famous victim of its Inquisition as a man of faith, just in time for the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope and the U.N.-designated International Year of Astronomy next year.
Pope Benedict XVI paid tribute to the Italian astronomer and physicist Sunday, saying he and other scientists had helped the faithful better understand and "contemplate with gratitude the Lord's works."
.
The church denounced Galileo's theory as dangerous to the faith, but Galileo defied its warnings. Tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, later changed to house arrest.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Is this a generous gesture; or a little too little, a little too late?VATICAN CITY: Galileo Galilei is going from heretic to hero.
The Vatican is... more
-
-
Looking for a solid investment in this difficult financial market? Try celebrity body parts. The current owner of Napoleon Bonaparte's penis, Evan Lattimer of Englewood, N.J., recently turned down an offer of $100,000 for the fabled organ. Not bad for a relic purchased in 1977 by her father, the famous Columbia University urologist Dr. John Kingsley Lattimer, for a mere $3,000--about $10,000 in today's money.
Napoleon should be proud, given that his manhood was often the butt of cruel jokes while he was alive. (The item is not exactly imposing today: Dried out like a piece of beef jerky, the mummified organ is only about an inch and a half long, laid on a wad of cotton wool, although the antique leather presentation case in which it is preserved is very tasteful, embossed with a gold crown and the letter "N").
Le Petit Corporal isn't the only deceased militant bringing in the bucks. A lock of Che Guevara's hair sold for $100,000 last year in Dallas. (It had been cut from his corpse by CIA operatives after he was killed in Bolivia.)
But not every body part hits the jackpot. Take Albert Einstein's eyeballs, which the scientist's former ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams, reportedly still keeps in a safety deposit box. Abrams, who is now 96, tried to sell the items in the early 1990s. The figure of $5 million was bandied about, and rumors spread that Michael Jackson was interested--who else?--but then Abrams got cold feet and the whole sale collapsed.
Still, the investment potential is huge. And luckily, there are enough celebrity body parts available to make up a luminary Frankenstein.
Abraham Lincoln's skull fragments are on display in Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C., at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. They have never been up for sale, but the president's blood-stained shirt collar will go under the hammer on Nov. 20, touted in the auction catalog as "the finest single 'blood relic' that exists" from the assassination night at Ford's Theater.
Galileo's withered finger can be seen in a museum in Florence, Italy, where it is kept in an egg-shaped glass resembling a football trophy. Bits of President Grover Cleveland's jaw are on display in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. Beethoven's ear bones were removed during autopsy and passed around by collectors for years. They were lost in the later 19th century but may yet resurface on the market--after all, parts of his skull turned up in California in 2005.
Given the recent collapse of the global equities markets, maybe investors should give up trading stocks and begin haunting the world's top celebrity cemeteries, like Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles, where Marilyn Monroe is buried, or the Père Lachaise in Paris, home to luminaries ranging from Oscar Wilde to Jim Morrison. Admittedly, you really have to have the stomach for this sort of memorabilia trading. When push comes to shove, many financial dilettantes may baulk at the prospect of having pieces of Napoleon or Beethoven lying around the house. It might all seem a little, well, creepy.
On the other hand, perhaps our interest in celebrity body parts isn't entirely morbid. There's something very human about this fascination, as if we must convince ourselves that these astonishing historical figures were once actual living beings, not demigods who sprang from the heavens. They had awkward adolescences, suffered dental problems, fell in and out of love. Our interest springs from the same source as our passion for lurid celebrity gossip that dominates tabloids. Buying Einstein's eyeballs is only a step away from the trade in Madonna's bras or George Clooney's cuff links.Looking for a solid investment in this difficult financial market? Try celebrity body... more
-
-
San Francisco's Marina district isn't only for visiting party posers, it is also home to one of the local high schools, built in 1921, Galileo Academy of Science and Technology. Here is the info for an art show, opening tonite:
-
The city as seen by the next generation
an exhibit of multiple art projects in a variety of media
Wednesday, May 14th 5:00pm - 8:00pm
Galileo Academy of Science and Technology
1150 Francisco St (main gate between Polk and Van Ness)
contact: Todd Berman, artist-in-residence, 415 595-0337
So many of us move to San Francisco as adults and move away again to start families. Still, San Francisco has thousands of children growing up here. As teenagers, they have a unique perspective that needs to be heard.
Todd Berman, artist-in-residence and acting librarian, will be displaying a series of collaborative paintings of the city. Berman has been creating art collaboratively with San Francisco residents for years now. His process is simple – he asks people at an event or on the street to express themselves on a small piece of paper, then he collages those papers into a larger painting.
San Francisco's Marina district isn't only for visiting party posers, it is... more
-
-
chief Vatican astronomer said Galileo's persecution 400 years ago "caused wounds." though, he didn't really say to who.chief Vatican astronomer said Galileo's persecution 400 years ago "caused... more
-
-
The movie "EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed" is a documentary about how the people promoting ID are claiming to be persecuted by the scientific community, who will not allow ID to be introduced into public schools.
There was a recent court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, which determined that Intelligent Design was creationism in disguise. NOVA produced a documentary about the case that can be viewed on-line.
One of the positions the judge cited for his decision to rule against the teaching of ID in the class room was based on evidence found showing “the text referred to as a resource for ID, Of Pandas and People, had originally been a creationist text.”
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/
Q: What is science?
Q: Isn't evolution just a theory, not a fact?
Q: What is intelligent design?
Q: Why not teach intelligent design, or creationism, alongside evolution?
These questions can be answered at this link http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/defi-qa.html
The movie "EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed" is a documentary about how the... more
-
