Heavy metal

Image credit: ESO/G. Lombardi

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This collapse [of the civilisation of Easter Island] speaks powerfully to the last factor in the Drake equation. The length of time a civilisation lasts. Imagine there are, and have been thousands or millions civilisations in the history of the Milky Way galaxy. Imagine their lifetimes are short.

No matter how they’re distributed in space and time.. They never overlap. And I think this is quite a sobering thought. The reason we have never and will never hear from any other civilisation is because none of them ever last long enough to contact each other. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the answer. I think the story of the Rapa Nui people hints at something else.

Their island was the final destination of the human colonisation of Earth. A journey that took us from our origins in East Africa to across the planet in less than 60.000 years. And I think a sufficiently advanced alien civilisation would mirror this process of colonisation.

In the 1940s, the mathematician John von Neumann thought about the possibility that we could build self-replicating machines, he called them Universal Constructors. So these would be space probes that could fly out to a solar system, land on an asteroid, or a moon, or a planet, and then mine the resources they needed to copy themselves. In This way von Neumann’s replicating machines could spread across the entire galaxy, just as humans spread across the Earth.

Think about how the Polynesians colonised the Pacific islands, they sailed across the ocean, they landed on some uninhabited rock like Easter Island, and they used the resources they found there to make copies of themselves. We call it breeding. Now, modern computer models suggest that such a strategy a would allow an advanced alien civilisation to colonise the entire Milky Way galaxy in only ten million years - the blink of an eye in cosmic time.

All this sounds like science fiction, but if they’re possible in principle then you have to construct some kind of argument as to why we don’t see them, and I can’t construct one. It bothers me.

It follows that if such an advanced civilisation had existed, we’d know about it. We’d have encountered one of von Neumann’s machines. And I think that suggests that there is only one technologically advanced civilisation in the Milky Way, and there only has ever been one - and that’s us. We are unique.

Could it be that we alone have passed through the evolutionary bottlenecks that seem to have prevented civilisations from arising elsewhere? If the answer is yes, we are the only intelligent civilisation in the galaxy, and that makes us indescribably precious and valuable

We are the only island of meaning in an infinite sea of lonely stars. And without wishing to be overly romantic of sentimental about it, that would seem to me to confer on us a responsibility, the responsibility to act together as a civilisation to survive, and, ultimately, to explore those stars. — Professor Brian Cox, Human Universe

A section of the Great Nebula of Orion, aka M42, observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

(NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Gigantic Ring System Around J1407b Much Larger, Heavier Than Saturn’s

Comet-Hale Bopp, observed on March 24, 1997, by J.C. Casado.

(NASA)

Did the Ancient Egyptians have electricity???

It is a widespread belief in alternative science that our forefathers possessed a much greater technological knowledge than our schoolbook science is willing to accept. Many of those theories are lacking serious foundation and are often based on overdrawn speculations, like the Manna machine I discussed before. But the theory that electricity was known and used in antiquity seems to rest on a much more stable foundation.

The key to the whole theory lies a few hundred kilometers east of Egypt, in today’s Iraq. There some strange pots were found. Some contained watertight copper cylinders, glued into the opening with asphalt. In the middle of the cylinder was an iron rod, held in place also with asphalt. The excavator who found the first of these pots in 1936 was sure: this is a galvanic element, a primitive battery. Reconstructions did indeed show that it was possible to create electricity with it.

Another key element for the electro-thesis is actually something that is missing. It’s a riddle where schoolbook science is capitulating. Soot. In none of the many thousands of subterranean tombs and pyramid shafts was found a single trace of soot, as we are told by the authors of the electro-thesis, although many of these tombs are full of often colourful paintings. But the primitive light sources the Egyptians knew (candles, oil lamps etc.) are always leaving soot and are using oxygen. So how DID the Egyptians get their light? Some rationalists are arguing with mirrors, but the quality of the copper plates the Egyptians used as mirrors were not good enough for that.

HATHOR-TEMPLE IN DENDERA

In this temple in Dendera, several dozens of kilometers north of Luxor, some experts found the light. A Norwegian electrical engineer noticed that the object shown on the relief on top of this page coud work as a lamp. An Austrian colleague was able to construct a working model, and two well known authors in the AAS, Peter Krassa and Rainer Habeck, could even work out a real theory based on it.

What we see is without question a form of bulb, with two arms reaching into it near its thick end, and a sort of cable at the other end, from where a snake is leaping out to touch the arms on the other side. The whole ensemble really looks like a lamp.

The first diffraction pattern from the brightest synchrotron light source in the world is here! The electrons whizzing around at nearly the speed of light at Brookhaven’s National Synchrotron Light Source II create a high-energy x-ray beam, which was steered toward a sample of sulfur-doped tantalum selenide just yesterday. When the beam hits the sample, the x-rays scatter off the atoms within the material, creating this gorgeous array of rings. 

This special compound has a strange characteristic: At low temperatures, electrons in both the pure tantalum selenide and sulfur-doped tantalum compounds spontaneously form into charge density waves, like ripples on the surface of a pond. These ripples have different wavelengths, and when they cross over one another, instead of canceling out electronic activity, they surprisingly create superconductivity — the pure lossless transfer of electricity.  

“It is like mixing red paint and white paint, and instead of getting pink you get blue after mixing,” said professor Simon Billinge, joint appointee with Brookhaven and Columbia University. Data from the X-ray Powder Diffraction beamline will help us understand how charge density waves in materials may lead to superconductivity. That’s super important for our nation’s energy future, but it also means we’ll have some more beautiful diffraction patterns to gaze at. Lucky us. 

Celestial Reflections  by Jarrod Castaing

Detailed View of a Solar Eclipse Corona

"Only in the fleeting darkness of a total solar eclipse is the light of the solar corona easily visible."

Lovejoy C2014-Q2. My stacking software doesnt work, so I worked with a single shot (60 seconds). My first comet I saw live through my telescope! Amazing!

Jesus Christ, this is a real place. The world’s biggest salt flat -the ground turns into a giant mirror when it rains.

This might even be better than the Aurora Borealis. I’ve never seen space like that, let alone mirrored on the ground below me.

Soft drink

Photo by Sándor Nagy

The Iris Field

So What Is a Fractal, Anyway?

It is my firm conviction that mathematics underpins everything in the universe. Mathematics was intrinsically designed to explain the world; Newton invented differential and integral calculus, for example, to explain why the orbits of the planets were in the shape of an ellipse. Understanding the mathematics behind phenomena will not make them any less beautiful; it will make them more beautiful in that the complexity of our world is better understood and appreciated.

To put it simply, fractals are self-similar and have an unusual relationship with space - kind of like the ‘It’s Complicated’ relationship status on Facebook. Self-similar, in this case, means that fractals have something called irreducible complexity: No matter how far you “zoom in” to a fractal pattern, the structure will be exactly or approximately similar to the fractal itself. In order to understand a fractal’s unusual relationship with space, however, we’re going to need to consider the concept of dimensions.

Dimensions, in their simplicity, are a very interesting mathematical concept. What, for example, makes a line one-dimensional, and a plane two-dimensional? Note that lines and planes are both self-similar, as outlined by the definition above. The differences actually lie in their self-similarity; a line can be broken down into N self-similar pieces, each with a magnification factor of N; a plane can be broken down into N^2 similar pieces, each with a magnification factor N; and a cube into N^3 pieces, with the same magnification factor N. A magnification factor will be defined here as the amount you have to “zoom in” to regain the original structure.

Therefore, dimensions of self-similar objects are simply the exponent of the number of self-similar pieces with magnification factor N into which the figure may be broken. So the line segment mentioned before exists in one dimension; the plane in two dimensions; and the cube in three dimensions. Not too bad, right?

Well, here’s the complicated part. Fractals can exist in non-integer dimensions.

For example, we can consider the Sierpinski Triangle, which looks like this:

If we accept our original ideas about dimensions to be valid, then the dimension of the Sierpinski Triangle - which, by our definition, exhibits a fractal pattern - would be governed by:

Fractals have an “unusual relationship with space” because they - as shown by the Sierpinski Triangle - can exist in non-integer dimensions. Amazing, right?

The three bottom images above are taken from the Mandelbrot Set - which has a topological dimension of 2 (meaning that it’s visualised, and pictured, in two dimensions) but has a fractal dimension that’s much more complex. Fractals from the Mandelbrot set - and other fractal patterns - are found throughout nature, including in the growth patterns of bacteria at the top of this post! Other examples include unfurling ferns, and the inside of certain types of seashells. It’s even been shown that the small motions of our eyes follow a fractal pattern - which is why we find things that exist in a fractal pattern aesthetically pleasing.

Next time you see a fractal pattern, remember that it doesn’t just exist topologically as you see it - it’s fractal dimension could be 1.58, or 1.7! The maths behind fractal images are just as beautiful as the images themselves. In fact, in my opinion they enhance the beauty of the images my eye naturally finds aesthetically pleasing.

Images: The top two images shown are of bacteria cultures exhibiting fractal growth due to environmental stress. The bottom three images are from the Mandelbrot Set.

Bryce Canyon (by jbs636)

ALMA image of the protoplanetary disc around HL Tauri

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

From ESO news release "Revolutionary ALMA Image Reveals Planetary Genesis"