Randall's maze 6

This brings me to a very interesting point (it’s totally a tangent from Randall’s book, but oh well). It has to do with God! So God’s supposed to be omnipresent, right? Everywhere at once? Well that would include extra dimensions. And if he created the universe then he must have created those extra dimension. He created time. This means he was not subject to it in the beginning. And he must exist outside of it! And like I was saying before we are 4-D (at least) creatures. So he must see us that way. So when God looks down at a person, say Einstein, he sees him as a holistic 4-D creature and not him as an old man (the way most of us are used to seeing him). It also means that whole thing about him knowing the future and us still being able to change it doesn’t even apply. When you think about it this way a whole host of interesting consequence pop out at us. I would really like to hear what you guys think about such a weird concept so send me a line!

Randall's maze 5

Now for another term. You know how I said that physicist and mathematicians put numbers onto our axes? Well this may seem like not that bit of a deal when we are just moving a string around a table, but when theorist make up new math these numbers become very very important, they even get their own name. They are called the metric of a system. If you’ve ever dabbled in relativity you will hear this work a lot, usually preceded by someone’s name. All they means is a specific system of units and measurements that goes along with the coordinate system they are talking about.

Now if I could I would like to take a moment to talk about time. Einstein declared it to be one more dimension and stated that we now had 4 dimensions. How does that fit into all of this? Well it is an extra dimension by not an extra spatial dimension (you know I just learned how to spell spatial…what a weird spelling). But how to picture this? Well…just like we normally would. Imagine yourself as a baby, a 5 year old, a 15 year old, a 20 year old and so forth to your current age. If you string these images together you get your 4-D projection. We are in all honesty 4-D creatures. We grow and change with time.

Randall's maze 4

All right now that you know what a vector is we can talk more about dimensions. In the exercise we did yesterday you were using a 3 dimensional coordinate system. There were 3 axes each corresponding to a different dimension. And we needed 3 different numbers, an x component, a y component and a z component, to specify exactly where your vector end was located. If you only had one dimension you would only need one component to tell where your vector end was located. And the same holds for five dimensions. You may not be able to draw a graph like that but you still only need 5 numbers or components to specify a location in 5-D space. I've included a picture of some objects in 2, 3 and 4 dimensions. String theory and now M-theory suggest 10 and 11 dimensions, respectively. Why so many?

Randall's maze 3

Hello!!! And Merry Christmas! I hope it was a good day for all. And now back to physics. So in order to more fully understand what Randall means by ‘dimensions’ we need to understand the concept of vectors. This took me two years to fully understand! It’s a weird concept for those who aren’t used to it, so take your time and think about it… So what is a vector? A vector is just a straight line. But when we say vector with regard to dimensions we’re talking about a straight line anchored at one point. (no one on the internet seems to have done this so I will go ahead and do it!) Here’s an exercise that should be helpful. Get a piece of string (or something like it). Now we are going to set up a 3 dimensional coordinate system. All you have to do is declare and origin (or zero point like in the picture), it could be the corner of a table or a book or anything. Next you need to declare an axis. The normal axis in math and physics are: left right or x, back and forth or y, and up and down or z. Next hold one end of the string against your origin. That is the anchor for your vector. Now pull the string taut in any direction. And there you have a vector. You can move the one end but not the one connected to the origin. Ok now pick a vector position. Take your finger and put it up to the end of your vector. Now drop it straight now onto the table. This is your vectors ‘projection’ onto the ‘x-y’ plain. Now if you run your finger straight over to one of you sides or axis you have that axis, say the x axis, ‘component’. The only thing that physicist and mathematicians to is put numbers on them. I hope this walk through was helpful. If it wasn’t let me know and I can change it.

Randall's maze 2

So why would be even bring such a crazy ideal up? We can only see 3 dimensions…why would there be more? Well why not? Why couldn’t there be more than 3 dimensions? Perhaps that could solve some of the weird problems we have in physics. And according to Randall, they do. There is one that I find fascinating that has to do with gravity. Have you ever thought about how weak gravity is? It’s really really weak. Even though you have the entire pull of the whole earth on you, you are still able to jump off the earth (it’s actually the electromagnetic force that allows you to do this). So in comparison to all the other forces gravity is really weak. Why is this? Randall and some of her colleagues say that it’s because the gravity is shared with the other dimensions. Fore some reason or another it’s stronger in those other dimensions than in ours and that’s why it seems so weak. Now, of course, that’s not all there is to her idea. There is a lot of super complicated math that I haven’t even looked into to go along with that general idea, but the point it extra dimensions are defiantly worth taking a look at.

Randall's maze 1

A couple of corrections. First Randall is spelled with 2 l’s. Second she hasn’t won the nobel prize…yet. So far I’ve gotten through the introduction and it looks like a fascinating book. It’s all about extra dimensions. So we are all familiar with our normal three dimensions, up-down, left-right and forward-backward. I used to have trouble explaining this concept because people can move in any combination of these 3 ways but most of that difficulty has been cleared up by (of all things) video games. When the first video games came out they were 2-dimensional you could only more forward-backward and up-down. But now they have those really advanced video games with toggles and if you push the toggle just forward you only go forward or side to side or you jump up and down (or in those flying video games up and down…those games are so hard to get the hang of). So basically what the book is about is the idea of there being more than just those three space dimensions.

fyi

Just an fyi (I just figured out what that meant!), I’m on vacation so my posting might be rather erratic. But I think I’ve found something to do while all of my library books are in hock…well I guess they’re not really mine…but…whatever. My friend lent me this book called “Warped passages” by Lisa Randal. I think she won the Nobel prize. It’s about higher dimensions and stuff, M theory and such.

Pop physics

So a breakdown of the graph: The little blueish slice there is the stuff we can see. All the stars and galaxies and everything that emits light is accounted for in that slice. And it’s a pretty small slice. The orange slice is the interstellar gas. This is the stuff that the stars form from. It’s mostly hydrogen and helium, and some carbon and bits of heavier elements. It floats around the universe and sometimes collapses to form stars (I’ve included a picture of some gas backlit by some stars). And the speckley grey stuff is obviously dark matter. It’s the stuff that contributes to gravity to hold the universe in the precarious balance that it sits in. And the rest is dark energy. And there sure it a lot of it. I’ve always found this graph amazing. All the stuff we’ve ever been impressed with or looked at or awed at is only the tiniest fraction of all the ‘stuff’ in the universe. That’s just nuts!

Pop physics

Ok so here we are in the 1970’s and we are very confused. There is this extra mass around the galaxy and we don’t know where it’s coming from but…it’s there! It must be there. It was certainly a time when many a physicist was questioning their sanity. But what has happened after that…? I have no idea, and I don’t have the time to figure that out. So, let’s skip to the stuff I do know. What has been established since…I don’t know, the 1990’s maybe….is the amount of ‘stuff’ in the universe. I’ve included a graph of all the ‘stuff’ in the universe as we know it today. So what we did is count all the stars and galaxies and gas that we could see and then compared it to the amount of gravity we could see and saw there was a lot missing. And by the looks of things we are missing a lot of energy in addition to the mass we were missing (remember that ‘stuff’ includes both mass and energy, E=mc^2). And so when we put all the ‘stuff’ we need back in we get the graph I’ve included. I’ll talk more about the graph tomorrow.

Pop physics

Ok so more dark matter. Last time I told you about the guy who first came up with the idea, Fritz Zwicky. But like I said he was kinda crazy so no one took him seriously. It took experimental evidence to get the idea under way again. In the 1970’s this lady named Vera Rubin looked at the rotational velocity of stars in different places throughout the galaxy and found the graph that I’ve included. So basically she looked at the speed of a star near the center and then a star further out in the galaxy and what we expect to see is a steady drop in speed as we go further out because the gravity is weaker out there. BUT what she found was that the stars near the edge of the galaxy go just as fast as the stars near the center. But this doesn’t make any sense with the amount of gravity we thought there was. So what is the explanation? There must be some more gravity that we can’t see. There must be dark matter!!!!

GOD! ?

any ideas on what you want me to write about next??? anyway...here's some pic's till i figure that out...

confession

Ok so I have a small confession to make: I don’t actually own the book out of which I’ve been writing out of. It’s a library book. And it needs to be returned. So I think we can put the whole “by the book” thing on hold until a certain arbitrary amount of time (three weeks or something) has passed and the library lets me check it out again. So until then I have to figure out something else to talk about. So any suggestion? More pop physics? More philosophy stuff? Let me know…

By the Book 12

Ok so here’s the interesting part (I’m feeling a little better by the way, I went to the doctor and he gave me pink mold in a bottle, I can’t get over the whole Penicillin thing), so ya know the whole matter-antimatter thing? Well that applies here. When temperatures started to drop at the end of the hadron era annihilation happened more frequently than creation and all the hadrons started to disappear. But we still have them? So why do we have them? Well according to Harrison its because there were slightly more matters than antimatters to begin with. He says the ratio between the fraction that survived (the difference between the matters and antimatters) and the total number that there was at one point is about 10^-9. In other words only about 1 in a billon of the original matters survived. And yet this amount of matters is what makes up the whole universe as we see it today. And when all the rest of the matters annihilated with the antimatters they created a whole bunch of energy. And this energy is what we see today as the photon and neutrino backgrounds. Our universe has done a pretty amazing turnaround since its beginnings no?

I guess matter and antimatter shouldn’t be plural.

no post tonight...i've got this cold...and a fever...is it still considered a cold if you have a fever...anyway...sorry

By the Book 11

Ok maybe this won’t take as long as I thought it would. What is a hadron? A hadron is a particle made of quarks. There are 2 different kinds of hadrons, the mesons and the baryons. Mesons are made of a quark and an anti-quark, (wait…I talked about this before didn’t I?) and baryons are made of 3 quarks. There are also anti-baryons, made up of 3 anti-quarks. I’ve attacked a table of a large number of the hadrons (and the quarks). There are two of importance to our everyday lives, the proton and the neutron. They are each baryons made of 3 quarks and…obviously they are our everyday nucleons at the center of all of our atoms.

Ok, so back to the hadron era. Just like the lepton and radiation eras the reason it’s called the hardron era is because it is dominated by hadrons. Hadrons are very heavy particles, at least compared to electrons or massless photons. So they take more energy to make (remember E=mc^2. You see it is useful for more than just the atomic bomb), and consequently the early universe can only produce them at very high temperatures. And as we go back and back temperatures get higher and higher and consequently we have a hadron era, but there are some subtleties…that I will talk about another day.

Pop physics

Ok so I thought that for the days when I don’t want to do read out of the book cause it does take a substantial about of time to figure that stuff out, I think I’ll try to explain some of the topics in pop physics that I know a thing or two about. First up:

Dark matter

The mysterious substance that seems to have appeared out of nowhere. It is very easy to be skeptical about such a (to borrow my 14 year old neighbor’s term) sketchy substance. But it’s not all smoke and mirrors. (look! I made an awesome introduction!) So here’s what I know. Dark matter was first proposed by Fritz Zwicky in 1933, but no one took him seriously (here’s his bio and here’s his facebook). So that’s the intro to Dark matter and when I feel lest like I’m going to keel over I’ll write more.

By the Book 10

And on we go…ever further back into time! We find ourselves starting at the beginning of the lepton era at a universal age of 100 microseconds and moving backwards. At this point things get shaky! Up until now all the stuff we’ve talked about in the by the book segments has been part of the standard model of the early universe. But now is when we get to the strange speculations that not everyone agrees on.

So get this: at this point in the universe’s history the temperature was 1 trillion Kelvin, and the density is 10^14 grans per cubic centimeter. That’s equivalent to 100 million tons per thimbleful! That nuts! The next era is the hadron era. But I would like to take a step aside from the book and take a moment to discuss some to the physic background we need in order to understand the hadron era to its fullest.

By the Book 9

So we’ve got a bunch of these neutrinos floating around in space…ya know free floating, just like the CMB, except not light. And we can calculate their temperature and stuff so we should see a background of them … if, that is, we could see neutrinos. But they don’t have any charge and barely have any mass so they are really really hard to see, but…we’re working on that. And eventually I think we will be able to see them better. When that happens something else that’s very cool will happen. Remember how I said we couldn’t see any further back in time because there wasn’t any light to look at before the end of the plasma period. But if we were able to see the neutrinos then we would have a small, strange window into the first second of the universe. This is monumental. We would be looking much further than we ever have before! And who knows what we would find!

By the Book 8

There are 6 different kinds, electron neutrinos, tauon neutrinos, and muon neutrinos, electron anti-neutrinos, tauon anti-neutrinos, and muon anti-neutrinos. But here’s the thing, neutrinos don’t really annihilate each other…I’m not sure why they don’t but they don’t. Also, each kind of particle only interacts with it’s respective leptons, tauon neutrinos and anti-neutrinos only interact with tauons and so forth so during the lepton era when the various leptons started annihilating the neutrinos had nothing left to interact with. So…what did you do? Well as far as I can tell they just spent the rest of their existence floating around in empty space doing nothing at all…just floating. Interesting yes?

By the Book 7

I should note that muon pair production only happens at the very beginning of the lepton era because they are really heavy and (if we invoke E=mc^2 again) it takes more energy to create some heavy muons compared to some really light electrons. Also the tauons are even heavier then muons so their production took place even earlier.

As the lepton era draws to a close the universe is expanding and the temperature is dropping. Tauon pair annihilation starts happening more frequently than pair production and soon almost all the tauons disappear. Then the same thing happens with muons later and then the same thing happens with electrons a little latter (they don’t vanish completely, but before there were crazy ridiculous amounts of them…now there are just a reasonable amount of them).

Ok now to talk about neutrinos! Neutrinos are tiny little particles that have barely any mass and travel at near the speeds of light. They don’t have any electrical charge so they tend not to interact with anything. They were predicted by theory, but it took us forever to find them. There’s a cool documentary on them. We’ll talk more about them tomorrow.

GOD! ?

here's some more. let me know what you think.

By the Book 6

Ok so if you look graph the density graph you will see that before the radiation era there comes the lepton era! You remember what leptons are, don’t you? They are the things that aren’t made of quarks, like electrons and tauons. This era begins when the universe is 100 microseconds old, that is .0001 seconds old. And the temperature was a trillion Kelvin or 100,000,000,000 Kelvin. Oh, and it was really really dense! Apparently this is when electron pairs where created. I might have talked about this before. So this is when two electrons (an electron and a positron) where spontaneously created from some energy (usually in the form of a photon) and then they get annihilated when they run back into each other. And it wasn’t just electrons it was tauons and muons and their neutrinos and all various forms of leptons. But this was happening all around so quickly and there was so much energy to create them with so the universe was a frothy mix of energy and leptons.

By the Book 5

Ok...so you know you are old when you write out an entire post and forgot to post it, so here's yesterday's post.

Before this ‘decoupling epoch’ or plasma period comes the ‘epoch of equal densities’ (I’ll have to make up my own spiffy name). So I think the all the ‘epoch of equal densities’ denotes is when the shift from radiation dominance to matter dominance occurred…yeah I think that’s it…but I could be wrong.

Before this was…obviously the radiation dominance era. This ere began when the universe was only a second old and lasted for about 100,000 years. Harrison takes a moment to talk about what it must have been like to be there in person, and I had never thought about that before. You would be trapped in a super hot fog of light. You would be surrounded by extremely intense white light (among all the other wave lengths). That would be pretty cool.

Shortly after the radiation era begins free protons and neutrons clump together to form helium nuclei. There were already a lot of hydrogen nuclei (protons) and a bunch of free neutrons and when the temperature got just right…they came together like the detonation of a giant hydrogen bomb all over the universe! But can you believe it… the temperature of the universe was already so high that the fusion of all that hydrogen into helium didn’t raise that temperature that much. Crazy stuff.

By the Book 4

Interesting fact: Gorge Gamow and colleges predicted the CMB in 1948 and they predicted it would have a temperature of somewhere between 5 and 50 degrees Kelvin (it has a temperature of 2.7 K but hey they were pretty damn close).

Cosmology rule of thumb: The density of mass in the universe (one of our lines in the density graph) is inversely proportional to the square of the age of the universe. In math terms this is Density of mass =1/((age of the universe)^2).

In his book Harrison then takes the reader on a journey back in time much as we did in the backtracking series (of course he did it much more eloquently) and we will fall into step with him to when the universe is only 500,000 years old and pick up there.

Ok so first he talks about the hydrogen plasma we talked about earlier and, get this, it took about 10,000 years for the nuclei to capture their electrons. I had no idea it happened that fast. This is called the decoupling epoch…but I’m not much for complicated names…so i’ll just keep talking about the plasma like I have been. Oh, something else I should mention, when telescopes like the Hubble satellite look at space they look back in time (but I’m sure you already knew that) and they can see very far…but even with the most advanced telescope we could ever build we wouldn’t be able to see (at least with light) during or before the plasma period. Remember how I said we the light was trapped in the plasma? Well it created this fog stuff that is impossible to see into or through this fog. So our telescopes could never look past this period.

By the Book 3

Ok…everyone have a good thanksgiving…and for those not in America…have a good week? Good. Now to get back to the physics. I have another graph for you. This one is a bit more technical but I think we are gonna try to tackle it anyway. Ok, so if you look at the graph you will see two solid lines, one labeled matter and the other labeled cosmic radiation. We have spent quite a bit of time talking about cosmic radiation, we’ve just been calling…light or photons. Anyway, the lines measure the density of the stuff in grams per cubic centimeter (How can light be measured in grams?? Well just use Einstein’s E=mc^2 to convert the amount of energy you have into a mass and there you have it.) with respect to time (here both axis are on logarithmic scales). The graph is a very nice compacted version of all the things we’ve been talking about recently especially the order that things happened in and the dominance areas. I’ll probably refer back to this graph later…I’ll just call it the density graph.

A Little Break for the US of A

Sorry I didn't post yesterday. I've been traveling and I've decided that i won't be posting this week. We've gone to a friends house for the thanksgiving holiday. I need some time off. Hopefully I'll be more gung ho for this new round of learning after some turkey and pie!

GOD! ?

Ok here are some more images...you might have to click the pictures to see all of them. Let me know what you think..

By the Book 2

I forgot about the gluons! We musn't forget them! They are a bit more complicated. For these puppies you can't just picture them as the billiard balls we see electrons and quarks as. Gluons are more like photons, while they are a particle, they also carry stuff...that is, photons carry enegry and deposit it and stuff...but gluons are the 'force carrier' for the strong interaction. They don't have any mass or charge, and there are 8 types.

Ok...now for the hadrons. Hadrons are just stuff made of quarks. there are a few different types of hadrons. We have measons, made of a quark and an anitquark, and baryons, made of three quarks (protons and neutrons are baryons). And that's it for the figure from yesterday.

Other particles you may or may not have heard of include the neutraino, and the muon and the ever popular higgs boson. The muon is just another kind of lepton, like the electon, exept heavier. The neutrino is just one 'flavor' of the leptons. We have an electron nuetrino a muon nuetrino and a tauon (the 3rd lepton) nuetrino and thier antiparticles. The higgs boson is another type of 'force carrier' partile that is suppose to give mass to things. It has yet to be observed (this is the job of most of the large hadron collider), but it is needed theoretically for our whole model to work.

Here is a link to the particle zoo, a very humorous look at the standard model and I've included a picture (you'll have to click on it) with a plethora of information on the stranded model and a great picture of how atoms are really composed.

By the Book 1

I would like to continue our discussion of the CMB, but I’m afraid things have picked up around there and I won’t be able to gather the necessary information to go any more in-depth, but I would like to continue our discussion of a time line. Up to this point I’ve been pulling in things I’ve know and going backwards. But now I would like to go a bit more out there and use a book (oh how scandalous). I’ll basically be going through Edward Harrison’s Cosmology: The Science of the Universe chapter 20. We’ll see what we find.

Note: So you remember when I talked about the “what’s dominate” eras? Well it appears that matter wasn’t dominate in our universe until about 100,000 years after the big bang. I don’t remember if I said that or not.

I found a cool graph. It’s a timeline set on a logarithmic scale. (If you don’t know what a logarithmic scale is you can look here, it’s actually really hard to describe and took me like 4 years for someone to actually explain it to me a way I could understand it.)

Ok now I will take a coupe of moments to explain what all of the things on this graph on graph. They don’t all relate directly to what we want to know but it’s a very very good thing to know what these things mean. Ok first we have monopoles and inflation, and we already talked about those. Next comes quarks. I have a picture of those. They are a fundamental particle (they aren’t made of anything). There are different kinds of them, 6 in total (and their antiparticles of course).When you put them together they make all kinds of things. When you put a certain combination of 3 quarks together you get a proton. And a different combo of 3 gives you a neutron and if you mix them up or put just 2 together you get a whole host of exotic particles. Next comes leptons. These are a little less…uniform. There are also six types of these but they are not all as common. The only one we see often is the electron, but there is also the muon and the tauon, and different ‘flavors’ of those. And tomorrow I will continue with the hadrons.

in the interim

ok...so i'm working on this super awesome but really long post. so i will not be posting today so i can work on that. have a good day and here have an lolcat!

GOD! ?

I had a thought. I'm personally a visual person (I have so many pictures on this blog) so I thought I'd do something with God and pictures. But if I do I really really want to guys to respond. Pleeeeeaaaaassssssseeeee! So here's what I'll do. I'll post some pictures of "God" and you respond to them telling me which ones you like best, which are most accurate for you're views on God, etc. This is suppose to be funny and informative. I'll post more pictures later as I find them.

Backtracking 14 CMB

So now to discuss the anisotropies (different colors)in the CMB. According to Wikipedia, there are two different types of anisotropies, primary and secondary. Primary anisotropies come from collisions of the light right before it was released to wander the universe. Secondary anisotropies come from interactions the light had with the gas since the formation of the hydrogen atoms that released them. But…then things get complicated…and my computer is broken. The screen went on the fritz and now it won’t show anything. I’ll have to figure this out tomorrow. I think I might have to ask my professor friend. So I’ll get back with you on that tomorrow. Sorry about the crappy entry.

Backtracking 13 CMB

Anyway, back to the CMB. So that picture that I posted of it last time, if you look at it you will notice there are some different colors in it. Different colors correspond to different temperatures. (I’m pretty sure this is how it works) There is an average temperature of 2.725 K (the K is for Kelvin which is just a shifted version of Celsius. 0 degrees Celsius is 273.15 kelvin). The scale on the side of the picture is the fluctuation away from this average temperature. The orange and red is slightly warmer than 2.725 K and dark blue and purple is slightly colder. But these are very tiny temperature changes. You can see that the scale on the side is in micro-kelvin, that is, in increments of .000001 K. But these changes are significant. They show us where matter started forming. The colder places are places where the matter first condensed and formed into the hydrogen atoms we talked about before.

Random aside

I have a question. This is posed at the young people. Do you still have deep intellectual discussions, in your colleges and things I mean? Like where you talk for hours about the nature of the universe and philosophy and society and you share your ideas. Do you still do that? I visited a college campus recently and talked with some of the students. They seemed very concerned with their grades and where they were going to go after school. Maybe I just don't know them very well and perhaps you just talk more in private. But does that still happen? The modern society seems to be obsessed with progress and achievement. When did that happen? And why? Is there a way to fix it?

Backtracking 12 Nucleosynthesis

To take a quick break from the CMB, I was recently posed a very good question about where elements came from. We haven’t quite gotten there yet…but I think I can give a quick overview. The first elements were formed just after protons and neutrons were formed (ya know after inflation when things cooled down enough to form real particles). There first elements where mostly hydrogen and some helium but according to what I’ve read everything up to lithium and beryllium where formed before stars where created. From there stars and galaxies were created from the hydrogen and helium and proceeded with fusion. This made a lot of the elements (including a decent amount of carbon near the cores of ‘normal’ stars…that eventually became the earth!), but normal star fusion stops after iron. Once you reach iron it’s not energetically favorable to fuse nuclei anymore (I forget why right now…but I might be able to find out if you really want to know). Then a star dies and it blows up…or does a number of other random violent things. (I’ve included a picture of some of these random things) And when heavy elements like iron fly into other smaller elements like helium they fuse and form the heaviest elements, including the radioactive ones. And this is how the elements we know and love today were formed. There are other elements and exotic particles that are formed in the atmosphere when cosmic rays hit it (I’ve done some experiments involving these they’re fun)…but that’s a topic for another day.

Backtracking 11 CMB

So, as I explained yesterday, we’ve got this hydrogen plasma that traps light. This creates an opaque fog that covers the universe. But then when the temperature of the universe dropped, the electrons bonded to the protons to form hydrogen atoms and the light was freed up to move around. The picture from yesterday of this phenomenon is not really accurate in that things would be a lot more expanded and the light would move around much more without hitting anything. So what you have is basically a bunch of photons flying around in free space without anything to bounce off of. They have the same properties and distributions as they did when they were first set free. So now we can take a look at them. We sent out some satellites and they measured photon intensities at different locations and the picture up top is the kind of thing we got.

Backtracking 9 CMB

Does anyone else think it’s highly ironic that I view Wikipedia as the most up to date and reliable source of information available? Well I do…but it’s true. I trust Wikipedia the most. Anyway, the CMB. First I should give you a little background on atoms and things. Most know that atoms are made of a nucleus and some electrons that orbit them, like in the first picture. But in the early universe matter hadn’t formed into atoms yet. Things were still too hot to do that. Instead what matter there was took the form of hydrogen plasma. Ohhhh…plasma. This is what the second picture is of. In the modern age hydrogen plasma is found in stars, nuclear accelerators, lightning, neon signs and rocket exhaust. Plasma is actually considered a different state of matter…like solid, liquid and gas. A plasma is a sort of fluid where the most of the electrons has been stripped away from their atoms, or in our case they electrons were never attracted to the atoms. So what we are really left with a bunch of hydrogen nuclei. But the nucleus of a hydrogen atom is just a proton…so we just have a bunch of protons in a strange fluidly state.

Backtracking 8 CMB

Ok back to the timeline. Now that we’ve explored the possibilities for how our current universe (the matter or possibly dark matter dominated universe) came to be, we can move on to what came before that, the light dominated universe. By ‘light’ I actually mean radiation, so that includes all forms of light from gamma to radio waves. Basically the universe had more photons than anything. Well how do we know there was a light dominated era? Because of the CMB! The cosmic microwave background, the precious baby of modern cosmology. All the cosmologist are so so so proud of the CMB, cause it validates a lot of their ideas. And brought down some of them as well. But anyway the cosmic microwave background is a layer of microwaves that are left over from the radiation dominate era of the universe. And as to how it works…I’ll talk about that later.

Here! Have an lolcat!

Backtracking 7 The way science is...

As I continue reading Gamow’s article things I learned are once again brought to mind and I do think they are worth sharing. So ya know how I was talking about how the larger elements where formed in star fusion? Well they didn’t know that until rather recently. In fact in this article I’m reading Gamow mentions that the heavier elements were created before the stars were formed. This, of course is not the prevailing theory today but they that’s what they thought back then. They also thought the universe was about 5 billion years old. So since we measure the radioactive elements (ya know like carbon 14 from carbon dating for the dino’s) to be about 5 billion years old they thought they had to be formed very early on in the universe…which lead to all kinds of wrong assumptions. But, today we know heavy elements are formed in stars and the universe is about 14 billion years old. Just goes to show you how if we have one or two pieces of the puzzle wrong we can get a lot wrong.

Backtracking 6 Super massive black holes

I think this is how it goes: in those big dust clouds that formed when the dominance switched from radiation to matter, there formed a black hole and it sucked in a bunch of dust and grew really big and spewed out radiation which heated up the surrounding dust and triggered millions of stars to form. And the same radiation that formed them pushed them away from the black hole so they didn’t get eaten (of course I’m sure some of them got eaten first. Then when the black hole had eaten everything that it hadn’t pushed away it when to sleep and stopped sucking in matter and emitting radiation and nothing would go near it and it would lay there, dormant waiting for the day when it can feast again! Who knew astrophysics had scary stories. This explanation might be a bit exaggerated, but you get the general idea. It was actually the black hole that created the galaxy, or triggered galaxy formation.

Backtracking 5 Black holes

Recently, as in the last 20 years or so, people have been taking a good look at black holes (pun intended…ya get it…cause you can’t see them…cause they’re black…anyway). We look at them by observing the motion of the things around them. Then we can find where they are and how big they are. And we’ve found some big ones. There are 4 general classes of black holes, tiny ones like the one the Large Hardon Collider is suppose to make, small ones created when stars violently blow up (the ones in sci-fi movies), big ones that theorists have predicted are them, but we don’t know that much about them, and super massive, the monsters that we have observed at the center of every galaxy we’ve looked for them in. I once saw this wonderful documentary on super massive black holes but I couldn’t really find it so here’s one that seems to be just as good. These giant objects sleep, literately, at the center of most galaxies, including our own and are thought to play a major role in galaxy formation.

Backtracking 4 Star formation

Today I read part of an essay by George Gamow entitled ‘Modern Cosmology’. It was written in 1954. I didn’t realize this until I was several pages into the essay…so I kept on reading…but I don’t know how much of what he says is still held up as truth today. So take these next couple of entries with a grain of salt or two. Yesterday I said we would talk about radiation dominance, but I have found more information about the switch in dominance from radiation to matter so I think I shall expound upon that. According to Gamow when this switch took place, giant clouds of matter started forming they took the shape of giant dust clouds clumping together. (I’ve included a picture of a modern dust cloud. Of course at this point in the universe there weren’t any stars…but just pretend.) Then when you get enough dust and just the right amount of radiation mixed up (like so many good cocktails I know) you get magic. In a complicated and very violent moment the cloud condenses and forms a star. And if you get lots of clouds you get lots of stars…and lots of stars form a galaxy. And there you have it, galaxy formation…of course that’s not quite that simple.

Backtracking 3 Domination

Next we can talk about the ‘what’s dominate?’ eras. Right now we are in the ‘dark energy’ dominate era. But what does this really mean? Dominate means that that is what there is the most of. In the ‘dark energy’ dominate era, now, there is more dark energy than anything else. So… it is the driving force of the universe. That is why we are expanding at an accelerated rate. The dominance of an energy term make us accelerate. Before that was a matter dominance. I’m not sure, and I don’t think cosmologists know either, but somehow and at some point the dark energy overpowered the matter, including dark matter. Before this point matter was dominate and the expansion of the universe was decelerating. Before that, 70,000 years after the big bang, the dominance switched to matter from radiation. So… light was the dominating force in the universe. And that is what we will talk about tomorrow.

God's Aside 4

I think I’ll just keep going on this train of thought. If he designed math and the universe for us to figure out than that implies he wants us to (goodness, I sound so much like a philosopher). And why wouldn’t he? If he is anything like us (the whole created in his image thing) I should think he would like to show off. One of my dearest and oldest friends is a terrific artist and he is always ready to show his latest work and explain the how the why the details to any ear that would listen. Why wouldn’t God be any different? His masterpiece, the creation, is so much more complex and intricate, and daresay beautiful, and why wouldn’t he want to show it off. In all honesty he does seem a big showy. I mean even for those who aren’t (to further the analogy) art students, he’s created features that absolutely cannot be ignored, like the sunset and the ocean and the stars. Now, for those who do study his work, he is…well, a downright showoff. Quantum mechanics is the most ridiculously dumfounding thing I’ve ever found. For the bio people out there the transition from larger scale chemical combinations to a living thing has always seemed rather incredible to me. The scales on which the structure of the universe lies, in and of itself is enough to blow the mind of any rational human. He is a showoff on the grandest scale. And if you have no one to show it off to, well that’s just no fun. But it seems he does. (no, I’m not suggesting humans were created just to study science) But he does have use, and we do seemed to be programmed with this innate curiosity. And well, somehow I don’t think he minds at all. But if all this is true why do we have to search so hard? Perhaps it’s simply more fun that way. I mean after all I do like a challenge. If I didn’t I would have done something else.

God's Aside 3

Today I must share an experience with you. I had this cake…it was be best thing I’ve ever eaten. It was divinely blessed cake and it make me so so so so happy. It make me believe that if there are things that are that good and make people that happy there must be a God…there must. Someone had to create that kind of feeling. And with that lead it here is the next part on my God series.

Perhaps there is a God, such as the Jews claim, who has spoken with humans and cares about them. I’ve read quite a few of their texts and in one, I do believe the Christian’s share this part, it is said the God made man in his image. I’m not quite sure what this means to them, but I am rather certain that there is defiantly something special about man (and woman of course, there is no doubt in my mind there is something special about woman!). We are the only species on earth to have the kind of advanced cognitive thinking that we do. Well, let’s just put it this way, I’ve never met any other animals that wondered about God. We believe we are special. This kicks back to an earth centered model of the universe. We have always thought we had a special place in the universe. As far as the actual location of earth, we really aren’t that special. We are just in a small branch of an average galaxy in a rather uninteresting part of a (supposedly) uniform distribution of matter. But how come we know that (or at least we think we do). We’ve never found any other beings as intelligent as us (at least not yet), but I will be very honest, the fact that all our math and physics works seems a little more than coincidental. That’s why all of the physicists and chemists and mathematicians put their trust in it. It works. It’s works in so many situations and under so many circumstances. We can predict things with it, and we are right. We measure, calculate, modify, conceptualize, invent math, and in the end we get it right, at least so far we have. I can firmly say I don’t believe science is going about understanding the universe in the wrong way. And if this is so well, then there is a set mathematical structure to the universe. Yes, take a moment to try to comprehend this. There is a set mathematical structure to the universe. Math sort of governs the universe. Math. I often hear stories from math teachers of student’s asking how math applies to real life. Operations and relations of constants and parameters govern the universe! Talk about structure. Think with me for a moment about some of the highest forms of structure that humans have created, languages, the stock market, the internet, the space shuttle, etc., they don’t even compare to the higher structure of the universe.

Backtracking 2

Forgive the lack of post yesterday as well, more IRS stuff to be dealt with…I don’t understand all of the paper work I have to fill out…way back when you would just explain your situation to a judge and he would make a decision and that would be that…there was no box checking (there are no boxes for someone over 100 years old). Anyway back to our discussion. Interesting things that happened in the recent past include earth's origins 4.5 billion years ago and the sun forming around 5 billion years ago, but what I really want to focus on is the formation of stars and galaxies about 300 million years after the big bang. You know that whole ‘human are made out of stardust’ thing from the 70’s? Well, let me take a moment to explain that. Stars work by fusion, that is, they take small atoms like hydrogen and cram them together to form larger atoms like helium, and so on and so forth until they make things like carbon and iron and other elements. Then the stars blow up…well not all of them….but a substantial amount do. And when they blow up these elements get spread around the universe…get trapped in big rocks, sucked into other stars, expelled again, etc. then at some point they got trapped in a big rock that started rotating about a normal old star and there ya go: Earth! So yeah…the carbon we’re made out of and all the iron in the building you’re standing in was once created in a star! That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?