"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.
