Lee's blog: "Science and Discoveries"

Yes I am ammused easily...but bear with me here!!! I found this awesome interactive website about black holes. Go check it out and do the journey to the black hole....it was fun :D http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/black_holes/home.html

I'm really starting to like this guy...he has brought us a lot of understanding about the solar system and was a great scientist...here are some of his views on religion, and then there are a couple that I'm not too sure what they are in reference too.... 1. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. [Carl Sagan] 2. Such reports persist and proliferate because they sell. And they sell, I think, because there are so many of us who want so badly to be jolted out of our humdrum lives, to rekindle that sense of wonder we remember from childhood, and also, for a few of the stories, to be able, really and truly, to believe--in Someone older, smarter, and wiser who is looking out for us. Faith is clearly not enough for many people. They crave hard evidence, scientific proof. They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal. [Carl Sagan] 3. One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) [Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection] 4. Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along. [Carl Sagan, The Fine Art of Baloney Detection] 5. I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. [Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism] 6. In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. [Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address] 7. The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity. [Carl Sagan] 8. You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe. [Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985] 9. A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. [Carl Sagan, Contact, pg 244] 10. The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and rightYou can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation. [Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 162. ] 11. What I'm saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job. [Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 164.] 12. Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it. [Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 166.] 13. The question [Do you believe in God?] has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I'm convinced God doesn't exist, or do I mean I'm not convinced he does exist? Those are two very different questions. [Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 168.] 14. My faith is strong I don't need proofs, but every time a new fact comes along it simply confirms my faith. [Palmer Joss in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 172.] 15. You see, the religious people -- most of them -- really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition. [Sol Hadden in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 285.] 16. The Earth is an object lesson for the apprentice gods. 'If you really screw up,' they get told, 'you'll make something like Earth.' [Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 286.] 17. Part of my message is that we're not central to the purpose of the Cosmos. What happened to me makes us all seem very small. [Dr. Arroway in Carl Sagan's Contact (New York: Pocket Books, 1985), p. 420.] 18. (When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 percent in China.) When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago--when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashonhan and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old. [Carl Sagan, _The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark_, p. 325] 19. I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. [Carl Sagan, 1996 in his article In the Valley of the Shadow Parade Magazine Also, Billions and Billions p. 215] 20. The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble. [Carl Sagan, A&E Biography interview] 21. Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy. [Carl Sagan] 22. In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed? [Carl Sagan, Cosmos, page 257] 23. Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. [Carl Sagan] 24. Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods. [Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain] 25. We should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. [Carl Sagan, on secular morality] 26. One prominent American religion confidently predicted that the world would end in 1914. Well, 1914 has come and gone, and - whole the events of that year were certainly of some importance - the world did not, at least so far as I can see, seem to have ended. There are at least three responses that an organized religion can make in the face of such a failed and fundamental prophecy. They could have said, Oh, did we say '1914'? So sorry, we meant '2014'. A slight error in calculation. Hope you weren't inconvinenced in any way. But they did not. They could have said, Well, the world would have ended, except we prayed very hard and interceded with God so He spared the Earth. But they did not. Instead, the did something much more ingenious. They announced that the world had in fact ended in 1914, and if the rest of us hadn't noticed, that was our lookout. It is astonishing in the fact of such transparent evasions that this religion has any adherents at all. But religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. The fact that religions can be so shamelessly dishonest, so contemptuous of the intelligence of their adherents, and still flourish does not speak very well for the tough- mindedness of the believers. But it does indicate, if a demonstration was needed, that near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry. [Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain] 27. In a democracy, opinions that upset everyone are sometimes exactly what we need. We should be teaching our children the scientific method and the Bill of Rights. [Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan] 28. It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand. [Carl Sagan] 29. There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly all right; they're the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. [Carl Sagan, Cosmos television series] 30. I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us-then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark] 31. If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults? [Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, p. 109] 32. If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 204 quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996] 33. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 30, quoted in 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996] 34. Since World War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new religions featuring the supernatural.... In Thailand, diseases are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred Scripture. Witches are today being burned in South Africa.... The worldwide TM [Transcendental Meditation] organization has an estimated valuation of $3 billion. For a fee, they promise to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 16, from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt] 35. In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, p. 413, from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief, Famous People with the Courage to Doubt, by James A. Haught, Prometheus Books, 1996] 36. If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?....For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark] 37. At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark] 38. Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our own ignorance about ourselves. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark] 39. Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark] 40. Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any miraculous cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark] 41. Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World] 42. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark] 43. Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species-- back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire-- has been ethically ambiguous. [Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark]

The history of antimatter begins in 1928 with a young physicist named Paul Dirac and a strange mathematical equation... The equation, in some way, predicted the existence of an antiworld identical to ours but made out of antimatter. Was this possible? if so, where and how could we search for antimatter? Dirac theorized for every particle that exists there is a corresponding antiparticle, exactly matching the particle but with opposite charge. For the electron, for instance, there should be an "antielectron" identical in every way but with a positive electric charge. In his Nobel Lecture, Dirac speculated on the existence of a completely new Universe made out of antimatter! From 1930, the search for the possible constituents of antimatter, antiparticles, began, and it has been the main influence behind a major scientific and technical evolution over the last 70 years. In 1932 Carl Anderson discovered the antielectron, or "positron", called so because of its positive charge. Confirmed soon after by Occhialini and Blackett, the discovery proved the existence of antiparticles as predicted by Dirac. With the discovery of the antiproton in 1955, Segre' and his group of collaborators (O. Chamberlain, C. Wiegand and T. Ypsilantis) had succeeded in a further proof of the essential symmetry of nature, between matter and antimatter. Only a year later, a second team working at the Bevatron (B. Cork, O. Piccione, W. Wenzel and G. Lambertson) announced the discovery of the antineutron. By now, all three particles that make up atoms (electrons, protons and neutrons) were know to each have an antiparticle. So if particles, bound together in atoms, are the basic units of matter, it is natural to think that antiparticles, bound together in antiatoms, are the basic units of antimatter. Towards the end of 1995, the first such antiatoms were produced at CERN by a team of German and Italian physicists. Although only 9 antiatoms were made, the news was so thrilling that it made the front page of many of the world's newspapers. So what happens when matter meets antimatter? If a particle and its antiparticle come into contact with each other, the two annihilate each other. Antimatter is not found naturally on Earth, except very briefly and in vanishingly small quantities. This is because antimatter which comes to exist on Earth outside the confines of a suitably equipped physics laboratory would inevitably come into contact with the ordinary matter that Earth is made of, and be annihilated.

Astronomers have new evidence from the Hubble Space Telescope that a strange force was present in the universe billions of years ago. The force is called "dark energy." It's forcing the universe to expand at an ever quickening pace. From 'Cosmological Constant' to 'Dark Energy' A Static Universe: When Albert Einstein was writing equations to describe the nature and the shape of the universe, most astronomers believed at that time that the universe was neither growing nor shrinking: it was simply static. His theory of general relativity, however, predicted that the universe must be changing. So to make his equations fit the physics of the times -- to make the universe a static place -- Einstein introduced a "cosmological constant" into the equation. He predicted that there must be a force that counteracts gravity and thus keeps the universe from collapsing into itself. Problem: In 1929, Edwin Hubble published a study based on observations that said the universe actually was expanding. Hubble's study caused Einstein to call his notion of a "cosmological constant" his greatest mistake. Cosmological Constant Reborn: In 1999, when astronomers discovered that the universe is not just expanding, but the pace of expansion is accelerating, the idea of a cosmological constant came back into consideration. This time, with a sexier name: dark energy. Astronomers suggested that dark energy -- something thought to make up 70 percent of space -- may be Einstein's anti-gravity force, i.e. a force that pushes the universe apart, while gravity tries to pull it together. One of the many questions about dark energy is, does it change or is it a steady force? Problem: In order to be Einstein's cosmological constant, dark energy must be steady. But a new observational study by LSU professor Bradley Shaefer finds that dark energy is not steady, but appears to have changed gradually over time. If Schaefer's observations hold, Einstein's idea of a cosmological constant may be put back on the shelf. Dark Energy or Just Gravity? One new, radical idea in physics even suggests there's no such thing as dark energy. What astronomers may be seeing is new behavior from a long-known force, gravity. For instance, in the distant, relatively empty hinterlands of the universe, gravity may behave differently than it does inside the crowded Milky Way. -- Vikki Valentine All Things Considered, January 11, 2006 · An astronomer says he may have found an important clue to one of the most profound mysteries in the universe: Why the stars in the sky are moving away from us at an ever increasing pace. Some scientists have suggested that the vacuum of space is filled with a weird force, called "dark energy." But new results, presented Wednesday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., call that idea into question. When astronomers look out into the sky, they see that everything around is moving away from us. Part of their explanation is that the universe started with a cosmic explosion, known as the Big Bang. In 1999, astronomers set out to measure the speed of expansion by looking at distant supernovae -- exploding stars -- to see how fast they were moving away. To everyone's surprise, they found that the material isn't just coasting away from us in space, as expected in the aftermath of an explosion. It's actually picking up speed as it goes. "Something out there is pushing the universe, making it expand, making it speed up and we don't know what this is really," says Bradley Schaefer, the Louisiana State University astronomer who presented the results. "It's been given a name, dark energy, and you can say this dark energy is pushing the universe, pushing the acceleration," he says. A leading notion is that dark energy is something that pervades what was thought of as empty space. It's sometimes called "quantum vacuum energy" or the "cosmological constant." The idea is that it's a constant through all space and through all time. Schaefer decided to test this idea by probing deeper back in time, to see if the constant was the same way back then. He did this by studying objects called gamma-ray bursts. "They're an extreme version of supernovae," says Schaefer, "and as such, they are 100 times more luminous than supernovae, and so you can see them much further out in the universe." Early results from Schaefer's study of the movements of gamma-ray bursts suggest that dark energy is different far out in space, and therefore way back in time. "The first result of this new method happens to be pointing toward the direction of this cosmological constant not being constant," Schaefer explains, "which would be to say it appears that the dark energy is changing with time." Schaefer, however, stops short of making a definitive claim about the nature of the universe from these results. And his evidence is not strong enough at the moment to be absolutely convincing. Even so, it is attracting a lot of attention at the astronomy meeting, including from heavyweights such as Michael Turner from the University of Chicago and the National Science Foundation. "It's very intriguing," says Turner, "but I don't think it rises to the level of me being able to issue Schaefer a ticket to Sweden." The Nobel Prize will have to wait for more convincing results, Turner says. But he adds that a breakthrough in this field would clearly be gold-medal material. "Cosmic acceleration, I believe, is the biggest mystery in all of science." Turner says it's hard enough for scientists to understand how the supposedly empty vacuum of space can be suffused with some form of cosmic energy. If Schaefer's data hold up and the idea of a constant and pervading energy is thrown out, then what? "The alternatives really are mind-stretching," says Turner. Maybe the universe contains hidden dimensions. Turner says the uncertainty about Shaefer's results won't last long; other astronomers have also been trying to measure the expansion of the universe way back in time. In a few years, Turner says we should know whether this is just a statistical fluke, or a real clue about the fabric of our universe.

At security posts dotted around the fields between the Jura mountains and Lake Geneva scientists are installing hi-tech retina scans above shafts descending 80m down - and leading to the largest scientific instrument ever built. The machine is being bolted together inside a tunnel 17 miles (27km) long, and when the power is thrown on next year it will recreate conditions unknown for 14bn years since the extraordinary fireball that marked the beginning of the universe - the big bang which blasted time and space into existence. In the coming months engineers using cranes will lower sections of detectors weighing several thousand tonnes into caverns carved within the tunnel. They will wire in some of the world's largest magnets and test run the machine's computer, built to handle a torrent of data equivalent to 150 times the content of the world wide web each year. The machine, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, Europe's particle physics laboratory, in Switzerland, was commissioned as a £4.2bn sledgehammer to crack some of the most compelling mysteries of the universe. Britain's stake in the project is enormous. This year alone £78m will be channelled into the experiment, where 600 British physicists are based. The project may prise open extra dimensions and create baby black holes; it may reveal enigmatic "dark energy" that drives the expansion of the universe. It should certainly discover what some call the "God particle", finally answering the embarrassingly simple but elusive question of why things have mass. In 1993 science minister William Waldegrave was so stumped by the notion of a God particle - correctly known as Higgs boson after the Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs who proposed it - that he offered a bottle of champagne to anyone who could explain it on one side of A4. The winning entry used the analogy of Margaret Thatcher gathering hangers-on as she moved through a cocktail party, to explain how Higgs bosons make other particles heavy by clinging to them like treacle. Finding the Higgs boson will confirm scientists' most complete theory of the universe and the matter from which it is created. "It's probably the closest to God that we'll get," said Jos Engelen, Cern's chief scientist. Inside the collider vanishingly small protons, the particles at the heart of every atom, will be propelled to nearly the speed of light and slammed into other protons hurtling the other way. By the time they collide each proton will pack as much punch as a 400-tonne train travelling at 120mph. Every second an estimated 800m head-on collisions are expected, each unleashing a shower of subatomic debris for scientists to sift through. Although the elusive Higgs particle may be created in collisions every day it will take enormous skill to spot them. Their existence is fleeting, each lasting less than a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. Scientists will use the enormous 7,000-tonne Atlas detector, which sits inside a cavern large enough to house the nave of Westminster Abbey, to pick up other particles that can only be created when a Higgs boson vanishes from existence. Other experiments will veer sharply into what has previously been the realm of science fiction. Some scientists believe the universe has more dimensions than the ones we know about. In one extra dimension gravity is believed to be exceptionally strong. If the collider momentarily wedges extra dimensions open, it could release a powerful tug of gravity that compresses matter so much it creates a miniature black hole. Cern officials are keen to point out that there is no reason to be alarmed by artificial black holes. "You should not deduce that we are ready to build a black hole and Cern along with the planet will disappear, although this is a letter I receive every week," said Robert Aylmar, head of Cern. Other detectors will investigate a theory called supersymmetry which predicts that there is a heavy invisible twin for every particle in the universe and which could explain why 90% of the material in the universe appears to be "missing" - a mystery that led scientists to name it "dark matter". Valuable spin-offs from past research include the world wide web and the most advanced medical scanners found in hospitals. Professor Engelen admits there is no practical benefit in finding the Higgs Boson. "Even in my wildest imagination I can't think of this discovery having a practical application, but setting ourselves that goal, doing something so exceptionally difficult, has required us to be innovative technology-wise. I can very easily sell the idea of new and fundamental science using that argument, even though the Higgs itself is not going to let you make a better toothpaste," he said.