Uncategorized – Page 16 – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

Two Stories from Right Beneath our Feet: Geology News for November 2021.

Even if you haven’t experienced one yourself we all know about Earthquakes. Those destructive and often deadly events where the ground shakes and rumbles because two sections of the Earth’s crust are either moving past each other or one is literally shoving itself against the other. These shoving matches come about because the Earth’s crust is divided into a series of what are called tectonic plates that ‘float’ upon the planet’s hotter, soften mantel.

Anyone who has lived through a strong Earthquake knows just how destructive they can be. I lived just south of San Francisco when the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake struck. (Credit: History.com)

While the hard crust is only around 20 kilometers thick on average the Mantel beneath it is much thicker, approximately 3000 kilometers thick. And beneath the mantel lies Earth’s liquid core. This means that, as you go deeper beneath the planet’s surface the rocks become ever hotter and softer until they actually become molten.

The outer Crust of the Earth is hard, cold and brittle. So that’s where most Earthquakes Occur. (Credit: Universe Today)

If you think about it then, Earthquakes must really be a phenomenon of the rocks near the surface, where they are harder and tend to break suddenly and catastrophically. Deeper rocks on the other hand, at hotter temperatures and higher pressures would bend or deform slowly rather than break abruptly. And in fact the greater majority of Earthquakes that geologists have studied since the invention of the seismograph have occurred less than 100 kilometers beneath the surface.

A Seismograph works because the suspended heavy mass stays where it is while the Earth moves beneath it! (Credit: SMS-Tsunami-Warning.com)

Geologists recognize several different types of waves picked up by seismographs. Here is the actual observation of the Loma Prieta Earthquake from Keva in Finland! (Credit: AGU Blogosphere)

In June however an Earthquake was detected near Japan’s Bonin Islands in an area known geologically as the Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc. In this location the vast Pacific Plate is diving beneath the Philippine Sea Plate leading to many small and even some large quakes such as a 7.9 magnitude quake that rattled the Bonin Islands back in 2015. The quake that was detected in June of 2020 is considered to be an aftershock of the 2015 quake and was so weak that it could not even be felt at the surface. What stunned the researchers at the University of Arizona who analyzed the data from Japan’s Hi-net array of seismic sensors however was the depth of the quake’s epicenter, fully 750 kilometers below the surface.

A lonely set of small islands belonging to Japan the Bonin islands were the scene of heavy fighting during WW2. (Credit: Maritime Logistics Professional)

The geological feature Izu-Bonin- Mariana Arc also includes the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world’s oceans. (Credit: Wikipedia)

For a quake to be generated so far down in the lower mantel is quite impossible according to many theories of Earth’s inner structure. What the June quake may therefore be telling us is that the precise depths at which the various layers of the mantel occur may not be exactly where we think they are. It has already been suggested that the mantel beneath the Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc may be different than it is in most areas of the world because it is a subduction zone where the Pacific plate’s crust material is being pushed down under the Philippine Sea plate. That could mean that harder, more brittle rocks are being thrust deeper than we thought they could enabling a rare quake even as far down as 750 km.

Subduction Zones, where one techtonic plate is forced below another are the sources of many geological processes from Earthquakes to Volcanoes. (Credit: USGS.gov)

In any case the 750 km deep Earthquake is a mystery that seismologists will have to study and understand. Hopefully as new, more sensitive sensors like Japan’s Hi-net array become available other deep quakes will be detected giving additional clues as to their nature and allow geologists to better understand the inner workings of our home planet.

The nation of Japan is often subjected to daealy Earthquakes. It’s no wonder therefore that they have built the most sophisticated seismographical network in the world. (Credit: ResearchGate)

Even as geologists study the Earth today in the hope of learning its secrets they are also trying to discover as much as they can about its past. One thing we do know about our planet is that it is a dynamic place, that its face may change slowly but it changes relentlessly. How much that face has changed is the subject of a study undertaken by the Geoscience Department of the University of Queensland Australia.

We’re all familiar with the seven continents but Earth’s face wasn’t always this way. Once our planet was completely covered with water. (Credit: Dashamlav)

We were all taught in grade school that the surface of the Earth is mostly water; only about 30% is dry land making up the seven continents we all know. However there is considerable geological evidence that in the distant past oceans once covered our planet’s entire surface, that there were no continents, just one big ocean. Currently the consensus opinion is that the first continents appeared above sea level about 2.5 billion years ago and that tectonic activity to move the continents began at about the same time.

Current thinking is that the first land appeared above sea level about 2.5 billion years ago and rapidly grew into continents. But is that date correct! (Credit: Reasons to Believe)

The new study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined sandstone deposits from what are considered to be the oldest fragments of land in the world, areas known as cratons in India, Australia and South Africa. Now sand is formed when the rocks in mountains and hills erode due to the action of rain and wind, so you can’t get sandstone until after land exists. Therefore, if you can measure the age of the oldest sandstone then you have a minimum age for the existence of continents.

As the wind and rain erode away the rocks of mountains and hills some of that material will form sandstone. (Credit: YouTube)

Starting in the Singhbhum craton in the eastern part of the Indian sub-continent the geologists found several formations of ancient sandstone. Within the sandstone they succeeded in extracting grains of the mineral zircon which contains small amounts of the radioactive element uranium. The uranium in the zircons can accurately dated by a technique known as Uranium – Lead dating, the very technique by which the age of the Earth was first measured.

A sandstone formation at Singhbhum craton in India. Could this be the remains of the world’s first beach! (Credit: The Weather Channel)

The measurements obtained showed that the sandstone in India was about 3 billion years old, 500 million years older than what was thought to be the oldest age for land deposits.

The technique by which scientists first measured the age of the Earth itself is the Uranium- Lead dating system. (Credit: YouTube)

Later dating measurements from Australia and South Africa came up with approximately the same age so it appears that before 3 billion years ago several land masses, several continents had poked themselves above the oceans waves. What processes enabled those first continents to form are yet another mystery of the Earth. But knowing exactly when that process took place will help geologists to eliminate some incorrect theories. That’s how science works, by comparing measurements to theories and the more, and more accurate the data the more accurate we can make our theories.

Archaeology News for November 2021: The Northmen are Coming.

I’d like to begin this month’s archaeology post by discussing one error that is often made about the fierce warriors who spread out from Scandinavia in their longships wreaking havoc throughout Europe during the Dark Ages. There is actually almost no evidence that they called themselves Vikings. Indeed, from the few records of those dark years it seems more like they referred to their raids as to ‘go Viking’. In others words Viking was an activity, not a name for themselves. The name they seemed to prefer, and by which their enemies called them was Northmen, Norsemen or just Norse.

A Sight to strike fear in the hearts of civilized folk, Norse longships approaching. (Credit: History Extra)

Another big question is just what is the relationship between the ship borne Northmen of the 9th-12th centuries and the Germanic ‘Barbarians’ of the 5th-8th centuries who overran the Roman Empire. Their languages were similar, modern German, Norwegian and Swedish are all part of the Germanic group of the Indo-European languages. They were all best known as warriors and they all contributed to making the ‘Dark Ages’ Dark!

The sacking of Rome in 455 CE by the Germanic Vandals is often considered to be the start of the Dark Ages. Just how closely related were the Vandals to the later Northmen? (Credit: Wikipedia)

Such questions can only be answered by more evidence and so this month I’ll be covering some of the latest archaeology finds concerning the Northmen. In fact the first find deals directly with the question of the relationship between Germans – Northmen as it contains elements characteristic of both groups.

Metal Detectorists and Archaeologists working together to learn more about the history of the Germans – Northmen. (Credit: VejleMuseerne)

Despite it’s small size the nation of Denmark has played a central role in both the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire and the later Norse invasions of Christian Europe. Now a new discovery of a buried hoard of gold objects in the small Danish town of Vindelev highlights that key role. The buried treasure was unearthed, not by a professional archaeologist but rather by an amateur metal detectorist. In fact the detectorist, Ole Ginnerup Schytz found his treasure on an old friend’s land after only a few hours of using his brand new metal detector.

Just a few of the better known Norse archaeological sites in Denmark.

The hoard has been officially been named the ‘Vindelev Hoard’ and contains several dozen items totaling nearly a kilogram of solid gold which have been dated to the 6th century CE. The items range from large, saucer like medallions called bracteates to pieces of jewelry to coins from the Roman Empire.

The gold objects discovered as a part of the ‘Vindelev Hoard’. (Credit: CNN)

One of the bracteates is particularly interesting as it shows the figure of a man with braided hair surrounded by images of a horse, a bird and another man. There are also runes on the surface that may spell out the word ‘houar’ meaning ‘high one’. Both the title and images could refer to the Norse god Odin and could be some of the earliest evidence for the worship of that pagan god who was best known from the 9th-11th century.

Could this golden disk from the Vindelev Hoard hold an image of the God Odin? Notice the Old Norse Runes along the top left that refer to the figure as ‘Houar’ or High One. (Credit: The Wild Hunt)

The site where the hoard was unearthed was later surveyed by archaeologists from the Vejle Museum who found that the treasure was actually buried inside a longhouse, a structure typical of both the Germans and the later Norse. The size of the house and the value of the hoard have suggested to some archaeologists that Vindelev may have been an important cultural site back in the 6th century.

If the Vindelev hoard tells us something about the connection between the Germans of the late Roman Empire and the early Norse another site, from 500 years later and thousands of kilometers distance may tell us the exact date when the Norse attempted to colonize North America. The evidence comes from the only agreed upon Norse site in the New World, an archaeological settlement in Newfoundland called L’Anse aux Meadows.

L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the only generally agree upon Norse settlement in North America. (Credit: ThoughtCo)

What the team of scientists, led by Margot Kuitems and Michael Dee of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands have recovered are four pieces of wood that show clear signs of having been cut by metal tools, which the local Native Americans did not possess. Those samples of wood were then subjected to a special type of carbon-14 dating test.

Tree Rings hold Carbon-14 from the year that the tree grew them. As such they have begun to play an extremely important role in the dating of archaeological sites. (Credit: BioLogos)

Carbon-14 dating is possible because cosmic ray particles striking the upper atmosphere convert nitrogen atoms into the radioactive isotope carbon-14; the stable isotope of carbon is carbon-12. A small amount of this radioactive carbon is absorbed by plants, which then makes the plants slightly radioactive.

During its life a plant absorbs radioactive carbon 14 from the air. Once the plant dies that carbon 14 decays at a known rate. This allows scientists to date organic material. (Credit: Science / How Stuff Works)

Once the plant dies it no longer absorbs carbon and the carbon-14 that it did absorb begins to decay with a halflife of 5730 years. By comparing the amount of carbon-14 in a long dead plant to that in a living plant it is possible to make an accurate measurement of how long that plant has been dead. Also, since animals eat plants, or eat other animals that ate plants the same technique can be used for any kind of organic material.

With a half life of 5730 years Carbon-14 is useful in dating organic material back about 30,000 years. Beyond that there is so little C14 left that the error in measurement becomes too large to maker the technique reliable. (Credit: www2.upenn.edu)

That’s how carbon dating usually works, but there are special circumstances that have occurred in the past that sometimes allow extremely precise dating by carbon-14. One of these occasions happened in the year 993 CE when for some unknown reason cosmic ray activity peaked well above the average leaving those plants that grew in 993 CE with a telltale spike in carbon-14.

The increase cosmic ray flux that occurred in 993 CE followed an even stronger spike in 775 CE. (Credit: Nature Communications – Miyake, Masuda et al April 2013)

Doctors Kuitems and Dee examined each and every tree ring in their wood samples looking for the exact tree ring that showed the spike in carbon-14 that would indicate it had been grown in 993 CE. They found the tree ring in question on all four pieces of wood they had collected. Once that tree ring had been identified they simply had to count the remaining tree rings in the wood in order to determine the exact year in which the trees from which the wood pieces had come had been chopped down.

Actual sample of wood from L’Anse aux Meadows used to date the Norse settlement to the year 1021, exactly 1000 years ago. (Credit: ScienceAlert)

Assuming that those trees had been felled the year that the Norse founded L’Anse aux Meadows then the first Norse settlement in America was founded exactly 1000 years ago in the year 1021. The Northmen, or Vikings if you prefer, are one of the most iconic symbols of mankind’s violent past. As we learn more about these adventurous people however we find that they were much more than just fierce warriors.

The COP26 Climate Change Conference closes with an Agreement. Is it all just a lot of Promises or are the Nations of the World ready to begin the hard work of saving the Planet we all live on?

The international conference on combating climate change known as COP26 has ended and so now the question can be asked, how much was accomplished? Was it enough to keep the increase in global temperature below the +1.5ºC agreed that was upon at the 2015 Paris conference? That figure of +1.5ºC happens to be the maximum value that scientists think will allow us to avoid catastrophic environment damage. Was anything accomplished in Glasgow at all?

The Main Hall of the COP26 Climate Conference. (Credit: Reuters)

In my pre-COP26 post of 3 November 2021 I wasn’t too optimistic. The very fact that the heads of state for two of the world’s biggest polluters, China and Russia, weren’t even going to Glasgow to attend the conference certainly didn’t bode well. And the Prime Minister of India, another big emitter of greenhouse gasses, seemed to come to the conference with the full intention of preventing any meaning full progress.

India’s PM Modi announced that his nation will not reach net-zero emissions until 2070. Not a good start to the conference. (Credit: India Today)

If there was going to be any progress it would all depend on how much pressure the smaller countries, especially those Island nations like the Marshall Islands and Grenada whose very existence depends on curtailing the rise of sea level due to global warming, could impose on the big polluters. Some of the big economies, the big emitters of the past like Great Britain, Germany and France supported the smaller nations and perhaps most importantly this time the United States took a leading role pushing for meaningful commitments towards reducing greenhouse gasses. Other nations like China and India however were determined to resist any threat to their growing economies.

To dramatize his nation’s plight the Minister of the small Island Nation of Tuvalu gave his opening address while standing in the Pacific Ocean. (Credit: Today in 24 English)

So what was actually accomplished, anything? Yes, believe it or not at least there were some meaningful, and surprising agreements made at the conference. Halfway through the conference, even as the final, big climate pact was being negotiated it was announced that a group of 30 nations had made a separate agreement to reduce deforestation by half within their collective borders by 2030. The biggest surprise about this agreement was that one of the signatories was Brazil whose Amazon rainforest has over the last decade suffered a greater amount of deforestation than anywhere else on Earth. The Amazon jungle has been christened ‘the world’s lungs’ because of its ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and replace it with oxygen so Brazil’s agreement is a big deal.

Piece by piece the Amazon rain forest, the largest forest in the world is being converted into grassland for cattle production. Will the new agreement at COP26 do anything to bring this destruction to a halt? (Credit: The Guardian)

The most important part of the conference however was the final agreement, the final climate pact that had to be signed off by all of the 197 countries that participated at the conference. One major achievement in that pact was that for the first time fossil fuels were explicitly called out as being the cause of climate change. (Makes you sort of wonder how it was possible to have 25 previous climate change / global warming conferences without ever mentioning the cause!)

The main hall at COP1, the first worldwide conference on dealing with global warming. The meeting took place in Berlin in 1995. 26 Conferences and what has been accomplished? (Credit: Medium)

Another positive result was the promise by the world’s wealthier nations to double the amount of money they would provide to poorer nations. This money is intended to both help the small economies mitigate the effects of climate change as well as develop greener sources of energy so that they not further increase the amount of CO₂ being released into the atmosphere. The new agreed amount is $200 billion per year by 2024.

Even my local Weather reporter mentioned the progress at COP-26. If these pledges are kept they could be actually help. (Credit: WPVI)

Nevertheless the final document feel well short of the hopes of climate scientists because it did not explicitly call out any actual cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from any country. Instead each country made a commitment to prepare such a concrete plan of action that will be submitted at the COP27 conference next year. The metaphor ‘kicking the can down the road’ was used several times in media reports.

The one thing Politicians are able to agree on is to not solve a problem. Just kick that can down the Road and let Someone else solve it! (Credit: The Argotist)

The last two days of intense negotiations actually came down to a conflict over a single word. The draft pact that had been prepared by Conference President Alok Sharma of the host nation the UK stated that the use of coal, the source of the greatest part of greenhouse gas emissions, was to be ‘cut out’ by all nations although no definite date was given. Several nations objected to the word ‘out’ and wanted it to be replaced by the word ‘down’. In the end India and Iran simply refused to accept the pact without the change so the final pact agreed upon by all the participating nations does not even call for an eventual end to the use of coal for energy!

India needs cheap power from coal to grow its economy and lift it’s 1.3 billion citizens out of poverty. Currently the Indian government is simply ignoring the harm that does to both India and the World. (Credit: The Economic Times)

Of course the real problem is that the entire agreement is just promises, there are no consequences for any nation that fails to live up to the pact. All of which means that literally nothing could come from the COP26 climate change conference, CO₂ emissions could keep on rising along with sea level, deforestation could continue unabated while wild fires destroy the rest of the trees, severe storms could continue to grow both in number and intensity.

Climate Change really isn’t so bad right now so doesn’t that make it her problem? And shouldn’t we just leave it for her to solve? (Credit: CTV News)

Some of you out there may be familiar with an old British comedy series called “Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister”. The premise of the show was that a Minister in Her Majesty’s Government, Prime Minister in the second year of the show, named James Hacker matches wits with his chief Civil Servant named Sir Humphrey Appleby. The politician Hacker wants to achieve great things so that he can get re-elected while the bureaucrat Appleby wants to slow everything down with red tape. It was without doubt one of the most intelligent TV shows ever written.

If you’ve never seen the BBC comedy ‘Yes Minister / Yes Prime Minister’ I can only recommend it as the most intelligent comedy I’ve ever seen. (Credit: Amazon.com)

In one episode the two are arguing over exactly what constitutes efficient government. A local city council has been providing services to their people without high taxes, Minister Hacker calls that efficient. “But they haven’t been filling out their forms and submitting them,” Sir Humphrey complains, “So we don’t know what they’re doing.” The best line comes when Sir Humphrey proclaims. “We don’t measure our success by our accomplishments but by our activity!”

The Right Honourable James Hacker MP (l) with his department’s permanent Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby (r). You’ll learn a lot about how government functions while laughing your head off! (Credit: BritBox)

On that basis COP26 has been a great success because there was certainly an enormous amount of activity by hundreds of bureaucrats who did finally manage to get everyone to sign on to a massive agreement. Whether that agreement actually accomplishes anything at all only time will tell.

The XENON experiment was designed to detect particles of dark Matter, has it detected Dark Energy instead?

Two of the greatest mysteries in all of science concern the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy which combined are estimated to make up as much as 95% of the matter and energy in the Universe. Dark Matter was first proposed in the 1920s to explain the rotation curves of the galaxies, which when all of the visible matter is taken into account, do not appear to obey Newton’s law of gravity. Dark Matter, particles that only interact with other particles by their gravitational attraction, is supposed to account for this discrepancy. The particles predicted by theories of Dark Matter have been given the generic title of WIMPs, which stands for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. Trouble is that no particles of a type that could be called Dark Matter have ever been discovered.

Today scientists really only understand about 5% of everything that makes up the Universe. About 25% is Dark Matter and fully 70% id Dark Energy. (Credit: NDTV Gadgets 360)

There are literally dozens of different candidate particles that could be Dark Matter but at least that means we have some idea of what it’s like, we can design experiments to check our guesses. We have hardly any idea about what Dark Energy is like. (Credit: Physics – APS.org)

Dark Energy on the other hand, was proposed in 1998 to account for the shocking discovery that the Universe was not only expanding, it was accelerating its expansion. Something was pushing the galaxies apart and for want of a better name it was called Dark Energy, although many physicists would rather refer to it as Dark Pressure. We know almost nothing else about it.

We do know that since 70% of the Universe is Dark Energy it will determine the eventual fate of the Universe. (Credit: NASA)

Since Dark Matter is supposed to be made up of WIMPs, particles something like those we’ve been studying for decades experimental physicists have put a good deal more effort into trying to detect them than Dark Energy, which as I said we know almost nothing about. One of the current experiments designed to detect WIMPs is the XENON series of detectors operating at the Gran Sasso National Labouratory in Italy. The Gran Sasso facility is one of number of High Energy Physics labouratories that have been constructed deep underground, often in old mines, in order to help shield them from the cosmic rays that rain down from outer space.

The layout of the Gran Sasso National Labouratory in Italy, one of the world’s leading centers for High Energy Physics. (Credit: Nature)

To date there have been three XENON detectors with a fourth just beginning operation, all are designed to provide two distinct signals whenever a WIMP ‘bumps’ against an atom of liquid Xenon. The liquid Xenon is contained within a ‘time projection chamber’, see image below. The liquid Xenon is kept at its boiling point, 165 Kelvin or -108 degrees Celsius, and there is a layer of gaseous Xenon at the top of the chamber. At both the top and bottom of the chamber are arrays of photomultiplier tubes (PMTs). There is also a high voltage electric field across the chamber, positive at the top, negative at the bottom.

Setup of the Xenon Experiments. When an unknown particle strikes am atom of liquid xenon light is first detected at the bottom array of Photo Multiplier Tubes (PMTs). released electrons then float upwards in the liquid because of a large electric voltage until they reach the surface and ionize xenon gas that is detected by the upper array of PMTs. (Credit: NI Group at UC San Diego)

When, and if a WIMP strikes an atom of liquid Xenon it knocks off an electron causing a spark of ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 178 nm in a process known as scintillation. This signal is picked up by the lower PMTs and is referred to as S1.

The electron then begins to drift upward at a known speed, the deeper the collision with the WIMP took place the longer it takes for the electron to reach the top. Once the electron reaches the top of the liquid layer it pops out into the gaseous Xenon where it accelerates rapidly knocking into atoms and ionizing them. This ionization releases more photons of light that are picked up by the upper PMTs as signal S2. The X-Y location of the original collision is determined by the location of the PMTs that picked up S2. The Z coordinate, the depth in the liquid Xenon where the collision occurred is calculated from the time difference between S1 and S2.

The original Xenon10 experiment was just a small, proof of concept model. (Credit: UCLA Physics and Astronomy)

The first detector to be installed at Gran Sasso contained 15kg of liquid xenon as was known as XENON10. This experiment was operated between October of 2006 and February of 2007 as a proof of concept model and an analysis of the data provided by 58 days of operation found no excess signals that could have been caused by a WIMP collision.

The second experiment, called XENON100, contained 165 kg of liquid xenon and was operated between 2008 and 2014. Over several data collecting runs the detector found no excess signals beyond that which would be expected by random background events.

The latest experiment to complete its data collection run is known as the XENON1T and contains 3.2 tonnes of ultra-pure liquid xenon. This detector began operation in 2014 and gathered 278.8 days of data before being taken off line in order to make space for its successor. During its time in operation the XENON1T experiment recorded 285 events, 53 more events than were theoretically expected by random collisions with radioactive particles. These 53 signals are the first evidence for possible Dark Matter particles, specifically a type of theoretical particle known as an axion.

The Xenon1T experiment was much larger and was the first to give signals that could have been caused by unknown particles. (Credit: Science.Perdue.edu)

But a new theory suggests that the 53 events could be the sign of something even more exotic, particles of Dark Energy. In a paper written by astrophysicists at Cambridge University’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology and published in the journal Physical Review D the signals detected by XENON1T could have been caused by a hypothetical particle that screens the short range effects of Dark Energy and which the researchers have christened ‘Chameleons’. The idea is that; while Dark Energy is dominant over a distance scale of the entire Universe, at smaller scales, say within our galaxy, it is almost imperceptible, so some form of screening is necessary. The Chameleon particles would provide that screening.

Results from existing experiments already restrain the effective mass of any ‘Chameleon’ particles that could be Dark Energy. (Credit: Phys.org)

According to Doctor Sunny Vagnozzi, first author on the paper, “Our chameleon screening shuts down the production of Dark Energy particles in very dense objects…It also allows us to decouple what happens in the local, very dense Universe from what happens on the largest scales, where the density is extremely low.”

This whole idea of screening Dark Energy on the local scale while allowing it to have full effect at the cosmic scale is very new and so far without any observational data to back it up. So the question of just what are those 53 excess events detected by XENON1T, Dark Matter, Dark Energy or just some contamination inside the containment vessel will have to wait.

The Standard Model of Elementary Particles is nice and simple, it is also incomplete. Just what else there is in the Universe is the big question. (Credit: Quantum Diaries)

the XENONnT experiment is now completed and has begun taking data. (Credit: Pegasus WMS)

The XENONnT experiment, with 8 tonnes of Xenon gas, came on line just a year ago and is collecting data even now. Perhaps we’ll have the answer in a very few years.

Astronomy News for November 2021

There was a time, not so long ago that space was thought to be just an empty vacuum with a star here and there every couple of light years and maybe some of those stars had a few planets circling around them. The rest, all of that space between the tiny little balls of matter was nothing.

This is how I was taught to think of the Solar System back in grade school. The Sun and Planets and pretty much nothin’ in between. (Credit: The Vedic Vision Blog)

That all started to change in the 1950s as solar astronomers like Eugene Parker began to understand the stream of particles emitted by the Sun that they called the solar wind. At the same time other astronomers were paying closer attention to the clouds of dust and gas in the galaxy, developing as they did so the concept of the interstellar medium. Much of this work was carried out by the new science of Radio Astronomy because those particles between the big objects were often electrically charged and as they moved through the magnetic fields of the Milky Way, another discovery of the time, they gave off radio waves that radio telescopes could pick up. So space, which to us may seem like a vacuum, isn’t truly empty, there is matter out there between the stars.

Both Voyager spacecraft continue to send back measurements from interstellar space and while the vacuum out there would kill us in just a few seconds there is actually a lot more matter, and structure than we ever imagined. (Credit: Room The Space Journal – EU.com)

And where there is matter there can be structure as well. Using the results from radio surveys of the sky astrophysicist Jennifer West at the University of Toronto in Canada has suggested that our entire solar system, as well as the neighboring region of the galaxy may be inside a magnetic ‘tunnel’ made up of charged particles shaped by the galaxy’s magnetic fields.

Like a car driving through a highway tunnel (l) our entire Solar System appears to be traveling through a ‘magnetic tunnel, in the Milky Way Glaxy (r). (Credit: Phys.org)

What Doctor West and her colleagues have done is to connect two well known, radio emitting regions in opposite areas of the sky into a single structure, with our Sun and its planets on the inside. These two regions, known as the ‘Fan region’ and ‘North Polar Spur’, are each shaped like long ropes and are about 1000 light years (ly) in length and 350 ly distant. West was able to connect these two separate objects by modeling them on a computer. According to Doctor West, “If we were to look up in the sky we would see this tunnel like structure in just about every direction we looked…that is, if we had eyes that could see radio light.”

Doctor Jennifer posing with the Arecibo radio telescope behind her. (Credit: CBC)

The results obtained by Doctor west and her colleagues are an example of how important computer analysis has become in astronomy. Another example would be the latest cosmological simulation developed jointly by Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics. The model is of a type known as an N body simulation where a certain number N of objects interact with each other gravitationally. Since every time you add one more body to your simulation it has to interact with every body your model already contains the size of such a program grows very quickly.

At the Center for Computational Astrophysics two researchers try to understand the mechanics of neutron star merger. Sounds like fun to me! (Credit: astronyc.org)

That makes the number of objects contained in the new simulation all the more impressive. The motions of 60 Trillion separate astronomical objects are being calculated along with the effects of every other object on their motion. The simulation has been given the name AbacusSummit and is being run on U.S. Department of Energy’s Summit Supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee.

An image generated based on some of the results of the AbacusSummit simulation. Every one of those dots is an entire galaxy of billions of stars. The amount of computer processing needed is just mind boggling! (Credit: Phys.org)

The developers of AbacusSummit hope to use the simulation as a test bed against which various theories of the Universe can be compared. In particular AbacusSummit will be employed as a tool for judging theories of Dark Matter and Dark energy.

Since in the real world every object interacts gravitationally with every other object the amount of arithmetic grows and grows every time you add one more object. (Credit: Phys.org)

Over the next decade or so several major new surveys detailing the structure of our Universe will be competed. These surveys include newer, larger ground based telescopes like the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) as well as new satellite observatories like the Euclid spaceprobe. According to Lehman Garrison, lead author of one of the papers published by the AbacusSummit team,”the galaxy surveys are delivering tremendously detailed maps of the Universe, and we need similarly ambitious simulations that cover a wide range of possible Universes that we might live in. AbacusSummit is the first suite of such simulations that has the breath and fidelity to compare to these amazing observations.”

The Euclid space telescope is nearing completion and will soon be launched to begin its mission of studying the Universe. (Credit: Space Flight Insider)

As a final story for this month I’d like to give an update on the Breakthrough Listen Project that I discussed in my post of 29 July 2020. Breakthrough Listen is a privately funded, by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner no less, project searching for evidence of radio signals coming from Extraterrestrial Intelligence elsewhere in our Galaxy. Breakthrough Listen is therefore a part of the wider Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) initiative.

Using large radio telescope like this one at the Green Bank radio Observatory in West Virginia the Breakthrough Listen project hopes to answer the question, ‘Is anybody out there”? (Credit: SETI Institute)

Back in December of 2020 the Breakthrough Listen team found an intriguing signal coming from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own Sun and one of the many stars now known to possess planets. The signal coming from Proxima Centauri was christened BLC1 and possessed several of the characteristics that SETI researchers expect radio signals from alien intelligences to have. The most important of these characteristics being that it was contained within a narrow frequency band like an FM or TV channel instead of having a much broader frequency range as most natural radio sources do.

The closest star to our Sun is called Proxima Centauri and it has a planet Proxima Centauri b. However indications are that b would not be a good world for life as we know it. (Credit: GoodFon.com)

Although there was some mention of the signal in the media at the time the Breakthrough Listen team decided to keep quiet for the most part and study the signal further in order to gather as much evidence as possible before making what would be one of the most important claims in human history. And as so often has happened in the past 50 years when a potential signal from an ET has been picked up the true source of the transmissions turned out to be right here on planet earth.

An analysis of the signals coming from Proxima Centauri. The signals resemble intelligent radio transmissions because it turned out that they were coming from right here on Earth. (Credit: Nature)

The researchers searched across the entire frequency range of the Parkes radio telescope and discovered ‘Lookalike’ signals coming from many parts of the sky, not just Proxima Centauri, showing clearly that they are of human origin. Exactly how the BLC1 signal was generated is not exactly known but the scientists speculate that an overdriven amplifier on some nearby transmitter of the main signal created what are known as ‘Intermodulations’. (Being someone who has often dealt with the problem of intermods I can only say that it very possible.)

When two different frequencies ‘beat’ against each other the result is intermodulations, the two small peaks on the outside, at both the sum and difference frequencies of the two original frequencies, the big ones. (Credit: Wikipedia)

So once again a possible contact with ETs turned out to be something much more ordinary. Still the way that BLC1 was found, analyzed and eliminated as extraterrestrial in nature shows that the protocols developed by Breakthrough Listen are working. There’s a lot of Universe out there to be examined for intelligent life, we could discover it next week or a hundred years from now.

Till then we’ll just have to keep looking!

A Little Economic News, including updates on Previous Stories.

The Nobel Prizes for Economics were awarded back on October 10th but since I was planning to publish a post updating a couple of previous economic stories I decided to wait and discuss the economic Nobels at the same time. By the way, the economic Nobel Prize wasn’t actually established by Alfred Nobel himself but rather was set up by the Swedish government’s central bank in honour of Alfred Nobel.

See, the Nobel Economics Prize is actually the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences. The winners this year were David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens. (Credit: The Hindu)

The prize itself this year went to three economists for their work in analyzing actual economic conditions. Half of the prize was awarded to David Card who was born in Canada but now teaches at the University of California in Berkeley. Card’s work dealt with an examination of job growth, or lack thereof in a community whenever the legal minimum wage was raised.

The wealthy like to portray the minimum wage as hurting our economy but in fact it allows millions of Americans to live a decent life for all of their hard work. (Credit:Pennsylvania House Democratic Caucus)

In particular Card studied job growth in New Jersey when that state hiked its minimum wage law in response to economic conditions in neighboring Pennsylvania. What Card found was that, contrary to prevailing theory there was no indication in a slowdown of job creation after the wage increase. Actual evidence that Minimum wages increases were not ‘job killers’ as many economists had argued.

And the work of this years Nobel winners will help to determine, quantitatively just where the truth lies. (Credit: Rostra Economica)

Joshua Angrist of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens, born in the Netherlands but now a professor at Stanford University in California shared the other half of the prize. Their work, like Card’s dealt with being able to make precise conclusions from real world economic data, which is often so complex and confused that it is difficult to separate cause from effect.

With such a complex subject as economics determining which is cause and which effect is not always obvious. (Credit: Udemy Blog)

Together these three scholars have shown how economic theory can be evaluated against real world conditions, an idea without which economics can never become a real science.

One thing that would help to reduce the complexity of economic data would be if the various legal and political entities, in other words countries in the world would agree on certain economic conditions. Trying to set up such conditions is often referred to as ‘leveling the playing field’ and in my post of 14 August 2021 I discussed one such attempt to establish a minimum corporate tax level of 15% among 136 countries representing more the 90% of the world’s economy. Large economies, like the members of the G8 and G20 groups had long been pushing for such a global agreement in order to counter the ability of small countries to lure in billion dollar corporate headquarters by offering them low tax rates.

Over the last 50 years corporate tax rates have been falling throughout the world making the rich richer and…well you know the rest. (Credit: AFP, KPMG, Tax Foundation)

Well the deal is done, on October 8th the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development announced that a final draft of the tax plan had been agreed to by all 136 nations. The final two nations to agree to the plan were Ireland and Hungary, both of whom had benefited by being tax havens for large, multi-national corporations.

Considering how difficult it is to get politicians in one country to agree on anything it’s a miracle that 136 countries managed to agree on a global minimum tax. (Credit: Affairscloud.com)

The final document not only requires the signature nations to maintain a minimum corporate tax of 15% but also stipulates that corporations must pay the applicable tax rate for any and every country in which they operate, not just the tax rate of that nation in which they locate their headquarters. Concessions to the holdout nations included language agreeing that the tax rate would not ever be further increased and that small businesses, businesses that only operate in one country, could be exempted from the 15% tax.

Today we live in a global corporate world so a global tax on corporations only makes sense. (Credit: Seven Pillars Institute)

For my final topic today I’d like to discuss several updates to my previous post about cyptrocurrencies, see post of 16 June 2021. The first event concerns an announcement by the government of China on the 24th of September that cryptocurrencies would henceforth be illegal for any transactions in the world’s second largest economy. What’s going on here is that the Chinese government has realized that cryptocurrencies will be impossible for it to control and are already being exploited by criminal organizations for drug trafficking and cyber crimes in general.

The Chinese government doesn’t trust Bitcoin since it can’t control it. It has therefore banned it from China. However the Chinese people want bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. We’ll see who wins! (Credit: ThePrint)

Whether of not the Chinese government is right to be concerned about the growth of cryptocurrencies here in the United States they are becoming ever more mainstream. As a sign of that acceptance the best known cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has since the 19th of October been traded on Wall street as an Exchange Traded Fund or ETF. The Asset Management company ProShares launched the Bitcoin ETF ‘BITO’ making it possible for any licensed brokerage to buy and sell Bitcoin futures just like any other commodity. Similar ETFs had already been launched in both Canada and Europe so the worldwide financial industry seems to have decided that cryptocurrencies are a good way to make money, whether they understand them or not.

The financial services company has launched Bitcoin as an Exchange Traded Fund or ETF. So now you can buy shares of Bitcoin just like shares in a mutual fund. (Credit: U.Today)

As you might imagine, with any valuable commodity that only a small number of people really understand, trying to put a stable price on it is a difficult task. This means that cryptocurrencies are subject to ups and downs caused by the feelings of investors, feelings that often have little or nothing to do with the actual product. This makes cryptocurrencies very volatile, and in fact the price of Bitcoin jumping up and down every day is several times that of even the major stick indices.

Daily percentage changes in October 2021 for the Doe Jones, S&P 500 and Nasdaq stock exchanges versus the percentage change for Bitcoin over the same period. Notice how volatile the Cryptocurrency is. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

In fact to check that this volatility was more than just my feeling I kept track of the percentage change each day of October for both Bitcoin and the major stock averages the Dow, the S&P 500 along with Nasdaq. The results, as seen in the table above and graph below, were a more than four times greater average change in Bitcoin than for the Nasdaq exchange and more than six times greater change than for either the Dow or S&P 500.

A graph of the data above shows quite clearly how Bitcoin, the blue line, is just much more subject to up and down motions than the stock market. (Credit: R. A. Lawler)

So to anyone out there who might be thinking about investing in cryptocurrency ask yourself this question, do you really want your money to change its value, up or down, by an average of 3¾ percent every day?

Rare Earths really aren’t all that rare. So how did they get that name anyway?

Technically known as the Lanthanoid series of elements the seventeen Rare Earths occupy the upper of the two rows that are always placed at the bottom of a periodic table of the elements. In terms of abundance rare earths are actually not that uncommon, cerium, the most plentiful of the group is actually the 25th most abundant element in Earth’s crust, making it more common than the better known element copper.

The Rare Earth elements proper occupy the upper of the two rows at the bottom of the Periodic Table. Scandium (No. 21) and Yttrium (No. 39) are considered to be chemically related elements. (Credit: University of Kentucky)

The properties of the rare earths that gave them their name is that in the ground they don’t clump into veins or ores like the more familiar elements do. You’ll never find a nugget of thulium or a rich deposit of gadolinium. Not only that but chemically all of the rare earths behave very similarly. Even if you do find a layer of rock rich in rare earths it is no easy task separating your ytterbium from your neodymium from your erbium.

To look at them the Rare Earths are pretty nondescript powdery metals. The reason why they were christened ‘Rare’ is that they don’t concentrate into ore deposits and they are very difficult to separate from each other. (Credit: American Geosciences Institute)

As you might guess the discovery and understanding of the rare earths was a long and labourious process. The story began with a lieutenant in the Swedish army who was posted to a small village known as Ytterby in Sweden. At a nearby quarry in the year 1787 he identified a new mineral that he named ytterbite but which is now known as gadolinite. That quarry and the surrounding mineral deposits would for the next thirty years be the center of research into rare earth elements which is why so many of them have Swedish sounding names.

And here is why! Four elements, the first four known Rare Earths in fact, were discovered at a mine just outside of the town. (Credit: itservices.cas.unt.edu)

Even by the late 19th century when Dmitri Mendeleev was developing his periodic table the rare earths were still confusing chemists. Since the elements didn’t seem to fit in any of columns of his chart Mendeleev put them together in a row of their own at the bottom, and he had no idea how many there were. It wasn’t until the development of X-ray crystallography and quantum mechanics that the relations between the rare earths and other elements, and amongst themselves, were finally sorted out.

Dmitri Mendeleev looking very Russian. Both a cautious researcher and a keen theorist his Periodic Table is central to the science of Chemistry. (Credit: Britannica)

The Periodic Table as first proposed by Mendeleev. (Credit: Corrosion Doctors)

And some aspects of the rare earths are still a bit controversial, such as whether they should formally be known as the Lanthanoids, as I have done, or the Lanthanides. Since the suffix -ide is generally used in chemistry to refer to a compound containing oxygen, such as iron oxide or carbon dioxide I prefer to go with Lanthanoid.

The most difficult part of chemistry is just trying to remember all the naming conventions! (Credit: YouTube)

Because of the difficulty in processing large quantities of pure rare earth elements their applications in industry and technology were for many years rather limited. Over the last few decades however the uses of rare earth elements has grown dramatically as scientists have studied their unique properties. Perhaps the best known use of rare earths are in co-called ‘rare earth magnets’ using neodymium along with small amounts of terbium and samarium. Other rare earths, such as lanthanum are used in the electrodes of lithium ion batteries while several rare earths, such as holmium and erbium are used in different kinds of lasers. Other current uses include parts for smart phones, digital cameras and computers along with renewable energy technology. As more and more uses for rare earth elements are discovered the demand for them has skyrocketed, as has the price.

The Rare Earth’s most people are familiar with are the very powerful permanent Rare Earth Magnets. (Credit: ETSY)

In the year’s following World War 2 various countries have held the title of world’s largest producer of rare earth elements with India, Brazil and South Africa each having a turn. During the 1960s through the 1980s the Mountain Pass Rare Earth mine in California was the world’s largest producer. Starting in the late 1980s however China’s Inner Mongolian mines have taking the biggest share of the market and currently manufactures more than 80% of the world’s supply of rare earth elements and, critically nearly all of the heavier rare earths.

Global production of Rare Earths over the last fifty years. Not so long ago the US was the leading producer but now China dominates the market, and is using that dominance to its advantage. (Credit: ResearchGate)

All of which, in these days of political tensions between China and the rest of the world, have made rare earth elements an issue of vital national security concern. Because of this there has been a worldwide search for deposits of rare earths that can be mined profitably. Regions in Australia, Brazil, Greenland and the United States are being explored for possible development.

The Mountain Pass Rare Earth mine in California is an example of how the mining of Rare Earths can be destructive to the environment. (Credit: Wall Street Journal)

One further problem in rare earth production is that, since rare earths occur only in low concentration in the best ore deposits, a large amount of earth has to be mined in order to collect any useful amounts. Rare earth mines therefore can be environmental nightmares, ripping up whole ecologies in an effort to procure reasonable quantities of the valuable elements. One possible solution is to mine the leftover, discarded waste from old gold, copper or iron mines where rare earths may be concentrated and the environmental harm has already been done.

An Abandoned Copper mine outside of Santa Fe New Mexico. If the leftover mined material contains high concentrations of Rare Earths reprocessing it could provide the Rare Earths we need without further harm to the planet. (Credit: Santa Fe New Mexico)

Now a new technique has been invented that may be able to increase the quantity and quality of rare earths in a more environmentally friendly way. Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Critical Materials have found that the naturally occurring protein lanmodulin (LanM) will bind to all rare earth elements making it easier to separate them from unprocessed ore.

Using the protein Lanmodulin chemists at Penn State University have succeeded in separating Rare Earth elements from their ore, and from each other. (Credit: C&EN American Chemical Society)

Also, by altering the acidity or adding compounds known as chelators specific rare earths can even be extracted. The researchers are currently working on scaling up the process to industrial levels. If this process can be developed cheaply enough it could be a game changer, converting old abandoned mines into new sources of rare earths. In that case we may just have to stop calling them ‘rare’ earths.

COP26, the Climate Summit is going on right now. How much Progress can we hope for and how much can we reasonably expect?

The U.N. Climate Change Conference known as COP26 is now underway in Glasgow in the UK. On the October 31st, Halloween no less, representatives of 197 nations gathered to discuss and hopefully agree upon some policies that will enable our species and our planet to mitigate if not actually avoid the worst consequences of Earth’s changing climate. Those changes are of course being driven by humanity’s continued dependence on fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy.

The Main Conference Chamber for COP26. This is where all of the ceremonies and speeches will atke place but much of the real work will be done is smaller, more intimate settings. (Credit: www.news.cn)

In the statement above I mentioned the hope of mitigating if not actually avoiding the worst of climate change because any honest person who isn’t a fool has to acknowledge that the first effects of climate change are already upon us. Here in the United States for example the year 2021 has already seen a record number of eighteen natural disasters that have each caused over a billion dollars in damage. In fact the total losses caused by those disasters have been estimated at $104.8 billion along with 538 known fatalities and that’s with three months left to go in the year. That figure already tops the $100.2 billion for all of 2020. 2021 also marks the seventh consecutive year in which the US has suffered more than ten such billion dollar disasters while the average number for the years 1980 to 2000 was only seven, a definite sign of increasing frequency. (Note: All dollar values have been adjusted for inflation.)

Year by the year the destruction caused by natural disasters just grows and grows. You’d think the Earth was trying to tell us something! (Credit: National Climatic Data Center)

And the COP26 conference also comes just a few months after the release of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report back in August. This report, which I discussed in my post of 21 August 2021, forecast the kind of world our grandchildren will have to endure if we continue to release ever greater amounts of green house gasses into the atmosphere. Based on the findings of that report, if the nations of the world continue on their present course our planet could face a truly horrifying 4.4ºC rise in global temperature by the year 2100.

Observed Temperature rise from 1850 to today. The effect of greenhouse gasses is obvious and really is just starting. A further rise of more than 3 degrees is predicted by 2100 unless we do something to prevent it! (Credit: BBC)

So what can we hope for from our collective leaders as they meet in Glasgow to decide the fate of the world? Not much if you go by a series of documents that were leaked to the organization Greenpeace and then given to the BBC. These documents were submitted to the UN from several major nations requesting that the language employed in the IPCC report be ‘toned down’. For example the nations of Japan, Australia and Saudi Arabia all insisted that the world does not need to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as the IPCC report would indicate. Saudi Arabia in particular told the UN that it wants all messaging encouraging the ‘active phasing out of fossil fuels’ to be deleted from future reports.

Brazil (l) and Saudi Arabia (r) are two nations whose economic development is heavily dependent on destroying the environment. Both have sought to block attempts by the UN to fight Climate Change. (Credit: Unearthed.greenpeace.org)

The nation of India is another problem having already stated that they intend to continue employing coal, the worst source of CO₂, as the prime source for their electricity until around the year 2050. Indeed the world’s second most populace country has declared itself to be a ‘victim’ of climate change in that its policy of industrialization is being constrained by any attempts at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

India’s Prime Minister Modi is another world leader opposed to large cuts in CO2 emissions. (Credit: Hindustan Times)

The world’s third biggest polluter has also announced that it has no plans to even set a target date for reaching zero carbon emissions. If India is not careful it may soon become a real victim of climate change because air quality on the sub-continent has become so bad that it is affecting the health of tens of millions of Indians while the annual monsoon flooding this year has been the worst in many decades.

As India uses coal for the power to improve its economy the air pollution in its capital of Delhi has become the worst in the world. (Credit: Business Standard)

So one key event that is certainly going to occur at Glasgow will be a battle over just how much of the IPCC report will be accepted by those nations with a vested interest in fossil fuels, and how much of it is going to be watered down. Also I suppose there will be plenty of star power in attendance, all of the well known environmentalists like Greta Thunberg, Jane Goodall and David Attenborough will certainly be there. At the same time however critical world leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping have decided to only attend the conference via video.

Perhaps the greatest spokesman for the natural world ever, David Attenborough speaks to the delegates at COP26. (Credit: Ukcop26.org)

Aside from that I’m very much afraid that all we can reasonably expect from the conference is platitudes, empty statements about how important the fight against global warming is, and how humanity must unite if we are to overcome this threat to the very existence of life on this planet. Of course there will also be promises, like the promises made at the Paris climate conference in 2015 where a goal was announced of keeping the global rise in temperature to a maximum of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels, usually considered to be about the year 1850.

World Temperature Change over the last 50 years and we haven’t hit that +1.5 degree rise yet. Will we be able to prevent further rises? (Credit: Ealing Friends of the Earth)

Trouble is that many of the promises made in Paris, like the pledge from wealthy countries of the world for $100 billion dollars a year to help the poorer countries transition to green technologies, have already fallen far short. The amount collected in 2019 amounted to less than $80 billion and it is estimated that the $100 billion goal will not be reached until 2023. And by some estimates that overall goal of 1.5ºC temperature rise has already been reached, all while global CO₂ emissions continue to climb not shrink.

Having promised to deliver $100 billion a year to help poorer nations fight climate change the richer nations of the world have so far failed to even come close. (Credit: BBC)

In fact over the last few weeks the prospects for real progress have become so dim that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has even warned his fellow heads of state of the consequences of failure, reminding them of the fate of the Roman Empire and the collapse of civilization that followed its demise. For the host of COP26 to express such concerns is very discouraging and may be an ominous sign of how little real progress is going to be made at Glasgow.

The fall of the Roman Empire. Looks something like a natural disaster doesn’t it? (Credit: Live Science)

If the preceding analysis has seemed to be a bit too pessimistic for a conference that has only just begun I apologize. But it seems to me that right now the Petroleum Industry and other vested interests are united in their efforts to derail any efforts to save the Earth at the cost of their profits. On the other hand while the percentage of ordinary people who are concerned about global warming grows with every poll, climate change is not their primary concern so they fail to unite enough to make a real difference.

All of the Polls show strong support for fighting Climate Change but money talk in politics and the Fossil Fuel industry has so confused the issue that little has been done so far. (Credit: Environmental and Energy Study Institute)

From where I sit it seems to me that the environmental problems of the world are going to have to get a lot worse before any serious effort will be made to even try to make them better.

Book Review: ‘Flashes of Creation, George Gamow, Fred Hoyle and the Great Big Bang Debate’ by Paul Halpern

The history of science may not be bloody, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t had some memorable fights. Often the conflict is between a new idea and an entrenched opinion, such as the flight between Darwin and the creationists over evolution. Other times two opposing ideas can battle for decades or more before forming a synthesis. For example Newton thought that light was made of particles but Hyugens demonstrated that they were made of waves, only to have Einstein come along 200 years later and show that they were both, which you saw depended on their energy and what experiment you were performing.

Sometimes Light Waves behave like Particles while sometimes Electrons behave like Waves. Wave-Particle Duality is much of the basis for the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics. (Credit: Hyperphysics)

The book ‘Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle and the Great Big Bang Debate’ by Paul Halpern is about another such battle that took place from the 1930s through the 1960s over the very nature of the Universe in which we live. In fact a religious debate over this issue had been going on for millennia. Was the Universe eternal as the Hindus and Buddhists maintained or was there a moment of creation as the religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity and Islam proclaim.

Cover Art for ‘Flashes of Creation’ by Paul Halpern. (Credit: Basic Books)

By the 20th century it was science’s turn to take up the issue but of course the ideas of science have to account for the observed facts about the Universe as discovered by astronomers. By 1935 the most important of these facts had been established by the work of astronomer Karl Hubble. Using the 100-inch Hale telescope on Mount Wilson outside of Los Angeles California Hubble had described a Universe that was unimaginably large and filled with millions of galaxies. One more thing, Hubble showed that the Universe was expanding, those galaxies were moving away from each other.

Hubble’s law, the velocity with which a galaxy is moving away from our Milky Way is proportional to its distance. (Credit: University of Cal Poly Pomona)

That expansion of the Universe fit in well with Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Indeed the great physicist had been having problems trying to use his equations to describe a static Universe, an expanding one worked much better. But if you run an expanding Universe backward in time you get a contracting one, you get a Universe where all of the galaxies are getting closer and closer until if you go far enough back in time all of the matter that exists is squeezed together into a big ‘Cosmic Egg’.

Many scientists had a problem with Lemaitre’s notion of a ‘Cosmic Egg’ as it smacked of Metaphysics. Some still have that problem. (Credit: Triple Moon Psychotherapy)

It was the Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître who first proposed this idea that the Universe had a dense, hot beginning that expanded into what we see today, an idea that would later be called ‘The Big Bang’. There was a problem with Lemaître’s model however for if you inserted Hubble’s values for the size of the Universe and the speed that it is expanding you obtained an age for the Universe of about three billion years. But radioactive dating of Earth’s rocks gave an age for our planet of more than four billion years. How could the Earth be more than a billion years older than the entire Universe?

A professor of Physics at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, Paul Halpern is the author of several books on the history of science. (Credit: YouTube)

It’s at this point in the story that the two main actors in ‘Flashes of Creation’ take center stage. Russian physicist George Gamow would become the champion of the evolving Universe scheme of Lemaître while Fred Hoyle would become its greatest critic, co-developing an alternative Steady State / Continuous Creation theory. In the Continuous Creation theory as the Universe expanded new matter would be created to fill in the gaps and keep the Universe looking the same eternally. It was Hoyle who also first jokingly gave Lemaître’s model the name by which it is now famous ‘The Big Bang’.

George Gamow (l) and Fred Hoyle (r) were the two leading advocates for the Theories of ‘The Big Bang’ and ‘Continous Creation’ respectively. (Credit: Science News)

Halpern’s book is as much biography as science, beginning with the early life of these two scientists and relating details of their other scientific interests and achievements aside from the nature of the Universe. Halpern also gives a detailed and uncompromising personal portrait of two the men. Both were independent minded and often came into conflict with the institutions were they taught. Gamow was widely known as a joker and socializer, i.e. drinker who late in life acquired a reputation as a drunkard. Hoyle’s brand of humour was more sophisticated, but could often cross the line into meanness.

Gamow was the author of many books popularizing Science. Mister Tompkins is perhaps the best known. (Credit: Amazon)

While Hoyle also wrote non-fiction books about Science he wrote a few Science Fiction novels as well. I like ‘The Black Cloud’ the best. (Credit: Goodreads)

The crucial point in the story of Big Bang versus Continuous Creation happened in 1965 when radio astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) the leftover heat that erupted as the Big Bang. Gamow, along with his colleagues in Big Bang research Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman had predicted this leftover radiation but the Continuous Creation theory had no mechanism to account for it. The CMB is still considered to be the best, most conclusive evidence for the Big Bang.

Arno Penzias (r) and Robert Wilson (l) stand before the Horn Antenna with which they accidentally discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background. (Credit: JILA)

The endings for both Gamow and Hoyle were rather sad. Gamow died just a few years after Penzias and Wilson had proved him right but at the same time stolen his thunder as the champion of the Big Bang. Hoyle, who never accepted defeat vainly tried to fit the CMB into a quasi-Continuous Creation but as his ideas grew more outlandish his reputation suffered.

The Cosmic Microwave Background, our Universe’s baby picture as seen by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. (Credit: Research Gate)

‘Flashes of Creation’ tells this very important story in the fullest detail. Halpern has not only interviewed many of the surviving characters in the story, most especially the children of Gamow and Hoyle, but also uncovered letters and notes related to the conflict of ideas. By the way, Gamow and Hoyle only met once, and talked amicably. In fact there were never any ill feelings between these two giants of 20th century science; they just had different ideas. To bad all of our conflicts can’t be carried out in such a civilized fashion.

Einstein and Bohr argued for decades about the probabilistic nature of Quantum Mechanics, but remained friends throughout that time! (Credit: YouTube)

I must admit at this point that ‘Flashes of Creation’ does have a few flaws. Several times in the book Halpern praises Gamow for the illustrations that he made for his own popular books about physics, but ‘Flashes of Creation’ has none. As a firm supporter of the adage ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ I can only say that many of the difficult concepts Halpern describes would have been helped with a few illustrations. Also, the book could have benefited from a little more proofreading. Really there are quite a few typos spread throughout the text.

George Gamow drew many of the illustrations for his books on Science himself. ‘Flashes of Creation could have benefited from a few of Gamow’s drawings! (Credit: CSE – IIT Kanpur)

Nevertheless I certainly recommend ‘Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle and the Great Big Bang Debate’ by Paul Halpern. This is one of the most important stories in the history of science and Halpern has penned the definitive book on the subject.

Space News for October 2021: Both Manned and Robotic Missions making news.

Over the last several months most of the big news from outer space has come for manned space missions but this month there are also several robotic missions making headlines along with the manned spaceflights. Let’s start with the manned missions.

Following last month’s Inspiration Four tourist spaceflight aboard Space X’s Dragon capsule, see my post of 2 October 2021, this month the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos launched the first film crew into space to the International Space Station (ISS). Taking off on October 5th aboard a Soyuz capsule were actress Yulia Peresild and producer Klim Shipenko along with veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov.

First Film Crew in Space. Russian Actor Yulia Peresild (l) along with her producer Klim Shipenko (r). Veteran Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov is in the center. (Credit: Space.com)

The two entertainers remained on the ISS for ten days filming scenes for a new movie that is entitled ‘Challenge’. The plot of the movie concerns a medical emergency aboard the ISS for which a doctor from Earth has to be rushed to the station, which actually sounds like a good story for the first movie to be made in space. After completing their filming aboard the ISS the two returned to Earth on the 16th along with the veteran Shkaplerov.

Return of the Russian Film Crew that made the first Movie in Space. Most of the Film will actually be shot here on Earth and the Scheduled Release date has not been Announced. (Credit: New York Post)

Going forward the commercialization of space will undoubtedly see movie production as a major component of its revenue. The American actor Tom Cruise has for several years now been trying to put together a location shoot that will put him aboard the ISS and other production companies will certainly follow. Time will only tell if box office receipts can justify the high cost of filming in space.

American Actor Tom Cruse had hoped to be the first to Film in Space. (Credit: Metro)

And China also made news with the launch of the Shenzhou 13 mission to their Tiangong space station. The launch took place a little after noon eastern time on the 15th with Taikonauts Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping, and Ye Guangfu aboard. Once in orbit the capsule successfully docked with the space station after a flight of about 6 hours. This second mission to China’s new station is expected to last six months.

Yes the Launch of China’s Shenzhou 13 mission to their Tiangong station was carried live on YouTube. (Credit: YouTube)

Speaking of going forward that appears to be one thing that Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule is not doing. Ever since its final unmanned mission to the ISS back on August 3rd was cancelled the aerospace giant has been attempting to fix a problem with 13 stuck valves in the capsule’s service module. Even though Boeing has identified what it considers the likely cause of the problem and is taking corrective measures testing of the fix will take weeks if not months. Because of that the capsule’s final unmanned test mission, designated as Orbital Test Flight 2 or OTF-2 has now been officially pushed back until sometime in early 2022.

Starliner continues to undergo an investigation into the problem that occurred with 13 valves shortly before it was scheduled to launch. Currently it is thought that the humidity in Florida was the cause of the problem. (Credit: Space News)

Starliner is already several years behind schedule and well behind Space X whose Dragon capsule has now successfully sent 14 people into space and is preparing to send another four later this month on the 31st of October. Because of all the delays with Starliner NASA has quietly reassigned the two astronauts who were scheduled to fly the capsule’s first manned mission to another mission aboard Dragon. According to NASA the space agency did not think it was fair to the two astronauts to make them wait any longer for a chance to go into space. I may be reading too much into that but it certainly doesn’t seem like a vote of confidence in Boeing.

Astronauts Josh Cassidy (l) and Sunita Williams (r) had been assigned to the first manned Starliner mission but now they have been reassigned to an upcoming flight aboard Space X’s Dragon. (Credit: WBUR News)

And before I leave manned spaceflight I must mention Captain Kirk’s finally getting into space. Yes I know it was really the actor William Shatner who on the morning of the 13th of October flew to a height of about 100 km aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule. The ten minute flight was only sub-orbital but upon returning to Earth Shatner was visibly emotional, claiming the experience to be “…the most profound in my life” and that “I hope I never recover from it.” Sentiments worthy of the Captain of the Starship Enterprise.

Captain Kirk (William Shatner) describes his brief trip into actual space. (Credit: The New York Times)

There is also a lot of news this month coming from beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) thanks to our robotic probes. The combined European-Japanese spacecraft BepiColombo has finally reached its destination of Mercury flying by the closest planet to the Sun on October second.

One of the first images of Mercury taken by BepiColombo as it flew by the innermost planet. The spacecraft has several more flybys to make before it settles into orbit around Mercury. (Credit: ESA)

Getting to Mercury has been no easy task; prior to BipiColombo only two spacecraft had managed to reach the innermost planet in the solar system. You see, because Mercury is nearest to the Sun it has to orbit at the greatest speed of any planet in order to balance out the enormous pull of the Sun’s gravity. And when it comes to interplanetary travel speed is just as important as distance so a trip to Mercury can be every bit as difficult as a trip to Neptune.

Nice animation of how the Voyager 1 Spacecraft got a gravity boost from Jupiter on its way to Saturn. (Credit: Wikipedia)

In order to make such difficult journeys space scientists make use of other planets, closer to the Earth, to give their spacecraft a gravity boost. Voyager 2, the only probe so far to reach Neptune first flew by Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, getting a gravity boost as it flew by each planet on its way to Neptune.

Still the only spacecraft to visit the outermost planet, Voyager 2 got gravity boosts from three other planets on it way to Neptune. (Credit: The Atlantic)

Since being launched in October of 2018, BipiColombo has already gotten several such gravity boosts, one from our own planet Earth and two from Venus, the planet between Earth and Mercury. And BipiColombo still isn’t finished, the Mercury encounter on the second was only a flyby, the spacecraft has to perform five more flybys of the planet before it can finally settle into orbit around Mercury becoming the first spacecraft to do so. Only then, in the year 2025 can its real mission of exploration, scheduled to last five years, begin.

Actually two space probes, once in orbit around Mercury BepiColombo will separate into the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter which will each carry out their own missions. (Credit: YouTube)

The Lucy spacecraft on the other hand, is only just beginning its long journey to visit the Trojan asteroids that lead or follow Jupiter in its orbit around the Sun. Launched on the 16th of October Lucy will swing by Earth twice in order to get gravity boosts before even heading to it’s first destination. That first asteroid is designated as 52246 Donaldjohanson after the discoverer of the famous hominid fossil Lucy for which the space probe is named.

The Fossil named Lucy revolutionized our knowledge of human ancestors. It is hoped that the Lucy spacecraft will do the same for our knowledge of the Solar System. (Credit: Institute for Human Origins – Arizona State University)

The Trojan asteroids have long intrigued astronomers, captured from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter by the Giant planet’s gravity the Trojans occupy the stable Lagrangian L3 and L4 positions, (see my post of 6 January 2017 for a discussion of the Lagrangian positions). Since the first asteroids in these groups were named for characters from Homer’s Iliad the L3 and L4 positions have become known as the Trojan positions.

The five Lagrangian positions are the only known exact solutions to the ‘Three Body Problem’ in Physics. L1,2 and 3 are unstable but L3 and L4 are stable locations often called the Trojan positions. (Credit: Wikipedia)

After flying past three asteroids in the group leading Jupiter in its orbit around the Sun in 2027 Lucy will head back towards the inner solar system making yet a third flyby of Earth before visiting the asteroids following Jupiter 2033. Altogether Lucy will visit more different bodies in the solar system than any previous spacecraft while making what is surely the most complex space voyage to date.

Out to Jupiter space, then back to Earth before going out to Jupiter’s orbit again. A long trip but there will be plenty to see along the way! (Credit: NASA)

Unfortunately, when shortly after launch the space probe was order to deploy its two seven meter in diameter solar arrays only one array returned the proper signal that it had completely latched. The other array is producing power and exactly what the problem may be is unclear. At the present time NASA is trying to understand the problem before trying any fix and the space agency stresses that the probe is in no immediate danger. Still any spacecraft going as far from the Sun as Lucy is will need both its Arrays to be working properly.

Engineers are confident that they will solve the problem with one of Lucy’s solar arrays not latching. Hope they’re right! (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

So there you have it, a little bit of manned spaceflight and a bit of robotic probes. Working together they are exploring our solar system in ways unimagined just a few decades ago.