Astronomy

Even while the world suffers, investing in science is non-negotiable

esiegel — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 05:01:10 +0000

Even while the world suffers, investing in science is non-negotiable

“I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope.” –Albert Schweitzer

Every so often, the argument comes up that science is expendable. That we’re simply investing too much of our resources — too much public money — into an endeavor with no short-term benefits. Meanwhile, there’s suffering of all kinds, from poverty to disease to war to natural disasters, plaguing humanity all across the country and our world. Yet even while there is suffering in the world, investing in our long-term future is indispensable. This story is nothing new.

To invest in any one thing means to not invest in something else, but both science/space exploration and humanitarian relief are worthy of the investment of human resources. Image credit: NASA and WFP / Q. Sakamaki.

Back in 1970, shortly after the first Moon landing, a nun working to alleviate poverty in Africa, Sister Mary Jucunda, wrote to NASA, and begged them to stop this frivolous waste of resources, and instead to use their funding for the benefit of humanity. The letter made it all the way to Ernst Stuhlinger, then the Associate Director of Science at NASA. Stuhlinger’s response was all at once compassionate and convincing, and helped convince Jucunda — as well as skeptics everywhere — of the value that science has to offer.

The first view with human eyes of the Earth rising over the limb of the Moon. This was perhaps the greatest moment in education / public outreach for NASA until the first moon landing, and it was the picture that Stuhlinger sent to Sister Jucunda with the above letter. Image credit: NASA / Apollo 8.

Come see the full story, and read Stuhlinger’s complete, original letter, on the non-negotiable value of science to our world!

esiegel Thu, 10/26/2017 - 01:01

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Yes, yes, you're so indispensable, however did we survive before the Ministry of Silly Wal-, er, I mean government funded science came along saved us from certain doom.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2ViNJFZC8&index=27&list=RDaOqHNNmTz68
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Typed CFT on his computer connected to the internet.

I wonder with whom these planned non-negotiations won't be.

@Mike #2,

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Ethan is espousing scientific rent seeking. I'm mostly against it. It almost always has a tendency to mission creep towards 'Silly Walks' research and groupthink. There was a good reason Monty Python made fun of this kind of thing.
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@John #3,
The question is:
"I wonder with whom these planned non-negotiations won't be?"
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The answer is: The people they are taking the money from to fund their science projects. Ethan is supporting the elitist technocratic position that the people who pay for this shouldn't be able to say no-thank you.
I seriously beg to differ.

Hey, CFT, have you ever noticed that pretty much everybody else can make paragraph breaks without inserting a period between them?

@CFT
Unsupported assertion coupled with irony blindness. Are you from the US by any chance?

@Narad #6,
If you were asking as a serious question,
For whatever reason, If I don't insert one, there is no space between paragraphs. It looks fine when I type it, but the spacing goes away when it posts.
If you were just being a pill,
meh.

@mike #7,
With bigoted comments like that, I sincerely hope you aren't.

Seeing One Example Of Merging Neutron Stars Raises Five Incredible Questions

esiegel — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 05:27:54 +0000

Seeing One Example Of Merging Neutron Stars Raises Five Incredible Questions

"O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and caesium. It can be shown by simple considerations that this type of nuclear reaction may be described in an essentially classical way like the fission of a liquid drop, and that the fission products must fly apart with kinetic energies of the order of hundred million electron-volts each." -Lise Meitner

Now that we've observed merging neutron stars for the first time, in many different wavelengths of light as well as in gravitational waves, we've got a whole new world of data to work with. We've independently confirmed that gravitational waves are real and that we can, in fact, pinpoint their locations on the sky. We've demonstrated that merging neutron stars create short gamma ray bursts, and shown that the origin of the majority of elements heavier than the first row of transition metals comes primarily from neutron star-neutron star mergers.

This color-coded periodic table groups elements by how they were produced in the universe. Hydrogen and helium originated in the Big Bang. Heavier elements up to iron are generally forged in the cores of massive stars. The electromagnetic radiation captured from GW170817 now confirms that elements heavier than iron are synthesized in large amounts the aftermath of neutron star collisions. Image credit: Jennifer Johnson / SDSS.

But the new discovery raises a ton of questions, too. Seeing this event has presented theorists with a number of new challenges, ranging from the event rate being some ten times as great as expected to much more matter being ejected than we'd thought. And what was it that was left behind? Was it a neutron star? A black hole? Or an exotic object that's in its own class?

We knew that when two neutron stars merge, as simulated here, they create gamma-ray burst jets, as well as other electromagnetic phenomena. But whether you produce a neutron star or a black hole, as well as how much of a UV/optical counterpart is produced, should be strongly mass-dependent. Image credit: NASA / Albert Einstein Institute / Zuse Institute Berlin / M. Koppitz and L. Rezzolla.

There are some great advances that the future will hold for gravitational wave and neutron star astronomy, but it's up to theorists to explain why these objects behave as they do.

esiegel Fri, 10/20/2017 - 01:27

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Would this be one way to make a quark star? Since quarks are also fermions the Pauli Exclusion Principle ought to provide enough pressure under certain circumstances to make a star that looks like a gigantic hadron held together by gravity. Or would such a hypothetical quark star already be so dense that it would make an event horizon all by itself?

Could the omnidirectional gamma ray bursts be coming from the ejecta themselves? It seems like the process of going from a lump of neutronium to all those heavy elements is a lot like the fission reaction of an atomic bomb - just one the with the mass of 30 to 40 Jupiters.

@Anonymous Coward #1: Yes, it is possible. Two merging neutron stars close to the mass limit (about 2.5 solar masses, depending on the equation of state you like) would clearly exceed the mass limit for the final state.

Whether that final state becomes a black hole directly, or an over-mass neutron star which collapses later, or something like a quark star, depends on astrophysical details we just don't know yet. Future GW observations, including the post-merger ringdown, will give us substantial information on the mass distribution and equation of state.

GW170817 didn't show a ringdown signal; we don't know whether that's because the merger went directly to a black hole, or for some other reason.

Have the initial orbiting black holes detected by LIGO been independently observed apart from laser interferometry yet?

CFT @4.
There is really no other signal likely observable over a distance of 2 billion LYs. So the answer in theory is no. And
we don't have their location on the celestial sphere narrowed down, we don't even know which galaxy clusters to search.

That's a good reason why Ethan thinks NS mergers are where the real discoveries will lie.

CFT,

I fear you'll have to wait until EM telescope measurements are able to capture the impact of the accretion disks around two merging black holes for the independent observations you’d like. By definition there will be no EM residue from the merger of such entities, but the impact of their intersecting accretion disks (assuming both have one) is likely to be awesome!

The wikipedia entry on GW179817 says the the two LIGO sites and Virgo detected the signal.
It has images of "Time-frequency representations of data containing the gravitational-wave event" from the three sites. For the LIGO sites, a signal can be clearly seen, but for Virgo what is it on the image which represents the signal?

I'm going to regret the loss of scienceblogs: the format seems much better for viewing text contributions, which is after all largely what it's all about. I can't get on with Forbes: it's too cluttered, and wasteful of screenspace.

...sorry "GW170817"...

The Hubble Space Telescope Is Falling (Synopsis)

esiegel — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 05:09:00 +0000

The Hubble Space Telescope Is Falling (Synopsis)

"When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength." -Dalai Lama

Orbiting at hundreds of miles above Earth’s atmosphere, you’d think the Hubble Space Telescope would be safe and stable for a long time. But despite our definitions, Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t “end” and space doesn’t “begin” when we get 60 miles (100 kilometers) up. Instead, Earth’s atmosphere continues, albeit tenuously, for incredible distances, until it eventually merges with the solar wind. It’s the fourth (of five) layers that contains the Hubble Space Telescope: the thermosphere.

The layers of Earth's atmosphere, as shown here to scale, go up far higher than the typically-defined boundary of space. Every object in low-Earth orbit is subject to atmospheric drag at some level. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Kelvinsong.

Although each oxygen molecule might travel for a kilometer before striking another, the presence of these molecules is enough to slowly produce a drag on Hubble. Over the timespan of years and decades, it loses altitude and begins to fall. If we do nothing, then by the late 2020s to the mid-2030s, it will uncontrollably de-orbit on its own. Our greatest optical observatory will be lost, and there are no plans to save it.

The soft capture mechanism installed on Hubble (illustration) uses a Low Impact Docking System (LIDS) interface and associated relative navigation targets for future rendezvous, capture, and docking operations. The system’s LIDS interface is designed to be compatible with the rendezvous and docking systems to be used on the next-generation space transportation vehicle. Image credit: NASA.

Come learn how the Hubble Space Telescope is falling, what we can do, and why we need to act now.

esiegel Wed, 10/18/2017 - 01:09

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Get a Kickstarter-thingy and you might get enough funding by the end of the month.

I think there are always some old satellites worthy of saving.
So we should try to find a general solution.

Maybe NASA should try to design little remote controlled space drones that can fly to any satellite and attach itself to it
(imagine one or multiple drones attached to each satellite).

And imagine afterwards, movements of the satellite controlled by those attached drones.

They could be used to increase lifetime of old satellites, as well as they could take them down for a fast and controlled reentry (to keep Earth's orbit clean).

I felt the same way about Skylab, and waiting for the space shuttle to save it is what killed it. At this point they need to do some cost analysis and determine what the cost of putting another telescope in orbit (with more powerful instrumentation) versus saving the dated Hubble would be.

@Frank @2,
Sounds interesting but for a few possible complications.
Having a drone that could move other satellites around could be perceived (or actually be) as a weapon by other nations. It in theory sound like some of the anti-satellite weaponry I've read about.
The other problem is the orbits. You might have to have multiple drones set up for the different kinds of orbits, as you would probably spend a great deal of fuel just to match the same location in orbit while evading thousands of pieces of space junk.

@Elle H.C.,
The defunct space shuttle cost broke down around 450 million dollars a launch. I'm not sure you could reasonably expect that much in a month or two. Developing an entirely new launch system would put that figure in the billions of dollars.
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Maybe the SpaceX people might make a publicity thing out of it.

@CFT #5

How big of a rocket would it take to push it into a safe position? There are regularly going 'supply' rockets into space, so I'm guessing that an extra package going along wouldn't cost that much.

I'm here indeed thinking of a Space X like enterprise to figure it all out. There are 7 billion people on this planet I'm sure you can set up anywhere a company that could figure out a solution. Even India and China are up there …

Now I might be exaggerating but I have the impression that students that finish a PhD these days have an understanding of technology and tools available that's ten times more advanced then 20 years ago, they could run a simulation on a laptop, by components for a fraction etc.

How far would you get for $100.000?

@Elle H.C.,
While I do like your ingenuity in thinking about ways to save Hubble, also consider the alternative of replacement. Sometimes keeping an older piece of technology ends up being far more expensive and less productive than originally thought, this is made more complicated because of the cost of sending one type of craft for replacement, versus another kind of craft for repair or orbit alteration might also be significant.

@CFT,

Well the James Webb Space Telescope is going to be launched around this time next year and it will be the one that takes science a step further, so Hubble could be sold as a kind of secondhand telescope to a bunch of enthusiasts.

Anyway they could also give a couple of billions to NASA to do the update, I don't care the money spend flows anyhow back into the economy.

I just checked and it appears that at 27,000 lbs a falcon 9 could launch a replacement (it can deliver 50,000 lbs to a low earth orbit. But the science community has determines that the Webb telescope with its different bands is a better use of funds. Further if this article is correct : http://www.iflscience.com/space/telescopes-ground-may-be-cheaper-hubble…
"When E-ELT observations start in 2024, the state-of-the-art correction for atmospheric distortion will allow it to provide images 16 times sharper than those taken by Hubble."

This does suggest that at least for wavelenghts that make it to the ground ground based scopes are better, the web being an example of a telescope that operates at wavelenghts blocked by the atmosphere.
So for example you would not replace Hubble in the visible light range but in ultraviolet, since the Webb telescope handles the infrared. (so it can detected strongly red shifted objects)

I'm with Elle. This won't be cheap and I would rather NASA spend their government money on the new stuff - so much to do and so much more to learn
Leave conservation to philanthropy. Or private. Surely a few of the fats cats could get their heart behind this.

We got bigger things to worry about. Like a 75% decline in insects over 30 years - now THAS a scary problem. Only stayed on the from page of CNN for half a day - Trumps rants seem to be more important.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/19/europe/insect-decline-germany/index.html

@Steve Blackband #10,
Relax. Just relax and put things into perspective with George Carlin.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
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The planet has been through a lot worse than us.
There is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine, it's the people who are in trouble.

Why Neutron Stars, Not Black Holes, Show The Future Of Gravitational Wave Astronomy

esiegel — Tue, 17 Oct 2017 03:11:56 +0000

Why Neutron Stars, Not Black Holes, Show The Future Of Gravitational Wave Astronomy

"This is going to have a bigger impact on science and human understanding, in many ways, than the first discovery of gravitational waves. We're going to be puzzling over the observations we've made with gravitational waves and with light for years to come." -Duncan Brown

Detecting black holes and the gravitational wave signals from them was an incredible feat, but doing the same thing for neutron star mergers is a true game-changer. Instead of fractions of a second, neutron star mergers show up for up to half a minute. Unlike black holes, there’s an electromagnetic counterpart. Because of that, we can verify that the speed of gravity really is identical to the speed of light: to better than 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000.

All massless particles travel at the speed of light, including the photon, gluon and gravitational waves, which carry the electromagnetic, strong nuclear and gravitational interactions, respectively. Image credit: NASA / Sonoma State University / Aurora Simonnet.

And perhaps most spectacularly, we can bring the electromagnetic and gravitational-wave skies together for the first time. Even though LIGO has seen more merging black holes, the fact is that there are more merging neutron stars. The key, now, is finding them. We live at a moment where gravitational wave astronomy is just in its infancy, giving us a whole new way to look at the Universe.

The galaxy NGC 4993, located 130 million light years away, had been imaged many times before. But just after the August 17, 2017 detection of gravitational waves, a new transient source of light was seen: the optical counterpart of a neutron star-neutron star merger. Image credit: P.K. Blanchard / E. Berger / Pan-STARRS / DECam.

esiegel Mon, 10/16/2017 - 23:11

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So they shifted the frequencies of the gravitational waves to the audio so that you can 'hear' the collision.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41650745

Do you think this is helpful or misleading?
*and was what you hear real time?"

@Steve Blackband #1: In fact, there isn't any shifting involved! LIGO's sensitivity range is right around 300 Hz (spanning a few tens of hertz up to a few kilohertz), which is exactly the range of human hearing (middle C is 256 Hz).

IF gravity traveled at the speed of light, how do you explain the actual orbits of planets around the sun? Interesting things happens if you put your propagation effects at c. Unfortunately stable planetary orbits is not one of them, orbital calculations depend upon gravity being much faster than c to nearly instantaneous in order to work at all. The Earth also orbits a location that is approximately 20 arc seconds ahead of where the sun appears in the sky, where it actually is, not where the light which we are just receiving some eight minutes later shows it to be.
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Lets get skeptical and use Occam's razor to clear the air a bit instead:
What did LIGO actually detect? The laser wiggled (effect). The effect was attributed to gravity waves (cause). It is now admitted that what was detected was propagating at c. What was actually detected? Gravity waves traveling at the speed of c, which is in disagreement with our own planet's orbit, or just an electromagnetic effect to begin with? There is also the problem that gravity travels at c in Einstein's math only because he wanted it to, the equations are coordinate dependent, you get differing speeds for gravity unless you cherry pick your coordinates specifically to get c. There has been a lot of debate on this by physicists.
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Ethan admitted the reason they could even 'detect' orbiting black holes to begin with is because they created such powerful gravitational waves. How much less powerful are the gravity waves of neutron stars? Magnitudes? Considerably? If LIGO had troubles with detecting black holes, would it not have even more trouble with detecting something far less massive? The sudden pivot to detecting orbiting neutron stars seems a bit suspect, combined with claims of c propagation for the gravity waves. In any case, something has got to give theoretically. I have no trouble picking an initial side. I'm siding with direct evidence of our own planetary motion requiring faster than c propagation of gravity, over a highly inferred and indirect evidence based off a theoretical template in a computer processed 'wiggle' of something much farther away.
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This to me seems much like the point of contention with BICEP2. Polarized dust WAS actually found (effect). Assumptions were made about (cause) how and when it was polarized. The assumptions turned out to be wrong. The tragedy of BICEP2 wasn't that it didn't turn out the way they wanted, it was that not a single purportedly brilliant person on the entire research team, or even one of their financial backers asked the obvious question the entire projected revolved around "How will we be able to discern the causes of the polarization?"
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The same obvious question is there again. "How do you know what is causing your laser to wiggle?" You have a connection between a subject (neutron stars) and your detector now, but is it what you want it to be? Or is it something more mundane?

@CFT #3: What an awesome demonstration of ignorance.

"Gravity" doesn't "travel at the speed of light," any more than a _static_ (i.e., unchanging) electric or magnetic field travels at the speed of light. If you actually studied the physics you so blithely distain, you'd already know this.

The gravitational field of the solar system is essentially fixed (the movement of the Sun's barycenter is tiny compared to the sizes of any of the planets' orbits). The same is true, of course, for the orbits of all the planetary moons about their primaries. Consequently, the orbit of the Earth and other planets is perfectly described by a Keplerian ellipse. In Newtonian language, we can say that the force between the Sun and Earth is instantaneous. In Einsteinian language, we say that the solar system metric is static to high precision. The observable outcome is the same in both cases, and in both cases can be derived quantitatively by someone who can handle the maths. Your statements demonstrate clearly that you either can't, or just don't want to because it doesn't fit your argument.

What does travel at the speed of light (as measured to within +/- half a part in 10^15) are _disturbances_ in gravity, such as gravitational waves.

The interferometer didn't "just wiggle," as your willful ignorance would have it. The mirrors (not the laser, another demonstration of your ignorance) moved in a very specific oscillatory pattern, with a frequency which increased over time in a very specific, continuous way. What is observed, measured, is not just the movement, but the very specific time history of that movement. Your sidestepping of those quantitative technical details (here as in so many other of your ranting posts) demonstrates that you are either ill-equipped to understand them, or you do understand them but deliberately confabulate in order to support a false narrative.

Uh, CFT, I think the compounding of events - Gravitational Wave, Gamma Ray Burst, and the correlated Optical detection pretty much seal it as a legitimate detection.

Going forward, there will either be more detection with all the parts, or not. The GRB within seconds of the gravitational wave detection is pretty strong evidence.

Dearest Michael,
You lost me the very moment you called me names...many months ago. I certainly would never take you seriously if you told me the sky was blue at this point. Incompetent experts such as yourself should be cleaning toilets until you develop a semblance of humility, not advising people on anything. Now please, go pound some sand.

@MK #4: " In Newtonian language, we can say that the force between the Sun and Earth is instantaneous. In Einsteinian language, we say that the solar system metric is static to high precision."

I really enjoyed that. Pick your language and your theoretical paradigm. Make your argument from that bias.

What happened to the scientific method?!

@MobiusKlein #5,
What their 'detection' reveals in terms of by optical and radio is not in contention, those are electromagnetic in nature. What they claim they are detecting on their laser seismograph is. The fact they are claiming detection of gravity waves at c means it could be something other than gravity waves. The math is not convincing me, as it does not stipulate gravity even travels at c unless you choose very specific parameters BICEP2 was claiming a positive detection at sigma 7. Do you know what the statistical odds of that being wrong are? 1 in 10 billion, and they were wrong.
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Forgive me for my skepticism, but no, I don't believe their ridiculously high claims of their calculations certainty, they aren't very credible at this point. Blowhards like Michael Kelsey having such peculiar overreactions to being questioned only further convinces me something odd is going on.
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If Michael actually was half as informed as he claims, he would have known the argument I was using to challenge the assertion of gravity waves in a vacuum traveling at light speed was actually not even mine, but someone else with considerably more expertise. In other words, he accused me of making up an actual position taken by one of the finest astrophysicists of the twentieth century who in fact worked alongside Einstein himself, A.S. Eddington.
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“The statement that in the relativity theory gravitational waves are propagated with the speed of light has,
I believe, been based entirely upon the foregoing investigation; but it will be seen that it is only true in a very
conventional sense. If coordinates are chosen so as to satisfy a certain condition which has no very clear geometrical importance, the speed is that of light; if the coordinates are slightly different the speed is altogether
different from that of light. The result stands or falls by the choice of coordinates and, so far as can be judged,
the coordinates here used were purposely introduced in order to obtain the simplification which results from
representing the propagation as occurring with the speed of light. The argument thus follows a vicious circle.”
---A.S. Eddington, The Mathematical Theory of Relativity
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As I said,
Cherry picked coordinates to get the predetermined results you want doesn't prove anything, except that it is just a math push determining your speed of gravity to be c. If you pick some other coordinates, your speed will vary.

@CFT #6 (?)
Go easy on Michael, after all he does work for you as a tax payer. Michael is an employee of a US Govt scientific institution and can provide vital input.
He can be a bit salty at times but that's understandable because of all the testosterone fostered penis measuring contest that has gone here in the past.

Men in the science community should follow some of the decent lessons from physical sports teams in our society where we disagree, give some hard hits, and then shake hands and move on. Holding long term grudges does no one ESPECIALLY the truth any justice.

If there is an undetected (by instruments, of course) omnipresent field/medium, that would explain how everything is connected and that direct connection would explain how the force of gravity could be instantaneous.Then we could throw out "spooky action at a distance" as a problem... which resulted in GR.

Notice the opening "If." Yes, I do theoretical physics too... even without credentials! (It's not illegal, except in mainstream physics) "The fabric of spacetime"... so malleable in response to mass... is a story like "the Emporer's New Clothes." Only idiots can't see it. It's the ultimate hypocrisy in science today.

No mathematical or velocity or superluminal speed need be applied to what need not move to be ever present. While such a supposition supervenes even need for an initiating isolated theoretical all inclusive big 'bang[' singularity as a hypothetical a point of origin; even such an singular originating coalescence required prior gravitational and space presence. Also, there are no "holes" in space and space is also not "black". Such seeming appearances result from telescopic limitations.
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Since there are no "holes"in sqace -nor would they be sustained by the tremendous pressures within galaxies- what is being observed is other than as hypothesized and widely accepted. What is deemed to be "black" seems so, because so does space so appear. However space also has no color.'The APPARENT darkness is due to telescopic equipment limitati0ns unable to detect and record the full spe4ctrum and breadth and origins of spatial antecedents and content.

@Ragtag Media #9,
With due respect,
I'll change my stance on Michael when he changes his tone, and learns to argue his point, not talk down. Elitist snobbery is for badly behaved aristocrats, not civil servants.

@CFT:

You need to take a good look at ALL your past/present comments in this blog before blaming anyone for talking you down!

You are obviously someone who see all discussions as a fight for personal honor. I am pretty sure other readers of this blog prefer FRIENDLY DISCUSSIONs instead!

@CFT #6:

I think that comment alone is good enough reason to get you banned from this blog you need to realize well!

"Scientific discussion"

"I do not think those words mean what you think they mean." - Inigo Montoya (paraphrased)

Steve Blackband,

Yesterday, in the Comments of the Week thread, you appeared to invite comments about the relationship between Science (primarily Physics in this blog) and Philosophy. So, at the risk of antagonizing those few remaining readers I have not yet irritated, the below is a brief reply. If I misinterpreted, please excuse this response.

Scientific Realism is, I think, better understood in a historical context. It originated as a response to Scientific Positivism/Empiricism, another interpretation of what distinguishes Science from other intellectual disciplines. That school of thought came about as the result of Einstein’s publishing of "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", his Special Theory of Relativity (SR) in 1905. Also published in 1905, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", Einstein determined a relationship between mass and energy.

SR and E=mc^2 were Revolutionary Science, and criticized for violating Immanuel Kant's categoric scheme that was a (if not the) contemporary philosophic world view. At that time, and to many people now, the three-dimensionality of space, Euclidean geometry, and the existence of absolute simultaneity were thought to be needed to understand Nature, and none of them should be altered by empirical findings. SR delivered a shock to physicists and to scientifically minded philosophers, and did not just point out surprising new facts, nor merely require strange new concepts. It revealed a disturbing lack of clarity within familiar concepts, such as simultaneity and length.

This sets the stage for the logical positivists/empiricists. Their goal was to build a new-and-improved version of empiricism, one that would make the philosophy and the world safe for science. The central principle of logical empiricism is that any cognitively meaningfully statement must be either analytic or a claim about experience. I shall not present an exposition of what an analytic statement might be, but if you are due for some penance, feel free to ask. Science deals with facts, hence the "claim about possible experience".

Once science is rooted in just the facts, the meaningfulness of a statement depends upon verification. By verification the positivists mean a method for finding its truth or falsehood. Since to be cognitively meaningful is to be either true or false, if there is the right sort of method for testing truth or falsehood, the statement will be meaningful.

Okay. All good, clean fun, and useful in clearing away some of the underbrush of 19th century European philosophy. Clarity uber alles, eh?

Now try to shoehorn the Bag Model of Quark Confinement into a vision limited by observation. Assuming it to be true, not only are quarks unobservable, but cannot be individually observed. Is that model of (presumed) quark confinement science, or not?

Scientific Realists find ways to relax many of the constraints which the Positivists had insisted science embrace. The Realists can then say, as the Positivists cannot, that science theorizes about quarks the same way as it theorizes about macro-sized objects. So unobservable objects are, in this philosophical POV, not second-class citizens. Of course, there’s a price to be paid. The distinctive virtues that science attained, due to its tight connection to experience are forfeited, and metaphysical possibilities made possible.

Frank #14,
A personal attack is not how you respond to an answer you think is incorrect. If you disagree, say you disagree and explain why coherently, that's all.
Michael took the first shot. I responded. Every time Michael takes a kick at me under the table, I'm going to kick back twice as hard and try to make him reconsider his clumsy approach to disagreement.
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The advice I gave him also wasn't arbitrary.
I've taken it myself.
I cleaned over 40 toilets a day when I was a teenager, I worked at a fancy hotel near Santa Barbara on the housekeeping staff, and yes it did teach humility, as I believe was my parents intention. When you come home from work exhausted and the skin on your hands is raw from having been in Brasso polish and cleaning solvent, and your back is killing you from having been bent over most of the day scrubbing and making beds, you realize this is all some people will ever know until they die, and you begin to look at the smug self-entitled folk of the world a little differently. I don't care what you know, or what your position is, If you talk down to me I'll suggest you to go scrub some toilets too. I've had to clean up after some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, quite literally, and in the process quickly lost any sense of awe I ever had with fame or celebrity. Cleaning up other people's shit does wonders for gaining perspective.

As I understand it, Einstein's General Relativity (GR) says that if our sun suddenly disappeared, it would take about 8 minutes for the lack of its gravitational effects to be felt by the Earth. However, the Sun has been in place for a long time, and it's gravitational effects have long since propagated throughout our galaxy and beyond. (As it moves with and within our galaxy the effects sweep along with that motion but so does our solar system.) (Recall that according to GR, the effects are a strong local warping of space-time that constrains the orbital motion of nearby objects. This warping may vary slightly as the Sun itself orbits the center of mass of the solar system, but a) this is not a large effe

I read at another site that the equations of GR have been used to calculate (numerically) the orbits of the planets of our solar system for the next 5 billion years, and they all stayed in the same orbits. (This assumed no outside interference.)

To continue where I was somehow interrupted:

a) this is not a significant effect compared to planet orbital radii; and b) it is a cyclic effect which is part of the existing orbits.

I will also add, there is an immense amount of evidence for GR. E.G., our GSP system would not work accurately until GR calculations were used in it.

Any premise of orig9ns need incorporate adequate inducements for such an fcvcurrence.

Any premise of origins need incorporate original inducements.
Gravity as an all pervading static state is not reasonably viewed as having once been confined singularly with space when both are diverse in function and as such not be subject to an intense coalescence, apart from some prior inducing overpowering factor. able to resolve mutual functional virtual incompatibility.

@John #16: Not irritating at all! I wish I had a good enough grounding in philosophy (and the history of philosophy) to engage in a meaningful debate. On the other hand, this is an opportunity for me to learn about stuff I have had less touch with.

You used an example to make a point that I think is not quite correct. First, in describing empiricism (which I _think_ i my own philosophical basis) you wrote, "Science deals with facts, hence the 'claim about possible experience'."

Later, using the example of the quark model, you questioned whether, in dealing with "unobservable entities," it counted as (empirical) science at all. I think this misses the point. Scientific theory deals with "unobservable entities" all the time, in many fields. Atoms, electrons, electric and magnetic fields, various energy potentials, those are all _unobservable_ in the 18th century sense of directly impinging on our senses.

The test of whether a scientific theory is empirical or not (i.e., whether it is "really science") is whether it can be used to quantitatively _predict_ observable results. QCD uses the unobservable quarks and their interactions to make definite, quantitative predictions about things like the mass of the proton, lifetimes and decay channels of various particles (yes, there's a philosophical chain of inference involved), even predicting new particle states before they were observed.

Whether the underlying invisible entities are real or not is, philosophically, an ontological problem; more pragmatically, it's a question of how well the theory actually works. We treat electric and magnetic fields as real, even though they're not directly observable to our senses, because electrodynamics works _perfectly_ every time it is applied to an observable situation, and has done so for a century and a half and counting. We treat atoms and electrons as real for the same reason. Perhaps quarks seem less real to you (and to most people) because they don't directly impact day to day life, and because QCD has only been around for fifty years?

Incompetent experts such as yourself should be cleaning toilets until you develop a semblance of humility, not advising people on anything. Now please, go pound some sand.

It's idiocy such as this that makes me happy that SWAB will cease to exist on SB (along with SB itself) at the end of the month. Enjoy Forbes, CFT.

Michael Kelsey,

"... this is an opportunity for me to learn about stuff I have had less touch with."

That's kind of you.

My (limited) exposure to physicists persuades me that philosophy and physics are seldom pursued in tandem.

In re the scientific stature of unobservables: The logical positivists were able to integrate them into Science by the use of the analytic truths which have equal standing with observables (ref prior post) in their Received View of Theories where theoretical propositions such as the bag model of quark confinement are given a partial observation interpretation by inference to their relationship to other, observable phenomena.

In contrast, you, I, and all (LOL! both) physicists I know are Popper's intellectual children.

Narad,
Look in the mirror snowflake, and then keep scrubbing. Acting snobby while blaming others is not a winning combo. You are going to have to learn to share the playground of ideas a bit, it doesn't belong to you.
.
The moment Ethan had his Forbes site, this one became an afterthought, a neglected stepchild he didn't really care about anymore, and he wanted out of. Guess why?$?

@John #24,
If you are truly Popper's intellectual children, you realize the importance of falsifiability. Inflation theory, String Theory can't be falsified, at all. Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed this out to Ethan several times...and he has agreed with her in personal discussion, but then glossed over it in his PR (things are fine) narrative on this and the Forbes site.
.
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/10/i-totally-mean-it-inflation-ne…
.

CFT,

Yes, I am comfortable with the notion that a "scientific" theory can not be proved, but it can be falsified. That criterion of falsifiability means that to be a scientific theory, the theory can and should be tested by experiment.

But what does one say about a theory that has been repeatedly tested using techniques independent of each other, and the results (observations) of those tests have been as predicted by the theory? I don’t know about you, but sooner or later I’d say it's correct, or even True, with a capital "T". I'd only start to discount its truthfulness if there started to accumulate observations that fell sufficiently far outside the theory’s prediction that they couldn’t be honestly attributed to experimental error. The first time some weird anomaly was reported, I’d go back and try to rework the observations within the theory, not instantly drop the theory, wouldn't you? Of course you would! Good physical theories are not found in the bargain bin at Walmart.

If that paragraph didn't sound vaguely familiar, it should have. Newton's law of universal gravitation produced accurate predictions for more than 200 years. When the observations (empirical tests) of the orbit of Uranus were observed to deviate from the predictions derive from that theory, first too fast and then too slow, instead of dropping the theory, in 1846 a scientist, Urbain Le Verrier, proposed the deviations could be resolved within the Newtonian theory. He suggested that the gravity of a farther, unknown planet was disturbing Uranus’orbit. He crunched the numbers (although it must have been a bitch to do back then), and Galle and d'Arrest saw Neptune where the "rethought" Newtonian theory said it was supposed to be. It wasn't until the turn of the 20th century that the illumination provided by Newtonian Physics was to be clouded by the ultraviolet catastrophe and the curious case of the missing ether.

All theories operate successfully with domains. QM, SR and GR are physical theories that are less inaccurate than Newton's. They pass many more tests. Does that make them True? Technically no, but not only are all four scientific theories, you can safely rely on them every day.

CFT,

I think you're overlooking some of Ethan's poste opinions about String Theory.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2008/04/18/on-string-theory-fro…

Factual cosmological antecedents are not entirely telescopically observable being only inferred from keen visual observations and collaborative deductions..

@John #27,
When the 'working story' you tell yourself can't be falsified, and you can just 'change it' to agree with whatever you like, you aren't going to be able to break out of your epi-cycles. This is why I don not like group-think consensus and despise the Bayesian mindset which is turning the scientific community into a self congratulatory echo-chamber of self referential paper writers.
.
There is good news for the future however:
Scientists eventually die, and someone else is going to come along who doesn't give a rat's ass about the political consensus of experts and their overly convoluted 'stories', and do something else.
.
This is what happened when a couple of bicycle builders from Ohio somehow managed to figure out what the rest of the scientific community could not.
.
Science advances one funeral at a time.

@Alby #29,
Try harder. Random word generators are only good for spam.

The detection of the gravitational waves produced by the merger of two neutron stars –GW170817– has allowed scientists to fix at 70 km/s per megaparsec * the value of the increase in speed of the expansion of the universe in the 130 million light years that separate us from the origin of said merger.
As these calculations approach the speed of light throughout the age of the universe, we can do the inverse calculation to determine the average increase in the velocity of expansion so that the observable universe is of the age stated by the Big Bang Theory.
The result is 300.000 km/s /(13.799/3,26) Mpc =70,820 km/s Mpc. https://molwick.com/en/gravitation/072-gravitational-waves.html#big-bang

Astronomy’s ‘Rosetta Stone’: Merging Neutron Stars Seen With Both Gravitational Waves And Light

esiegel — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 05:01:54 +0000

Astronomy’s ‘Rosetta Stone’: Merging Neutron Stars Seen With Both Gravitational Waves And Light

"It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics." -Martin Rees

When the Advanced LIGO detectors turned on in 2015, it shook up the world when they detected their first event: the merger of two quite massive black holes. Since that time, they’ve observed black hole-black hole mergers multiple times, with the VIRGO detector in Italy joining them for the fourth event. But this wasn’t what LIGO/VIRGO expected to see; rather, they were built to hunt for merging neutron stars that were much closer by.

Two merging neutron stars, as illustrated here, do spiral in and emit gravitational waves, but are much more difficult to detect than black holes. Hence, they can only be seen if they're close by. However, unlike black holes, they should eject a fraction of their mass back into the Universe, where it composes most of the heaviest elements we know of, and emits an electromagnetic counterpart. Image credit: Dana Berry / Skyworks Digital, Inc..

Neutron star mergers would be superior to black hole mergers in an extraordinary way: it would enable other astronomers to get in on the action. Unlike black holes, merging neutron stars should emit radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma-rays to UV/optical afterglows. On August 17th, LIGO and VIRGO saw their very first neutron star merger, pinpointing its location to galaxy NGC 4993, just 120 million light years away.

As soon as the location had been pinpointed, many of Earth's greatest observatories, including the space-based Hubble, turned towards NGC 4993 to observe it. The telltale sign of a neutron star-neutron star merger, shown above, represented the first cross-correlation between the gravitational wave and electromagnetic sky. Image credit: P.K. Blanchard / E. Berger / Harvard-CfA / HST.

For the first time, we’ve joined the gravitational wave and light-based skies together with an incredible event. It’s a glorious step forward. And it’s just the beginning.

esiegel Mon, 10/16/2017 - 01:01

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When two neutron stars have been circling each other for 11 billion years, what is the relative velocity of their "collision" when they do collide? Is their collision more kinetic or quantum in nature?

And the PR machinery keeps on rolling on …

So a week before the Nobel prize they make the announcement; then there's the prize; and now a week later we get to see these 'Rosetta' results, from an event that happend almost exactly 2 months ago.

Anyway it looks fine, but what are the chances of seeing a flash within such a giant region on a particular day?

An other thing I found odd was in a video they showed;
http://content.jwplatform.com/previews/2ZE9NAox-coeAxn20
That the scientists apparently hadn't seen a signal like this before, this seems a bit weird, in it.

Dear Dr. Siegel,

Thank you for educating people about technology on Coast to Coast last night and in your book. You stated last night that you were concerned about a technology that can implant memories, and effect the body, including the loss of sight. Please tell me what kind of technology that is, so that I can research it further.

Thank you,
Gail Farley
Ytilaer8040@outlook.com

Incredible.
So what is the expected frequency of these events, or rather of these events being close enough to observe the gravitational waves as well as the electromagnetic output? I'm betting the astronomers are thanking their lucky stars that we were so fortunate.

So some questions, for those who don't have the time, understanding and/or access to the papers.
(1) What is the estimate of the NS masses?
(2) How did they come up with the age of the NS system?
(3) What is the estimated rate of mergers per cube a billion light years on a side?
(4) If both NS are near the minimum mass of a NS, can we get a NS rather than BH.
(5) Do we expect of significant gamma-ray burst from a BH NS merger?

@Omega Centauri #5: None of the LIGO papers or press releases are behind paywalls. They are all open access. Some of the 70+ optical counterpart papers may be behind paywalls; I haven't plowed through them yet.

Why don't you start with the Wikipedia article? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW170817 The links therein will be to non-paywalled writeups.

1) About a solar mass each.
2) Use PSR B1913+16.
3) Not as high as for BH mergers.
4) Yes.
5) Yes.

If you want justifications for any of those answers, go read the non-paywalled papers.

5 NASA Photos That Changed The World

esiegel — Fri, 13 Oct 2017 05:00:50 +0000

5 NASA Photos That Changed The World

"Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow. Science has been greatly successful at explaining natural processes, and this has led not only to increased understanding of the universe but also to major improvements in technology and public health and welfare." -National Academy of Sciences

It’s no secret that peering out into the distant Universe is best done from space, just as looking at our entire world is best done from that same vantage point. For all of human history until the mid-20th century, this was an utter impossibility. But thanks to advances in rocketry, and how NASA managed to put space technology together, we now have views of everything from our home planet to the deepest recesses of the Universe that have taught us lessons we never could have imagined.

This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed 'Pale Blue Dot', is a part of the first ever 'portrait' of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. The spacecraft acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic. From Voyager's great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera. Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Image credit: NASA / JPL.

From the most distant galaxies to a distant view of Earth, all the way back to the youngest baby picture of the Universe ever taken, NASA has been with us throughout every step of the journey. As we peer ever deeper into the abyss and put not just the cosmic story but our place in it into perspective, it’s important to periodically look back at the beautiful but science-rich images that helped shape our view of what all this is actually about.

The full UV-visible-IR composite of the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field; the greatest image ever released of the distant Universe. Image credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI).

Come see the five NASA photos that changed the world, and see if your list of five would be any different. (I bet it would be!)

esiegel Fri, 10/13/2017 - 01:00

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I have a bone to pick with the person that named Bill Anders Apollo 8 photo "Earthrise". They clearly did not understand the mechanics of the Earth-Moon system.

The Earth does not "rise" on the Moon. I wonder how many people realize that if you lived on the Moon the Earth would hang in the same spot in the sky eternally. It would go through phases like the Moon does, but it would never change its position.

The only reason that Anders saw the Earth "rise" is because his craft was orbiting the Moon at the time.

To refer to the Earth "rising" from the Moon is just wrong.

I don’t know about the other pictures, but “Earthrise” and the “Pillars of Creation” are #1 & #2 in my book!

Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first pictures of 'earth rise'. Sadly grainier BW was dismissed by color in the publics imagination, or by the fact it was taken by a man. So I guess the Apollo ones fit better in the 'change the world' category.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_1

Still, in terms of 'change the world', Galileos first sketches (OK not images but still) I think deserve to be at the very top of this list.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/2009/02/25/our-solar-system-galileos-…

Oh poop. I just realized you said NASA photos. OK, nix last comment.

Well, the Sun does not rise on the Earth either, if you want to be pedantic.

IMO all astro photo's ever taken are equally important. We learn our craft from seeing the results of a session with a camera-on-telescope. Next time, what we learned, gets applied to the new session. Progress. As technology improves, we get better again.
Yes, we have improved over time, but that is inevitable. Our nature to be better at what we do is always there.

An interesting story to note about the "pale blue dot" image. Sagan had to struggle to get approval to do that picture, because there was no science value in taking that image. And even when the picture was made, at first it seemed like a dud.. just one pixel among many. It was only after Sagan put it in context of his now famous paragraphs, that;s us.. the only home we've ever known.." did it start to sink in. And really sink in :)

Sure is difficult to pin it down to five, especially in terms of 'changed the world'.
This was also a big one for me and popular impact.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/576200main_s84-27017_fu…

As was this (even though, according to Armstrongs own autobiography, it wasn't the first footstep).
https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/138157main_footstep.jpg

And in terms of 'changed the world', tragically, this one.
http://a.abcnews.com/images/Technology/GTY_Challenger_Explosion_ER_1601…

Wahoo. My copy of Treknology arrives wednesday. Thats the rest of the week gone!!

Here is my nominee:
http://hubblesite.org/image/1415/news_release/2003-28

Missing Matter Found, But Doesn’t Dent Dark Matter (Synopsis)

esiegel — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 05:03:26 +0000

Missing Matter Found, But Doesn’t Dent Dark Matter (Synopsis)

"There are stars leaving the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it." -Carl Sagan

It’s no secret that if we look at the matter we see in the Universe, the story doesn’t add up. On all scales, from individual galaxies to pairs, groups and clusters of galaxies, all the way up to the large-scale structure of the Universe, the matter we see is insufficient to explain the structures we get. There has to be more matter, both normal (atom-based) matter and dark (non-interacting) matter, to make our theory and predictions match.

Constraints on dark energy from three independent sources: supernovae, the CMB and BAO. Note that even without supernovae, we’d need dark energy, and that only 1/6th of the matter found can be normal matter; the rest must be dark matter. Image credit: Amanullah, et al., Ap. J. (2010).

In a wonderful new pair of papers, two independent teams have detected the warm-hot intergalactic medium along the large-scale structure filaments in the Universe. With six times the normal matter density, this accounts for a significant fraction of the missing normal matter in the Universe! It’s estimated that 50-90% of the baryons in the Universe are part of the WHIM, and this could be the first step towards detecting them. But it doesn’t touch or change the dark matter at all; we still need it and still don’t have it.

The warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM) has been seen before, but only along incredibly overdense regions, like the Sculptor wall, illustrated above. Image credit: Spectrum: NASA/CXC/Univ. of California Irvine/T. Fang. Illustration: CXC/M. Weiss.

esiegel Tue, 10/10/2017 - 01:03

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"Neutral atoms formed when the Universe was a mere 380,000 years old; after hundreds of millions of years, the hot, ultraviolet light from those early stars hits those intergalactic atoms. When it does, those photons get absorbed, kicking the electrons out of their atoms entirely, and creating an intergalactic plasma: the warm-hot intergalactic medium (WHIM)."

So the UV light from earliest stars keeping the intergalactic gas hot (and does it perfectly for all gas atoms somehow).

But how it is possible that UV light photons stayed same after billions of years of expansion of universe?

I have a really crazy idea on this WHIM which maybe a better explanation though:
What if WHIM is no ordinary gas?
What if WHIM is an effect similar to Hawking Radiation?

What if spacetime is created by virtual particles as an emergent property?

What if Gravitational Fields are polarization of spacetime?
(Where positive curvature indicates probabilities of positive energy/mass virtual particles are higher in that region and negative curvature indicates probabilities of negative energy/mass virtual particles are higher in that region.)

In case of WHIM, imagine Dark Matter particles increase probabilities of positive energy/mass virtual particles and we observe it as hot gas.

Imagine any (+/-) unbalanced probabilities for virtual particles, on the path of light rays, act like different gas mediums that change the local refractive index, so the light rays bend.

And in case of BHs, imagine probabilities of positive energy/mass virtual particles increase so much nearby, some of those particles turn real, that we could observe as Hawking Radiation.

missing mass problem for Dark Matter, or Dark Energy. I suggest both arise from a (Sub-)Quantum Effect, a prediction from a theory more general than Quantum Physics as we know it today. The basic idea is that there is something one should know as the “Quantum Interaction”, and it proceeds at a finite speed.

The “Quantum Interaction” would be the Entanglement speed and the Collapse speed. Over cosmological distances, it leaves remnants: Dark Matter. It also weakens gravitation over cosmic distances, accelerating the universe.

Some will scoff. However, basic ideas in physics can be simple.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

I just realized if my ideas about true nature of spacetime and gravitational fields (stated above) are correct then it would mean Casimir Force actually can be thought as creating artificial gravity, like in Star Trek for example. :-)

A generic comment on "what if" 'science':
What if pigs could fly? It would be one of infinitely "possible" "universes.' (Excuse my excessive quotes. It's all imaginary except that the Universe is "one verse.")

Ducking pig shit or having a good umbrella would be ordinary reality in that "universe."
But scientifically speaking.... just kidding.

I am guessing if positive spacetime curvature slows down time then negative should speed it up. Then if Casimir Force is creating spacetime curvature, and since we can make it negative in the lab, then we can make time move faster, and it maybe measurable in the lab.

"Missing Matter Found, But Doesn’t Dent Dark Matter"

Translation into scientific realism:
We found more normal matter but we still have no idea what else we can not yet detect which might generate gravitational force to explain our astronomical observations.

Might be that it's normal (baryonic) matter that our excellent equipment is still not able to detect. (Instrumentalists would hate to admit that.)

@Michael Mooney #10,
I was thinking along similar lines. If the stats were off before, and every time they improve instrumentation they discover more things, (in the early 20th century they thought the size of the universe pretty much was our galaxy) what compels some to keep making definitive statements of certainty and creating models based on such very limited information? I'd think some would start saying, 'save your breath until the fat lady sings.' While I can understand people want to understand the proportional make up of the universe, I keep asking "how do you know how much of it you are looking at to base your proportions on?" Unless you know big something is, saying 50%, 20% etc, is meaningless. Until that is known, all guesses, and they are just guesses, should be tempered with prudence. I would suggest blatantly keeping all estimations always within only what has been measured, and be very clear about what that encompasses at the time the calculation is made. This would then start to provide a precise time lapse record of how much scientific estimations change with new data.

I wonder if we could use sheets of Graphene like Casimir Plates and stack them as countless layers to create a multiplied Casimir Force generator. Then we could also add a strong electric and/or magnetic field to amplify that force.
Would a device like that could create human weight level strong artificial gravity field?

And of course "What if pigs could fly?"
Thanks for reminding us this big question MM.
I don't think I know the right answer.
I think you always bring joy to this website and keep it alive.
I apologize if I ever hurt your feelings.
I always indicate when I am just kidding.

@Frank #12,
Pretend you get what you want, I call this the god game. Give yourself whatever you want, but afterwards roll with the punches of consequences that follow. If you could produce a machine that generated gravity in a small localized area, what else do you think might happen?
.
If the gravity was generated at small location, everything would be drawn to this small location, not very suitable for walking around, unless your ship was built like an onion, layers within layers. If the field could somehow be put into the flooring, this would created a problem too, as unless the field was very small, people on the deck below would be pulled upwards into their 'ceiling'. If you put the same effect on each deck, you would be pulled upwards and downwards at the same time....this doesn't sound very practical for normal human movement either. Also, gravity has the effect of pulling something down towards the source, but would this not cause all kinds of stresses on your space ship structure as well? You might be much better off just using centrifugal force in large spinning sections, and magnet shoes in areas where that wasn't practical, it might save an awful lot of engineering headaches.

@CFT #13,
Imagine you made bricks of artificial gravity generators.
Imagine a spaceship (or spacestation) with a single floor of those bricks. Imagine the crew walks on top and bottom of that single floor (upside-down to each other). So you have a kind of symmetric (up-down) 2 floor internal spaceship design.

Also what if those brick can also create artificial anti-gravity?
(Wikipedia says we can generate both attracting or repelling Casimir Force.)

If that is possible, imagine each floor of spaceship is 2 layer of bricks. Top layer generates gravity, bottom layer generates anti-gravity. People on top feels downward force of gravity but people on the lower floor does not feel upward force of gravity, because the anti-gravity layer (which they are closest) cancels out total gravity to zero for them.

I wonder what would happen if we somehow created artificial gravity in front of a spaceship and artificial anti gravity in the back? Could that cause the spaceship to move forward faster and faster, like keep falling in a gravity well?

@Frank #15,
Interesting concept, but I'm not sure you even can have something that is only gravitational on one side (I know of no examples in reality), that sounds more like electro magnetism than gravity.
.
At the risk of bursting your balloon, trying to make spaceships and stations like horizontal office buildings may just not be in the cards of possibility.

If we can create artificial anti-gravity, I think it could be also useful as a shield in space, against space dust etc.

There is evidence of the strongly interacting dark matter every time a double slit experiment is performed, as it is what waves.

Again, MM and CFT, you show your lack of understanding. The "missing matter" discussed in this post is normal matter. We know from real, actual observations of how things gravitate that we were not seeing all of the normal matter that exists. This WHIM is at least some of that missing normal matter.

We know also, again from real observations, that either one of two things must be true. Either there is matter out there that is not normal, baryonic matter, but rather must have certain properties and interactions -- this is known as dark matter. The alternative is that our models of gravity are wrong, i.e. we need to come up with a modified version of the laws of gravity -- this is known in the physics community as Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND.

How do we determine which alternative is correct? Contrary to what you guys seem to think, it is NOT just assumed that our current theory of gravity is correct and that there must be dark matter. The various flavors of MOND have indeed been given careful consideration. In general, these were designed to account for galactic rotational anomalies, and it's unsurprising that they do better than dark matter at explain galactic rotational speeds. However, these MOND models are atrocious at all other scales, whereas dark matter does very well at all other scales.

Does this mean that dark matter is right and MOND is wrong? Maybe, but not necessarily. If you still think MOND is the answer, then it's incumbent on you to come up with a new version of MOND that accounts for observations on ALL scales better than dark matter can. If you (or anyone else) can do so, then MOND will supplant dark matter and we will reject the idea of dark matter. If not, then dark matter is the best idea currently available, and it is the model that most physicists will continue to investigate further.

Dark matter fills 'empty' space and is displaced by ordinary matter. What are mistaken for dark matter filaments is actually the state of displacement of the dark matter.

Galaxy clusters move through and displace the strongly interacting dark matter, analogous to a caravan of submarines moving through and displacing the water.

@ Frank re: cassimir effect vs gravity

Cassimir effect is not similar to gravity. There is no "attraction" between the plates. Instead (as understood) it is vacuum energy pushing the plates because the number of modes outside is greater then the number of modes between the plates. No matter how large of cassimir apparatus you build, it still doesn't effect anything outside of plates themselves. Thus, bricks based on anything relating to cassimir effect would just contract themselves and nothing significant would happen.

For gravity. you need mass or energy. Super large amounts. In principle, if you could build a mega dynamo machine, that generates massive amounts of energy, that would cause it to bend spacetime and thus act as gravitational source to things nearby. Anti-gravity is a completely different beast, I don't know how that would work... even in theory. A dark-energy powered machine maybe.

What if Planck particle is the smallest and Dark Matter particle is the biggest size/energy particle of the Universe?

More on Ethan's "un-dented" dark matter, from Axil's link on the "kill list" post.
From the New Scientist, Leah crane, Oct, '17:
"Two separate teams found the missing matter – made of particles called baryons rather than dark matter – linking galaxies together through filaments of hot, diffuse gas."

New Scientist, Sabine Hossenfelder and Naomi Lubic, '15:
"Strangely familiar: Is dark matter normal stuff in disguise?...
***Dreaming up new particles to explain the universe’s missing mass has got us nowhere.*** Great clumps of quarks stuck together in weird ways could do the trick." (My *** emphasis.)

@ cft #11 the same thought has occurred to me. i believe we are only seeing .000001% of the actual whole multi universe universe

(Still here for now.)
@CFT #11:
" Unless you know (how) big something is, saying 50%, 20% etc, is meaningless."
This point has always been obvious to me too. I wonder how such a simple, basic truth keeps eluding instrumentalist mathematicians like Ethan.... The pretense of knowing more than is known... and the math to "prove it."

Same with the possibility of a perpetually oscillating, "bang/crunch" universe. If the time scale of such a two phase cycle is beyond our ability to measure, the cosmology is discarded. (Hey, it's still expanding at an accelerating rate!... so that one is impossible, they say.)

Star Trek: Discovery Is Smart-Sounding Scientific Nonsense, Season 1, Episode 4 Recap

esiegel — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 07:03:39 +0000

Star Trek: Discovery Is Smart-Sounding Scientific Nonsense, Season 1, Episode 4 Recap

"You were always a good officer. Until you weren't." -Saru, from Star Trek: Discovery

Science is full of great ideas and brilliant discoveries, and some of those more recent ones have made their way into the popular consciousness. TED talks, popular blogs and online magazines, and Facebook pages and internet memes have helped disseminate bits of knowledge to millions. But how much of what's come through is actually worth knowing, versus how much is simply science-sounding buzzwords that's content-free?

Outside the event horizon of a black hole, General Relativity and quantum field theory are completely sufficient for understanding the physics of what occurs; that is Hawking radiation. Image credit: NASA.

As we dive deeper into the world of Star Trek: Discovery, that's what I fear we're looking at: the IFLS of a Star Trek series. Invented terms an misinterpreted legitimate science is the norm now, as though no one could be bothered to speak with a science consultant. It's like the filming/script-writing crew is suffering from the same myopia as the crew of the Discovery: unable to look beyond of their own, bull-headed path.

In the early 21st-century, we've successfully mapped out practically all the stars in our neighborhood in three-dimensional space. Somehow, we're to expect that starfleet doesn't have vastly improved maps of star systems and black holes hundreds of years in the future. Image credit: Richard Powell / Atlas of the Universe.

The terms may sound smart, but this is jumping from science fiction into science fantasy, and leaving morality behind.

esiegel Mon, 10/09/2017 - 03:03

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"Black Alert" sounds like something the Wayans Brothers would put on a Star Trek send up.

Shame to hear the reviews. While I'm not paying for access, I did hope the series would be good and not Star Trek: then Next Cancellation.

Crikey when you read your summary you wonder how the hell this got approved.
Yet again everyone was dumb, and don't forget the angry dumbass who took on the water bear and got sliced was the SECURITY officer!!
As to water bear driven space travel with spores all I can think is Dune and the spice. This is not Star Trek.

And the Captain, who has a drive that doesn't work yet and could take them anywhere uses it to jump? Really?

And the hsip, which Ive said many times now I hate with the rings and people peering at each other through the windows and the horrible triangle hull. In this episode the rings rotated in opposite directions but only when they jumped. Whats that for? And if they are only needed when they jump, and they didn't know how the spore drive worked, how did they know they would need it and build the ship like that? Or do they fulfill another function we haven't seen? And what of the people in the spinning disks? I suppose we are supposed to think the artificial gravity and inertial dampers take car of that. How do you cross from the ring to another part of the ship when its spinning since internship beaming is not safe (though we used it again this week)? Yuk.

Orville ep 4 however was another hoot, and Charlize Theron was in it - Mcfarlane got to write a script where he has to kiss her - oh the pain. We had a dark matter storm, a couple of things i won't say as they are spoilers, a good running joke on practical jokes, and jealousy affecting command decisions. Just realized they have quantum drive and tractor beams, but NO transporters (but they will have in the distant future). (I hope you know the transporters, probably the hardest part of Trek, were originally devised to save money so they didn't have to film ships landing). They even had a crashing into the sun scene not as good as Trek in effects but more fun. AND this episode was directed by Johnathon Frakes and you can tell. AND Seths wife in real life is the voice of the computer.

Yet again the Orville beat ST. I am so sad.

As to water bear driven space travel with spores all I can think is Dune and the spice. This is not Star Trek.

Herbert wrote Dune in 1965 (and as you say, it's a different sub-genre of sci fi). So I think completely missing the boat on the capability of 21st century astronomy can be forgiven.

Granted he might still have been behind the times; even in 1965, I doubt physicists would have agreed with the premise that relativistic non-simultenaity makes it impossible to predict where other systems are at any given local time t.

Yea yea. It was the 60s.
To conquer space travel you have to get high. OK. Dude. Cool. Live long and procreate.

But back then i was reading Asimov, Aldiss, Niven and Clarke. Non of this bullshit!!!

And in terms of what Star Trek did, wow, then there is Blade Runner. The old and the new. Wow.
It is a slow film, but you need to have that to get into what happened to Ryans character.
And Harrisons.
I cried.
But I cry real easy.
More human than human.
We all need to be that. We really do.

Hey Ethan,
I didn't miss of course your not so subtle plea to be science advisor for Star trek.
Forget it.
How about you write your own real science based fiction novel?
I am sure you have thought about it.
With this web site you won't be lacking for help. :-)

If you don't like it, don't watch, or read. Write your own, then we can judge your views. It IS fiction, after all. It is a bed for ideas upon which we gain an understanding of where we want to be in our future.
By the way, Rippers nose(mouth) is reminisce of the star nosed mole of Canada.
Since the series is a lead-in to Kirks time, it can only become more comfortable as the series progresses. After all, this is only episode 4.
Enjoy it.
:)

Really. If you don't like it don't watch it? How you gonna know if you don't like it till you watch it?
I am a die hard ST fan of 50 years - what the hell are you talking about?
ST changed America, Europe, maybe the world. Not in 'reality' of course (its a TV show you know that right?). But in our mindset,. Our hopes. Our humanity.
For real. I am not making this up.
Please don't patronize me. I don't even know you,
Express an opinion but leave me alone.
Star Trek was groundbreaking. This show is not. I borrows. They can do so much better. It needs visionary writers like DC Fontana.
Not commercially driven studio hacks.
Any more than real research in the USA need business men telling them what to do.

Yea. That was a sore point. Sorry.

Did you catch Wallace this last few days? Given up on research since his last few grants had, as he put it, their 'lungs ripped out'.

And then he gets a Nobel.

This is messed up.

Read this, especially his last few paragraphs,
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(07)02369-X

The link, as written, does not go anywhere. Perhaps one has to sign up first??
Oh, I didn't address you personally, SB. I'll see your 50 years, and add another 14 of my own.
As I wrote earlier, it will be interesting to see how they blend into Kirks era.

@Ethan

Troll

It's a fiction no need to keep on hammering on.

The idea of the spores and this sub-creature knowing it's way through the underground is quite fascinating. One of the coolest concepts I've seen in a while. It makes me think of the portals in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I thought Dune was actually about a lot more than drug use. It was very provocative because it explored the idea of human progress and what that does or does not mean. The characters in Dune struggle with the fact they don't agree at all what perfection is, or how it should be expressed, or what the role between people and power should be. When one group finally gets their fondest wish and creates what they thought was the perfect superhuman, it turns on them, refusing to be used as their weapon, and enslaves them instead. The entity eventually goes mad when the ability to see the future locks it into a destiny it can't change, the price of actually knowing the future is the inability to change it and having to be captive to it as it plays out.
.
Most people don't know the fascinating backstory to Dune, in which humanity at one time did have utopia-like space faring civilization (like the federation), then got lazy, created artificial intelligences that dwarfed human ability, and they in turn enslaved humanity as pets. The humans managed to take their own freedom back eventually, but had to pay a heavy cost, they were forced to eschew computers and self aware technology above a certain level of sophistication so they wouldn't ever become sentient again. Making a self aware 'machine' in Dune is one of the highest crimes...next to creating artificial life or resurrecting the dead, all of which they have the capacity to do, but are culturally inculcated never to do. To compensate for this loss in computing capability, two divergent groups evolved to fill the void, the Mentats, male living human computers entirely devoted to pure logic and mathematics, and the Bene Gesserit, female bio-engineers who decided superhuman intuition and psychic abilities via genetic manipulation were the key to supremacy. Between the two groups was the spacer's guild, humans mutated into near monsters by the use of a drug that allowed their minds to perceive space and time differently, and somehow change it, basically much like the 'jump drive' from STD. This was combined with the feudal system of government expressed through 'houses' (like game of thrones), which were then ruled by an Emperor who with the vital help of the Bene Gesserit and Mentats and Spacing Guild managed to keep the worlds in communication and commerce with each other, while managing sanctioned wars between houses as almost chess like ritualistic sport to prevent humanity from ever being destroyed by uncontrolled violence. I actually learned a lot about western and eastern civilizations by examining many of these ideas and examining their historical origins. This is science fiction world building at its finest.
.
When I was young, I always assumed the future would be more democratic or socialistic, and much more clean, polished and shiny looking, with machines doing everything (pretty much George Jetson). Frank Herbert turned this idea on its head by going back to the grittiness of actual history and realizing this is usually not the case, human civilizations flourish then collapse and people forget the past very quickly, most people never consider how much of their lives is unquestioning acceptance, democracies tend to be highly unstable long term, and are relatively short lived in almost all precedent. Good science fiction should do more than entertain, it should wake you up to look around and think about it.

The Dune omnibus is the best sc-fi epic I have ever read! Yes, I love ST and SW and Asimov and Clarke and everything else, but Dune is something else. The amount of wisdom and social observations that are present in Dune books, I haven't found anywhere else. Tolkien comes close in terms of scope of the world. But Dune goes beyond. There are passages in Dune, that just make you stop and think about yourself, humans, politics, philosophy, etc. An incredible piece of writing!

“The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred.”

Troll !!!!
My first time. I guess i asked for that.

With this I am going to stop commenting at all in this forum on Star Trek and stay with real science.I am not being understood. Of course its fiction - but its special to me and my trolls. I am clearly too emotionally involved and hold ST to too high a standard for my own good - my wife at least, that poor soul, understands this ;-). I am the physicist/astronomy nutcase that pushed Neil Armstrong out of the way to get to Nichelle Nichols after all. Very embarrassing.
Yes Dune was a lot more than spice, but the idea of a drug based or mushroom spore based space drive teeters off the edge of any real joy of imagination or creativity rooted even a tiny bit in the real world. Its lazy. Its not much to ask that the idea inspires rather than wanders off in to Harry Potter land where anything can be a magical talisman. Its like making it rain on Dune. It looks like Michael is going to lead a crisis of conscience using the cuddly water bear as a space drive for moral reasons. OK. But the Klingons, maybe Romulans and certainly the Ferengi wouldn't stop using a drive that can take you anywhere in the universe in an instant. What power. The needs for ships at all would become obsolete. Water bears would be more precious than dilithium. The human batteries of Matrix. So if the Federation chooses not to use it for moral reasons, well, they would quickly become insignificant if not extinct. And thats where forward thinking sic-fi that has a strongly established cannon bitterly disappoints, ESPECIALLY in a prequel (why oh why - sniff sniff).
For me anyway.
And that a comedy is standing up to cannon better than the real (fictional, I know) thing. At least Abrahams understood. Lord I hope these Discovery clowns don't get to make a movie.
At least my oh so precious Blade Runner hasn't bee violated. What a joy that sequel was - talk about the human condition! Ryan's characters emotional roller coaster - well - no spoilers here.
With that, signing off on ST. (Still gonna watch it :-)

Weird on the Wallace article - I can see it and so can my colleagues who sent it.
Heres the link to the pdf instead. He says some terse things about funding and the increasingly sad condition of our universities these days. And i cannot disagree.
http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(07)02369-X.pdf

#14,

"the idea of a drug based or mushroom spore based space drive teeters off the edge of any real joy of imagination or creativity rooted even a tiny bit in the real world. Its lazy."

It's not lazy, it is a lack of imagination from your part.

Let's imagine the spores and the critter have a kind of metabolism that converts their Proton-shaped bodies, into a kind of particle that is 'superfluid', like how you could turn a 'dead' copper-wire into a magnet, by just twisting it into a coil and run a current through it generating a magnetic field.

Let's say those spores and the animal can solder all quarks thanks to a unique mechanism into an invisible state or code that can flow through sub-gravitational pathways.

Think of SpaceTime as a foam were waves ripple through, from bubble to bubble at a slow steady pace; but how on the other hand electricity can run just right through the edges, at a speed that is a billions time faster; or how our nerves-cells work, sending fast electrick pulses through our solid body vs. our heartbeat at 60 bps.

What you need to ask from your imagination is, what SpaceTime is made off?

Oh Elle. You're winding me up aren't you :-)

And in terms of what Star Trek did, wow, then there is Blade Runner.

Philip K. Dick's writing was more weird and psychedelic than Herbert's (or Roddenberry's screenplays). Valis is probably the go-to example. Yes they've adapted a couple of his stories into very mainstream movies, but claiming Dick had his head on straighter than Herbert...I'd say not by a longshot. Dick saw visions. Literally. He wrote autobiographically about it.

@eric wrote:

Philip K. Dick’s writing was more weird and psychedelic than Herbert’s (or Roddenberry’s screenplays)

Philip K Dick was also paranoid. In that way he was the 180 degree opposite of Roddenberry. GR wanted to see the state as benevolent while PKD had a deep mistrust for all authority. It is that mistrust of authority that seems to resonate with modern audiences. No one now puts total faith into our government, or the press, or corporations. The studios couldn't license PKD's stuff fast enough while CBS seems to have given up on Roddenberry's original vision in producing this darker interpretation.

#17,

"Oh Elle. You’re winding me up aren’t you ?"

Now this is awkward …

Wow, finally watched the fourth episode! What a mess.

@Ethan: Great review! Especially calling them out for the Hawking Radiation Firewall and the obviously chair shaped device that was somehow a great mystery.

@CFT: Great recap of Dune's backstory!

@ Steve Blackband: Good point about the weird spinning ship parts!

The mention of the Glenn running into a Hawking Radiation Firewall was hilarious! I'm glad Ethan pointed out how foolish that was. It's easy to say, 'Wouldn't they be more worried about the black hole in that case?' but clearly the writers were using a random science term generator or something.

Here are some of the other problems I had with the episode, in no particular order.

Science (other than the 'firewall')

The first would be the first time the Discovery jumped, they accidentally showed up next to what they claimed was a type O star. But the star was yellow! A quick trip to Wikipedia would have cleared that up for the writers.

Speaking of which, if they can't aim their ship and their destination is based on probability, wouldn't it be much more likely that they would get stranded in the middle of nowhere?

The Discovery:

When they tried to get away from the star, they were 'caught in the gravity well'. Seriously? Those ships can get away from black holes! I think the writers, and therefor the ships crew, all forgot they have warp drives!

When we start the episode, the bridge crew (and no-one else on the ship) are deep within a battle simulation (which just amounts to a video game). They are up against multiple simulated klingon ships (probably birds of prey, although they mostly look like flying triangles when they're in motion), and for some reason the captain isn't helping them, he's letting each station act independently, which is odd by itself. The bridge crew is just babbling to each other while the captain berates them, his advice boiling down to 'shoot them, and keep shooting them until they blow up'. Seems pretty reasonable to me, considering this version of Star Trek doesn't believe in flight maneuvers and so on, but why wouldn't the crew already know this? Is this their first simulation? Is this a green crew? Why wasn't the first officer involved?

Then captain berates the bridge crew again for not considering their ship's ability to teleport itself during their failed simulation, reminding them that they will be able to get to a war time hot spot before anyone else, and so will be alone. Yet this capability wasn't a part of the simulation at all!

Later, when the ship manages to teleport itself above the imperiled mining colony, the captain fires a few shots at the wee klingon ships, then just has his ship sit there, taking fire and damage, just so that he can trick the enemy ships into flying directly at them, and he can drop some unidentified bombs and use the fungus drive to jump away, leaving the ships to be blown up by the bombs. This was a trick he clearly had in mind from the start, but didn't bother telling his crew about. It was also pretty foolish, because they could have just used their regular weapons to blow them up and not damage the ship on purpose. I thought the whole point was to use the fungus drive to pop up behind them or something, not act as a sitting duck! Their ship is not designed for that!

As the Discovery jumps away, the captain makes a quip, something like 'lets give them something to remember'... then leaves no survivors. How does that make sense?

Speaking of which, where did these space mines come from? One of the other science bays? This is something we've never seen before in Star Fleet!

I wonder if ship repairs will even come up, or if the ship will be magically repaired the next time we see it? Is... Is the ship itself an action star? Is this a flesh wound?

One last thing: all of this goes down just above the settlement itself, and I mean directly above and at a low altitude. Not only do they let off this giant triple-ship destroying explosion way too close to the base they're supposedly trying to save, but the pieces of the destroyed ships start to rain down on the colony as well! We cut away as as the residents stare at the falling flaming wreckage. I hope that admiral who sent them there gives him a scathing report.

The Genital Fungus Beast:

So, okay, it's a space tardigrade now. It's a cute cuddly water bear genital fungus beast who can absolutely still tear through the walls of a ship, can tear the bones right out of people with it's clawed tentacles, and is unphazed by phaser fire. It acts like an animal, but somehow has a brain that acts like a supercomputer. It's as if the cute Bone Vampire from Futurama was crossed with a Star Wars astromech droid.

Last episode, the presence of the beast was a secret, but now he shows Michael like it's no big deal, and later Michael shows Saru the First Officer, and her roommate, and the doctor's aren't shocked by the specifics of the Chief of Security's death, so I guess all that secrecy wasn't necessary.

The captain shows Michael the beast, in what is clearly meant to be some kind of jump scare. However, we've seen the beast there already, so it isn't surprising to us, the audience. Then, Michael's reaction is subdued, because of her vulcan training (it isn't a klingon after all), so there's no way to be shocked by proxy. This was a failed scene.

The captain tells Michael to weaponize the beast. Shouldn't she be aghast at this? The captain sold her on the whole idea of staying with the ship by telling her that she'd be working on the fungus drive, after all.

Michael and the Chief of Security mostly attempt to weaponize the beast by staring at it in a darkened room, then looking at a wireframe picture of it like they're stuck in the 80's. Really? They could at least use a tricorder on it!

The Chief of Security eventually decides she's going to knock the beast out with drugs, then shoot it with a phaser to cut pieces off of it for further study. Three things here: First, she foolishly doesn't bother checking to see if the thing's out first, despite Michael bringing it up. It's not like they can just look, it's dark in there! Second, she's clearly forgotten that phasers don't work on it. Third, she and Michael both seem to have forgotten that their ship computers can alter the force fields to put holes in them! She could have just called up a small hole (too small for a tentacle, obviously), and shot through that.

The Chief of Security was killed by the beast just so Michael could figure out it was afraid of light. But why? It's food glows! That doesn't make any sense.

The genial genital fungus beast is trapped in some kind of holding cell, but how? As far as we know, only the end of the tunnel it's in is a force field, and we know it can tear through hardened safety shield doors, but we're left to guess for ourselves what the cell's walls are made from, and therefor why their security doors aren't made from the same stuff.

On top of that, we learn how the beast got on to the Glenn - it fungus teleported itself in, in search of food, in the form of spare fungus spores they were keeping in their hold! We know the beast can still fungus teleport, because it teleports the ship. We also know that force fields don't hinder it, because it does it from inside a force field anyway. Long story short, there seems to be no reason the beast can't leave at any time under it's own power. At the very least, they could have kept losing it and finding it again in their fungus forest, which would have been a good clue.

Michael befriends the beast by bringing it some spores to eat. (Stolen? Maybe, I guess! Also, seems like a bad move to trust this thing... she should have just teleported the spores in there, or tossed it through the force field really quickly, or pushed them through a small hole in the force field, or maybe used the air handling system to do it as with the knockout gas earlier. This is so poorly written!) Anyway, she releases the spores into the air, they form a cloud, and the beast makes some weird chomping motions randomly in the air. This was both really poor CGI (was it two entirely separate CGI bits that fail to interact?) as well as poor creature design. Shouldn't it be inhaling the spores somehow?

Later, after Michael has sort of befriended the beast, she finally realizes that it's supposed to be clamped into the machine that they found in the Glenn (which they somehow installed, hooked in, powered up, and so on without knowing what it was or what it did) and she's concerned about it's feelings. That's great and all... but then why doesn't she dim the lights? Later, after basically torturing the beast (twice), Michael is shocked that it doesn't like her anymore. What was she expecting?

It was also weird how the Chief Science Officer described the interface with the beast, specifying that a map of all space currently cataloged by the Federation was in the beast's brain, presented in an easy to use visual display. Wouldn't that be more of a clue that the map came from the device?

Don't they all feel silly now that they blew up the Glenn, now that they know there was only the one beast on there? You know, if the beast was so easy to capture that they eventually did it off screen (still don't know how, especially considering their continual screw-ups), there was no reason they couldn't have downloaded all their computer logs first (a tried and true Star Trek trope), salvaged the valuable components from it (wait, they must have at least gone back to get the beast chair equipment!), or just towed it back to space dock as a valuable ship for the ongoing war!

Michael's inheritance:

Okay, so at some point the Discovery, while on a super secret mission, gets a delivery: Some sort of carrying case that she inherited from her former Captain. It's all very sad, since she mutinied against her in the first episode and is responsible for her death. When she finally opens it, we discover that it contains the old-timey (we don't actually know if it's an antique or a new replica) optical telescope they were using on the old ship! This is absolutely ridiculous because it means that that thing was salvaged from the abandoned ship, while the super high tech, valuable, and equal sized 'dilithium processor' is left behind for the klingons to salvage. Also, the telescope was all beat up, but paired with the identity locked case and private message, so they must have found it, found the case, put it in the case, and then carried it out, all while they were evacuating!

We know they didn't come back for it later, because the klingons have just been sitting there right next to all the wrecked ships for the entire six months between the second and fourth show!

The Klingons:

Evidently the Klingons don't have replicators, because they have power, but no food. Even when they finally get the 'dilithium processor' (and what the heck even is that?) and have enough power to move the ship, they still don't have any food... even though they've been stuck out there for ages before the start of the show.

It seems crazy that these religious fanatics decide to follow the new guy... I know the new guy brought food, but seriously, they were about to go get some! They couldn't wait a few more minutes! As we've already established, you can get from one side of the Empire to the other within two hours max.

I guess the deposed albino klingon is going to get some kind of super spy training from his new girlfriend? If it's so good, why hasn't she used it to.. do whatever it is she thinks its going to do for him?

Worst part of the show:

Overall, the worst part of the show was when they casually recount eating the body of the first Captain. Holy what? That's just insult to injury. It sounded like they ate her right away too, not because they were eventually starving. Cannibalism doesn't have a place in klingon lore, and it doesn't have a place in this show.

This episode wasn't enjoyed, it was endured. I hope the entire series doesn't end up the same way!

In terms of science advisors for Discovery, I couldn't find anything online. The IMDB list of complete crew doesn't list anyone in that position.

What I did find however, is that Andre Bormanis, who was science advisor for both TNG, DS9, Voyager and Enterprise, and who did gigs with CBS before, isn't on Discovery team. But he is active... he is advising and writing for....yup.. The Orville ;D

On the other hand, if you check the writers of ST:Discovery, and what they did before this... the types of TV shows that they wrote for... is well, as much as a let-down as what ST:D is looking to be (Pushing Daisies, Pepper Dennis, Wonderfalls, GCB, Roswell, 90210 etc.. baah). There is only one or two writers who actually did any ST before). So that might be the reason why this ST seems to be so shallow and bad.

Some more observations about the Captain's desire to be an effective fighting ship along with his mission to develop new weapons tech for Starfleet:

There's no word on how he or Starfleet reconcile having super secret and super sensitive weapons tech testing on a vessel that's putting itself in harms way, or traveling to where the klingons are, or even just drifting around in space. Look what happened to the Glenn! Supposedly they had just as much going on on that ship, just as many wacky schemes and crazy ideas, but one accident later and it's all gone. We know it's all gone because the guys on the Discovery couldn't get all the info on the one project they most needed!

The other weird thing is that with all this focus on new weapons tech, the Captain walks in on his team's battle sim to see them barely keeping up with the battle. Why? Normal Start Trek stuff, where all flying and all targeting is done by typing commands on a keyboard. Of all the Star Trek tropes they wanted to keep, why keep that? Why doesn't the Captain walk in and say, "Guys, what the heck? Can't we set the Ops up like an old time fighter jet, and get the guys firing the phasers some gunners nests? Or maybe a video game controller or something? Or a mouse? Or a touch screen? And maybe, since we can fire more than one thing at a time, we could have multiple people ready to aim and fire them? What do we even have battle stations for, if not for that? Why don't we have the computer do it automatically? Wouldn't that be faster? Someone plug that robot in, see if that helps! Lets get some seat belts and some plastic shields to protect people from the inevitable console sparks! Make it so!"

I guess he's too busy being shady to think about little things like that!

The more I think about the spore drive and the lack of spore drive in any other Star Trek show, the more it feels like a huge plot hole for the series. I'm guessing that the tech is going to be lost at some point, because it's never seen again, and since all the info for it is self contained on the star ship Discovery. However, we've seen countless other civilizations over the various shows, and none of them have this tech either.

It sounds like these spores are everywhere already (that's the whole point of them), and if you grow enough of these spores, spore beasts eventually teleport in, which you would think would be a big clue.

Maybe there's another, even more dangerous beast that shows up eventually, or a preexisting civilization using spore drive that shows up to keep the process to itself, or maybe the spores actually do infect people (like I originally thought they were going for) and anyone who comes in contact with it eventually is forced to evolve into a spore beast of some kind and teleports away (sort of like what happened to Geordi that one time)?

The very last time.

Sorry Elle. You must be winding me up, or really still missing the point. I belabor it and get told to stop hammering on. And now I lack imagination. And then there is this.
"Let’s imagine the spores and the critter have a kind of metabolism that converts their Proton-shaped bodies, into a kind of particle that is ‘superfluid’, like how you could turn a ‘dead’ copper-wire into a magnet, by just twisting it into a coil and run a current through it generating a magnetic field."

Its a word salad. And a terrible analogy. Something Deepak Chopra might say.
BTW a straight copper wire will have a magnetic field.

I can imagine the universe used to be just dark matter, and that dark matter beings were experimenting with protodark matter, when an unanticipated interaction with virtual dark matter caused an irreversible and completely adiabatic increase in the eigen-sate of just one single dark matter gluon. The resulting chromo-dynamic quantum cascade lead to the creation of the first matter which, when entangled with itself in a transdimensional fractal matrix, amplified. Just like when you blow air into a balloon and it gets bigger. The matter started absorbing all the ambient dark energy in the universe, threatening to consume dark matter itself, like an infection. In desperation, the dark matter beings sacrificed 4 of their 27 dimensions, pushing all the matter into them centered on a singularity that was detonated by a gravimetric Higgs anti-boson field generator., aka the big bang. What matter had been generated was scattered so dilutely, just 4%, it could no longer amplify. Matter, if you like, is intergalactic herpes that dark matter can live with. The outcome of this treatment will not be known for millennia or until the flatness of this 4-dimensional sub-universe is unambiguously verified or not, in which case a second singularity may be required, like an intergalactic booster shot. The dark matter beings have formed a monitoring division, the Intergalactic STD Corps, who's sole charge is to monitor the infection and report to Admiral Penny E. Cillin.

OR, the universe is a giant creme brûlée and fluctuations in density depend solely on how heavy handed God was with the torch. Its hard to be sure.

(Common now. Thats funny.)

Now you've made me a liar. I said no more Star Trek. One last time.
Unintended sarcasm in the above aside, this is the last i will say.
I love fiction, superheros, The Magicians is a guilty pleasure, Dr Strange etc etc. but they sway way over to fantasy, and are nothing more than entertainment.
Its just that I, and many others, hold Star Trek through Rodenberrys vision to a higher standard (as he did). As I said before the science in it, even if flakey sometimes, has at least SOME root in reality as we know it (well, mostly - I can guess the episodes you are thinking about right now :-). Its then how humans, life (whatever that is) react to that. Wagon Train in science space. I think ST:TNG did it best and they got scientific advice.

Ive been to a Trek conference - it seemed half full of PhDs. The writers, actors, producers know the cross they bear with Trek, and they accept it. In fact they revel in it. They understand its influence. Thats why Neil Armstrong talked at one even though he had become reclusive. I saw the SpaceX guys talk there. Scotty got an honorary degree from Brown University when a survey showed how big an impact his character made on people going into engineering (goes with a funny story Koenig told). Even Shatner now understands and regrets his 'get a life' tease. Its why serious scientists would write books on Trek tech and physics. What other TV show has done such a thing? And yes its fun and entertaining. And i am a Dr Who fan and do not hold that to the same standard, Good Lord, next thing you know the Dr will be a woman.....

I am sorry but I hold ST to that vision and its cannon, and consequently I, and many others, get very upset when Discovery is appearing to trample all over it.
I will recover. There will be other shows to pick up the torch. But its still disappointing.

OK thats it. For good. No more!!!
I have my novel on intergalactic herpes to complete........

Phillip K. may have had his demons, as do many, but he was visionary and ahead of his time. Where Asimov saw robots as programs simulating emotions and reacting to them, Phil saw the roots as human.
He may have had weirdness and visions - apparently 'sane' people see angels and Gods and slaughter each other over them. As they say, there is a fine line between genius and madness. I say there is no line at all - more a gradient of moral perspective.Maybe. Will have to chew on those words.

Interestingly some of the 19th centuries musicians great works came under some degree of what you might call mental illness. Check out the influence of syphilis....

http://www.urologichistory.museum/content/exhibits/historyforum/AUA2014…

#21. Had me in stitches.
"Its food glows!"

@Sinisa Lazarek wrote:

he is advising and writing for….yup.. The Orville ;D

I wonder if he advised on the Dark Matter Storm.

In all seriousness, there was a moment in ST:D when the chief of security was working with Michael to drop the force field to the tardigrade pen, and I thought for half a second: "No big deal. The Chief of Security is far and away the strongest person on board".

Between the two shows I am liking The Orville better.

@Denier #28,
What make me kind of laugh is, Orville has far more invested in humor, yet when I think of the crew of STD meeting the Orville crew, I can't but help but think Captain Mercer would look at their counterparts angst ridden faces, observe their inhumane and illegal activities and say "What the flying #$%*@ is wrong with you guys?"
.
The way things are going with the plot lines, please tell me if I'm wrong, but doesn't STD seem more like a Mirror Mirror universe than the federation all the other series belong to? I've been curious if that's the rabbit they are going to pull out of their hat, that someone survives the terrible nasty dark federation universe and somehow jumps realities (al la the magic of Abrams) to warn another parallel federation of what not to do. The franchise has a history of altered history, now they can screw around with alternate realities as well.

@19: every reader takes something different away from an author. Personally I don't see paranoia in Dick's writing but rather something related to that: a concern/exploration of the notion of identity. If you're invented, or your memory's changed, or something is beaming thoughts into your head...are you still you? What's the "you" in that case really mean? But I'll also admit it's been many years since I read a PKD book.

@26: I fully agree Dick was a visionary writer in a lot of ways. I was really only quibbling with the implied point in your @4-5 that Dick belongs with Asimov etc. in being considered a more 'hard' sci fi writer. I don't think he ever (or...hardly ever) wrote with science realism in mind.

@29: Now you've got me hoping the Orville writers do a 'mirror, mirror' episode...

#25,

"I belabor it and get told to stop hammering on."

The world has its Einsteins but also its Whinesteins.

My comment #11 was addressed @Ethan.

Discovery Is Smart-Sounding Scientific Nonsense

So, exactly like every other Star Trek then? ST has never really been hard sci-fi - it's always been filled with sciency-sounding bafflegab and magical technology that has exactly whatever capabilities and limits the writers require at that moment in time (and change wildly from episode to episode).

I mean, I love Star Trek, and I've been (re)watching its different incarnations on a more-or-less continuous loop for almost my entire life, but let's not pretend that this is a radical departure. I can't help feeling that a lot of people criticising Discovery are comparing it to some entirely imaginary version of Star Trek that they've got in their heads rather than the real thing. Go back and try to rewatch the first season of TNG with an impartial eye, I dare you - by any objective measure, it's terrible. Yet we love it.

It's Science Fiction, not reality. Does it really matter if the science is correct? Can't we just enjoy the show without a bunch of people tearing it apart for not being real enough?

@Dunc

"So, exactly like every other Star Trek then?"

Precisely, as if beaming a person, made of atoms and molecules, is so different from a critter than can 'beam' itself from one place in space to another.

@Steve Blackband:

Whoa, that fictional paragraph you came up with would make a great comic book backstory!

@Dunc:

One of the great things about star trek has always been at least a nod to both science and continuity. They would write the story first, then, when something sciencey would hapen, they'd write 'tech' into the script, to be filled in later with official technobabble. So, the main story might involve some pop science, then how they deal with it would be in continuity with Star Trek lore.

Another difference is the more episodic nature of those shows. While that sometimes meant that continuity suffered a bit (like when Spock did, did not, then did have greater than human strength), but it also meant that we got a greater variety of science fiction stories. Star Trek: Discovery doesn't have that, we're getting one really long story, and if they muck it up, the don't get to reset for the next episode.

@CFT:

Okay, that would be awesome. I'd heard something about this, but if we're starting in the Mirror Universe, some story choices and character motivations could make more sense. For example, the Vulcans having a policy of shooting first.

Although, we still have the Federation, not the Empire, of planets, the Klingon Empire exists as an empire and is decidedly evil, the klingons don't look right for that universe either, and the future of the Mirror Universe also doesn't have the spore drive.

Yeah... I think that would have been a good idea! However, at this point, it seems that the Discovery writers have actively discouraged good ideas. I'd say that it would be possible that they're in one of the infinite alternate timelines (as shown in that one TNG episode where Worf keeps winning and losing a battleth tournament), but we were assured we're at least in the main timeline.

We can always hope they tie all this together in a satisfying way though!

The more I think about it though, and as cool as the concept would have been, I don't think starting in the Mirror Universe would make sense. If we're only ten years before the start of TOS, and Kirk is already halfway through Starfleet Academy at this point. I don't think that's enough time to turn everyone into crazy murderers.

Unless... maybe the spores act to flip people's morality if they get infected? Is that why the new Captain is so shady? Ehh, but he and the Security Chief were the most shady, and those spores are all through the ship. I guess they could force it to work if they really wanted to, but it really would seem forced.

It's obviously not the Mirror Universe. In the Mirror Universe, Zephram Cochrane kills the Vulcans who make first contact in 2063, and the Terran Empire is conquering its way across the quadrant by 2155. (As shown in ST:E "In a Mirror, Darkly".)

It's not an a parallel timeline. It's the same time timeline as the original series, set 10 years before Kirk, Spock and Enterprise. There are interviews with producers and even official site mentions that it's not exploring the timeline covered in new movies.

Whinestein!!! Funny. I like it.

I stand behind the vision of a unified humanity, science as a savior, and fiction as a way of communicating and compelling that vision. Fantasy is an escape, an excuse to do nothing, as is religion, taking away our accountability.

After all, we don't have much to deal with. Religious war, overpopulation, the sixth mass extinction well underway, material resources diminishing rapidly, deforestation, global warming, pollution of our waters and seas, the end of antibiotics.

Awww crap. We're screwed aren't we? As Pris said in Blade Runner "The we're stupid and we'll die"

I forgot Donald Trump.
Damn it. Need beer.

I forgot Trump.
Damn. Need beer.

@Dunc #37:
I really liked how the real character of Zephram Cochrane turned out a lot different than the people of the future were expecting, in ST First Contact. :-)

@Frank #40

I thought it was interesting too, but mostly because it seemed as if the Enterprise crew was violating the Prime Directive against themselves! "I don't know, if the Federation can't be established without outside interference, perhaps they're just not ready..." I'm sure they had some very interesting paperwork to file when they got back, at the very least!

It’s Science Fiction, not reality. Does it really matter if the science is correct?

Well we are going very far afield here, so I'll try and bring it back to Ethan's original complaint at the end.

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It's okay to be space opera or space fantasy. But most fans dislike a show that implies or touts itself as hard science fiction and then indulges in science fantasy.

That isn't exactly what Ethan is complaining about though, I don't think. He's more complaining that the characters in the story don't act in a rational manner given the plot context in which they are put. He's basically complaining that, like characters in old schlock horror movies, they utterly ignore things right in front of their face. Well sure there's a body dismembered by a chainsaw. But why should I believe there's a killer with a chainsaw on the loose?

Star Trek has never touted itself as hard science fiction - at least, not in this universe.

As for the characters acting in ludicrous ways to serve the plot - again, that's exactly like every other iteration of the franchise.

Whats the difference between science fiction and 'hard' science fiction?

This is mostly directed toward the author.

Don't worry about the writers not consulting with scientists, or even scientific journals. That is the least of their problems. They apparently didn't feel the need to actually watch any Star Trek before deciding to write an entire series based in an already established fictional universe.
They basically made a version of Lord of The Rings where Hobbits are eight feet tall, and Gsndalf can teleport anywhere with magical ent dust. Oh, and Boromir carries an AK-47.

Ask Ethan: How Many Planets Did NASA's Kepler Miss?

esiegel — Sat, 07 Oct 2017 05:01:54 +0000

Ask Ethan: How Many Planets Did NASA's Kepler Miss?

"How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them." -Christiaan Huygens

With a field-of-view encompassing 150,000 stars, NASA’s Kepler mission delivered an overwhelming prize when it came to hunting worlds beyond our own Solar System: thousands of new exoplanets. The majority of them, however, were different from what we have at home. They were larger, more massive, closer to their parent stars, and orbiting more quickly than what we find in our own neighborhood. In other words, we found the worlds that were easiest to find.

The numbers of planets discovered by Kepler sorted by their size distribution, as of May 2016, when the largest haul of new exoplanets was released. Super-Earth/mini-Neptune worlds are by far the most common, with only a tiny fraction of worlds smaller than Earth. Image credit: NASA Ames / W. Stenzel.

But NASA’s Kepler wasn’t sensitive to all the worlds that were out there. Sure, to observe a transit, where a planet passes in between its parent star and ourselves, requires a fortuitous alignment, and we can certainly extrapolate how many more exoplanets like the ones we’ve already seen are out there. But to know how many planets NASA’s Kepler mission truly missed requires a whole slew of other information, much of which the Universe hasn’t yet revealed to us given our current technology.

Viewed from a random orientation in space, and given the relative sizes and orbital distances of each planet compared to the Sun, we can compute the odds of having a transit. The farther away from the Sun you are, the lower the odds. This analysis does not account for size or time. Image credit: E. Siegel.

How many planets are actually out there in our galaxy? And how are we going to find out the true number?

esiegel Sat, 10/07/2017 - 01:01

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It was a very good start.

The Nobel Doesn’t Mean Gravitational Wave Astronomy Is Over; It’s Just Getting Good

esiegel — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 10:59:33 +0000

The Nobel Doesn’t Mean Gravitational Wave Astronomy Is Over; It’s Just Getting Good

"Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be." -Jonathan Nolan

Yes, we detected gravitational waves, directly, for the first time! Just days after Advanced LIGO first turned on, a signal of a 36 solar mass black hole merging with a 29 solar mass black hole gave us our first robust, direct detection of these long-sought waves, changing astronomy forever. Einstein’s General Relativity was validated in a whole new way, and over 40 years of work on developing and building LIGO was vindicated at last.

The inspiral and merger of the first pair of black holes ever directly observed. The total signal, along with the noise (top) clearly matches the gravitational wave template from merging and inspiraling black holes of a particular mass (middle). Image credit: B. P. Abbott et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration).

Now, it’s two years later, and yes, some of the most important team members have been awarded physics’ highest honor: the Nobel Prize. But gravitational wave astronomy isn’t over now; on the contrary, it’s only just beginning in earnest. With a third detector now online and two more coming along in the next few years, we’re not only poised to enter a new era in astronomy, we’re about to open up a whole new set of discoveries that would otherwise be impossible.

This three-dimensional projection of the Milky Way galaxy onto a transparent globe shows the probable locations of the three confirmed black-hole merger events observed by the two LIGO detectors—GW150914 (dark green), GW151226 (blue), GW170104 (magenta)—and a fourth confirmed detection (GW170814, light green, lower-left) that was observed by Virgo and the LIGO detectors. Also shown (in orange) is the lower significance event, LVT151012. Image credit: LIGO/Virgo/Caltech/MIT/Leo Singer (Milky Way image: Axel Mellinger).

esiegel Tue, 10/03/2017 - 06:59

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If Gravitational waves are real, then so is the potential for Star Trek like teleportation because of the plank scale size of data transfer potential

What about Einstein? ...
He still doesn't deserve the Prize for Relativity?
Nonsense.
p.

@Pino #2: You should do a very tiny bit of research. By the conditions of Nobel's will, the prize cannot ever be awarded posthumously.

@Pino #2,
I was just reading something about this, I think from Sabine Hossenfelder on her blog BackReaction. They award the prizes to living scientists only, otherwise the accomplishments of past scientists would pretty much swamp the accomplishments of presently living potential candidates.

I'm not an astrophysicist, but i believe they will soon find that what we call super massive black holes are small compared to undiscovered real super massive holes.

Any Thoughts on the issues raised in this article?
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/science/is-the-nobel-for-disco…