"Hence it is that poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him" Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter 17, line 33
Location: Lat: -43.3168 Lon: -11. 3677, Center of Tycho Crater.
Source: http://target.lroc.asu.edu/q3/, You can see the anomaly here. Dead center of the screen...
Tycho crater
Comments: The 'Old Man Of The Moon' is no doubt a naturally occurring geological feature similar to the Martian Face and/ or to The Old man Of The Mountain on Earth. I discovered it about five minutes after discovering the LRO hi res images at the above given source. The "here" link is the anomaly all centered up, so you don't have to scope it in manually. It really freaked me out and I thought for sure that I really slipped my clutch plates this time. So I got a second opinion, the wife told me that I was an idiot, in that there are three faces visible in the image location! And sure 'nuff, she was right again..Then a really scary thought occurred to me that it might possibly be a very ancient Mount Rushmore formation. The Mount Rushmore figures are about 18m high, the Old Man Of The Moon, is well, somewhat larger...about 230 m high and only about 130m wide. Note the triangular shaped monolith that is casting a shadow bottom center right, it will become important latter.
The highest density of star formation occurs for spiral galaxies about one third of the distance outward from the center to the edge. This is something of a mystery because radio astronomers show through study of the same galaxies that the highest density of neutral hydrogen gas is two to three times farther out from the center. For some reason, therefore, it appears that stars are formed not in areas where the gas density is highest, but inside those areas where stars and dust also lie thick. Harlow Shapley, Galaxies, Third edition, p.167
Doesn't it seem strange to you Dear Reader that nuclear fission was discovered by Otto Hahn on December 17, 1938 and that by July 16th, 1945 the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated!? This has to be the all time record in physics for text book to market of any physical discovery. And if you have read into the subject, the technical challenges were all but overwhelming, yet all overcome with slide rules and log tables.
Fusion - Squeaky Clean Will Never Work...
You would think that the feat of fusion in confinement, for the betterment of man, would have been a cake walk. Just from general appearance, any one with a high school education, would surmise that it would be much easier to fake a star in containment, then to actually create a portable supernova in a deliverable pipe! It seems that Man is a very resourceful monkey when it comes to overpowering other monkeys. And as history shows, there is no end of resources available for anyone with a really good other monkey frying device. And we as a species are destined to populate the galaxy? I think not.
It is yet another bummer of my life so far that we still have not even come close to solving this problem. Yet there has been lukewarm efforts for decades always cooled by the lack of government financing. You would think that if you built one device successfully, you could just extrapolate your way ahead or back to the easier devices. And you would think that copying nature would be a really good starting point. Like the Wright Brothers picked up the airplane design from actually watching birds fly! Why don't these fusion boys actually study the birth of stars in nature?
You have to remember Dear Reader, that hundreds of times a year in our local cluster stars come to life all on their own. Untouched by man, and yet since a fusion reactor is not designed to blow up in a ball shrivelling explosion, and to never be a threat to any one except oil industry executives, the job just can't seem to get done. Strange that...
P.S. It is the Oracle of Ottawa's greatest hope that this public service will somehow lift up the human race a few beeps up the Kardashev scale...
The human side and the succession of events are often full of drama. Emilio Segre, From X-Rays to Quarks, p. ix
By far and away the best book that I have read on the history of modern physics from the late 19th century to roughly the the end of the 20th century has to be From X-Rays To Quarks by Emilio Segre. What makes it so memorable is the natural gift of the author to tell a story, actually having been there at the historic moments and knowing a lot of the principals doesn't hurt either!
Emilio Segre - Manhattan Project ID
It is just mind boggling to contemplate the insane amount of progress that has taken place in just my lifetime, but when you go back to the end of the 19th century and follow it through to the end of the 20th century and follow the flowering the modern physics through the stories and all the inter relations of events mundane and historical, more random than than a quantum soup of what we commonly refer to as life, it is all pretty momentous stuff.
This is the style of writing that will satisfy the general reader and the specialist, leaving both satisfied, which is a real hard feat to successfully pull off. The text is nicely illustrated and the quality of the printing is the excellent W. H. Freeman level. There is also included many personal photographs, most of which have never been published I am sure.
The best quality of the book is Segre's ability to wrap you up into the frenetic whirl of the explosion of the revolution of physics that has changed our world forever. Especially the individual stories of long labor and sacrifice that I found very well done. Such as the trials and tribulations of the Curie's and the development of radioactivity, which I found spellbinding.
If you are an interested and budding amateur astronomer or arm chair cosmologist, you will greatly enjoy this. It is sort of like a program at a baseball game...
It goes with out saying that, if the constants are not constant, we need no longer strain ourselves to interpret the redshift as due to a velocity of recession, or, for that matter, strive to interpret anything else on the cosmic scale. Harlow Shapley, Galaxies, Third edition, p. 225
If there is one thing that the Oracle of Ottawa remembers about high school is that nothing - no way can ever go faster than the speed of light. Because the General Theory of Relativity said so! We all were even blessed at Arnprior District High School with certain science and physics teachers that could work in the general theory to most any problem, with out blinking an eye! The one example that comes to mind is; we detonate one ton of trinitrotoluene , how much of the mass of the TNT was directly converted into energy? And of course after an impressive flurry of chalk and dust and something about E equals MC squared we were told that it was some small piddling number that an engineering type wouldn't give the time of day to.
All the Oracle of Ottawa can remember thinking of the demonstration is that thank God we do not have to reinvent the light bulb, electricity, radio and the internal combustion engine using the general theory! All these things just happen to work fine without the general theory and gratefully all were invented before the general theory came out in 1915. And even before 1915 the Curies were working their magic discovering radioactivity, every time I read that story I can just picture that glow in their lab. Weird, no general theory was required... I often thought a lot recently, would nuclear weapons have been developed without the general theory? Are you sure about that?
Stanislaw Ulam, the father of the Super, in his book Adventures of a Mathematician never mentioned the general theory once if I correctly remember. Sometimes in passing one can only conclude that the general theory was more a hindrance than a help in the last 100 years.
But as the tribute books to the 100th anniversary of the general theory are still sitting on the bookshelves unsold, the fine cracks in the theory are starting to appear. The most powerful of them is that certain galaxies are being measured by the Hubble Space telescope and the ESA VLT as having z values greater than 1.4, which would mean that the galaxy is receding at a speed greater than the speed of light! Not only are they receding at slightly faster than the speed of light, they are receding at an impossible speed with z values greater than 8.0! And this value is being attached to more than just one recently observed galaxy.
The only reason that the Oracle of Ottawa is going on about this is that it is the first tell into how we can break the light barrier. We will do it the same way that space-time is expanding between far off galaxies. There is a possible very simple explanation for this. In closing the Oracle of Ottawa must mention the very weird coincidence of the Hubble z value of 1.4 for an object receding greater than the speed of light and that the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses that determines whether a collapsing star will be a white dwarf if under 1.4 solar masses, and a 'black hole' if over 1.4 solar masses. Very strange that...
We are stuck with our universe, and powerless to alter its fundamental constants. So long as this is the case, the anthropic principal will be immune to experimental falsification - a sure sign that it is not a scientific principle. Heinz R. Pagels, A Cozy Cosmology, The Sciences, Vol. 25 No. 2 March/April 1985 p. 35-38
As one gets a certain age, one must take stock. One must admit that some long held beliefs were a bust. As a youngster growing up in the 1960's I was all but convinced in my heart and soul that by the year 2015, we would have made contact with certain higher life forms that surely populated the universe.
Pioneer Plaque - Relax, no one will ever see it...
And in hand with that there would most certainly be proof that could be visited in a museum. The Lunar Rosetta stone for instance. After all there was Carl Sagan and the Drake Equation, how could one go wrong with authority such as that? Here we are in the early 21st century and not one artifact, not one message, and not even anymore sightings of possible alien spacecraft.
Relax! The aliens threw their record players parsecs ago...
For many years the Oracle of Ottawa was convinced of the mainstream urban myth that our governments had secretly cut a deal with the aliens and all findings were forever stored and suppressed. But the only people that could believe that are the ones that have never worked for government! Governments can't keep secrets. And the only thing that a government can cover up, given enough time and money, is it's self! And as time goes on it is getting harder and harder for them to even attempt to do so.
My favorite counter argument today for the space cadets is this; if the worlds largest governments really had the ear of a Type III civilization, do you think that they would have allowed 9/11 to happen? That argument just kills, feel free to use it. The smarter ones then start on about all the exo-planets discovered by the Kepler Observatory of late. How there are thousands of possible earth like planets in the sweet spot around a star with water. The reply here is, how many of those sweet spot planets have a counter rotating molten core like Earth that will generate the defenses from the full electromagnetic interstellar space spectrum like the Earth does? The answer is about zero.
Then there is the question is why did the Americans stop going to the Moon? Answer: the TV ratings went to hell and there was way more money and profit margin per item, for the defense contractors to make Agent Orange and Napalm then heavy detail cost plus contracts for small amounts of very closely supervised space vehicles! Yes Sir! The Humans of Earth are one serious bottom line life form...
People who find it difficult to understand that recession is without limit usually make the mistake of thinking that the receding galaxies are projectiles shooting away through space. This is an incorrect view; the correct picture consists of galaxies at rest in expanding space. Edward R. Harrison, Cosmology - The Science Of The universe, p. 216
There is nothing that makes the Oracle of Ottawa cringe more than when a media cosmologist uses the expanding balloon or the raisin cake cake analogy to explain the expansion of the universe. Accepting this very simplified view is the cause of many problems farther down the road so to speak.
It is also very strange that the current Big Bang cosmology has a very big reliance upon the continual expansion of the universe. They claim that it is one of the simple proofs that the universe popped out of a singularity at a specified time in the past, some 13.8 billion years ago, sort of the 20th century version of Bishop Usher all over again.
But it is also very strange that the Steady State universe also requires an expanding universe, but as far as the Oracle of Ottawa is concerned the reason why the Steady State expansion actually happens is so much simpler to understand. We will discuss this in detail more in a future post.
This is all pretty disturbing stuff to someone who has been alive long enough to remember the shock that there was quiet likely to be more than one galaxy. This idea didn't really start coming into standard thinking until the 1960's. Now at the time of this writing there are observed to be at least 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
And the Oracle of Ottawa hates to tell you Dear Reader, but this figure will greatly expand in your lifetime, as a matter of fact I will even go so far to predict that it will not be long that the only conclusion one can come to is that the Universe is infinite and unbound after all...
Modern cosmologists have more powerful tools and much more information at their disposal than did the pioneers of cosmology, and yet they are still far from a consensus on the nature and origin of the universe. Harlow Shapley, Galaxies, p. 227
There is the well documented story that Harlow Shapley picked astronomy out of the university catalog simply because he could not pronounce archeology! All one can conclude that it was a very bad day for archeology. Instead of knowing where we are in our own galaxy of the Milky Way, we could quiet possibly have had the Ark of the Covenant hanging by piano wire in the Smithsonian, with the Ten Commandments as a side exhibit! But fate choose astronomy and Harrison Ford never had to get a real job.
Harlow Shapley
It was just this morning that I finished reading his book Galaxies, third edition 1975, and Dear Reader it was a page turner from front to back. I bought the book in a used book store, knowing that it was a classic. But once I got into it, I soon came to the conclusion that it was all much more than that. Old Harlow had quiet the cosmological bent to his nature and he was beholden to no standard model save and except the Hubble redshift, and even that only up to a point.
Globular Cluster NGC 6397
And as you read on you come across some very interesting names, such as Halton Arp and Vera Rubin. Haltan Arp found that Quasers come from the center of galaxies. And Vera Rubin discovered the galaxy rotation problem, which led to the deferent and epicycle that the bangers created and called Dark Matter! Harlow Shapely had a great knack for the correct theory and for great talent. These stories are still unfolding and are not yet "in and done", but the writing is on the wall so to speak.
Another thing that I got from reading Harlow Shapley is that interest in globular clusters, which Halton Arp worked on early in his career. There are still a ton of unanswered questions on that topic even at the time of this writing. Among the details lies a great and dramatic truth, I am certain. He also made a very great long shot observation in passing regarding the possibility that if the universe is large enough, distant galaxies could actually be receding faster than the speed of light! But I will cover that in another post at a future time.
There is some great legacy footage on Harlow Shapley on You Tube. The first is an actual interview clip. Which I simply must include in this post. And it is pretty cosmological.
The second awesome piece of archive footage is a recent lecture on Harlow Shapley by one of his long ago students! And it is fascinating, I watched it right through enthralled. The reason Harlow Shapley looms so large on the horizon of astronomical history is that he was one of the last great astronomers before the big science of today, that is complete with talking points but somewhat short on substance.
Societies create universes, not only do these universes reflect their societies, but each universe controls the history and destiny of its society. Edward R. Harrison, Cosmology - The Science Of the Universe, 1981, p.18
Books on cosmology are pretty thin on the ground. The best one you can order from Amazon and not go wrong on is by Edward R. Harrison who spent most of his professional life in the United States and was greatly admired and respected by his students and his peers.
Edward R. Harrison
The Oracle of Ottawa has been holding onto his copy of Cosmology - The Science Of the Universe for decades. The first edition came out in 1981, published by Cambridge University Press, which I have found is always a great start if you are into reading the best science books money can buy. You can't go wrong with anything from good old Cuppers.
It was only recently that I finally had the time to finally read the book. And as I turned each successive page I was pretty glad that I kept hold of it all these years. The major strength of this text is the perfect balance of what I consider to be the three pillars of cosmology. And those three pillars are philosophy, physics, and mathematics. It certainly is not surprising that has a 4.8 out of 5 rating by Amazon customers.
Another great strength of the work is that all the major theories of the Universe are treated respectfully without any detectable agenda for or against any of the major plausible theories. And all the background information that you must be aware of such as time and curvature and expansion are handled brilliantly in their development to the reader, whether a student or a lay person of above average curiosity.
There are no glossy pictorial barrages of Hubble Telescope images like many undergraduate astronomy textbooks, and you soon come to realize that in cosmology this is a good thing. There are elegant line illustrations were they are really required. Best of all the text is fully cited which means you can use it for future reference and further exploration. All in Dear Reader, this is the one to start on, and one that will really stick with you.
Even though the first edition came out in 1981 and the second came along in 2000, the whole work is by no means dated, even at the time of this writing. But what is really interesting is how far our view and confirmed facts of cosmology have progressed and how a very favorite theory of the Universe is under great pressure. Edward R. Harrison, no doubt, would have loved that...
Today we have with us, a group of students, among America's best. To you we say we have only completed a beginning. We leave you much that is undone. There are great ideas undiscovered. Breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truths protective layers. Neil Armstrong, Speech, at The White House, 1994, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
One can only find it wondrous weird, that at the time of this writing, early in the 21st century, that armed only with a lease back laptop, and a half decent internet connection, one can readily stir up Google Earth and check out any place upon the planet Earth, in rather breath taking resolution in the great majority of cases. But if you want to do the same thing as regards to any place on the Earth's moon, good luck with that!
The Moon - Earth's Cosmological Flypaper...
All the Oracle of Ottawa can get is those medium resolution (at best) mosiacs by the Lunar Society! You would think that all those greatly talked about high resolution Lunar Orbiter images would have been declassified decades ago, and in turn available to every one with access to the internet, in their entirety. But that might be true, just that the Oracle of Ottawa can't seem to find them. Why do you think that is Dear Reader?
It has become clear to me recently that all higher life forms through out the Universe will have several things in common, no matter their differences in biological origin and/ or appearance. Let us go over a few of them. First is that all higher life forms fabricate stuff. The higher the life form, the bigger and more voluminous the stuff fabricated. Secondly all higher life forms litter! This may ironically be the one thing that all life forms of the Universe have in common. Thirdly higher life forms love to build tributes to their awesomeness! And again the higher the life form the more grand the artifacts.
The Moon is 4.5 billion years old, slightly younger than the planet Earth. We the people of the planet Earth were gifted by the Force with something very valuable. A piece of cosmological flypaper. In 4.5 billion years what do you think the chances are that something and or someone crashed, built, fought over, destroyed, rebuilt, harvested and left the wreckage behind? In 4.5 billion years what are the chances that some higher life form claimed the moon with the construction of a very grand monument to their awesomeness? The Oracle of Ottawa would have to say, greater than 50 -50 easy.
(Google - Moon Shard)
What the Oracle is saying is that if I can see the painted parking lines that are a mere 4 inches wide (really, I measured!) on Google Earth for my hood in Ottawa Ontario, why is it that we can't arrange the same coverage of the Moon? Can't something be arranged that will map the shit out of the Moon and put all the images out to crowd sourcing Earth wide? Wouldn't it be great to show your grand children where Apollo 11 landed? (It did really land on the Moon didn't it?) And I figure that there are a ton of fascinating artifacts to be found. What the hell are we afraid of ? Think of the paradigm technological leaps we could make in one fell swoop! Just by cataloging these artifacts and sending up a rover with a hand held X-ray spectrometer?
Of course the whole thing could be a bust, in that we discover some of the most interesting naturally occurring geologic anomalies known in the Universe so far. In that case the Oracle of Ottawa will revert back to his existentialist kick, and read that first edition copy of Being and Nothingness by Sarte. (With the original dust jacket of course!) With the greatest comfort in that at least, even as an old man, I stepped into the arena...
Now let us move helter-skelter to a dramatic conclusion. Sir Fred Hoyle, Frontiers Of Astronomy, p. 339
The species of Man, if it is to realize its full potential in the Universe, must get over it's self. We must start to face up to our limitations and realize that being a really smart ape with a big stick (dick?) is just not going to cut it for much longer. In all the astronomy and cosmology texts that I have read so far has no dimension for man in context to his place in the Universe.
The Oracle of Ottawa, as a public service to his world wide readership, has decided to remedy the situation. We have all heard of the angstrom that is a unit of length equal to 10−10 m or one ten-billionth of a metre, it is used to measure very small things. My unit is called the spanstrom, that is a non dimensional unit of time and space, compared to the average mans life. For the calculations in this post, our "unit life" will be equal to 83 human years, or 83 trips around the sun of our solar system.
The highest score you can achieve is 1.00. This is scored to the man who seriously believes that that the universe started when he was born and will end when he expires. i.e. 83/83 = 1.00
Now assume that the man was a very big fan of Bishop Usher, whose date of the creation was October 23, 4004BC. Now add 2015 years and you get 6,019 years. The fundamentalist creationist will have a spanstrom value 83/6,019 = 0.0137
Now let us continue with some values that would pretain to a thinking man. Let us first try the earliest value for the Hubble length. The figure 1.2 Billion light years comes to mind. This would gave a spanstrom value of 6.1967 x 10^-8.
Of course as time went on the Hubble Length tended to get longer. For a Hubble Length of about 5.0 billion light years the spanstrom value is now 1.66 x 10^-8.
For todays Hubble Length of 13.8 billion years, the spanstom value is 6.0145 x 10^-9.
Then there is that circumference figure that I believe is 93 billion years. This will give a spanstrom value of 8.9247 x 10^-10.
If you look up the number of stars in a galaxy in Wikipedia, the number at the time of this writing is
100 billion, The value of the spanstrom of the number of stars in just one galaxy compared to an ordinary mans lifetime you will get a spanstrom value of 8.30 x 10^-10.
At the time of this writing the suspected number of galaxies in the observable universe is 400 billion, this gives a spanstrom value of 2.075 x 10^-10.
So now we can come to our conclusion. And that is that as man finds out more about his universe and it's unimaginable vastness the value of his significance tends to zero.... Sorry about that.
The intrinsic brightness of galaxies may change with time. George Gamow, Modern Cosmology, Scientific American, 1954
It is hard to believe that as the scientific community celebrates the Hubble Space Telescopes 25th anniversary, that there is already something bigger and better in the pipe and coming to us in 2018. But the Oracle of Ottawa just can't see how NASA can ever top the bang for tax payers buck that they have received from the Hubble. And as we all know the images that have come back from the Big Hub have sure kept the bangers up late through many nights. The Hubble changed our understanding of the Universe forever. There are indeed many people who are not amused at these unintended consequences.
If you read into the Webb Space telescope in any level of detail, you are soon forced to the conclusion that the sucker is doomed to fail. Who was the brainiac that thought an L2 halo orbit would be a good idea? And how are you going to engage the hearts and minds of the taxpayers with boring infrared images? It all sounds like a sour grapes surrender of the bangers and the dark energy and dark matter crowd.
In astronomy size is not always everything...
Hopefully this time around NASA will actually assemble the optics from the contractor out back in the parking lot and actually test the optics BEFORE it is launched into space. And yes I have watched the contractor video and I see a ton of potential screw ups. You would think that as man has been in space for over fifty years now, at the time of this writing, that there would be total and banned avoidance of delicate things that that are to be unfurled in space. The failure rate of such stupidity is very high.
If you have followed along this far you should now be coming to the realization that this device is actually being set up to fail. The bangers of the dark crowd just are not going to risk inadvertantly proving Fred Hoyle and Halton C. Arp right after all! But it is all nothing to worry about... Construction is now well under way on the European Extremely Large Telescope, The United States has lost its dominance, probably forever, and if you thought the Hubble changed everything, just be patient and look both ways before you cross the street and wait for the first light of the mighty EELT.
But a philosophic issue is a philosophic issue whether it is discussed by a philosopher or by a physicist. Ernan McMullin, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol.18, No.3, July 1981, p. 177-189
It was while the Oracle of Ottawa was on one of his very frequent book crawls that I came across a book from my distant youth entitled "Mans Conquest of Space" by William R. Shelton, published in 1974 by the National Geographic Society, The Revised Edition. It was complete with the dust jacket with a pristine interior. All the color photos as bright and glossy as I remembered them. I of course immediately scooped it up for old times sake and at a cost of a mere 99 cents I couldn't go wrong.
Back in the heady and exciting days of the Apollo Moon Program I couldn't get enough of these beautiful picture books. They were at the school library's and even the public library. The only problem of course by the time I got to read it, the cover was damn near off, and the pages were not so bright any more.
Now deep into an early retirement, my interest has turned to cosmology of all the stupid things that a grown man could possibly be interested in. Recently I was quiet surprised that you just can not find the complete very high resolution photographs that were taken by the Lunar Orbiter 5 mission of 1967. The resolution was claimed to be awesome, two meters! And there there were 683 hi res photos from the mission. I was hoping that they were declassified by now and that I could conduct my own anomaly search. The mosiacs exist but the individual hi res, I can't find them. Why do you think that is Dear Reader?
I think I found the answer while enjoying my fresh copy of Mans Conquest of Space... On page 65 there is a beauty color picture of Eugene M. Shoemaker standing at a table looking at a fresh long strip of the awesome hi res photos from the Lunar Orbiter. And the look on his face is pure and classic WTF?? You have to see it for yourself. I tried to dig up the picture on Google images but to no avail.
Once you see this picture you will immediately realize that perhaps those rumors of the very many weird and strange things were found on those hi res Orbiter images. Especially from Orbiter 5 which focused on the far side of the moon... are quiet possibly true after all.
E. M. Shoemaker was the first real astro geologist. He trained the astronauts what to look for, of that I found a great tribute picture of him which I have included in this post. After some intensive searching at the University of You Tube I was even lucky enough to find ancient footage of him discussing his profession. He was one of the Best and the Brightest of his time. I could go on about the very weird pictures on page 122 and 123 of the same book, I know there are linear rilles, but through the craters?
Possibly the single most tantalizing feature is the omnipresence of magnetic fields. Detectable fields a hundred thousand times weaker than the earth's field are found in interstellar space. At the other extreme, the feebly glowing dense cores of some defunct stars have magnetic fields twenty million times stronger than that of the earth! Lawrence H. Aller, Atoms, Stars and Nebulae, (Third Edition), p. xii
The fans of the Electric Universe have been around for a very long time. And the Oracle of Ottawa is amazed at the utter quality of the names. And I was very surprised to see the endorsement of L. H. Aller to it in the Preface of the Third Edition of his very popular and standard book Atoms, Stars and Nebulae, which I have just finished reading today.
Lawrence H. Aller
But not to worry about Lawrence getting in trouble over stating the truth of the future of the universe. He covered himself by making sure to mention the big bang and black holes the required number of times through out the remainder of the text and thus ensuring telescope time and office resources with out interference for the whole of his career.
Of course you have to wonder why the conception of the Electric Universe gets such a rough ride, especially if you know that the strongest force in the universe is the electromagnetic force. While gravity is in a distant place far away from the electromagnetic in weakness. Why it can be more dangerous to your academic career to state this fact than talk about intrinsic red-shift!
But the Oracle of Ottawa does not in the least expect you to take my word for it. There are many very instructive videos on the Electric Universe on tap at the University of You Tube. And as a public service the Oracle of Ottawa has selected what I think is the most fascinating one, just to start you off on your new education. Bet you can't watch just one video on this soon to be cutting edge topic.
Science does not build its theories by a single line attack. Sir Fred Hoyle, The Frontiers of Astronomy, p. 126
This blog was kicked off by watching videos late into the night at the University of You Tube. And one night I happened to come across one entitled Universe - The Cosmology Quest. Not only did it have rare and unknown footage of my childhood hero Sir Fred Hoyle, but it included all the heretics of that wild and wonderful time of my well misspent youth. And many that I have never heard of before and some more that I had no idea that they were involved with the cosmology quest.
Sir Fred Hoyle
I will never forget that part where Halton Arp was describing his theory of how a galaxy gives birth, and there was that animation of it as he talked of it. Well Dear Reader, it took the top of my head right off so to speak. Something just clicked deep inside. It one of the most important hallmarks of a valid theory in that it was self similar. Halton Arps theory of a galaxy giving birth looks exactly like a corral spitting forth a seed. There was no mention of these things in my high school physics texts.
Halton C. Arp and Jayant Narlikar
All the heretics were present, too many to name in this short writing. But I was amazed that they somehow got Jayant Narlikar to appear. And he was most interesting and I am sure someday soon to be proven right for all eternity. The Oracle of Ottawa was so set on fire that he dug up all his Fred Hoyle books from the stacks finally realizing that the time has come to get the reading in and done. And as providence does provide I found a mint new copy of A Different Approach To Cosmology in mint condition in hardcover, with the dust jacket, unread. It is not unread now. It was by Hoyle, Burbidge, and Narlikar, hail the gang was all together one last time.
Now the Oracle of Ottawa has been to college and why he even graduated! So A Different Approach was not that hard to get through. The end result of that was to read Ernst Mach's most famous book 'The Science of Mechanics', and would you believe that I had a fresh facsimile copy that I bought years ago and kept for that time when I had time. The time came and the book was wacked in no time, and I can understand why it is so often mentioned even today. I will riff on it in this blog in the near and probably into the distant future...
Of course the contemporary 'Big Bangers' say that all these heretics are ancient history. Sir Fred Hoyle has been gone from us since 2001. But somehow much to the chagrin of the bangers the Universe keeps getting older and bigger around. Objects that are of several million solar masses are being found where it is impossible for the Big Bang to have placed them. The Very Large Telescopes of the European Space Agency are detecting objects being ejected from galaxies near and far, like God was pitching batting practice.. And you often are starting to hear that nightmare quip that puts the fear of God, that can't possibly exist, into every bangers heart: The text books are going to have be re written...
We who write and read these chapters are setting forth as explorers who rarely touch solid ground or come abreast of contemporary events. Harlow Shapely, Galaxies, Third Edition, (opening line), p.1
The universe is a violent, dangerous, random place. And that is just starting out in our own solar system! Out in interstellar space it all gets even more dangerous, contrary to the pap that is fed to us through the large corporate ho media, it is best not thought of as a theme park.
After viewing many documentaries on the University of You Tube the Oracle of Ottawa has picked out a real winner. I have watched it myself a number of times. And I can find no fault. So as a public service to my Dear Readers around the world I have come to realize that it is my duty to share it with you.
The documentary is titled; Journey To The Edge Of The Universe. It is breathtakingly awesome in its visual quality and it's factual correctness. And best of all it is narrated by Alec Baldwin, who must have a very keen interest in such matters because his passion is utterly infectious. It is also in HD and the visuals throughout are simply breathtaking. And again, after watching it through more than once, the Oracle of Ottawa can find not a single factual error.
As a matter of fact at some points the Oracle of Ottawa was so moved that when Alec asked if we should bother to continue, the Oracle of Ottawa must be perfectly honest and admit that the door to the transporter room would not have slapped my ass on the way into it! Going were no man has gone before is most certainly for youngsters. And as the feature comes to its end the Oracle of Ottawa is always comforted by the fact that living at the bottom of a deep gravity well that orbits a naked nuclear furnace way out in the boondocks of an average galaxy certainly has its advantages...
All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy, no less than of science, lies solely in the contributions which it has made to it. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 15
It was sometime in 1970, just after Christmas, that the Oracle of Ottawa, set up his first observatory on the trunk lid of a 1967 Chevy Belair, in Pembroke Ontario, after I convinced my Mom that the legs of the tripod would not damage the paint. I can't remember if I got the telescope for Christmas or if I "sourced" it myself with the Christmas tips from my paper route. I was twelve years old at the time.
This was all started from watching the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on July 20th 1969. It is one of those events, that even at the time of this writing, I can remember with total clarity. The whole family watched the whole thing, my Mom declared a special event dispensation as regards to the usual rules of bedtime. I remember thinking, hell, if I am only twelve years old and we are walking on the Moon, the future is surely unlimited. Why in 2015, which seemed eons away, the Oracle of Ottawa should be surely getting regularly smashed at some bar at the end of some galaxy.
Dominion Observatory, Ottawa Ontario
I remember how well prepared I was for the big night. I read all I could get my hands on, I had my model of the command module, with matching lunar module that I carefully constructed from a kit that I ordered in the mail. And even though I was just a kid, I knew how risky this was, and if successful, what triumph it would be for all time...
With my crappy little refracter telescope set up, I picked the brightest object in the sky, and put my eye to the scope, and was pretty bummed that the image in the eyepiece was the same as looking with the naked eye, just bigger and somewhat brighter. And it was damn hard to focus a draw tube telescope, (twist and draw..), but I never even conceived that you could get one with a rack and pinion focus. Spirits lifted in later observation sessions when the moon was out. All my brothers and sisters lined up for a look, even my Mom came out and was truly amazed. My Dad of course took a pass. He assured me that he would always take my word for it that the Moon was still there... Oh, and did I mention how cold it could get in Pembroke Ontario in the middle of winter? A very early conclusion was that astronomy was very hard work.
Later on in the early 1970's, our family had moved to Arnprior Ontario, Consolidated Paper refugees, as my Dad took a job at the Gillies Mill in Braeside Ontario. It was a happening little town back then, and a mere half hour from Ottawa, the Oracle of Ottawa's horizons sort of widened, to say the very least. One example of that was when our boy scout troop went to the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa for a tour, and if the weather was favorable, a moment for everybody at the eyepiece of a real professional telescope! But as luck would have it rained cats and dogs for the whole evening and it all looked pretty hopeless until the clouds unexpectedly parted just long enough for everyone to get a peek at Venus, which was just like I saw it with my telescope but bigger and brighter.
Then came the teenage years, first jobs, first rock concerts in Ottawa, that just happened to be a golden time, for concert goers. And yes the Oracle of Ottawa saw Queen in their first appearance in the western hemisphere, you can check that... It was a trial run before the official tour started in the US. Interest in astronomy and all that hard work took a bit of a back seat. But as to the origins of it all, the Oracle of Ottawa was always interested. And my favorite cosmologist was Sir Fred Hoyle. I have always believed he was right. The most admirable thing of the man was that he went his own way and stuck with it no matter what the world thought.
Lately the comments about the stupidity of the Steady State universe are not so confident as they once were. And even though Sir Fred is long gone from us, the Universe just seems to be getting older and bigger... We will talk about that in postings to come...
