Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler – Page 64 – Discussions of Topics Related to Science and Science Fiction

World’s Most Powerful X-ray Laser generates its first Light (and just what is a Laser anyway?)

The European XFEL, a powerful new scientific instrument based at Germany’s nuclear research institute DESY near Hamburg has produced its first light pulses. The light produced by the XFEL (which stands for X-ray Free Electron Laser) has a wavelength of 0.8 billionths of a meter, that’s about 500 times shorter than the wavelength of visible light.

Although the XFEL only produced a single pulse of light as a test of it’s performance, when it is fully operational in September the instrument will produce 27,000 pulses every second. Also, while the X-ray photons produced by the XFEL are only considered “soft” X-rays, with an individual photon energy of around 10,000eV, the intensity of the light, that is the number of photons produced will be greater than any other X-ray source on Earth.

The research planned for the XFEL includes taking photographic images of individual atoms, investigations into just what is going on during chemical reactions, especially bio-chemical reactions, and even studies of conditions existing in the interior of planets

Now a Free Electron Laser (FEL for short) is a very different kind of Laser from the Laser pointers or Gas Lasers people are more familiar with. I happen to know a lot about the differences because I wrote a paper describing those differences for my course in Quantum optics back in grad school. My professor for that course was Lorenzo Narducci, a well known and highly regarded researcher in Quantum Optics. Doctor Narducci adamantly insisted that those differences were such that Free Electron Lasers were not actually Lasers. Which of course begs the question; what is a Laser.

Many people know that the acronym Laser stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation and they know that a Laser’s light is special because it is a very narrowly focused beam of only a single frequency or colour. However, the way that a Laser produces that light isn’t commonly understood, so I’m gonna tell ya.

Looking at the picture above we can see how an atom in its ground state can absorb a photon of light at a certain wavelength (spontaneous absorption) becoming excited in the process. The atom will then emit that photon again at a later time (spontaneous emission).

Funny thing is though, if while the atom is excited by the first photon a second photon comes along similar to the first (same wavelength) the second photon can stimulate the atom to emit its stored photon (hence the Stimulated Emission in Laser) and the two photons will fly off in the same direction together in step with each other, this is called coherence.

Do this with a lot of atoms all at once (something known as a population inversion) and you get the powerful flood of coherent light we call a Laser. It’s kind of like the difference between a lot of people just walking around and an army of men marching in step. A Laser is more powerful just as the army is more powerful.

Now a Free Electron Laser produces its light by a completely different mechanism. A beam of electrons is accelerated to close to the speed of light. This is usually done using what is known as a Linear Particle Accelerator and the Linear Accelerator at DESY for their FEL is 3.4 kilometers in length.

This beam of high energy electrons is then directed through the center of a device called an undulator where thousands of permanent magnets are arranged with alternating magnetic poles, north-south then south-north back to north-south then south-north and on and on. See picture below.

The charge on the electrons in the beam interacts with the magnets causing the electrons to undulate back and forth, switching direction every time the poles of the magnets flip and this switching back and forth produces a high intensity beam of light whose wavelength is determined by the spacing of the magnets and the velocity of the electron beam.

Now the light from a FEL does have several characteristics in common with the light from a Laser, the output beam is both very narrowly focused and the photons produced are almost exactly the same wavelength. However the light is certainly not produced by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, which is why Professor Narducci refused to consider FELs to be true Lasers.

Whether or not you decide that Free Electron Lasers are real Lasers the world will soon have powerful new instrument for the study of the interaction of matter and light. I look forward to the results that will come from the European FEL. By the way Professor Narducci gave me an A in quantum Optics!

Genius on the Nat Geo Channel – A biography of Albert Einstein

The National Geographic Channel has begun a new series that they’re calling ‘Genius’. The series will be a ten episode biography of Physicist Albert Einstein and stars Johnny Flynn as Einstein in his teens and twenties and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush as the older Einstein.

Genius on the National Geographic Channel

The series is being shown Tuesdays at 9PM on Nat Geo and the third episode is coming up this week.

The creative team behind ‘Genius’ are Producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, the same team that brought us the series “Mars” back last November and December. See my posts of 15Nov16 and 20Dec16 for my reviews. With this cast and behind the camera team you know the series is going to be a first rate production and so far it certainly is.

Now I’m a big fan of Albert Einstein, but I’m not a big fan of biographies. For example, it’s well known that Einstein was not a good student in school. He was the sort of person who learned better on his own, investigating the things that interested him and ignoring anything he found boring. Of course this is true of a lot of us, grammar bored the life out of me and was the bane of my existence back in grade school. This is a common aspect of many person’s schooling, movies and plays have been written about it so why go over it again?

In ‘Genius’ this conflict is the central plot of the first two episodes. Starting school in Germany young Albert finds his instructors to be so stuffy, there’s a quick scene of students memorizing the law of cosines. Transferring to Switzerland he now finds the instructors there refuse to even discuss the latest theories about molecules by Ludwig Boltzmann. We teach facts here, Einstein is told, not theoretical fantasies. Hum, could that be a foreshadowing of some of the conflicts Einstein would have because of his own theories. What do you think? I can’t imagine professors refusing to even allow their students to consider such new ideas.

In my opinion that’s the problem with biographies, the biographer tries to find a coherent theme running through a famous person’s life so they exaggerate details that reinforce the theme and ignore anything that doesn’t. I think a person’s life is too chaotic for that to work.

Then there are the personal details. I didn’t know that Einstein’s family moved to Milan, Italy while Albert was in school and nor in all honesty do I care. I also did not know that Einstein had a girlfriend, whose heart he broke, before meeting his first wife Mileva Maric’, and again, I don’t care. That’s just me, Einstein’s theories are interesting, his love life is not.

There is however, one very controversial part of Einstein’s love life that will probably receive at lot of attention in the next couple of episodes. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about how much influence did Mileva have on Albert’s groundbreaking papers in 1905. It’s quite possible that Mileva contributed but the evidence and consensus among historians of science is that she listened to Albert’s ideas more than initiating her own. It will be interesting to see how this controversy is handled in ‘Genius’

I will also be interested in seeing how some of the other scientists who contributed to relativity theory are treated. In particular I want to see if Hendrik Lorentz is given credit for his work on electromagnetic theory and it’s influence on the Special Theory. Indeed when you study Relativity Theory the first equations you learn are the ‘Lorentz Transformation’. Einstein did not meet Lorentz until after publishing his theories so will the show even mention Hendrik?

Nevertheless I will keep watching ‘Genius’ and I certainly recommend it. It’s well done and a show about the life of a great scientist is certainly an improvement over 99.9% of what passes for entertainment on TV.

A new Type of Aurora is Discovered and it’s called Steve

Throughout the history of Science there have been many occasions in which amateur scientists have provided the initial discovery or key data related to some new phenomenon. An example of this has occurred recently in Canada and revolves around the discovery of a new type of Aurora.

It all started when University of Calgary Professor Eric Donovan met with a group of amateur aurora scientists who called themselves the ‘Alberta Aurora Chasers’. The aurora chasers believed that they had managed to capture some photographs of a proton aurora, a form of the northern lights produced by protons in the solar wind rather than electrons which produce the well known aurora. Now Professor Donovan was skeptical, protons striking out atmosphere are so quickly slowed down to where they acquire electrons and become neutral atoms that a proton aurora is basically nonexistent.

Still, when Professor Donovan looked at the photos he could see that this was a type of aurora never noticed before. I didn’t say never seen before, because it turns out that this phenomena is actually fairly common but it is usually not noticed because of the more common aurora. The most obvious difference between the two types of aurora is that the better know type are seen as broad, horizontal sheets while this new type appears as a thin vertical pillar or as a complete arc across the sky. See picture below.

Looking at the photo you might ask, how could this go unnoticed but remember the pictures have been digitally enhanced to show the new type of Aurora rather than the more normal kind. In fact the new type is quite faint and only lasts for a few seconds.

The amateur scientists have given the new type of Aurora a temporary name. It’s called Steve after a scene in the movie “Over the Hedge” where an unknown entity is christened Steve because one character says “I’d be a lot less afraid of it if I knew what it was called.” to which another answers “Let’s call it Steve”.

With the help of both the Alberta Aurora Chasers and NASA Satellites scientists have already learned a good bit about Steve. So far we know that Steve is a strip of ionized gas about 20 kilometers wide and can be thousands of kilometers long. The strip of ionized gas has also be measured at move at a velocity in excess of 5 kilometers per second.

The causes of this new type of Aurora are presently unknown. in fact we’re not even certain that it is caused by the solar wind as the common aurora is. Professor Donovan hopes that in the coming months enough will be learned about Steve to publish a paper detailing it’s causes. Maybe then he’ll give the new aurora a more prestigious name, or maybe it will just keep on being Steve.

This discovery highlights the importance of ordinary people getting involved in science and how anyone can contribute. Amateur astronomers measure the light curves of variable stars. Amateur naturalists conduct bird counts. The list of ways you can become an amateur scientist is so long that I’m going to have to make it another post.

Are Artificial Organs in the near Future

Back on 11March17 I wrote a post about the recent advances in prosthetics. I discussed now close engineers and scientists were to designed and manufacturing robotic arms and legs that could replace loss limbs without any loss of ability. This is technology that will lead to actual bionic limbs.

Today I’ll like to discuss some of the advances in the field of artificial organs and whether they will soon be ready to replace the failing organs in human beings.

My inspiration for this post came from the recent paper published giving the results of an artificial womb which has been used to support a lamb fetus for up to 4 weeks and bring it to full term. The reason why this is so important an advance is because premature birth is the leading cause of death in infants and can lead to development problems that effect a person throughout their life.

For example, as soon as an infant takes its first breath after birth its lungs will stop developing. For a baby that is two months premature this will probably mean that their lungs will never fully develop. An artificial womb in which a premature birth can continue its development is obviously big news. This research was conducted at the Children’s hospital of Philadelphia by such a large group of scientists I can’t name them all. However, if you’d like to read the actual paper they have published in the journal Nature click on the link below.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15112

Others organs are also seeing rapid advances, one in particular is the artificial kidney. Researchers William Fissel of Vanderbilt University and Shuvo Roy of the University of California in San Francisco have succeeded in mounting living kidney cells on a silicon microchip substrate.

The artificial kidney is about the size of a coffee cup and is powered by the flow of blood through it. There is still work to be accomplished in preventing blood clotting but Doctors Fissel and Roy hope to begin human trials this year. If you’d like to read more about the artificial kidney click on the link below.

https://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/world-s-first-implantable-artificial-kidney-could-enter-human-trials-by-0001

Now we all know that heart disease is the leading cause of death so surely someone must be working on the possibility of an artificial heart, well of course they are. In fact the first artificial heart was built back in 1937 by Vladimir Demikhov and transplanted into a dog. Researchers have been working for many years to develop pumps that could keep the blood flowing, and a patient alive while waiting for a heart to become available for transplanting.

All of the attempts so far to develop an artificial heart have been more mechanical than biological and that is one of their leading drawbacks since the mechanical heart pump requires a source of power and this severely impacts the lives of the patients. The need for a more organic artificial heart has been recognized.

A big step in that direction has been taken by researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in collaboration with Arkansas State University and the University of Washington-Madison. This team of scientists have succeeded in growing heart cells on the cellulose structure of spinach leaves!

In a sense this is a variation on the design of the artificial kidney we talked about above. Providing a non-human substrate on which to grow human cells of the internal organ being studied. In this study the plant cells on a spinach leaf are washed away leaving the cellulose framework behind. See picture below.

Spinach Leaf being converted for use as a framework for Heart Cells

This plant substrate is now used to grow a layer of human heart cells that beat just like a real heart!!! See picture below.

The growth of blood vessels to provide nourishment for the heart cells can also be seen. There’s a lot of work still to be done in developing this technology but it holds the promise to manufacture completely organic artificial organs for transplanting into patients whose lives are threatened by organ failure. If you’d like to read more about the Heart Cells on Spinach Leaf research click on the link below.

https://www.wpi.edu/news/wpi-team-grows-heart-tissue-spinach-leaves

Paleontology News for April2017

There’s been some interesting new discoveries in the world of fossil hunters so I though I’d catch up on.

First up there’s been a new study of the ancient animals known as Eurypterids or Sea Scorpions by Scott Persons and John Acorn of the University of Alberta. Now about 450-300 million years ago Eurypterids were the top predator on Earth. growing to up to two meters in length they are the ancestors of modern lobsters, spiders and ticks. See the picture below.

Eurypterids are uncommon but still well known and well studied animals from the Paleozoic era. I have several fragments in my collection and would love to find a nice complete one.

For many years scientists have debated just how the Sea Scorpions actually captured and killed their prey. In particular the question of whether or not they relied solely on the claws near their mouth or did they strike with that pointy tail as a modern scorpion would.

What Doctors Persons and Acorn have succeeded in doing is finding enough well preserved specimens to show that the Eurypterid species Slimonia acuminate was able to turn its tail completely around and attack with a serrated tail spine. See picture below.

Now all Eurypterids may not have had such a lethal tail but the fact that Slimonia acuminate did answers a lot of questions as well as showing the early stages of the development of the striking tail of a modern scorpion. If you’d like to read more about the research of Doctors Persons and Acorn click on the link below.

http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/sea-scorpions-weapon-04794.html

In another story one of the world’s most important fossil sites, a location in China where the remains of some of the earliest multi-cellular life forms have been found, is threatened by mining activities. Part of the Doushantuo formation in southern China the site dates back 600 million years and has yielded important finds including some showing evidence of the development of bilateral symmetry in animals!

Zhu Maoyan of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology has been able to obtain a court order protecting the original site but a more recently discovered site has already been completely stripped by phosphate mining. This is just one example of valuable fossil sites being lost to development. Just last year my personal favourite site in Schuylkill County was just covered over by a highway expansion.

Finally one last story that may appeal to fans of the Jurassic Park movies. A blood engorged tick was recently found in a piece of amber estimated to be 15-45 million years old.

While not old enough to have dinosaur blood according to Professor George Poinar Jr. of Oregon State University two small holes in the back of the tick indicate that it was removed from its host and dropped into tree sap in a way reminiscent of the grooming habits of monkeys! Could the blood contained in this tick be that of 30-40 million year old primates! Some of the blood that had trickled out of the tick is already being examined and perhaps a DNA analysis will soon be carried out. If you’d like to read more about this discovery click on the link below.

http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/blood-engorged-tick-dominican-amber-04757.html

Speaking of fossils, with the weather here in Philadelphia warming up hopefully I’ll soon be doing a little paleontology of my own. I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.

Has CERN discovered a new Particle. Maybe.

It was five years ago now that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs Particle, filling in the last hole of what physicists call ‘The Standard Model’. For the next three years the LHC underwent an upgrade to increase it’s maximum energy to 13Tev, that 13 trillion electron volts. The upgrade was finished in 2015 and the LHC began another run of data collection on 3Jun2015.

Now the goal of this run is to look for new particles and new interactions beyond the standard model, something that will confirm or exclude the many different ‘Theories of Everything’ the mathematical types have come up with over the last 30-40 years. Supersymmetry, Dark Matter and String Theory are just the more well known models waiting and hoping for some sort of experimental conformation.

This past week a seminar was held at CERN giving preliminary results of the data collected by one of the LHC’s four detectors, the LHC-beauty or LHCb. The different detectors at the LHC each examine the products of the particle collisions by different techniques and the LHCb detector examines the number and behavior of particles called beauty quarks. (I was taught to call them bottom quarks but that was years ago, before their existence was even confirmed)

The researchers working with the LHCb have found a bump in their data that cannot be accounted for by any known particle, possible evidence of new physics. The researchers state that their results could be evidence of strange particles like LeptoQuarks, particles that share properties with both electrons and quarks.

As I said the results are preliminary, the researchers are currently estimating a 2.5 sigma confidence level, well below the 5 sigma level needed to announce a discovery. But more data is pouring in and the results of the LHC’s three other detectors could add further evidence. For now we’ll just have to wait and see. If you’d like to read more about the possible discovery at the LHC click on the link below.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-excited-by-latest-lhc-anomaly1/

Before I go I want to just mention that today, 22Apl17, the Cassini Spacecraft will make its final close flyby of the moon Titan before going into an orbit that will take it between Saturn and its rings. Only another 22 orbits of Saturn are planned before Cassini plunges into the Planet’s atmosphere to burn up. While it’s sad to lose the spacecraft after 13 years of discoveries the close ups of Saturn should give us a very exciting ride.

I have to do a quick update. Not five minutes after I posted this story I found a newly released picture by Cassini of the Earth as seen through Saturn’s Rings! Here it is, enjoy!

The Science of Agriculture

Howdy there y’all, farmer Bob here. It’s plantin’ time and I’m right busy with my taters and tomaters, my lettuce, carrots, peppers and cucumbers.

What’s going on here you ask? What happened to Science and Science Fiction? Well it is springtime and I am working to get my garden started so I thought this would be a good time to talk a little about some of the scientific advances happening in the field of agriculture.

Now I hope we can all agree that the science of growing food is about as important a technology as there is. In today’s world there are some one billion people living on the edge of starvation and since the Earth’s population is expected to grow another three billion by 2050 our food production needs to grow more rapidly than that if we hope to eliminate hunger from the World.

To realize such an increase could require large scale implementation of technologies that have actually been around for a long time. I’m taking about hydroponics, aquaponics and vertical farming.

I’ll start with hydroponics because back when I was a kid there was a lot of talk that growing food in nutrient rich solutions without soil was going to revolutionize food production. William Gericke first used the term hydroponics in the 1920-30s when he succeeded in growing tomato plants over seven meters tall. Gericke promoted the technology and in the 1960s NASA became interested because of the possibility of growing food by hydroponics on the Moon or Mars where there is no soil.

The basic idea is simple enough. A shallow tank of nutrient rich water is covered with a lid with holes through which plant roots are dropped into the solution. If the water is aerated the entire root can be immersed otherwise enough of the root is kept in the air to allow oxygen to be absorbed. See the picture below.

One of the advantages of hydroponics is the ability to control almost every parameter of the growth process from the concentration of nutrients and oxygen in the water to its temperature. This allows the plants to grow in optimal conditions producing much greater yields.

Notice I didn’t mention controlling the amount of light the plants get. That’s because traditionally hydroponics still used the Sun as the energy source. More recently however Glo-light bulbs and LED arrays have allowed indoor hydroponic farms with 24 hour intense lighting further increasing yield.

Now aquaponics is a combination of hydroponics with fish or shrimp farming. The fish or shrimp are raised in their tanks and the water in which they live, and let’s face it shit, circulates through the hydroponic farm with the fish excrement providing the nutrients for the plants. Now it’s not quite that easy, between the fish and the plants you need a bacterial mat or substrate to first turn that excrement into nitrites, then nitrates, the nitrates then become the nutrients the plants consume. The now purified water returns to the fish tank to begin the cycle once again. Obviously this combination of technologies not only produces two food products but also reduces cost because each technology benefits the other.

Now entrepreneurs are bring all these technologies together on an industrial scale, indoors, in the middle of a city, in a technique called ‘Vertical Farming’.

Vertical Farming combines hydroponics with intensive lighting, stacks it in layers and puts it inside a factory setting. Here in Philadelphia a company called Metropolis Farms has renovated an existing and unused factory into a large scale food production facility, i.e. a farm.

The advantages of Vertical farming are many. The controlled environment allows food production year round. According to Jack Griffin the President of Metropolis Farms instead of the typical two crops a year that a farm would get in the Philadelphia area he achieves more than 17! The stacking of layers of hydroponic tanks also enables him to grow an acre’s worth of food in only 36 sq.ft. (That’s over 1200 square meters worth of food in one square meter!). Also producing food right inside the city where it will be eaten eliminates the cost and waste associated with transporting the food hundreds or sometimes thousands of miles. Finally, growing food indoors virtually eliminates the possibility of pests and diseases destroying your crops.

There are drawbacks to Vertical Farming, the biggest is the cost of power. It takes a lot of electricity to keep all those light lit, the water pumps working etc. Still, in my view the technologies are coming together, over the next few decades the trend will be toward more and more food production taking place in settings that the farmers of old would never recognize!

More Space News for April

Two days ago NASA held a press conference to announce some of the results that scientists have discovered from the Cassini spacecraft. Cassini is in orbit around the planet Saturn and is in the final few months of it’s twenty year long mission.

The press conference mainly dealt with some new discoveries about Saturn’s moon Enceladus which we knew from earlier observations was an ice covered world similar to Jupiter’s moon Europa. For several years now NASA astronomers have speculated that, again like Europa, Enceladus might have a liquid ocean beneath the ice covering, an ocean that could support life.

Now the heat energy that keeps the ocean warm would come from the flexing and squeezing of the moon’s interior caused by the interacting gravitational fields of Saturn and it’s other moon’s, the tidal pulls. The same process is known to cause the numerous volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io and are suspected to keep the ocean on Europa warm. The heat generated by this process could also provide the energy for life on Enceladus.

Images taken of Enceladus by Cassini have discovered plumes of water spewing out of the Moon like geysers and now Cassini has even succeeded in flying through those plumes and identifying some of the chemicals contained in them. In their announcement NASA scientists stated that Cassini has detected considerable amounts of both Carbon Dioxide and Methane both of which are commonly associated with living processes. The image below details the processes going on at the moon.

These results give us another possible home for life in our Solar system. Along with Mars and Europa, Enceladus is another world we need to explore further. A specialized mission to search for life on Enceladus may take years to develop and launch however, but someday we’ll know whether or not we have close neighbors living around the ringed planet.

If you’d like to read more about NASA’s announcement click on the link below.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-missions-provide-new-insights-into-ocean-worlds-in-our-solar-system

There has also been another announcement from NASA concerning grant money being funded to a series of new technology programs. These grants are called the NASA Innovative Advanced Concept or NIAC program and are intended to study possible future technologies for spaceflight. The initial Phase I grants are about $125,000 dollars while Phase II grants can be as much as a half a million dollars.

The Phase I grants can be very interesting, even far out concepts while the Phase II grants tend to be a bit more realistic. In the Phase I group are included four completely new type of propulsion technologies, two are intended for interstellar travel, along with a ‘vacuum balloon’ to drift over the surface of Mars and Solar Surfing!

The Phase II grants include a probe of the interior of the planet Venus and a fusion enabled Pluto orbiter and lander. If you’d like to read a bit more about these possible future space technologies click on the link below.

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2017_Phase_I_Phase_II

There’s always something new happening in space so I hope you’ll be coming back soon.

Book Review” Saturn Run by John Sandford and Ctein

‘Saturn Run’, the novel by the writer John Sandford and photographer Ctein is a well knit combination of Science Fiction and Espionage Thriller all in one. The Science Fiction consists of the voyage of a Earth spaceship traveling to Saturn after an alien spaceship is discovered entering our Solar system and going to the ringed planet. The story therefore fits into two of my six ‘Great Themes of Science Fiction’. Number 3, Alien encounter along with number 1, the Exploration of Space.

The Espionage Thriller part comes from the fact that there are two Earth ships, one American and one Chinese and each side is out to grab some alien technology all for itself. The story takes place in the year 2066 so the science and politics haven’t changed all that much from today.

As far as the Science Fiction is concerned ‘Saturn Run’ tries very hard to be as accurate and up to date as is possible. Everything in the two Earth Ships is based on extrapolations from current technologies and the technical descriptions while brief, this is a novel after all, are still clear enough to give a good idea of what is going on.

The story is certainly exciting and well written with an ensemble cast of well developed characters. The action is also fast paced, it certainly kept my attention.

I do have a criticism however. (Spoiler Alert: If you don’t want to know too much skip this paragraph and the next) The alien encounter is probably the least interesting part of the story. We never meet any actual aliens, the alien station out in Saturn’s rings is kind of an automated supply depot and it’s computer is programmed not to give out any information about the aliens.

It does give out technology however, everything anybody would want to know about making and using anti-matter. In fact the aliens in ‘Saturn Run’ are pretty much just a plot device. Supplying something valuable that the Americans and Chinese can then fight over.

To me, the idea that the first encounter with another intelligent species would give us more cause to fight amongst ourselves is pretty depressing. Unfortunately, knowing human beings it could very well turn out to be that way.

With that in mind I do recommend ‘Saturn Run’. It’s a fun read and the technology keeps your attention. If you liked ‘The Martian’, and who didn’t, you’ll enjoy it.

Lecture: Beasts in the Night Sky by Professor Patrick Glauthier

Last Wednesday night (5th April) I attended a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology entitled ‘Beasts of the Night Sky’ given by Professor Patrick Glauthier of the University’s Department of Classical Studies. The lecture dealt with the myths and stories behind the familiar constellations the ancients used to understand the night sky. Wednesday’s lecture was the fifth in the museum’s series ‘Great Beasts of Legend’

Great Beasts of Legend at the U of P Museum

Professor Glauthier began the lecture with a short description of how the night sky works. That is, how the constellations we see each night change with the seasons. How most constellations rise in the east and set in the west just as the Sun does but how the constellations near the pole star never set and how the planets move against the background of fixed stars, the Greek word planet means wanderer after all. Now it’s important to remember that to the ancients Earth was not a planet but the Sun and Moon were.

The Professor also described how in the ancient world the sky was the only way for people to keep track of time and the passing of the seasons. When Orion the Hunter was in the western sky just after the Sun set it was time to plant but when he rose in the east after sunset it was time to prepare for harvest.

This part of the lecture was all very familiar to me but there was a lot of good stuff to come. Professor Glauthier concentrated on the stories the Greeks and Romans told about the constellations so of course he began with Homer. Actually it turns out that Homer didn’t say much about the constellations, in fact he never mentions the constellations of the Zodiac at all.

In book 18 of the Iliad Homer mentions the Great Bear as facing Orion the hunter even though today we recognize several other constellations, most notably Gemini, as being between them. This indicates that Homer did not know about the constellation of Gemini! In fact according to Profession Glauthier the 12 constellations of the Zodiac were absorbed by the Greeks from Mesopotamia around the fifth century BCE.

Professor Glauthier also spoke about the group of constellations associated with the Myth of Perseus, Andromeda, the Sea Monster Cetus along with Andromeda’s parents Cepheus and Cassiopeia. The grouping of these constellations indicates that they are also very old, before the Greeks knew about the Zodiac. These were some of the first attempts to impose order on the night sky.

Now comes what I thought was the interesting part of the lecture because a couple of the Mesopotamian constellations the Greeks imported, Cancer the Crab and the Goat Fish of Capricorn for example had no Greek myth that could be applied to them so later Greek and Roman writers made up myths to try and explain how they got into the night sky. What was happening was that mythology was being manipulated in order to fit the growing knowledge of astronomy.

Professor Glauthier finished up the lecture with a brief description of how astrology began as a part of astronomy but how in the Roman period the attempts to foretell the future overshadowed the practical uses of the constellations in keeping track of the seasons.

Lectures like ‘Beasts of the Night Sky’ are regularly given at science and other museums throughout the world but very few people are aware of them. I’m a member of the U of P museum and if you live around Philadelphia or are planning a visit I heartily recommend stopping by. But wherever you live there are museums nearby so go to them, learn something, expand your brain. You may find you really enjoy it!