Category: General: Fun Stuff

Mea Culpa, Sorta

On By rolcottIn General: Fun StuffLeave a comment

<breaking through the fourth wall> I, the author of this blog, stand before you both proud and abashed. There may be a word for that combination, just as “pareidolia” is the word for our tendency to see faces in inanimate objects.

Credit: NASA

This particular episode of “proud but abashed” began with an attack of pareidolia when I saw this Perseverence photo (→) that NASA retrieved from Mars.

Look closely at the large rock just to the right of center. See those two closed smiley eyes above chubby cheeks that look like they’re mashed into a pillow? I did, too, and now I can’t unsee them. Not to mention the belly button closer to us but that’s another story. Naturally, the mental image reminded me of the “rock monster” CGI effect (see photo below but it’s better in animation) in the Galaxy Quest movie (a knowing and funny parody of Star Trek; watch it if you haven’t already seen it and besides, Missy Pyle was adorable as Laliari).

Just a little later I saw yet another of those click‑bait “They don’t want you to see…” memes. That completed the circuit for a conceptual spark. As often happens, mischief ensued. It took just a few minutes of work with my digital graphics toolkit to produce this cartoon that I meant to be satirical —

I posted it in a few places. What was interesting was what happened next.

First and best, of course, was that a lot of folks recognized it as a joke. Many flagged it with a Like or HaHa and I’m sure many more just smiled (or not) and scrolled on and that’s okay.

One person wrote (I think he was kidding) “Bird poop.” There were several mentions (I think they were kidding) of “Men In Black” and “Pokémon.”

Then there are the people who took the altered image as faithful reportage and looked for explanations — “it’s a chance reflection off the robot’s metal skin” or “the Sun must have moved and illuminated an area that had been shadowed.” One responder expressed surprise and indignation that NASA would allow distribution (though the cartoon’s header says they hadn’t) of material that could incite panic. They were quite earnest about that.

It’s not the first time I’ve posted a graphic that didn’t get the reception I’d expected. There’s this pie chart (→) that compares readings for the same temperature according to different scales. (Rankine is Fahrenheit-sized degrees counting up from absolute zero. Rømer‘s, the first transferrable temperature scale, ran from zero at the freezing point of brine, up to 60 at the boiling point of water. No-one uses it any more.)

Yeah, I know the chart makes no sense, which is why I thought it was funny. I was sharply criticized for abusing the software. The carpers would start with something like, “A pie chart is supposed to demonstrate the relationship between the whole and a portion of it,” and go on from there. They were quite earnest about that.

Hey, numbers are abstractions. Why have them if we can’t chart them any way we feel like?

Other people assert numeric freedom, so I’m not alone in this. Someone in New Cuyama, California got creative and put up this sign (→). The arithmetic is good, I checked, but I wish they’d used a monospace font to put the numbers in proper columns. Anyway, the sign’s layout naturally led me to create the pie chart you see beneath it.

So — proud to have given some people a smile, but also abashed. Oh, well.

~~ Rich Olcott

Map-ematics

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, General: Fun Stuff, Uncategorized1 Comment

Big Vinnie lumbers into my office, a grin on his face and a sheaf of papers in his hand. “Sy, you gotta see these, you’ll love ’em.”

Vinnie and I go way back, so I string him along a little. “New clients, I suppose? Wealthy ones, with interesting problems?”

“Nah, just goofiness. Me and Larry, don’t think you’ve met him yet, were having pizza in Eddie’s place. Larry’d brought his laptop and we got to playing with some map software he just bought. You ever hear of a GIS?”

“Geographic Information Systems? Sure, they go back a century and a half to the guy who mapped cholera cases in London and traced the source back to a contaminated water pump. You use a GIS to produce mapped visualizations of useful geographically‑distributed statistics.”

“Yeah, that, except we weren’t going for anything useful. Here’s the first one we did. We had a list of states alphabetical‑like. There’s whole blocks that start with the same letter, like eight that start with ‘M.’ We told the mapper to put a different color on any three or more that share a letter. Silly, huh?”

“Mm-hm. I don’t see any pattern to it.”

“Right. We didn’t, either, so we went on to build a second map where each state’s colored by the date it entered the Union. We tried a bunch of different color schemes, finally settled on this one.”

“Nice. You can almost see the country growing year‑to‑year. … Ah, Hawai’i’s in there, too, tucked away in the southwest corner. It’s color’s so pale you have to look for it. West Virginia — let me guess, right around 1860 or so, right?”

“1863. Those folks rebelled against the Southern rebellion. Anyway, Jeremy was kinda looking over our shoulder and this map lit a fire for him. You know he’s doing an Indigenous History project with Professor Begaye. He ran off and brought back a list of where each state’s name came from. We coded that up, fed it to the program and this came out.”

“Wow. The Europeans pretty much claimed the coasts but look at all the green. It’s like the states acknowledged they were built on Native land. Indiana comes right out and admits it.”

“Yup. Jeremy said it was pretty poor compensation. I understand how he feels.”

“So, did you map anything more than the USA?”

“Of course. Larry wanted more silly so we went with the number of letters in each country’s name.”

“I don’t understand this one. Peru’s green for its short name, naturally, and so are Chad and Cuba, but why are Iran and Iraq different colors? Russia’s name isn’t longer than Saudi Arabia and Madagascar. How can five‑letter Congo be purple for a really long name? Doesn’t make sense.”

“Our name list came from the International Standards Organization. Larry and me, we’re both international charter pilots. We’re often checking ISO files for radio frequencies, airport codes and the like. According to ISO, Iraq is ‘IRAQ‘, but Iran is ‘IRAN (ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF).’ Russia is ‘RUSSIAN FEDERATION‘ which is longer than the other two. The USA would be redder if it was ‘UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,’ but it’s ‘UNITED STATES‘ and tied with ‘LIECHTENSTEIN‘ and ‘GUINEA‑BISSAU‘ at 13 characters so it’s brown.”

“And Congo?”

“The ISO name is ‘CONGO, THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE.’ That’s not even the longest. It’s beat by ‘KOREA, DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF‘ and ‘MACEDONIA, THE FORMER YUGOSLAV REPUBLIC OF.’ Politics, I suppose, and maybe ego. But I ain’t showed you the coolest map.”

“I’m all eyes.”

“You’ve read Andy Weir’s book, ‘The Martian‘?”

“Of course. Saw the movie, too. It was a nice change watching a drama that didn’t involve people battling each other physically or emotionally.”

“Uh. Yeah. I just saw it as an adventure story. Whatever. You remember Watney’s epic drive across that red desert to recover parts from the Pathfinder lander and then get to the launch vehicle?”

“Mm‑hm, though I don’t remember the geography.”

“Well, here’s his road map — Aries Base in Acidalia Planitia to Pathfinder in Chryse Planitia to take‑off from Schiaparelli Crater. Cool, huh?”

“Quite cool.”

Mars image credit: EMM/EXI/Dimitra Atri/NYU Abu Dhabi Center for Space Science

~~ Rich Olcott

The Name’s Not The Same

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The regular Thursday night meeting of the Acme Pizza and Science Society around the big circular table at Pizza Eddie’s. Al comes in, hair afire and ready to bite the heads off tenpenny nails. “This is the last straw!” <flings down yet another astronomy magazine>. “Look at this!”

I pick up the issue. “Looks like the lead article’s about the Psyche mission to the Psyche asteroid. You got a problem with that?”

“Nah, that’s just fine, exciting even. Look at the address label.”

“Ah, I see your objection. Instead of your first name it says ‘A. I.’ like those are your initials. Are they?”

“No. Never had a middle initial until the Navy gave me ‘N‘ for ‘No middle initial‘ and I dropped that soon as I got out.”

“So where’d they get the ‘I’?”

“That’s what chafes my cheeks, Vinnie, people messing with my name. All this stuff going on these days about Artificial Intelligence which everybody calls ‘AI’ which looks too flippin’ much like Al. People have been ribbing me about it since ChatGPT hit the street. They come in here asking me for virtual coffee or wanting to know about my ALgorithms. One guy claimed I parked a driverless coffee machine back of the kitchen. But it’s not just jokes. I get calls asking for programming help with languages I never heard of. My checks have my name as Al but the bank lady gives me grief because I don’t sign them with A. I.”

“You’ve got a good point there. When someone chooses a name, that name’s important to them. I know whole families where everyone has a ‘go‑by‘ name. First class I ever taught, I opened by calling the role so I could tie names to faces. I started out calling out first names but quickly learned that most of the men and half the women went by middle names — this was in the South where that’s common but still. Anyway, I called first and middle names until I got to this one kid. He’d gone through three years of college going by ‘C-M’ until I blew his cover by asking which student was named Clyde and it was him. I don’t think he ever forgave me.”

“I know the feeling, Cathleen. None of the teachers could handle my full name. This magazine’s stupid spell‑checker musta corrected me wrong. I want a new name that doesn’t get messed up.”

“Al’s not your full name?”

“No, it’s Aloysius which I don’t like. No-one can spell it, or say it right if they see it written out. I got named after my Mom’s favorite uncle before I could vote against it. I’ve been going by Al ever since I knew better.”

“We need to figure you a new name that looks different but sounds almost the same so you’ll recognize it when we holler at you, right?”

“That’s about it, Vinnie. Whaddaya got?”

“A negative to begin with. We can rule out Hal, the killer computer in the 2001 movie. Don’t want to see our physicist here walk up for a strawberry scone and get ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Sy.’ Haw!”

“How about Sal?”

Eddie waves it away. “My Uncle Salvatore’s already got that. One’s enough.”

I read off Old Reliable’s screen. “Baal was a god worshipped by some of the Old Testament enemy tribes, eventually turned into Beelzebub. That won’t do. And ‘mal‘ means ‘bad‘ in Spanish.”

Resident chemist Susan giggles. “I don’t suppose you’d be happy if I greeted you with a cheery, ‘Hey, Gal‘. Oh, wait, I’ve got a Chemistry thing for us. ‘Cal‘ is the standard abbreviation for ‘calorie,’ one of the old‑time measures of heat energy before everybody settled on the joule. What do you think of ‘Cal‘? Hot and cool and rugged enough for you?”

“Hmm… I like it. ‘Cal’s Coffee‘ even has that market‑winner k’‑kuh sound like Krispy Kreme and Captain Crunch and Crispy Critters. It’s official — from now on, Cal is my official go‑by name. Thanks, Susan.”

She grins. “First time I’ve named an adult. Hi, Cal.”
 ”Hi, Cal.”
  ”Hi, Cal.”
   ”Hi, Cal. Now about that magazine article…”

Adapted from a photo by Edward Eyer

~~ Rich Olcott

The Situation of The Gravity

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<bomPAH-dadadadaDEEdah> It’s been a while since Old Reliable blared that unregistered ringtone. Sure enough, the phone function’s caller‑ID display says 710‑555‑1701.  “Commander Baird, I presume? Long time no hear.”

<downcast tone with a hint of desperation> “It’s Lieutenant now.”

“Sorry to hear that. What happened?”

“Project Lonesome was a bust. It took us years to assemble those two planetoids but getting them into the right orbits around the black hole was more of a challenge than we planned for. Planetoid Pine got away from us and fell down through the Event Horizon. One big blast of inforon radiation and no more project. We lost a few robot space tugs but all carbon‑based personnel survived. Medical Bay just now pronounced me healthy — it’s amazing what they can do about pervasive sub‑cellular damage these days. The Board of Inquiry decided no‑one was at fault but they down‑ranked me because I was primary advocate for a jinxed project.”

“Well, those 15-minute orbits were a gamble all along. So why this phone call?”

“You know how it is, sitting in Med Bay with nothing much to do. I was poking around and happened to read a few of the files you’re working on—”

“Which ones?”

“The Projects directory.”

“But those are client files I’ve encrypted with the latest technology.”

“Oh, please, Mr Moire, I am calling from the 24th Century. Upton’s algorithm for zeta‑function decryption is ancient history. Don’t worry, your client’s secrets are safe, although one of your clients may not be.”

“Whoa, say what? Which one? What kind of danger? They all seem healthy, look both ways before crossing the street, that sort of thing.”

“One of those projects is extremely dangerous.”

“Which one? The biometrically‑lockable archery bow shouldn’t cause any problems. The electric yoga outfit? I triple‑checked the wiring and insulation specs, they’re safe and reliable. The robot rabbit? Surely not. Does this involve lethal spy‑craft of some sort? I try to avoid military work.”

“No, it’s the perpetual motion machine.”

“Ralphie’s project? Laws of Thermodynamics and all, I told him that’s just not going to work. He insisted I check his blueprints to make sure nothing’s going to blow up. I gave them a quick glance, didn’t see anything dicey.”

“It wouldn’t be obvious, especially not in view of your primitive science—”

“Hey!”

“No offense intended, Mr Moire, but it is primitive from my perspective. Two hundred years make a difference. Consider the state of Earth’s science in 1723 — Graham was still perfecting the pendulum clock.”

“Point taken, reluctantly. So what should I look for, and why?”

“The Prime Directive applies across time periods, too, so I can’t go into detail with you. I’ll just say it’s not any one component, it’s the overall physical arrangement and what will happen when he powers up. Move the boxy bits closer together or further apart by two centimeters and the danger’s gone.”

“But what’s the danger? I can’t just tell him to reconfigure for no reason.”

“Directed gravity, Mr Moire, the sculpting of spacetime. It’s the reason we don’t need safety belts on a starship — we manufacture local gravity that always pulls toward the deck. In fact, directed gravity’s at the heart of warp drive technology. Cochrane stumbled on the effect accidentally but fortunately his lab was in a reinforced hard‑rock tunnel so damage was limited.”

“Anti-gravity? Oh, that’d be so cool. Flying cars at last, and sky‑cycles. Okay, there’d be problems and we’d need an AI-boosted Air Traffic Control agency. The military would be all over the idea. But all that’s way down the road, so to speak. I don’t understand how that puts Ralphie in immediate danger and why would a tunnel help?”

“Not anti-gravity, directed gravity. Gravity’s built into the structure of spacetime. Gravity can’t be blocked, but it can be shifted. The only way to weaken it in one location is to make it stronger somewhere else. Suppose Cochrane had first powered‑up his device on the ground in the open air. Depending on which way it was pointed, either he’d have been crushed between rising magma and down‑falling air, or…”

“I’ll tell Ralphie to re‑configure his gadget. Thanks for the warning.”

~~ Rich Olcott

  • Thanks, Alex, for inspiring this.

Prime Contenders

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Between COVID and the post‑holiday wind‑down, things are slow. Vinnie and I are playing cards on my office side table, except my only deck is missing the heart face cards (long story) so we’re just trying to edge‑stack them. It’s not going well. “Geez, Sy, these towers collapse so quick, it’s boring. What else you got around here?”

“Well, before you arrived I was chasing prime numbers on Old Reliable for a New Year piece. Did you know, for instance, there we’re smack in the middle of a decade-long prime year dearth?”

“Prime year dearth?”

“Prime as in not divisible by any number other than itself and one, dearth as in no year’s name being a prime number since 2017 and the next one isn’t until 2027. In the forty‑four years leading up to 2017 we averaged one prime per 5½ years. On the other hand, after 2029 (also a prime year, by the way) there’s fifty‑two years with only five primes.””

“Is there some rule for how many to expect?”

“Sort of. I sampled a series of hundred‑number ranges on up to a billion. The percentage of primes fell off as the numbers got larger, settled in at about 6%.”

“Makes sense — you got a bigger number, you got more little numbers that might divide into it.”

“Mm-hm. Something weird happens around ten million, though. The percentage drops down to only 2% but then it goes right back up to around 6% and stays there. I tried different scan resolutions but couldn’t locate any single especially long non‑prime string. The mathematicians have carried the research a lot further than my little experiment. The Prime Number Theorem gives a general curve that’s good ‘for sufficiently large numbers,’ but a million is a small number on their scale. As a physicist I’m a bit frustrated because the Theorem says, ‘This is the way it is‘ but it doesn’t give a reason. Although there probably isn’t a reason, any more than there’s a reason for 2017 being a prime to begin with.”

“I know what you mean. My car’s Owner Manual is the same way. Uhh… as I recall, you had a post a while ago about primes and 3’s and 7’s.”

“That was for New Year 2016, to be exact. Yeah, I found a collection of primes like 3337 and 733333 that have a string of 3’s or 7’s fronted and trailed by 3’s or 7’s. It wasn’t a bad bet. No primes (except 2 and 5) can have 0, 2, 4, 5, 6 or 8 as a trailing digit, right?”

“Lemme think for a minute. … Right.”

“That list didn’t include scrambled combinations like 37737, so what I did this year was to use Old Reliable to construct a big list of all possible 3’s‑and‑7’s numbers between 3 and a billion.”

“That’s a lot of numbers.”

“Not so many, actually, only about 1000. I told Old Reliable not to sample numbers that have any non‑3‑or‑7 digit buried in them somewhere. That’s a lot of pass‑overs.”

“That’s a lot of checking and skipping.”

“I used a short cut. It’s easy to build a list of all possible numbers with a certain number of binary digits — just count in binary. The three‑digit binary numbers, for instance, give you every zero‑one combination between 000 is zero and 111 is seven. Then I converted all the zeroes to 3’s and all the ones to 7’s and got every 3’s‑and‑7’s number between a hundred and a thousand with no interlopers. As a bonus that method organizes the overall list by powers of ten, like 333 to 777 in a sublist, 3333 to 7777 in another and so on. I counted the primes in each sublist and charted all the sublist percentages in the same graph as the hundred‑number sampling. Pretty much the same curve, but no dip near 10 million. For the heck of it I played the same game with 1’s and 9’s. Same behavior. Oh well.”

“So that’s how you keep yourself occupied on a slow day, huh? I got a New Year prediction for you.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m gonna bring you a couple fresh decks of playing cards.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Maybe It’s Just A Coincidence

On By rolcottIn Crazy Theories, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Raucous laughter from the back room at Al’s coffee shop, which, remember, is situated on campus between the Physics and Astronomy buildings. It’s Open Mic night and the usual crowd is there. I take a vacant chair which just happens to be next to the one Susan Kim is in. “Oh, hi, Sy. You just missed a good pitch. Amanda told a long, hilarious story about— Oh, here comes Cap’n Mike.”

Mike’s always good for an offbeat theory. “Hey, folks, I got a zinger for you. It’s the weirdest coincidence in Physics. Are you ready?” <cheers from the physicists in the crowd> “Suppose all alone in the Universe there’s a rock and a planet and the rock is falling straight in towards the planet.” <turns to Al’s conveniently‑placed whiteboard> “We got two kinds of energy, right?”

Potential Energy    Kinetic Energy

Nods across the room except for Maybe-an-Art-major and a couple of Jeremy’s groupies. “Right. Potential energy is what you get from just being where you are with things pulling on you like the planet’s gravity pulls on the rock. Kinetic energy is what potential turns into when the pulls start you moving. For you Physics smarties, I’m gonna ignore temperature and magnetism and maybe the rock’s radioactive and like that, awright? So anyway, we know how to calculate each one of these here.”

PE = GMm/R    KE = ½mv²

“Big‑G is Newton’s gravitational constant, big‑M is the planet’s mass, little‑m is the rock’s mass, big‑R is how far apart the things are, and little‑v is how fast the rock’s going. They’re all just numbers and we’re not doing any complicated calculus or relativity stuff, OK? OK, to start with the rock is way far away so big‑R is huge. Big number on the bottom makes PE’s fraction tiny and we can call it zero. At the same time, the rock’s barely moving so little‑v and KE are both zero, close enough. Everybody with me?”

More nods, though a few of the physics students are looking impatient.

“Right, so time passes and the rock dives faster toward the planet Little‑v and kinetic energy get bigger. Where’s the energy coming from? Gotta be potential energy. But big‑R on the bottom gets smaller so the potential energy number gets, wait, bigger. That’s OK because that’s how much potential energy has been converted. What I’m gonna do is write the conversion as an equation.

GMm/R = ½mv²

“So if I tell you how far the rock is from the planet, you can work the equation to tell me how fast it’s going and vice-versa. Lemme show those straight out…”

v = √(2GM/R)    R = 2GM/v²

Some physicist hollers out. “The first one’s escape velocity.”

“Good eye. The energetics are the same going up or coming down, just in the opposite direction. One thing, there’s no little‑m in there, right? The rock could be Jupiter or a photon, same equations apply. Suppose you’re standing on the planet and fire the rock upward. If you give it enough little‑v speed energy to get past potential energy equals zero, then the rock escapes the planet and big‑R can be whatever it feels like. Big‑R and little‑v trade off. Is there a limit?”

A couple of physicists and an astronomy student see where this is going and start to grin.

“Newton physics doesn’t have a speed limit, right? They knew about the speed of light back then but it was just a number, you could go as fast as you wanted to. How about we ask how far the rock is from the planet when it’s going at the speed of light?”

R = 2GM/c²

Suddenly Jeremy pipes up. “Hey that’s the Event Horizon radius. I had that in my black hole term paper.” His groupies go “Oooo.”

“There you go, Jeremy. The same equation for two different objects, from two different theories of gravity, by two different derivations.”

“But it’s not valid for lightspeed.”

“How so?”

“You divided both sides of your conversion equation by little‑m. Photons have zero mass. You can’t divide by zero.”

Everyone in the room goes “Oooo.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Engineering A Black Hole

On By rolcottIn General: Fun Stuff, Physics: Black Holes and Relativity, Physics: Newton and Gravity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

<bomPAH-dadadadaDEEdah> That weird ringtone on Old Reliable again. Sure enough, the phone function’s caller-ID display says 710‑555‑1701.  “Ms Baird, I presume?”

A computerish voice, aggressive but feminine, with a hint of desperation. “Commander Baird will be with you shortly, Mr Moire. Please hold.”

A moment later, “Hello, Mr Moire.”

“Ms Baird. Congratulations on the promotion.”

“Thank you, Mr Moire. I owe you for that.”

“How so?”

“Your posts about phase-based weaponry got me thinking. I assembled a team, we demonstrated a proof of concept and now Federation ships are being equipped with the Baird‑Prymaat ShieldSaw. Works a treat on Klingon and Romulan shielding. So thank you.”

“My pleasure. Where are you now?”

“I’m on a research ship called the Invigilator. We’re orbiting black hole number 77203 in our catalog. We call it ‘Lonesome‘.”

“Why that name?”

“Because there’s so little other matter in the space nearby. The poor thing barely has an accretion disk.”

“Sounds boring.”

“No, it’s exciting, because it’s so close to a theoretical ideal. It’s like the perfectly flat plane and the frictionless pulley — in real life there are always irregularities that the simple equations can’t account for. For black holes, our only complete solutions assume that the collapsed star is floating in an empty Universe with no impinging gravitational or electromagnetic fields. That doesn’t happen, of course, but Lonesome comes close.”

“But if we understand the theoretical cases and it nearly matches one, why bother with it at all?”

“Engineering reasons.”

“You’re engineering a black hole?”

“In a way, yes. Or at least that’s what we’re working on. We think we have a way to extract power from a black hole. It’ll supply inexhaustible cheap energy for a new Star Fleet anti‑matter factory. “

“I thought the only thing that could escape a black hole’s Event Horizon was Hawking radiation, and it cheats.”

“Gravity escapes honestly. Its intense field generates some unexpected effects. Your physicist Roger Penrose used gravity to explain the polar jets that decorate so many compact objects including black holes. He calculated that if a comet or an atom or something else breakable shatters when it falls into a spinning compact object’s gravitational field, some pieces would be trapped there but under the right conditions other pieces would slingshot outward with more energy than they had going in. In effect, the extra energy would come from the compact object’s angular momentum.”

“And that’s what you’re planning to do? How are you going to trap the expelled pieces?”

“No, that’s not what we’re planning. Too random to be controlled with our current containment field technology. We’re going pure electromagnetic, turning Lonesome into a giant motor‑generator. We know it has a stable magnetic field and it’s spinning rapidly. We’ll start by giving Lonesome some close company. There’s enough junk in its accretion disk for several Neptune‑sized planets. The plan is to use space tugs to haul in the big stuff and Bussard technology for the dust, all to assemble a pair of Ceres-sized planetoids. W’re calling them Pine and Road. We’ll park them in a convenient equatorial orbit in a Lagrange‑stable configuration so Pine, Road and Lonesome stay in a straight line.”

“Someone’s been doing research on old cinema.”

“The Interstellar Movie Database. Anyhow, when the planetoids are out there we string conducting tractor beams between them. If we locate Pine and Road properly, Lonesome’s rotating magnetic field lines will cross the fields at right angles and induce a steady electric current. Power for the anti‑matter synthesizers.”

“Ah, so like Penrose’s process you’re going to drain off some of Lonesome‘s rotational kinetic energy. Won’t it run out?”

“Lonesome‘s mass is half again heavier than your Sun’s, Mr Moire. It’ll spin for a long, long time.”

“Umm … that ‘convenient orbit.’ Lonesome‘s diameter is so small that orbits will be pretty speedy. <calculating quickly with Old Reliable> Even 200 million kilometers away you’d circle Lonesome in less than 15 minutes. Will the magnetic field that far out be strong enough for your purposes?”

“Almost certainly so, but the gravimagnetodynamic equations don’t have exact solutions. We’re not going to know until we get there.”

“That’s how research works, all right. Good luck.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Question Time

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Cosmology, Crazy Theories, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Cathleen unmutes her mic. “Before we wrap up this online Crazy Theories contest with voting for the virtual Ceremonial Broom, I’ve got a few questions here in the chat box. The first question is for Kareem. ‘How about negative evidence for a pre-mammal civilization? Played-out mines, things like that.‘ Kareem, over to you.”

“Thanks. Good question but you’re thinking way too short a time period. Sixty‑six million years is plenty of time to erode the mountain a mine was burrowing into and take the mining apparatus with it.

“Here’s a different kind of negative evidence I did consider. We’re extracting coal now that had been laid down in the Carboniferous Era 300 million years ago. At first, I thought I’d proved no dinosaurs were smart enough to dig up coal because it’s still around where we can mine it. But on second thought I realized that sixty-six million years is enough time for geological upthrust and folding to expose coal seams that would have been too deeply buried for mining dinosaurs to get at. So like the Silurian Hypothesis authors said, no conclusions can be drawn.”

“Nice response, Kareem. Jim, this one’s for you. ‘You said our observable universe is 93 billion lightyears across, but I’ve heard over and over that the Universe is 14 billion years old. Did our observable universe expand faster than the speed of light?‘”

“That’s a deep space question, pun intended. The answer goes to what we mean when we say that the Hubble Flow expands the Universe. Like good Newtonian physicists, we’re used to thinking of space as an enormous sheet of graph paper. We visualize statements like, ‘distant galaxies are fleeing away from us‘ as us sitting at one spot on the graph paper and those other galaxies moving like fireworks across an unchanging grid.

“But that’s not the proper post-Einstein way to look at the situation. What’s going on is that we’re at our spot on the graph paper and each distant galaxy is at its spot, but the Hubble Flow stretches the graph paper. Suppose some star at the edge of our observable universe sent out a photon 13.7 billion years ago. That photon has been headed towards us at a steady 300000 kilometers per second ever since and it finally reached an Earth telescope last night. But in the meantime, the graph paper stretched underneath the photon until space between us and its home galaxy widened by a factor of 3.4.

“By the way, it’s a factor of 3.4 instead of 6.8 because the 93 billion lightyear distance is the diameter of our observable universe sphere, and the photon’s 13.7 billion lightyear trip is that sphere’s radius.

“Mmm, one more point — The Hubble Flow rate depends on distance and it’s really slow on the human‑life timescale. The current value of the Hubble Constant says that a point that’s 3×1019 kilometers away from us is receding at about 70 kilometers per second. To put that in perspective, Hubble Flow is stretching the Moon away from us by 3000 atom‑widths per year, or about 1/1300 the rate at which the Moon is receding because of tidal friction.”

“Nice calculation, Jim. Our final question is for Amanda. ‘Could I get to one of the other quantum tracks if I dove into a black hole and went through the singularity?‘”

“I wouldn’t want to try that but let’s think about it. Near the structure’s center gravitational intensity compresses mass-energy beyond the point that the words ‘particle’ and ‘quantum’ have meaning. All you’ve got is fields fluctuating wildly in every direction of spacetime. No sign posts, no way to navigate, you wouldn’t be able to choose an exit quantum track. But you wouldn’t be able to exit anyway because in that region the arrow of time points inward. Not a sci‑fi story with a happy ending.”

“<whew> Alright, folks, time to vote. Who presented the craziest theory? All those in favor of Kareem, click on your ‘hand’ icon. … OK. Now those voting for Jim? … OK. Now those voting for Amanda? … How ’bout that, it’s a tie. I guess for each of you there’s a parallel universe where you won the virtual Ceremonial Broom. Congratulations to all and thanks for such an interesting evening. Good night, everyone.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Too Many Schrödingers

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, Crazy Theories, Physics: Quantum Mechanics, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Cathleen takes back control of the conference software. “Thanks, Jim. OK, the final contestant in our online Crazy Theories contest is the winner of our last face-to-face event where she told us why Spock and horseshoe crabs both have green blood. You’re up, Amanda.”

“Thanks, and hello out there. I can’t believe Jim and I are both talking about parallel universes. It’s almost like we’re thinking in parallel, right?”

<Jim’s mic is muted so he makes gagging motions>

“We need some prep work before I can talk about the Multiverse. I’m gonna start with this heat map of North America at a particular time. Hot in the Texas panhandle, cool in British Columbia, no surprise. You can do a lot with a heat map — pick a latitude and longitude, it tells you the relative temperature. Do some arithmetic on the all numbers and you can get average temperature, highs and lows, front strength in degrees per mile, lots of stuff like that.

“You build this kind of map by doing a lot of individual measurements. If you’re lucky you can summarize those measurements with a function, a compact mathematical expression that does the same job — pick a latitude and longitude, it tells you the value. Three nice things about functions — they take up a lot less space than a map, you can use straightforward mathematical operations on them so getting statistics is less work than with a map, and you can form superpositions by adding functions together.”

Cathleen interrupts. “Amanda, there’s a question in the chat box. ‘Can you give an example of superposition?’“

“Sure. You can superpose simple sine‑wave functions to describe chords for sound waves or blended colors for light waves, for instance.

“Now when we get to really small‑scale thingies, we need quantum calculations. The question is, what do quantum calculations tell us? That’s been argued about for a hundred years because the values they generate are iffy superpositions. Twenty percent of this, eighty percent of that. Everybody’s heard of that poor cat in Schrödinger’s box.

“Many researchers say the quantum values are relative probabilities for observing different results in an experiment — but most of them carefully avoid worrying about why the answers aren’t always the same. Einstein wanted to know what Bohr was averaging over to get his averages. Bohr said it doesn’t matter, the percentages are the only things we can know about the system and it’s useless to speculate further.

“Hugh Everett thought bigger. He suggested that the correct quantum function for an observation should include experiment and experimenter. He took that a step further by showing that a proper quantum function would need to include anyone watching the experimenter and so on. In fact, he proposed, maybe there’s just one quantum function for the entire Universe. That would have some interesting implications.

“Remember Schrödinger’s catbox with two possible experimental results? Everett would say that his universal quantum function contains a superposition of two component sub-functions — happy Schrödinger with a live kitty and sad Schrödinger with a disposal problem. Each Schrödinger would be quite certain that he’d seen the definite result of a purely random operation. Two Schrödingers in parallel universes going forward.

“But in fact there’d be way more than two. When Schrödinger’s eye absorbs a photon, or maybe doesn’t, that generates another pair of universes. So do the quantum events that occur as his nerve cells fire, or don’t. Each Schrödinger moves into the future embedded in a dense bundle of parallel universes.”

Cathleen interrupts. “Another question. ‘What about conservation of mass?‘”

“Good question, whoever asked that. Everett doesn’t address that explicitly in his thesis, but I think he assumed the usual superposition math. That always includes a fix‑up step so that the sum of all the pieces adds up to unity. Half a Schrödinger mass on one track and half on the other. Even as each of them splits again and again and again the total is still only one Schrödinger‑mass. There’s other interpretation — each Schrödinger’s universe would be independent of the others so there’s no summing‑up to generate a conservation‑of‑mass problem. Your choice.

“Everett traded quantum weirdness for a weird Universe. Not much of a trade-off, I think.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Worlds Enough And Time Reversed

On By rolcottIn Cosmology, Crazy Theories, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Cathleen unmutes her mic. “Thanks, Kareem. Our next Crazy Theory presentation is from one of my Cosmology students, Jim.”

“Thanks, Cathleen. Y’all have probably heard about how Relativity Theory and Quantum Mechanics don’t play well together. Unfortunately, people have mixed the two of them together with Cosmology to spawn lots of Crazy Theories about parallel universes. I’m going to give you a quick look at a couple of them. Fasten your seat belt, you’ll need it.

“The first theory depends on the idea that the Universe is infinitely large and we can only see part of it. Everything we can see — stars, galaxies, the Cosmic Microwave Background — they all live in this sphere that’s 93 billion lightyears across. We call it our Observable Universe. Are there stars and galaxies beyond the sphere? Almost certainly, but their light hasn’t been in flight long enough to reach us. By the same token, light from the Milky Way hasn’t traveled far enough to reach anyone outside our sphere.

“Now suppose there’s an alien astronomer circling a star that’s 93 billion lightyears away from us. It’s in the middle of its observable universe just like we’re in the middle of ours. And maybe there’s another observable universe 93 billion lightyears beyond that, and so on to infinity. Oh, by the way, it’s the same in every direction so there could be an infinite number of locally-observable universes. They’re all in the same space, the same laws of physics rule everywhere, it’s just that they’re too far apart to see each other.

“The next step is a leap. With an infinite number of observable universes all following the same physical laws, probability says that each observable universe has to have twins virtually identical to it except for location. There could be many other people exactly like you, out there billions of lightyears away in various directions, sitting in front of their screens or jogging or whatever. Anything you might do, somewhere out there there’s at least one of you doing that. Or maybe a mirror image of you. Lots of yous in lots of parallel observable universes.”

“I don’t like that theory, on two grounds. First, there’s no way to test it so it’s not science. Second, I think it plays fast and loose with the notion of infinity. There’s a big difference between ‘the Universe is large beyond anything we can measure‘ and ‘the Universe is infinite‘. If you’ve been reading Sy Moire’s stuff you’ve probably seen his axiom that if your theory contains an infinity, you’ve left out physics that would stop that. Right, Cathleen?”

Cathleen unmutes her mic. “That quote’s good, Jim.”

“Thanks, so’s the axiom. So that’s one parallel universe theory. OK, here’s another one and it doesn’t depend on infinities. The pop‑science press blared excitement about time‑reversal evidence from the ANITA experiment in Antarctica. Unfortunately, the evidence isn’t anywhere as exciting as the reporting has been.

“The story starts with neutrinos, those nearly massless particles that are emitted during many sub‑atomic reactions. ANITA is one kind of neutrino detector. It’s an array of radio receivers dangling from a helium‑filled balloon 23 miles up. The receivers are designed to pick up the radio waves created when a high‑energy neutrino interacts with glacier ice, which doesn’t happen often. Most of the neutrinos come in from outer space and tell us about solar and stellar activity. However, ANITA detected two events, so‑called ‘anomalies,’ that the scientists can’t yet explain and that’s where things went nuts.

“Almost as soon as the ANITA team sent out word of the anomalies, over three dozen papers were published with hypotheses to account for them. One paper said maybe the anomalies could be interpreted as a clue to one of Cosmology’s long‑standing questions — why aren’t there as many antiprotons as protons? A whole gang of hypotheses suggest ways that maybe something in the Big Bang directed protons into our Universe and antiprotons into a mirror universe just like ours except charges and spacetime are inverted with time running backwards. There’s a tall stack of maybes in there but the New York Post and its pop‑sci allies went straight for the Bizarro parallel universe conclusion. Me, I’m waiting for more data.”

~~ Rich Olcott