There have been a number of true and non-silly stories about astronomy and cosmology recently, which I'll collect here as penance for the earlier silly post:
Some theorists at Penn State have constructed a Loop Quantum Gravity model that they claim allows for an oscillating universe with no singularities. In one of those psychology-of-the-press moments, the PSU press release accentuates the positive, with the headline "What happened before the Big Bang?" Meanwhile, the IOP Physics Web news item goes negative: "'Cosmic forgetfulness' shrouds time before the Big Bang" (referring to the model prediction that even if the universe is oscillating, there would be no way to get information from the time before the last collapse. However you spin it, Sean Carroll doesn't like it, for reasons having to do with entropy.
Closer to home, the Opportunity rover is still going, and planning to enter a deep crater. With all the crap NASA gets about their misplaced priorities and poor management, they don't get nearly enough credit for their successes, which really are spectacular.
Finally, Tommaso Dorigo has a summary of the current sate of gravitational wave detection experiments. These are really cool stuff, and I may have more to say about the topic later.
And that's what's going on in the universe today.
Comments
Exactly, they seem to think that landing a remote control vehicle on another planet is somehow easy. Now if we would just quit wasting our money on pointless en devours, then maybe NASA could get some decent funding. I'd much rather see more pictures of Mars than build an ineffective wall between here an Mexico, or fight a pointless drug war, or etc, etc, etc, etc.
Posted by: ji | July 3, 2007 10:44 AM
My Across-The Street Neighbor is an Engineer at JPL and we chatted about the rovers during our Fourth of July Block Party.
They are building a new one and this one will be much bigger "the size of a mini-cooper" and have a plutonium battery so they will not have to depend on the sun.
I imagine one of the reasons that the rovers are lasting so long is that it turns out that there are dust-devils on Mars which come by every so often and clean off the solar panels.
A few years ago I asked a NASA astronaut why send people to Mars when robots will do just as nicely, he replied to the effect of "I could do in one day what it takes the robot weeks to do."
I meant to counter that if you gave JPL 10 billion dollars (Or whatever a manned Mars mission would cost) you could probably build a robot that could be *faster* than he would, and we would not need to bring it back. Though we could probably build a launch vehicle to get some samples back in a few years.
Posted by: KeithB | July 6, 2007 2:44 PM