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Kepler Finds, Our Big Universe, Power To The Future, Brains And Bacteria, Military Alternatives, Getting Humans Out, Making Better Chips, Minion Mailbag, And Much More…
Show Notes:
Some of the stories we discussed…
Kepler finds mini-solar system (Thanks to David Eckard, Gord Mcleod, Ed Dyer!)
Universe bigger than thought (Thanks to Monkey, David Eckard!)
Bacteria and the Brains (Thanks to Ed Dyer and Gord McLeod!)
Get a free audiobook at Audible.com!
And join in with the bookclub: grab your copy of
Humans left Africa earlier than thought (Thanks, Pamela! )
Humans left Trees 4.2 mya
Molybdenum, yum! Molybdenum better for transistors (Thanks, Monkey, Gord McLeod!)
If you love TWIS, please support us by donating below:
I'm the host of this little science show. 
Justin, if you’re not yet convinced that the Universe is expanding, you’ll want to read The Day We Found The Universe by Marcia Bartusiak.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6320013
It chronicles Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the Hubble Parameter, which is now universally accepted as a consequence of the expansion of the Universe.
Incidentally, you are mistaken in your assumption that an expanding Universe must be specially finite.
An infinite Universe can be expanding just as easily as a finite one!
Looks like an interesting read, thanks.
While the Hubble Parameter maybe universally accepted at the moment, I am not yet convinced that it is correct.
Not that I doubt the doppler effect here on Earth, but seems reasonable that if redshift over large cosmic distances can occur for any reason other than acceleration… the universe may not be expanding. We can’t measure light over light years here
It makes too great an assumption for me, and seems like a correlation leeds to a conclusion rather than any direct observation.
Hi Twis, listening to your Feb. 3 show you discussed the reduction in funding of sciences due to budget deficits; while this is true (we are in a $14.1 trillion deficit) our elected officials are the ones we need to complain to about the use of our Tax money. Please remember that the formation of government was to ensure that taxes collected would serve the greater good of the people. Today the elected officials are swayed not by the need of 44 million on food stamps nor the 24 million unemployed, let alone scientist who want to study new helpful societal changes. Our elected government is if full control by the industrial war machine and foreign governments. The US provides more in aid to foreign countries than to our own tax base. In every case tax money is diverted to war and control of wealth than US citizens own needs. To date our elected officials have placed this great nation in such debt that the income to GDP ratio is currently at 97%.
Rather than resign to the situation a call for action by scientists like you is what this nation needs.
Great thanks for the 10:23 campaign shout-out! Love the podcast…
… redshift over large cosmic distances can occur for any reason other than
acceleration(I think you mean the expansion of space)
1. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) is a perfect black-body spectra.
2. The CMBR is uniform in every direction.
3. The CMBR spectra has an apparent temperature of 2.725 K.
4. Apply Hubble’s Law to the CMBR and you get about 3000K around 13 billion years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_background
As you said, redshift alone isn’t evidence enough to be certain of the Universe’s expansion.
Add the CMBR, predicted by every model of an expanding Universe, and it’s hard to deny.
redshift over large cosmic distances can occur for any reason other than acceleration
I think you mean expansion, not acceleration.
The Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is such perfect evidence, it rules out alternate hypothesis for the Hubble Parameter.
Hey Kyle,
You are absolutely correct. The political system in the US is beholden to the economic interestes of the elite. The wars in Iraq were never about Saddam, democracy or even oil. They were about opening the US treasury vault, a looting of the American tax wealth. Ditto the bank bailouts. Ditto the tamiflu bird flu scare. Ditto the cold war, the war on communism, the war on drugs and the war on terror.
There is profit in war, and so it continues.
What we truly need is a work stoppage. A strike by the enlightened minds of this world. The scientists, the engineers, the techies. Or a new country, a place for intellectual refugees who refuse to take part in the destruction of the planet, of each other, for profit.
A new America, a new shining city on the hill. A home not just of the brave, but the brilliant as well.
-j-
Gendou
The CMBR is NOT uniform in every direction… it has odd voids, and other quirks… It ia a very low resolution look at one tiny spectrum of information.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.3229
So, Justin, what have you to say about the CMBR?
Don’t you find it convincing evidence for an early, hot, dense universe?
So, you’re just deleting my posts now? Wow, nice job. I want my donation back.
Please, don’t jump to conclusions. Especially withing such a brief period of time. Nothing has been deleted. It takes time for me to approve comments. I am the only person approving comments at the moment, and I don’t live on my website waiting for people to post.
“Don’t you find it convincing evidence for an early, hot, dense universe?”
Yes, it’s a convincing explanation… but I don’t buy it.
I just dont agree that this leads back to a big bang…
or an expanding universe…
These theories are built on an understanding of gravity and space that may be wrong, or at least flawed enough to have sent assumptions in motion.
I have been offering up a number of things that I don’t believe in when it comes to prevalent theories and think it’s worth offering my alternative at this point. The disclaimer here is that I do not pretend to be a physicist in doing so, but am offering grounds for an alternative that I believe has not been logically ruled out.
I find my main contention with any theory is centered on gravity and space.
The historical assumption is that matter is traveling through space, as point particles of energy moving in a dimension empty space.
The way I see space is as a conduit. Not an empty dimension of motion, but as an actual background of bits through which energy must travel to be in motion.
A photon of light then isn’t a self contained string moving through spacetime at the maximum speed it is allowed to by its ability to gain acceleration…
Instead it becomes a photon energy signature moving through conduit, being transferred from conduit bit to conduit bit at the maximum speed that a transfer from one bit to the next can take place. And even a single photon of light would be (to account for dark-matter, quantum uncertainty and double slit tests) a signature of energy that would be spread out and spanning 50 or more conduit bits at any one time.
If energy is exciting a bit of conduit, the bit collapses to a point… uses up less of the dimension of space than a latent conduit bit would use, creating conduit density variations in the surrounding space. This concept alone is enough to account for all gravity in the universe. Not as a force, but an equilibrium of energy and available conduit and motion along paths of least resistance.
If I imagine this across deep space I see that any light traveling through such space would encounter more conduit than if it was traveling within a galaxy. Compared to local observations the light would appear red shifted because it would be traveling through more conduit and our assumption is that it is traveling moving away from us (because that is what would be required to create such a shift locally), even though it is not.
I get the feeling that you’re deliberately misunderstanding everything I say…
Quit weaseling around about this!
The black body spectrum of the CMBR is the most accurate black body spectrum ever measured: http://www.theeternaluniverse.com/2010/05/cmb-is-perfect-black-body-spectrum.html
If a sigma equal to 400 does not satisfy you, I don’t know what will.
Of course there are anisotropies. That’s what you expect to see.
Anisotropies are not inconsistent with a black body spectral emission!!!
In fact, the anisotropies seem due to quantum fluctuation consistent with the theory of cosmic inflation.
Without such fluctuations, it would be hard to explain the local density concentrations responsible for the formation of galaxies.
It would also be hard to explain the distribution of galaxies into large super-clusters.
So, the existence of galaxies and galaxy clusters are further evidence for inflationary cosmology, which begins with a hot, dense early universe.
My question for you, Justin, is why are you so quick to dismiss good evidence?
What is it about a hot, dense early universe that you find personally offensive?
It is [sic] a very low resolution look at one tiny spectrum of information.
Honestly, I am unsure what you’re trying to say here.
The CMBR is so very far from low resolution that I’m having trouble figuring out where you got the idea from…
It’s like you secretly know all the interesting properties and are deliberately provoking me to give obvious responses to the most base criticism…?
Is this some kind of Stephen Colbert thing? Sorry, I’m poor at assessing sarcasm.
Taking you at face value:
The classic false-color image of CMBR anisotropy is very high-resolution, thanks to the folks over at NASA:
http://bit.ly/hBOrLJ
http://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Of course, if you want an even HIGHER resolution image, you can check out what’s new from PLANCK:
http://www.sciops.esa.int/index.php?project=PLANCK
http://bit.ly/eg9lYe
It’s got even higher resolution!
Now remember, this is a picture of the miniscule (400 sigma!!!) variation in the intensity of the CMBR across the sky.
Good old Penzias and Wilson discovered the CMBR (predicted by big-bang cosmology) back in ’63 with a clumsy horn-shaped antenna.
http://www.bell-labs.com/project/feature/archives/cosmology/
This was, I’ll grant you, far from a precision experiment, Pigeon poop and all that.
Yet the data was still good enough for Tony Tyson at Bell Labs to conclude:
Its precise black-body spectrum and uniformity over the sky have ruled out many theories of the evolution of the Universe
This was 70 years ago, Justin! Time to catch up!
In response to the article “Goodness in the Axis of Evil” I have only to say that it draws no conclusions in disagreement with the theory of the expansion of space following a hot dense early universe.
Certainly, non-Gaussian distributions, if present, would imply new physics.
Interesting stuff, but it would offer NO alternative to an early hot dense universe that expanded and continues to expand to this day!
Justin, your February 26th post is a non sequitur to the issue I raise about the opinion you expression on-air… I’ll respond to it soon, none the less.
I feel let down when you and your co-host are talking about things you don’t understand.
I want to feel well informed!
I get upset when I hear opinions expressed do not reflect the latest scientific understanding.
Sadly, this happens to me a lot when you talk, especially on the topic of cosmology.
As for Justin’s “Conduit Theory” (which sounds a bit like Loop Quantum Gravity to me):
Let’s say I fire a simultaneous pulse from 2 lasers both pointed at a distant galaxy.
One fires red light, the other fires blue light.
In your theory, a photon, being an energy signature, deforms the conduit bits as it is propagated
Since your theory claims to reproduce gravitational effects, this deformation must be proportional to the amount of energy in this signature.
So, a blue photon energy signature will deform the conduit more than the red photon energy signature as it is propagated
One would then predict the blue laser pulse to arrive at it’s destination behind the red laser pulse.
This is unique prediction of the theory, and it has been falsified experimentally:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/10/quantum-gravity-theories-meet-a-gamma-ray-burst.ars
http://theastronomist.fieldofscience.com/2009/10/gamma-ray-bursts-place-limit-on-quantum.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7271/full/nature08574.html
http://statistics.roma2.infn.it/~glast/A191.Fermi.nature.GRB.pdf
I’ll revisit the non-sequitur in a future post, but it has to do with starting from a different perspective. I didn’t start out as a steady state’r… I started with a different take on space and gravity as an emergent, non force… this did cross over into a steady state in a few ways though I’m not entirely convinced of that take either…
I like the tale of two lasers as lot, though it looks to me like a potential proof of concept for me and a possible hit on the expansion view…
In my take, the speed limit of light is the limit of transfer between conduit bits… deep space would have more occurances of this transfer because there are more “conduit bits” in such space, which would offer the apearance of acceleration, adding red shift… yet the beams would arive at the same time.
over the course of the great distances between stars and the earth, there is required a very little shift to the red to make it look like the universe is expanding. The number is astronomically small (pun intended)
In the expansion theory, space is expanding, very slightly but everywhere at once…
The wave of light that is traveling from distant stars is also expanding to this same degree thus explaining the red shift. (this is at least one explanation of it, there may be others)
If you are expanding a red wave and a shorter blue wave by the same degree, the red should show up a tiny bit sooner… having expanded along both axis of an expanding space
can i crudely extrapolate that this finding bolsters my case?
I’ll revisit the non-sequitur in a future post, but it has to do with starting from a different perspective. I didn’t start out as a steady state’r… I started with a different take on space and gravity as an emergent, non force… this did cross over into a steady state in a few ways though I’m not entirely convinced of that take either…
I like the tale of two lasers as lot, though it looks to me like a potential proof of concept for me and a possible hit on the expansion view…
In my take, the speed limit of light is the limit of transfer between conduit bits… deep space would have more occurances of this transfer because there are more “conduit bits” in such space, which would offer the apearance of acceleration, adding red shift… yet the beams would arive at the same time.
over the course of the great distances between stars and the earth, there is required a very little shift to the red to make it look like the universe is expanding. The number is astronomically small (pun intended)
In the expansion theory, space is expanding, very slightly but everywhere at once…
The wave of light that is traveling from distant stars is also expanding to this same degree thus explaining the red shift. (this is at least one explanation of it, there may be others)
If you are expanding a red wave and a shorter blue wave by the same degree, the red should show up a tiny bit sooner… having expanded along both axis of an expanding space
can i crudely extrapolate that this finding bolsters my case?
This distinction is pure semantics.
As a matter of fact, as far back as 1916, gravitation has been described by General Relativity as a property of spacetime, not as a force.
Most attempts to unify General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics involve a quantum particle that carries the gravitational force; the graviton.
No theory has any hope of unification without some emergent property which you can point your finger at and say, this is the graviton.
If not, where does gravity come from in the theory?
It has to be somewhere in the theory, which has to approximate QM at low energies, GR at high energies.
QM has particles, GR has gravity, so somewhere inbetween, must be a particle (or many particles) responsible for gravity.
Not true in Justin’s conduit theory!
If energy is exciting a bit of conduit, the bit collapses to a point, using up less of the dimension of space than a latent conduit bit would use.
This creates conduit density variations in the surrounding space.
Since the signature of energy is spread out, spanning 50 or more conduit bits at any one time, the photon propagation rate varies with it’s energy/wavelength.
These are your own words, sir!
No. Light does not have a size, so it cannot expand in size.
It has a wavelength, which is red-shifted by the expansion of space which does not change the position.
Not true in General Relativity. Not true in nature.
As mentioned above, light has no size! Instead it has a wavelength.
If you picture a photon as a thing that is stretched, you’ve made a mistake.
It is spacetime its self which is stretched out, not the individual particles within.
In general relativity, the speed of light is a constant of nature, invariant of wavelength.
In fact, this is the PRIMARY assumption of the theory!
General relativity predicts that they will arrive at the same time.
If you sincerely disagree with this, show me your calculations.
No. 😉