Category Archives: Science

Stars in the News

On supernova SN 2006gy:

In a cascade of superlatives that belies the traditional cerebral reserve of their profession, astronomers reported Monday that they had seen the brightest and most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded.

The cataclysm — a monster more than a hundred times as energetic as the typical supernova in which the more massive stars end their lives — might be an example of a completely new type of explosion, astronomers said. Such a blast — proposed but never seen — would explain how the earliest and most massive stars in the universe ended their lives and strewed new elements across space to fertilize future stars and planets.

Nathan Smith says:

“This was a truly monstrous explosion, a hundred times more energetic than a typical supernova,” said Nathan Smith of the University of California at Berkeley, who led a team of astronomers from California and the University of Texas in Austin. “That means the star that exploded might have been as massive as a star can get, about 150 times that of our sun. We’ve never seen that before.”

Images here.

Evolution and Belief

I have not and will not be following any of the debates for so-called president, but I read that three grown men didn’t get the memo on evolution.

Three of the candidates indicated that they did not believe in it.

None is a front-runner but even so there will be American scientists who will feel deeply depressed that serious politicians in 2007 can be disputing the entire thrust of modern knowledge about how the world was formed and how it, well, evolved.

What does it mean “not to believe” in evolution. This may be the kind of thing that people will often say to express disagreement.

“I don’t believe in _____________” means “I disagree” with it. (In the case of a political debate, I’d have to assume that disagreement is always political.)

But what, then, does it mean to disagree with evolution? “I don’t believe” mixes obstinacy with the inability to supply facts and logic to a claim, especially when the science is both deep and nuanced. What member of the glass-eyed class could stand in front of a crowd and piss off just about everyone with hard-nosed reason? I’d vote for her.

What We See

Joshua at Thoughts from Kansas writes a little about Drew Ryan’s comment on the Mormon religion. (follow links back at the original)

Drew Ryun, Jim Ryun’s baby boy and former Evangelical Outreach director for the RNC, thinks Mormonism is weird. He defends that claim by encouraging people bothered by that statement to read up on Mormon theology. . . .

. . .

It’s my opinion that any religion looks weird to outsiders. I think it’s problematic to suggest that weirdness only belongs to others, or that it is an automatic strike against an idea.

Praying towards Mecca 5 times a day is a little weird, so is washing your hands and feet each time. I don’t know that Joseph Smith’s story about Moroni, the Golden Plates, Urim and Thumim is that much weirder than Mohammed’s revelation from Gabriel, or Moses and the Burning Bush. Buddha’s chance at nirvana is pretty weird, too, as is much of the Mahabharata.

Orthodox Christian theology can seem very strange to an outsider. It argues that sin entered the world because Adam and Eve – two perfect beings created by a perfect, omniscient and omnipotent God – ate a fruit. Orthodox Christianity further holds that that sin passes down to all human beings without exception. Actually, there was one exception, Mary, on whom God sired a child, a child both separate from and part of the father. Orthodox Christianity then goes on to argue that the only way an omniscient and omnipotent deity could purge the sin derived from eating a fruit was by allowing, perhaps even orchestrating and causing, the son to be charged, convicted and killed in an agonizing manner, after which the body was physically transported to heaven, after which a vision of it appears to various people, mostly in rural settings or on grilled foodstuffs.

The narratives that shape a religion are important. They are all odd. I remember the game of saying a word repeatedly until it becomes meaningless, just a series of ambiguous sounds. Tiger, tiger, tiger, tigger et cetera. A man ascends into the heavens on a particular day–but only way back when. The closer the miraculous in time, the events become even stranger because the deep past can indeed mystify. The more distant the story in the past or the future, the more it exists in an envelope of mythology; the nearer, the more it corresponds to the rules of observed law. I like those rules; I like to think about the reality of the number and its mysterious world.

Can religion be religion only as a set of metaphors or interesting mythologies?

Science and Knowing

I think it’s a good thing to ask questions about what a thing can teach, about process and method, but these sorts of critique are growing tiresome.

PARIS (Reuters) – Pope Benedict, elaborating his views on evolution for the first time as Pontiff, says science has narrowed the way life’s origins are understood and Christians should take a broader approach to the question.

The Pope also says the Darwinist theory of evolution is not completely provable because mutations over hundreds of thousands of years cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.

But Benedict, whose remarks were published on Wednesday in Germany in the book “Schoepfung und Evolution” (Creation and Evolution), praised scientific progress and did not endorse creationist or “intelligent design” views about life’s origins.

What good does talking about “Darwinist theory” like this bring about? “Let’s understand the limitations of shoes before we move forward and so that no one gets the wrong idea. Everyone knows that shoes are not good for drinking out of. Let’s just remember that.”

Just Four Dimensions?

On E8 and symmetry

At the most basic level, the E8 calculation is an investigation of symmetry. Mathematicians invented the Lie groups to capture the essence of symmetry: underlying any symmetrical object, such as a sphere, is a Lie group.

Lie groups come in families. The classical groups A1, A2, A3, … B1, B2, B3, … C1, C2, C3, … and D1, D2, D3, … rise like gentle rolling hills towards the horizon. Jutting out of this mathematical landscape are the jagged peaks of the exceptional groups G2, F4, E6, E7 and, towering above them all, E8. E8 is an extraordinarily complicated group: it is the symmetries of a particular 57-dimensional object, and E8 itself is 248-dimensional!

To describe the new result requires one more level of abstraction. The ways that E8 manifests itself as a symmetry group are called representations. The goal is to describe all the possible representations of E8. These representations are extremely complicated, but mathematicians describe them in terms of basic building blocks. The new result is a complete list of these building blocks for the representations of E8, and a precise description of the relations between them, all encoded in a matrix with 205,263,363,600 entries.

Nobody seems to be writing about what all this means.

Climate Change and the Wide-eyed TV

When ever I have questions about climate science, global warming, or context, I click over to RealClimate. Al Gore is in the news, of course. The problem of “what’s the real story here” that 24hr news laughs out of the screen always brings out the devils and angels. I see the debate as fact-based with fairly complicated moral choices on the line, not “Will he run?”

Anyway, there will be lots of people debating the proposals. Many will also call Gore “alarmist.” Others will defer with dullness.

This post by Mann and Schmidt is an example of what I mean by the debate as fact-based first. It’s also a wonderful example for students of argument to brush up on their counterargument skills. TAnd please follow the links. The facts are one thing, but then we have to act on what we know best now. That’s the moral/ethical part.

Pluto and Definitions

My son S is trying to resolve the planet-no planet issue over Pluto. He’s a big fan of the planets and doesn’t want to hear about this kind of subtraction. On the one hand, I think it’s good scientific practice to put definitions through the consistency test. On the other, the answers seem to lead to more questions. The basic phenomenon of a solar system appears simple on the system: first there’s a sun with different types of objects acting “systematically” in its vicinity according to certain relational reactions. Orbits can be tracked, classes of objects chalked up, forces measured and observed.

But it seems to me that Pluto remains a mystery. Despite the power of probes, Hubble, and other telescopes, nearly everything scientists know about Pluto comes from a distance and from pretty good inference. I’d suggest stipulation as the approach for this kind of decision. Why not? I myself don’t like Pluto as a planet. I’ve never really understood the decisions made about Pluto in the excitement over the need for a ninth back at the Lowell Observatory. Pluto might have resolved Neptune’s mistaken perturbation, but this would not come to pass. Little could have been understood after Pluto had been observed–size, mass et cetera.

But, there you have it.

Time

Time to get back to some regular entry-writing here. Building and remodeling, teaching and engaging in a second phase pilot–have been taking up much of the fullthrottle time in my space. Been reading a book about telescopes too which has broadened my understanding of the importance of patents and intellectual property in English history and mechanical design on pretty deep technical scales.

Also looking forward to the Fall semester and near full implementation of abilities-based models of teaching and learning with some organizational help from eLumen software (that’s what the pilot’s been about). Now back to some short story reading.