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...
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.
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.
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...
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...
