Brian Greene became ill...substitute provided

Deceased--Halton C. Arp

Halton C. Arp
March 21st, 1927 to December 28th, 2013

"Halton C. Arp, Astronomer Who Challenged Big Bang Theory, Dies at 86"

by

Dennis Overbye

January 6th, 2014

The New York Times

Halton C. Arp, a prodigal son of American astronomy whose dogged insistence that astronomers had misread the distances to quasars cast doubt on the Big Bang theory of the universe and led to his exile from his peers and the telescopes he loved, died on Dec. 28 in Munich. He was 86.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter Kristana Arp, who said he also had Parkinson’s disease.

As a staff astronomer for 29 years at Hale Observatories, which included the Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain observatories in Southern California, Dr. Arp was part of their most romantic era, when astronomers were peeling back the sky and making discovery after discovery that laid the foundation for the modern understanding of the expansion of the universe.

But Dr. Arp, an artist’s son with a swashbuckling air, was no friend of orthodoxy. A skilled observer with regular access to a 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain, he sought out unusual galaxies and collected them in “The Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies” (1966), showing them interacting and merging with loops, swirls and streamers that showed the diversity and beauty of nature.

But these galaxies also revealed something puzzling and controversial. In the expanding universe, as discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929, everything is moving away from us. The farther away it is, the faster it is going, as revealed by its redshift, a stretching of light waves — like the changing tone of an ambulance siren as it goes past — known as a Doppler shift.

Dr. Arp found that galaxies with radically different redshifts, and thus at vastly different distances from us, often appeared connected by filaments and bridges of gas. This suggested, he said, that redshift was not always an indication of distance but could be caused by other, unknown physics.

The biggest redshifts belonged to quasars — brilliant, pointlike objects that are presumably at the edge of the universe. Dr. Arp found, however, that they were often suspiciously close in the sky to relatively nearby spiral galaxies. This suggested to him that quasars were not so far away after all, and that they might have shot out of the nearby galaxies.

If he was right, the whole picture of cosmic evolution given by the Big Bang — of a universe that began in a blaze of fire and gas 14 billion years ago and slowly condensed into stars, galaxies and creatures over the eons — would have to go out the window.

A vast majority of astronomers dismissed Dr. Arp’s results as coincidences or optical illusions. But his data appealed to a small, articulate band of astronomers who supported a rival theory of the universe called Steady State and had criticized the Big Bang over the decades. Among them were Fred Hoyle, of Cambridge University, who had invented the theory, and Geoffrey Burbidge, a witty and acerbic astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Arp survived both of them.

“When he died, he took a whole cosmology with him,” said Barry F. Madore, a senior research associate at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif.

Halton Christian Arp was born on March 21, 1927, in New York City, the only son of August and Anita Arp. His father was an artist and his mother ran institutions for children and adolescents. Halton grew up in Greenwich Village and various art colonies and did not go to school until fifth grade. After bouncing around public schools in New York, he was sent to Tabor Academy, on Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts, a prep school for the United States Naval Academy.

After a year in the Navy, he attended Harvard, where he majored in astronomy. He graduated in 1949 and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in 1953 at the California Institute of Technology, which had started an astronomy graduate program to prepare for the advent of the 200-inch telescope.

At Harvard, he became one of the best fencers in the United States, ultimately competing in world championship matches in Paris in 1965. Cutting a dashing figure, he would adopt a fencer’s posture when giving talks. “He would strut across the stage and then strut back, as if he were dueling,” Dr. Madore said.

Dr. Arp married three times. He is survived by his third wife, Marie-Helene Arp, an astronomer in Munich; four daughters, Kristana, Alissa, Andrice and Delina Arp; and five grandchildren.

Dr. Arp became a staff astronomer at the Hale Observatories after stints as a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science and Indiana University. His breakthrough occurred, as he recalled, on a rainy night at Palomar in 1966, when he decided to investigate a chance remark by a colleague that a lot of his peculiar galaxies had radio sources near them in the sky. Looking them up in the Palomar library, he realized that many of those radio sources were quasars that could have been shot out of a nearby galaxy, an idea first explored by the Armenian astronomer Victor Ambartsumian a decade earlier.

“It is with reluctance that I come to the conclusion that the redshifts of some extragalactic objects are not due entirely to velocity causes,” Dr. Arp wrote in a paper a year later.

He combed the sky for more evidence that redshifts were not ironclad indicators of cosmic distance, knowing that he was striking at the heart of modern cosmology. He turned out to be an expert at finding quasars in suspicious places, tucked under the arm of a galaxy or at the end of a tendril of gas.

One of the most impressive was a quasarlike object known as Markarian 205, which had a redshift corresponding to a distance of about a billion light years but appeared to be in front of a galaxy only 70 million light years away.

The redshift controversy came to a boil in 1972, when Dr. Arp engaged in a debate, arranged by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, with John N. Bahcall, a young physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study. Timothy Ferris described the event in his book “The Red Limit” (1977): “When the debate was over, it was difficult not to be impressed with Arp’s sincerity and his love for the mysterious galaxies he studied, but it was also difficult to feel that his case had suffered anything short of demolition.”

As Dr. Arp’s colleagues lost patience with his quest, he was no longer invited to speak at major conferences, and his observing time on the mighty 200-inch telescope began to dry up. Warned in the early 1980s that his research program was unproductive, he refused to change course. Finally, he refused to submit a proposal at all on the grounds that everyone knew what he was doing. He got no time at all.

Dr. Arp took early retirement and joined the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics near Munich, where he continued to promote his theories. He told his own side of the redshift story in a 1989 book, “Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies.”

Halton C. Arp [Wikipedia]

Halton C. Arp - The Official Website

Arp Peculiar Galaxy Club Introduction

ATLAS OF PECULIAR GALAXIES

Sayonara planet Pluto

Tova Hagler, 10, left, reads through the names of the planets with her brother, Yaakov, 5, as they walk through the Scales of the Universe exhibit at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Pluto was considered a planet from 1930 to 2006, but is now classified as a trans-Neptunian object.

"The IAU confirms three requirements for planet status: the object must orbit around the sun directly; it has to be big enough so its gravity squeezes into a ball; and it has to have cleared out most other objects in its orbit."

Maybe those criteria need to be changed.

"New rules mean Pluto is no longer a planet"

by

Hope Babowice

January 6th, 2014

Daily Herald

New rules are announced all the time for things like professional sports, driving and politics. Astronomy is no different. In fact, new rules are the reason why Pluto, which had planet status from 1930 to 2006, was demoted to the lesser level of trans-Neptunian object.

"When scientists sharpened the definition of a planet, they realized that Pluto has a lot more in common with the 'Trans-Neptunian objects' than the regular planets," said Dr. Geza Gyuk, director of astronomy at Chicago's Adler Planetarium.

In the early 1900s, a miscalculation led scientists to believe there was something beyond the eight planets in our solar system, so they scoured the skies to locate and identify this mysterious planet. Dubbed Planet X, this space object was presumably the cause of discrepancies in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, causing them to tug or weave outside of a predictable orbit.

Percival Lowell, the benefactor for the Lowell Observatory at the University of Arizona in Flagstaff, hoped the discovery of Planet X would resolve the unexplained variations.

New on the job in 1930, Clyde W. Tombaugh, a 23-year-old astronomer at the Lowell Observatory, examined photos taken over time and quickly realized that beyond Neptune, an oversized space object existed at the outer reaches of our universe. He named it Pluto.

"When they found Pluto, it was natural to consider it a planet," Gyuk explained. "As it turns out, the measurements of Neptune's orbit were incorrect. There weren't any unexplained tugs after all, and Pluto turned out to be vastly less massive than originally thought."

This and other data led scientists to develop new rules for defining planets.

"In the 1990s and early 2000s, astronomers started discovering a whole bunch of other objects out there that were a lot like Pluto — strange orbits, about the same size, etc.," Gyuk said. "But all of these couldn't be planets, could they?"

The International Astronomical Union, or IAU, is the authority that names and identifies objects in the solar system. The IAU confirms three requirements for planet status: the object must orbit around the sun directly; it has to be big enough so its gravity squeezes into a ball; and it has to have cleared out most other objects in its orbit.

"The eight major planets fall into this definition," Gyuk said. "The asteroids don't, even if some are large enough to the spherical. Pluto and its gang share similar orbits so they aren't planets. Instead, the IAU has classified them as dwarf planets."

A telescope for Christmas?...read this

"Your First Telescope: Stargazing Tips for Amateur Astronomers"

by

Joe Rao

January 2nd, 2014

SPACE.com

  
A person's first telescope can tilt one's eyes to the sky in a somewhat permanent fashion, if anecdotal evidence has any standing. Over the years many other amateur astronomers have said their interest in the sky can be traced back to receiving their first telescope over the holidays.

With Christmas just behind us, perhaps you now fall into this category. If this were the case, you are now at a very important crossroad, one I can help you navigate.

While it is true that many have become "hooked" for life by viewing the wonders of the sky through their first telescope, it is also true that many others have had their initial enthusiasm for astronomy severely dampened by their first telescope — especially if the pleasure-to-frustration ratio becomes too low. So now is the appropriate time to talk about how best to take advantage of your new instrument. 

Learn your way around

First, if you have not already done so, I would also invest in a couple of good books on the stars and constellations. As the late George Lovi (1939-1993) a long-time columnist of Sky & Telescope magazine once wrote: "First spend some time learning the sky with your own personal optics — the set nature mounted in your head."

If you haven't yet opened the box that contains your telescope, good! From over 45 years of both personal observing and teaching many others, I believe you should not hastily rush outside with a telescope before knowing what's in the sky or what to look at. It's not unlike buying a catamaran if you've never sailed before.

When you finally start setting up your telescope, take whatever time is needed to learn its use and operation. Be sure that you have assembled everything with great care. In the beginning, practice how to aim and focus your new instrument on daytime terrestrial objects. Not only are they bright and easy to see, but unlike night sky objects, they will not drift out of your field of view due to Earth's rotation.

Some telescopes come with a manual that perhaps promises "spectacular views" of the moon or the rings of Saturn at magnifications of, say, 500-power or more. Unfortunately, too many uninitiated amateurs are "power happy" (I call this malady "poweritis"). But high power only dilutes the brightness of an image, as well as aggravates any unsteadiness of detail. And if you have an unsteady telescope mount, high power will not only magnify the image of the object you’re trying to see, but also magnify every shake or wobble. 

So, always remember as a general rule of thumb the maximum amount of magnification for any telescope is 50-power per inch of aperture. If you have, for example, a 6-inch reflector, 300-power is as high as you should ever attempt to go; the maximum for a 3-inch refractor should be 150-power.

"But wait a minute," you may protest, "my telescope comes with a special Barlow lens, that the manufacturer promises will double or even triple the magnification of my eyepiece."

True enough. In fact, that aforementioned 500-power is likely achieved by pushing the scope's highest power eyepiece with that very same Barlow lens, which ultimately will result in a dim, impossibly fuzzy image. If you're a beginner, you need to understand that using a Barlow lens is similar to enlarging a photograph. The negative — like a telescope's image — contains only so much detail, which can be blown up only so far before all you can see is fuzz. So, if you have purchased a 3-inch telescope — even if it is blessed with perfect optics — the claim of 500-power is more than three times the limit of the most practical magnification that it can provide.

Truth be told, you’ll probably be surprised to discover that your most pleasing views with your new instrument will come at much lower powers. Low power, in fact, makes a telescope much more convenient to handle, and if your telescope mount or tripod is a bit shaky, as least lower powers will not magnify "the shakes" as much.  I personally recommend one-half of the maximum magnification, so if you have a 6-inch telescope, try going no higher than 150-power; for a 3-inch scope, 75-power.

One other thing that should be mentioned is in regard to solar viewing. Some department store telescopes, especially imported varieties, may include a dark glass designed to screw into the eyepiece of the scope. Supposedly, this filter is to be used to view the sun. If your telescope came with such a device, discard it immediately.

Unfortunately, by directing your telescope toward the sun the light and heat from our host star are intensified tremendously when they reach your eyepiece. As such, there is an ongoing threat that the dark glass will be heated to a point where it will suddenly crack. Should your eye be looking through the eyepiece if that were to happen, you likely would not have enough time to turn away. The end result can be partial or total blindness. Never, ever, look directly at the sun at any time with your telescope. If you do wish to observe the sun, the only way to go is to project its enlarged image onto a white card or screen.

What's up there?

So what is there to see? This week's sky offers several fine sights. Probably the most rewarding object is the moon. It is bright, easy to locate and filled with fascinating detail, although this week it will be difficult to see since it will pass new phase on New Year's Day.

Try for it on Jan. 2 about a half-hour after sunset when it will appear as a razor-thin sliver of light low in the southwest sky. Below and to the right of the moon that evening will be the brilliant planet Venus, now in its finally days as an evening object. Venus alone can steal the show, and in recent nights it has appeared as a beautiful crescent even in steadily held binoculars. [10 Weirdest Facts About Venus]

On the opposite side of the sky is the planet Jupiter, which will pass opposition (and hence shines in the sky all night) on Jan. 4.  Its four bright moons provide a constantly changing target even in binoculars.  And if you desire to train your new scope on the ringed wonder, Saturn, it is well placed in the southeast sky at dawn.

The brilliant starry scene in the eastern sky during the early evening hours contains innumerable treats such as the Pleiades and Hyades Star Clusters, as well as the Great Nebula of Orion. Indeed, there's an entire universe of stars — double, multiple and highly beautiful — as well as other nebulae and galaxies for you to explore. The choices are virtually inexhaustible.

Welcome to a club

And as a final piece of advice, make an effort to contact a local astronomy club. You can probably locate the one nearest to you by consulting the website of the Astronomical League (AL), by far the largest national organization of amateur astronomers ( http://www.astroleague.com ). The AL is composed of scores of local amateur astronomical clubs and groups, totaling thousands of individuals.

By attending local club meetings, you'll get to meet any number of fellow sky gazers who can offer you valuable advice. If you own a telescope, but are experiencing problems with it, there is no better place to go than an astronomy club whose members can offer assistance and helpful suggestions. Besides, there is also the camaraderie of spending time with other people from different walks of life who all share the same love for the nighttime sky.

So, good luck and enjoy your new telescope!

[Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer's Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for News 12 Westchester, N.Y.]

Why?...Bill Nye vs creationism debate

Seems like a waste of time...each side is entrenched.

"Bill Nye will debate founder of Creation Museum"

Bill Nye, science education advocate and TV personality, will visit Kentucky in February to debate Ken Ham, the founder of the Creation Museum. The event will be titled, 'Is Creation A Viable Model of Origins?'

by

Dylan Lovan

January 4th, 2014 

The Christian Science Monitor

Bill Nye "The Science Guy" is set to visit Kentucky to debate evolution and biblical creation with the founder of the Creation Museum.

Ken Ham wrote on his Facebook page Thursday that he will square off Feb. 4 with Nye, the former host of a popular science TV show for youths.

The event is likely to attract plenty of attention in scientific and faith circles, as Nye is a high-profile advocate of science education and Ham is a respected leader among Christians who believe the Bible's origin story is a factual account of the Earth's beginnings.

Ham had been hoping to attract the star of TV's "Bill Nye The Science Guy" to the northern Kentucky museum after Nye said in an online video last year that teaching creationism was bad for children. The video was viewed nearly 6 million times on YouTube.

"Having the opportunity to hold a cordial but spirited debate with such a well-known personality who is admired by so many young people will help bring the creation-evolution issue to the attention of many more people, including youngsters," Ham said in a release Thursday.

The Creation Museum has been lauded by supporters and prodded by scientists for exhibits that assert the Earth was created in a few days about 6,000 years ago. It also has displays with dinosaurs and humans living alongside each other, in contradiction to scientific findings that the two species were separated by more than 60 million years.

Nye said in an Associated Press interview in September that steering children away from evolution and teaching creationism would hurt scientific advances. Science has demonstrated that the Earth is billions of years old, and "if that conflicts with your beliefs, I strongly feel you should question your beliefs," he told the AP.

Nye, who is executive director of the Planetary Society, said in that interview that he would be willing to travel to Kentucky and debate Ham if the museum paid his travel expenses.

An email message sent to Nye's assistant was not returned Thursday. Nye agreed to participate in the debate early last month, said Mark Looy, vice president of outreach for Answers in Genesis, the ministry that operates the Creation Museum.

Ham said some "mocking, strident evolutionists" have invited him and other Creation Museum staff to debates in the past, but they have declined. Ham wanted to engage with Nye because, "as a serious advocate for his beliefs, Nye's opinions carry weight in society," Ham said in the release.

The event will be titled "Is Creation A Viable Model of Origins?" Tickets to the evening event at the museum's Legacy Hall will be $25.

Lucy Lawless [Xena] reads Sartre's "No Exit"

Uh, okay, this is different.

From PEL [Partially Examined Life]...

Mark Linsenmayer and Wes Alwan are joined by real actresses Lucy Lawless (Xena, Battlestar Galactica, Parks & Recreation, etc.) and Jaime Murray (Defiance, Dexter, Warehouse 13, etc.), who are pals through working together on Spartacus.

Technical Warning: If you downloaded this before Jan. 3, 4pm central, then there was a problem with the file that causes it not to play right if listening in mono (like out of your iPhone speaker). This problem has been fixed, so you should re-download if you were having problems.

Also, this is a cold read, not a rehearsed production, for educational purposes only (meaning you’re not allowed to have fun listening to this, I guess).

You can read the version we read of this 1944 French existentialist play online here. You may also want listen to Mark explain Sartre’s view of human nature and freedom and read more about the topic.

End song: “No Exit,” by Mark Lint, freshly written and recorded for this occasion.

No Exit

Jean-Paul Sartre [Wikipedia]

Jean-Paul Sartre [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Sartre’s Existentialism [International Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

Jean-Paul Sartre Archive

North American Sartre Society


No Exit text

And this from the BBC...

Jean-Paul Sartre..."In Camera" [aka "No Exit"]

5MB hard drive...RAMAC

"Tech Time Warp of the Week: The World’s First Hard Drive, 1956"

by

Daniela Hernandez

January 3rd, 2014

Wired

IBM unleashed the world’s first computer hard disk drive in 1956. It was bigger than a refrigerator. It weighed more than a ton. And it looked kinda like one of those massive cylindrical air conditioning units that used to sit outside your grade school cafeteria.

This seminal hard drive was part of a larger machine known as the IBM 305 RAMAC, short for “Random Access Method of Accounting and Control,” and in the classic promotional video below, you can see the thing in action during its glory days. Better yet, if you ever happen to be in Mountain View, California, you can see one in the flesh. In 2002, two engineers named Dave Bennet and Joe Feng helped restore an old RAMAC at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, where it’s now on display. And yes, the thing still works.

As we’re told in IBM’s 1956 film — which chronicles the five years of research and development that culminated in the RAMAC — Big Blue built the system “to keep business accounts up to date and make them available, not monthly or even daily, but immediately.” It was meant to rescue companies from a veritable blizzard of paper records, so adorably demonstrated in the film by a toy penguin trapped in a faux snow storm.

Before RAMAC, as the film explains, most businesses kept track of inventory, payroll, budgets, and other bits of business info on good old fashioned paper stuffed into filing cabinets. Or if they were lucky, they had a massive computer that could store data on spools of magnetic tape. But tape wasn’t the easiest to deal with. You couldn’t get to one piece of data on a tape without spooling past all the data that came before it.

Then RAMAC gave the world what’s called magnetic disk storage, which let you retrieve any piece of data without delay. The system’s hard drive included 50 vertically stacked disks covered in magnetic paint, and as they spun around — at speeds of 1,200 rpm — a mechanical arm could store and retrieve data from the disks. The device stored data by changing the magnetic orientation of a particular spot on a disk, and then retrieve it at any time by reading the orientation.

“That was the giant, conceptual leap behind this,” Dag Spicer, the curator of the Computer History Museum, tells WIRED. “[RAMAC] knows where the information is and it just goes and grabs it immediately.” The arm could fetch information at a 100,000 bits per second clip.

This is the same basic technology that now juggles data on everything from your laptop to a vast majority of the computer servers that underpin the massive web services run by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Apple — though this tech is slowing giving way to faster “flash memory” devices.

The RAMAC hard drive could hold roughly 5 MB of data, the equivalent of an MP3 music file. That may seem puny, but in the 50s, it was enormous.

RAMAC was also physically big, filling an entire room. During Big Blue’s promotional film, you get a good sense of its massive scale, as all the people who helped build the thing — accountants and artists, chemists and clerks, engineers and electricians, stenographers and salesmen — walk past the hard drive outside IBM’s sun-drenched facilities in San Jose, California, some 50 miles south of San Francisco.

Why is his massive computer sitting outside in the heat, and, later in the film, next to a glistening pool of water? Marketing! IBM would also take the thing on a RAMACADE marketing tour, just like “other stars from California.”

Eventually, the basic technology pioneered by RAMAC led not only to smaller hard drives, but also the relational database — software that revolutionized information storage and retrieval in the ’80s. “People [are] now totally dependent on this kind of storage to do their business, to do their communicating, to keep in touch,” said Albert Hoagland, the founder of the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center, in 2011. “I can’t imagine a bigger legacy you could leave than that.”

Yes, RAMAC was big and clunky. But it worked.

Hoagland was the man who began the restoration of the RAMAC that’s now at the Computer History Museum, one of roughly 1,000 systems built by IBM over the years. He went to work on the device alongside some students at Santa Clara University, and eventually, Bennet and Feng were able to actually retrieve information that had been stored on the thing almost 40 years before.

They found data from what seemed to be a Canadian insurance company, along with some stuff about some contemporary car manufacturers and the 1963 World Series. All of it was readable without error. “The RAMAC data is thermodynamically stable for longer than the expected lifetime of the universe,” says Feng. He acknowledges, however, that there are other ways for the thing to fail.

Hard drives have never been perfect.