The scale of things

[Hammer of Los]

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Ah I recall David Deutsch.

The Fabric of Reality.

Is Woven on the Knees of Intuition.

Spun, as it were.

Don't get me started.

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[hanshan]

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Thanks, hanshan. Since I don’t know the works of either Mr. Brunner or Mr. Constantine, I think, from a personal point of interest with regard to the scale of things, the more scientifically specific would be cosmological ideas expressed in an excerpt that I’ve personally transcribed from David Deutsch’s TED talk. The only thing is, and it’s not surprising, Deutsch didn’t include shock or sound waves, or vibrations ftm, in his hypotheses. However, when I first heard Deutsch’s talk, I don’t think I could’ve been more excitedly dazed for days.
The excerpt begins approx 07.45.


^ David Deutsch | TED JULY2005

“…The brain contains an accurate, working model of the quasar; not just a superficial image of it—though it contains that as well—but an explanatory model embodying the same mathematical relationship, and the same causal structure. That is knowledge.

“And, if that weren’t amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge.

“So the laws of physics have this special property: that physical objects, as unlike each other as they could possibly be, can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure, and to do it more, and more so over time.…”

POST 2671

Very cool, Allegro. Thanks for taking the time to transcribe & link.

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[Allegro]

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Highlights mine. See links in original.

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The cold, thin, glorious line of star birth | Phil Plait
Bad Astronomy | April 14th, 2011 7:00 AM

At the end of May, 2010, the European Space Agency’s orbiting Herschel telescope was pointed toward a dark cloud in space over 2500 light years away. What it saw may solve a bit of a scientific mystery… and is also truly beautiful:



This object is called IC5146, and consists of the Cocoon nebula on the left, and two long streamers of gas extending to the right. Herschel is very sensitive to cold dust in the very far infrared; in this image blue shows gas and dust emitting at a wavelength of 70 microns (the reddest color the human eye can see is roughly 0.7 microns), green is 250 microns, and red 500 microns — that’s over 700 times the longest wavelength light the eye can detect.

The Cocoon nebula is a well-known gas cloud being lit up by a massive, hot star in its center. In the visible light image inset here — grab the stunning high-res version to compare to the Herschel shot — the dust is dark, since it absorbs the kind of light we see. Also, stars are pretty faint at these extreme infrared wavelengths, so they don’t interfere with the observations of the gas and dust. That’s why observatories like Herschel are so important: they allow us to investigate objects that might be invisible to other telescopes.

As you can see in the Herschel image, the entire region is interlaced with long, thin filaments of dust. This dust is cold: much of it is only about 15° Celsius above absolute zero, or -430°F! What’s so very interesting is that the filaments, no matter what length they are (and as seen in other parts of the sky by Herschel as well), seem to have about the same width of roughly 0.3 light years across. That argues very strongly that these filaments are formed from turbulence in the dust, probably caused by exploding stars roiling up the matter between stars. That width is just about what you’d expect as shock waves from exploding stars slam into each other, interact, and become turbulent.

Looking at other filaments like these in other parts of the sky, astronomers also found about 100 dense knots of dust that are forming into stars in the filaments. This shows clearly that these filaments are the sites of star birth, something that was unclear before these Herschel observations. Not all filaments form stars, but the fact that some do will help astronomers understand the fiercely complicated mechanics of star formation.

These filaments are all over the sky; the image here from Herschel is actually of a region on the sky near the star Polaris (click to get a much bigger, very cool picture), which I would’ve thought would be nearly empty of dust. But clearly there are filaments galore there, and again they show that same characteristic width of 0.3 light years. Apparently supernovae have been going off all over the galaxy for quite some time, their expanding gas stirring up the ethereally thin material of interstellar space. In fact, these filaments are considered by astronomers to be dense, but the air in Earth’s atmosphere is hundreds of trillions times denser!

In astronomy, thin means thin. But over trillions of kilometers, even material that rarefied can eventually condense from gravity and form mighty stars.

The Universe is a lesson in superlatives, from thin to dense, from huge to huger, from chillingly cold to searingly hot. And, as usual, the beauty of the images themselves is rivaled by the beauty of the science and knowledge we derive from them.

Image credits: Herschel IC5146: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/PACS/D. Arzoumanian (CEA Saclay) for the “Gould Belt survey” Key Programme Consortium; Herschel Polaris region: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/Ph. André (CEA Saclay) for the Gould Belt survey Key Programme Consortium and A. Abergel (IAS Orsay) for the Evolution of Interstellar Dust Key Programme Consortium; Optical image: Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSF

[hanshan]

...

Allegro:

In astronomy, thin means thin. But over trillions of kilometers, even material that rarefied can eventually condense from gravity and form mighty stars.

The Universe is a lesson in superlatives, from thin to dense, from huge to huger, from chillingly cold to searingly hot. And, as usual, the beauty of the images themselves is rivaled by the beauty of the science and knowledge we derive from them.

We would hazzard the observation that thin means thin in all disciplines...

tx - waayy coool


...

[Allegro]

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We would hazzard the observation that thin means thin in all disciplines...

tx - waayy coool ...

You’re Welcome.

Yes, well, in any discipline, “thin means thin”, until it’s thinner or thicker.
The Laws of Physics will not be denied .
Spoken as a paragon of physics , of course.
(For new readers, green indicates sarcasm at RI.)

[Allegro]

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See Libration libretto by Phil Plait
Bad Astronomy | September 17th, 2012 12:30 PM

An excerpt from Mr. Plait’s article.

“…then my friend, the skeptic and awesomely talented mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chin, asked me about libration, because she was working on a musical piece about it. She’s done several scientific songs with her partner Matthew Schickele, so it’s not as weird as it sounds. At least, not for them. Or me.”

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Allegro here.
I love these types of songs that remind us that there can be musical scales applied in astronomy!

Here’s a real human soprano* with, relatively speaking, darker, heavier operatic tones, accompanied by a human at the piano, performing a composition by a human. (The producer, for instance, of Symphony of Science creates the music for her/his video productions, too, I realize; however, the SoS videos I’ve listened to incorporate electronically generated voices and instrumental accompaniments.)

The libretto lyrics taught me what libration meant,
which surely I should’ve known yet didn’t.


^ Libration: a song | Hai-Ting Chinn, mezzo-soprano | Erika Switzer, accompanist

^ Matthew Schickele, composer

LYRICS adapted with permission from texts by
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and Dr. Phil Plait.

This is animation.
Each frame represents one hour;
the whole, one year.
The moon keeps the same face to us,
but not exactly the same face.
Because of the tilt and shape of its orbit
we see the moon from slightly different angles.
In a time lapse it looks like it’s wobbling.
This is libration.
That rocking and tilting is real,
it’s called libration.

The moon’s orbit is not a circle,
but an ellipse.
The speed varies,
but the spin is constant.
Together these geometries
let us look East a little more,
then West a little more.
And the orbit’s tilt
let’s us look South a little more,
then North a little more.
This is libration.
The moon’s libration.

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* Ms. Chinn’s vocal mid-range, well taken care of, will be her golden nugget throughout her career and beyond. I know she already knows, but just had to mention that.
All the best to Ms. Chinn!

[Allegro]

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Within the Earth’s magnetosphere, there are sounds generated by radio waves that are audible by the human ear. I’ll likely never cease to be seriously fascinated with myriad variables of the scales of things!

Highlights mine. Links in original.
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NASA Probes Play the Music of Earth’s Magnetosphere
Universe Today | by Jason Major, September 18, 2012


^ stream of chirps and whistles

Launched on August 30, 2012, NASA’s twin Radiation Belt Storm Probe (RBSP) satellites have captured recordings of audible-range radio waves emitted by Earth’s magnetosphere. The stream of chirps and whistles heard in the video [to the left] consist of 5 separate occurrences captured on September 5 by RBSP’s Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS) instrument.

The events are presented as a single continuous recording, assembled by the (EMFISIS) team at the University of Iowa and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.


^ Earth’s magnetosphereCalled a “chorus”, this phenomenon has been known for quite some time.

“People have known about chorus for decades,” says EMFISIS principal investigator Craig Kletzing of the University of Iowa. “Radio receivers are used to pick it up, and it sounds a lot like birds chirping. It was often more easily picked up in the mornings, which along with the chirping sound is why it’s sometimes referred to as ‘dawn chorus.’”

The radio waves, which are at frequencies that are audible to the human ear, are emitted by energetic particles within Earth’s magnetosphere, which in turn affects (and is affected by) the radiation belts.

The RBSP mission placed a pair of identical satellites into eccentric orbits that will take them from as low as 375 miles (603 km) to as far out as 20,000 miles (32,186 km). During their orbits the satellites will pass through both the stable inner and more variable outer Van Allen belts, one trailing the other. Along the way they’ll investigate the many particles that make up the belts and identify what sort of activity occurs in isolated locations — as well as across larger areas.

Audio Credit: University of Iowa. Visualisation Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. (H/T to Peter Sinclair at climatecrocks.com.)

[vanlose kid]

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a bit of perspective

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more here

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Slinkachu creates big worlds for little people

Photographer Slinkachu peoples his universe with tiny, 1cm-high figures. And while the resulting images raise a smile, they also subtly subvert our notions of modern city living

See a gallery of Slinkachu's photographs here
Emine Saner
The Guardian, Wednesday 19 September 2012 20.00 BST
Jump to comments (3)


All Alone, one of Slinkachu's images from his latest collection, Global Model Village. Photograph: Slinkachu

In order to find one of Slinkachu's street installations, look for a man in his early 30s sprawled face down on the pavement with a camera in his hands. He remembers a firefighter who came running, thinking he had keeled over, only to get close and find him photographing a minute figure of a woman looking up at a tiny weight-loss poster. Slinkachu immerses tiny plastic figures in their own worlds of drama. A child skateboards in the curve of a piece of discarded satsuma peel. A man walks up a ladder to a spaceship in the form of a McDonald's burger box. Another man points a rifle at a (real-size) bee while his miniature daughter hides behind him.

Slinkachu started placing his figures, bought from a company that supplies model railway enthusiasts, around London, where he is based, in 2006. For his latest exhibition, Global Model Village, he has photographed his scenes in cities around the world including Cape Town, Doha, Berlin and New York. Tiny paddy-field workers toil in the puddles made by a Beijing manhole cover; a couple cower beneath a CCTV camera in Moscow. "What you think of as being very different types of places [around the world], people experience the same type of things, people understand it," he says. "I guess that's the overarching theme of this collection."

There is a joy in some of Slinkachu's images - the people riding a waterslide into a drain makes me happy to think about how minuscule people would use our world - but they usually tell stories of fear, loneliness and vulnerability. "It's the melancholy of life, especially city life," he says. Barely a centimetre high, the figures can produce a surprisingly magnified emotional reaction. "I've thought about it quite a lot over the years," he says. "I think it's the same thing you get with animals or babies - they bring out a nurturing side. What I try to do is reflect people's feelings, so they can put themselves into the characters."

Once Slinkachu has finished photographing his characters, he abandons them to the street. One piece – a man standing by a cash machine – survived for about three months. "I think he must have been just out of the way of the roadsweeper," he says. "Most of the time, I don't check. I like to leave them and not know what happens to them. I hope people find them, but at the same time part of the idea is that they might not. They might be completely lost." He smiles. "Or sat on."

Global Model Village is at Andipa Gallery, London SW3, from 27 September to 27 October. Slinkachu's book of the same name is published on 29 September (Boxtree: £12.99).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/ ... tle-people

*

[hanshan]

...

...
We would hazzard the observation that thin means thin in all disciplines...

tx - waayy coool ...

You’re Welcome.

Yes, well, in any discipline, “thin means thin”, until it’s thinner or thicker.
The Laws of Physics will not be denied .
Spoken as a paragon of physics , of course.
(For new readers, green indicates sarcasm at RI.)

...

[Hammer of Los]

...

Totally awesome pics from my philosophy buddy!

God bless ya VK!

Oh, and Allegro.

That's right.

The message is in the Word, AND the Music.

Where's my radio?

What is the secret of the Magneto sphere?

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[Allegro]

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Perspective

[Allegro]

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Perspective

[Allegro]

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Perspective


^ Endeavour atop the SCA at Shuttle Landing Facility
at KSC on Sept. 17. Credit: Ken Kremer

[Allegro]

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Phil Plait’s commentary at Bad Astronomy:
Revealing the Universe: the Hubble Extreme Deep Field | 25SEP12, 12:13 PM

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Highlights mine, below.

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Hubble Goes to the eXtreme to Assemble Farthest Ever View of the Universe

September 25, 2012: Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind’s deepest-ever view of the universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full Moon. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is an image of a small area of space in the constellation Fornax, created using Hubble Space Telescope data from 2003 and 2004. By collecting faint light over many hours of observation, it revealed thousands of galaxies, both nearby and very distant, making it the deepest image of the universe ever taken at that time. The new full-color XDF image reaches much fainter galaxies and includes very deep exposures in red light from Hubble’s new infrared camera, enabling new studies of the earliest galaxies in the universe. The XDF contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

The public is invited to participate in a “Meet the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field Observing Team” webinar, where three key astronomers of the XDF observing team will describe how they assembled the landmark image and explain what it tells us about the evolving universe. Participants will be able to send in questions for the panel of experts to discuss. The webinar will be broadcast at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Thursday, September 27, 2012. To participate in the webinar, please visit: http://hubblesite.org/go/xdf/ .

[Allegro]

See links in original.
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To see little, build big | Phil Plait
Bad Astronomy | 03OCT12, 7:00 AM

One of the greatest ironies of physics is that to see the smallest things in the Universe we need huge machines. The Compact Muon Solenoid detector (or just CMS for short) is one of two extremely complex – and very, very large – pieces of equipment used by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva to sift through the bits of shrapnel created when packets of protons smash into each at very nearly the speed of light.

Just how big is the CMS? BABloggee Thomas Radke sent me this picture of it.



Click it to see the original 6000 pixel picture hosted at CERN. Then pick your jaw up from the floor. This monstrosity is 15 meters high – nearly 50 feet! To give you a sense of the scale here, look to the bottom of the green scaffolding on the sides, and you’ll see handrails where people can stand.

I visited the LHC a few years back, thanks to Brian Cox who brought me there for a tour and interview. This was shortly before the gigantic machine was switched on, so we went down 100 meters below the Earth’s surface to take a look. I stood off to one side of the CMS, and the scale of it was hard to grasp. It’s over 20 meters long, and weighs over 12,000 tons – 24 million pounds! A lot of that weight is from the huge slabs of iron you can see painted red.

I made a video during my LHC visit, and the CMS part is about five minutes into it.


^ Trip to the Large Hadron Collider

Yeah. That’s the kind of stuff we do when we want to pry open the seams of the Universe and peek inside.

Image credit: CERN

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