Of Lists and the Dismal Science

 

I was walking Charlie Sunday morning around 8 a.m. (before the solar cauldron that is Texas in August overwhelms my poor friend in his fur coat) and I listened to a short video on, of all things, how to make a reading list.

Hey! I’m quite familiar with that.

In 2012 I made a list of Civil War books to read, and during Covid I made a list of WW II books to read. (I chose WW II because it kinda mirrored the scary uncertainty of that first Wu Flu month, but in the end the good guys won.) To date I’ve read 38 Civil War and 40 WW II books, following my reading plans loosely and flexibly.

In 2013 I spent the first five months reading through SF author Philip Jose Farmer’s bibliography, wading my way through fourteen of his works. The next year I read through an H. P. Lovecraft omnibus of 23 lesser and major tales. I’ve done similar excursions with theologian Derek Prince, SF author Robert Silverberg (who I enjoyed much more than Farmer), and eight of thirteen novels from English writer Bernard Cornwell’s Napoleonic saga.

Anyway, I was interested in this YouTuber’s take. He was using “Economics” as an example – how to create a reading list for the beginner in the field of economics.

This got me thinking. To me, economics literally is “the dismal science.” I took Micro and Macro 101 at Rutgers eons ago. I despised the in-the-trenches Micro but only mildly hated the birds-eye-view Macro. Later, at night school, I had to take one or the other again, and I have no memory of the course or my feelings towards it (but I doubt it changed). Back in 2016 when I took a little training course to be a tax preparer for H&R Block, I read a couple of books in the subject, emphasizing taxes, and somewhat sorta enjoyed it. The section on the National Economy of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics was tolerable, but that could be due to Sowell’s skills as a writer and teacher.

In my educated-but-not-specialized mind, economics is statistics mixed with Jeanne Dixon psychic fortune telling. Statistics can be bent, warped, twisted, and extorted to tell anything you want them to tell. Was it Mark Twain who said that thing about lies, damned lies, and statistics? And every economist seems to have his own agenda – an outcome or policy he wants to promote and propound that it’s almost worse than the free-for-all melee that it the history of philosophy. That guy Thomas Friedman, has he ever been right about anything? (Honestly, I don’t know, but I think I read a few things over the years about his less-than-stellar predictions that made me write the previous sentence.)

Hopper’s relationship with economics boils down to a handful of simple but intuitive aphorisms:

   

   * The more you tax something, the less you get. This applies to people’s earnings, too.

   * Trickle down economics work more often than it doesn’t (like, 60% of the time, depending on the state of the economy). Still, the best way to fire up the economy is to cut taxes.

   * The U.S. tax system screws the middle class – and by that I mean it does absolutely nothing to help grow it; it’s almost downright nasty to its millions of members.

   * The Democrats will mug you in broad daylight while the Republicans will only pickpocket you when you feel safest in a crowd.

   * The less government is involved in the economy, the better the economy will hum along.

   * Government programs NEVER go away.

   * The economy is a fragile spider web – one part snapping at the fringe can spell disaster to the entire latticework.

 

   * The government does not create jobs. Rich people with capital do.

 

   * Capitalism is the worst economic system devised by man – except for all the others.

 

   * Firms should only be interested in profit, not social engineering, not discrimination, not DEI, not pandering to (leftist) causes. When the GPS goes off of profit, you wind up in a lake with Michael Scott.

 

   * Stimulus checks have zero economic value.

   * Bubbles burst. When everyone’s talking about one thing, you’re in a bubble. Hear that, A.I.?

 

Sigh. Okay, I see what I just did to myself. Now I’m going to have to ride out the rest of the year working a reading list of books for people who hate economics but now feel the need to study the dismal science.

Subatomic Universes

 

I have found the answer.

 

At least, an answer.

 

And, truth be told, I have heard this elsewhere in other iterations.

 

Ever since a little boy I was fascinated with atomic and subatomic particles. My dad and my brother would be watching the Mets on TV, and I’d be curled up on the rug memorizing the periodic table in my physics book. As I grew older, and before other interests took me, I wondered – what exactly is an electron made of? What makes up an elementary particle of matter?

 

I spent two years in my twenties studying physics at Seton Hall but never got up to the classes where such topics might be addressed. True, I knew about the wave-particle duality, how the electron acts as a particle when observed and a wave when not. True, I knew how electrons were categorized a fundamental unit called leptons and protons and neutrons were made up of fundamental particles called quarks. But what were they? If I could shrink my hands down to something like ten-to-the-negative-twentieth their size now and grab an electron like a snowball in my hand and squeezed, what would happen?

 

I’m finishing up Cosmos by Carl Sagan (a read about forty years overdue) and came across this:

 

There is an idea – strange, haunting, evocative – one of the most exquisite conjectures in science or religion. It is entirely undemonstrated; it may never be proved. But it stirs the blood. There is, we are told, an infinite hierarchy of universes, so that an elementary particle, such as an electron, in our universe would, if penetrated, reveal itself to be an entire closed universe. Within it, organized into the local equivalent of galaxies and smaller structures, are an immense number of other, much tinier elementary particles, which are themselves universes at the next level and so on forever – an infinite downward regression, universes within universes, endlessly. And upward as well. Our familiar universe of galaxies and stars, planets and people, would be a single elementary particle in the next universe up, the first step of another infinite regress.

- Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, page 221 of my paperback edition.

 

How neat does that sound? It gets the Hopper Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

 

My own semi-ignorant musings, however, tell me that somehow nanoscopic black holes are involved (thus the need to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics) and photons need to be tossed in (something I think physicist Roger Penrose writes extensively about).

 

However, I am probably wrong.

 

But it’s still fun to muse on.

 

A Return to Physics

 

 

Getting that itch again, and it must be scratched!

It started a week or two ago, with me feeling out of sorts while at work. My job is very report-intensive, something like two hundred reports a month that I merge together and modify, balancing to incoming bills with subsequent payments to be sent out. Very dry, and, well, dull. So I spend most of my day, like my co-workers, with headphones on while I wind my way down my monthly schedule of remittances. In the beginning I used to listen to music, but now I done got my dopamine all outta whack on the youtube.

 

For the longest time I’ve been watching police body cam videos, predator catching videos, true crime videos, seconds-away-from-disaster videos, etc. Dopamine overloads. A 180-degree response, I suppose, to the work life I lead. But the problem with feeding your brain 9-to-5 with such fodder is that it tends to make you quite negative, and it spills over into other areas of your life.

 

So I found myself watching – of all things – camping videos late at night right before bed. These videos are made by solo dudes (and sometimes a chick) out in the silent, lonely woods, in various climates in various tent configurations. I enjoy the ones in the rain mostly, then ones in the snow. They’re usually around 45 minutes long and are extremely peaceful and relaxing. I myself have not camped since I was a boy, and right now do not have any interest in actually doing it myself (nor does the Mrs.). But it kinda resets my dopamine for a better night’s sleep, I guess.

 

If these police and crime videos are fraying me out, would there be a better thing to watch as I’m manipulating my spreadsheets (since camping videos are a little too mellow for work)? Yes! I discovered some physics channels on Youtube, and I’ve been watching them over the past few days and they’ve reignited my physics passion.

 

As a single-digit youngling, the book above was one of my all-time favorites. I read it too many times to count. My zone of interest was atomic and subatomic particles. After my failed music career I went to Seton Hall for 18 months to study physics, with mixed results academically. But subatomic particles still hold my passion. I have a poster-sized “Map of Fundamental Particles” on the wall I’m facing as I’m writing this (nerd!).

 

Back then I wanted to know exactly what they were. Now I know I’ll never know that – we’ll never know that, at least for a long while. Our technology, while rapidly, exponentially advancing, still is about a century out from making any real advancement in particle physics. But what I want to have is some sort of working knowledge of some model of subatomic particles.

 

To even approach that, however, I need a lot of refreshing. I haven’t read any physics since moving down to Texas the summer of 2021. Before that I spent most of the summer of 2017 reading through my physics book collection (which I later bequeathed to my nephew). So I’ve got seven years of rust to sand off. The videos I’ve been watching at work – and will later working from home today – have helped tremendously.

 

I’m currently about halfway through a large biography of Mozart (that’s my subject for the next post). I should finish in two or three weeks. Then I’m going to dip my toes back into the waters of physics. I’ll start off light and nostalgia-laden – I found a copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos that I picked up in Hilton Head a few years back. I had a copy thirty years ago while at Seton Hall. Never read it. So that’s on deck after Mozart. After that I have a Lee Smolin paperback on the shortcomings of string theory and a short textbook on particle physics written by a grad student. Roger Penrose threatens from the bottom of my makeshift pile of physics books, a work I’ve tried unsuccessfully to get through twice, but one that I intuitively feel I must read, as I think Penrose has a lot of answers. More on that later, much later.

 

So that’s the short-term nonfiction reading plan. Anyway, as always, more to come soon!

Mathematical Jerk Redux

 

I was scrolling through Twitter over the weekend and saw this pic: 

 with the phrase, “DON’T BE A …” right in front of it.

 

Yes! It took me a while to decrypt this (then I had to resort to google) but this is the mathematical expression of a Jerk.

 

No, not that kind of a jerk, not the kind the witty Twitter user was referencing. This kind of a jerk is what you’d experience if you were speeding up the highway and suddenly a force, say a huge gust of wind, pushes your vehicle quickly and unexpectedly to one side.

 

Now, “speed” here is a relative term. In physics, it’s called “velocity” because direction is generally though not necessarily indicated. Velocity is distance per time. It can be expressed in an equation relating these two variable. Throw some Calculus 101 in the mix, and you can obtain what’s called the second derivate of this equation. Since velocity is the change in distance over time, the second derivative represents the change in velocity over time. It’s called acceleration. Now, the third derivative (if you apply the derivative-obtaining technique to the second derivative) represents the change in acceleration over time. This is called “jerk.”

 

Like the beard-second, like the jiffy, math and physics has some interesting and humorous * terms. I had known about jerk from my calculus classes back in the early 90s, but had forgotten. However, I have never heard the technical terms “snap,” “crackle”, and “pop” in mathematics. Now I have and now you, if you have followed me up to this point, have also.

 

For the layman,

Acceleration is the change in velocity over time

Jerk is the change in acceleration over time

Snap is the change in jerk over time

Crackle is the change in snap over time

and

Pop is the change in crackle over time

 

And this is the Euler’s-honest truth!

 

Edit: After writing and publishing this, I see that I had done a similar blog post on it, here, on January 14, 2011, over thirteen years ago! It’s a great exhibit about the fickleness of memory. If you have a mathematical bent, I’d recommend reading that short post, ’cuz I particularly like the analogy used way back then.

Dallas Eclipse 2024

 

Just experienced the solar eclipse from my backyard. It was amazing!

Both the Mrs. and I were working from home today. In the early morning the skies were a bit overcast, and I was more than a bit worried. But when the eclipse officially began at 12:18 the sky had cleared except for some wispy white cotton balls. I donned my eclipse glasses and reclined in the patio chair, going in and out of the house every ten or fifteen minutes as I was working in my upstairs office.

A crowd had gathered in the park across the street, a very loud and festive atmosphere. I went back outside just as my wife was wrapping up a Zoom call. The ambient light dimmed to some level approximating fifteen minutes before sunset and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees. The winds picked up and the birds began their anxious chirpings. Charlie sat out with us but remained blissfully unaware of the eclipse, focused on protecting his turf from the roaming trash and recycling trucks that prowl around every Monday.

At 12:40 CST totality began, and we removed our special glasses and experienced the awesomeness of a total eclipse that no second-hand images can truly convey. Applause from the park echoed to my backyard. I took it all in: the sky a rich deep blue, the moon a cool charcoal, and the silvery corona of the sun brilliant and waving behind it. I had the distinct impression of something watching me – is this what our primitive ancestors felt during totality? An angry god casting judgment down upon them? Or was it a doorway of sorts – into a different universe, a parallel dimension? Intriguing no matter how you think of it.

This was the third eclipse I saw, but by far the most successful. The first I experienced in 1992 in New Jersey, but had no glasses; I only felt the drop in temperature and the kicked-up wind and the birds cries. In 2017, down on the beach in Hilton Head, SC, clouds obscured the eclipse past the point of viewing. This is the first time I saw the corona during totality live, and it was incredibly amazing, if ever so brief.

Some pics – and yes, I know the iPhone is not designed for such photography, but I did the best with what I had on hand.

 

Eclipse Nerd ready for a once (twice) in a lifetime event

View from my office window of crowd of 50-75 in the park across the street

View from my backyard ... 8 minutes before totality

Totality - best I could do with my iPhone

Cosmodrome

 

Cleaning out my office a few days ago I realized I had, mixed among the stacks of bills, unfiled paperwork, books, records, and boxes of DVDs and NJ memorabilia, 27 Astronomy magazines.

Now, I have been an off-and-on subscriber to Astronomy magazine since my Seton Hall days, beginning sometime around 1992. Occasionally I’d let the subscription run out and start up a new one with Sky & Telescope, but I’ve been with Astronomy for probably twenty years. Back in NJ I’d read them cover-to-cover, especially in the 90s, then as physics left my life and I started a family and gained other obligations, I’d skim the magazines, reading at best one or two articles for each. We moved down to Texas two-and-a-half years ago and I notified the publisher of a change in address, and, 27 issues later, realized I haven’t read a single one.

So I decided that I’d try to get through one a week when the Mrs. and I are watching the Dallas Stars or she’s watching her thing on TV. Beats scrolling through twitter. I’m already halfway through the most recent issue, and will read them backwards over the next couple of months. I’ve learned (and re-discovered) a lot of interesting things, and learning new things is high on my values list.

I can’t remember when I last renewed my subscription. It’s probably due to end soon. Probably did a three-year run for something like $1.99 an issue. Dunno. Maybe I’ll switch to Sky & Telescope. Again, dunno. Regardless, I don’t like wasting any amount of money, so I’m off on a mission.

That mission involves my backyard, my own private cosmodrome. It’s a heckuva lot better than the one I had in NJ. Back then, nested in houses, trees, and a downward sloping hill to a highway, I probably could access maybe 20 to 30% of the bowl of the sky. Here, thirty miles north of Dallas, sitting in a chair on my backyard patio, I have access to something like 60 to 70% of the sky.

Down in Texas we have far horizons and big sky. Where I live there are literally no mountains. Trees, but no forests. All the houses are no higher than two stories, or fifty feet I’d guess. When I open the backyard and take a few steps to the center of the patio, I can see the complete southwest sky to the horizon. A close neighbor blocks off a small part of the south above the horizon, and another to the west an even smaller portion as he’s further away. So I can see clear to southern California, in a range from the Mexican border straight up to Canada, with a slight addition of kryptonian vision.

I can see up and over my head to zenith, and perhaps twenty degrees eastward tilting my neck back. (To view the full eastern sky I’d just have to open my front door.) And turning my head north I see two-thirds of the sky above the garage. Here’s where I see Polaris, the North Star, every night, accompanied by the Great Bear, Cassiopeia, or Cepheus, depending upon the season.

Looking though to that open southwest, this image from Close Encounters of the Third Kind always comes to mind, though it doesn’t quite represent actual reality for me:

 

(Actually, the scene where the police are chasing the UFOs and come to a screeching halt at a cliff as the objects fly over the countryside is a better image, but I couldn’t find it online).

 

There is lots of activity in this sky: Dallas Fort Worth Airport is 23 miles south/southwest. Sheppard Air Force Base is 112 miles west/northwest. Dyess Air Force Base is 200 miles directly west. So there’s lots of motion all the time. Planes of all types, including helicopters. I often see them dance before bright Venus setting in the west, or Jupiter and Saturn slowly traversing a great arc overhead. The moon is brilliant – to my chagrin as it makes identifying stars more difficult – but it seems to be out and full every evening, so clear and close I could hit it with a rock or dust it off had I a stepladder and a broom.

A few days ago we hit 71 degrees – unseasonably warm for this time of year even down here. I reclined on a chair and mapped the skies as Charlie the dog inspected the perimeter of the yard for bunny infiltration. Off to the northwest I see bright globes on the horizon, slowly nearing, getting brighter, more defined, eventually resolving into massive jet liners en route to DFW. And each time I see one I hope it won’t. Perhaps it will zig zag, change colors, speed up or speed away at some crazy angle. And who knows? It might be some aircraft of unknown origin escaping F-18 Super Hornets launched from Sheppard or Dyess in hot pursuit.

Ah, my cosmodrome! Looking forward to spring nights sitting out there sipping a beer and watching the stars.

(And yes, I know “drome” connotes “airfield”, such as “aerodrome” – UK airfields in WW II, but “cosmodrome” sounds cooler than plain ol’ “observatory”.)

 

Aristotle and the Gun

 

One of the coolest things about reading science fiction, aside from the potentiality of falling in to a great tale, is that on occasion a “great idea” – crazy, weird, mind-altering, world-expanding, awe-inspiring – a great idea will pop up and sweep me off my feet. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen. A couple times a year, I guess, for someone like me who reads science fiction about twenty, twenty-five percent of the time.

This just happened a few days ago.

You may know I am working my way through 18th century historian Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It’s a 1,270-page bucket list item that’ll take me about four months to march through. Now, since I’m a hopper and I’m determined to finish this tome before Little One returns from Italy, I’m only going to allow myself two science fiction short stories for every hundred pages of Gibbon I milepost.

So I just read two stories from 1991’s Modern Classics of Science Fiction I picked up just for this occasion. It was in the second one, “Aristotle and the Gun,” by L. Sprague de Camp, that a small idea wormed itself into my mind and refuses to leave.

First, a word about Mr. de Camp. Or L. Sprague. I’m not sure how to refer to him. He was a writer from the pre-Golden Age of Science Fiction, primarily the 30s and 40s. This is only the third short story of his I’ve read (each one from a different sci fi omnibus read in a different decade), but I did read his novel Lest Darkness Falls way way back in 2005 and thoroughly enjoyed it (I graded it an A-). The essence of the tale is – what would you do, with your knowledge and know-how, if you were transported back to Rome c. AD 550, as the city falls to the barbarians and the world teeters on darkness. A meek, run-of-the-mill archaeologist finds himself mysteriously in such a situation, and what follows is, well, what he does, and what he does, simple at first, turns out quite remarkable.

“Aristotle and the Gun” (1956) is of a similar idea. In the far distant future a scientist teleports himself back in time in attempt to meet Aristotle and subtly influence the philosopher so that the scientific age can happen half a millennia sooner that it did in his timeline.

The main character mentions that classic nagging problem that pops up in every time travel story: How much effect will one teeny tiny change in the past alter the future? A.k.a., the butterfly effect. The nifty part is that he states that the extent of the butterfly effect is directly correlated to whether space-time has a negative or positive curvature. “If positive, any disturbance in the past tends to be ironed out in subsequent history, so that things become more and more nearly identical with what they would have been anyway. If negative, then events will diverge more and more from their original pattern with time.”

Now I never thought about the universe’s curvature relating to time. I always thought of it, way back in my physics days and since, in terms of space. After all, space is a physical thing, at least that can be curved. How can time curve? A positively curved universe can be imagined as a great sphere whereas a negatively curved universe is like a horse saddle. But since space and time are connected into one four-dimensional entity care of Einstein, spacetime, one must think of time as positively or negatively curved.

When reading the story I immediately thought of the difference between a closed and open universe, as in a universe which will eventually collapse upon itself as opposed to one which will continue to expand forever. Which fate is realized depends on the amount of mass in the universe, as mass works as a brake on expansion. Curvature itself, though, does not necessarily influence whether the universe is bounded or unbounded, closed or open. But wouldn’t it be cool if somehow mass also affected the flow of time? I mean, it must, right, since it’s right there in the term spacetime.

(And I think it must be in Einstein’s relativity equations, if I remember correctly. It’s been a while ... a long while ...)

I dunno; I think I just gave myself a headache. Someone give me a million dollars so I can quit my job and think about these things, okay?

That Was Close!

 

Wow, I think the highlight of the year was, for me, that time when the superheated moon nearly smashed into the earth. I took this pic of it just as it swooshed by overhead. Didn’t hit my car, thankfully, but I did lose quite a few shingles off the roof.

Close call, man. Close call.

Supermoon or UFO?

Taken last night from the backyard looking southeast around 10:30 pm.

 

This blob of light is either one of those supermoons or the Mothership from Close Encounters descending from the cloud cover.

 

Oh, what’s a supermoon? It’s the Moon observed at perigee, the closest point in its orbit to Earth, while it’s also Full. They say tonight’s one is the last occurrence in 2022.

 

Here’s a marginally better pic, taken from my driveway a few minutes later:

 

 

 

It’s not the late afternoon Sun taken with a filter over the lens. No, it’s just an ol’ supermoon, captured with your average iPhone, never a good piece of photographic equipment to memorialize the heavens.

 

Sadly, it’s not a Mothership, either.

 

PS. Look for the Perseid meteor showers later tonight in the northeast. They’ll be fighting with a Full-ish Moon for your eye’s attention, but if you’re far from other sources of light pollution you should see ’em.

PPS. Also note canine at the bottom of the first pic, sitting there hypnotized by that supermoon. 

Physics and Eastern Orthodoxy

 

Two quotes ponging around my empty head of late:

“All creation is a gigantic Burning Bush, permeated but not consumed by the ineffable and wondrous fires of God’s energies.” – Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity

 

“Wolfgang Pannenberg has suggested that there may exist a previously undiscovered universal energy field … which can be regarded as the source of all life, and which can be identified with the Holy Spirit … I shall argue that the universal [quantum] wave function …. is a universal field with the essential features of Pannenberg’s proposed new ‘energy’ field. … If this identification is made, it becomes reasonable as a matter of physics to say God is in the world, everywhere, and is with us, standing beside us, at all times.” – Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality

 

2675 Tolkien

 

One of the more pleasant surprises I love receiving is the shock of synchronicity. I’ll see something in one area I’m interested in that will instantaneously correspond to another seemingly unrelated area of study. A synchronicity event just happened to me last night.

If you’ve been reading the last couple of posts, you’ll note that I’ve gotten the itch to read some Tolkien again. I decided to re-read The Lord of the Rings beginning on March 1, once I’m finished with the current epics I’m working my way through. You’ll also note that while out shopping last Sunday in preparation of the blizzard I bought the current copy of Astronomy magazine on a whim. It’s become a pleasant habit to read an article or two in bed before lights out every night this week.

Last night I read an article that mentioned asteroids, and I looked up the entry on asteroids in Wikipedia on my cell phone. Skimming through it I see a link for notable asteroids. I click on that and soon it’s revealed that, out there some two hundred million miles distant, is an asteroid floating in the inner region of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, called 2675 Tolkien.

2675 Tolkien!

Normally, an asteroid is designated by a number and a name. The number originally was assigned in the order of discovery. Thus, the first asteroid discovered over two hundred years ago is known as 1 Ceres. Since over 100,000 asteroids have been discovered to date, I assume this numbering convention has been modified. Anyhoo, the discoverer is allowed to choose a name, which is then either approved or rejected by the International Astronomical Union.

2675 Tolkien was discovered on April 14, 1982, by British astronomer Martin Watt. It orbits the Sun every 1,202 days, and rotates about itself once every 44 days. A lumpy potato thing with dimensions something like 6 miles by 7 miles, it resembles, to my mind as I can’t find a photo of it anywhere, to be something like a rocky Rubik’s cube. It tumbles rather than rotates. It’s dark and has an absolute magnitude of 12.2, which means it can’t be seen by human eyes. You’d need something 100,000 times more powerful, like a 12” telescope.

I’ve read in several places (might be the same citation) that “Tolkien” was chosen because of the author’s lifelong interest in astronomy. I’m not so sure of that, never having read or heard of it before. There’s not much astronomy in his legendarium. So it seems to me the naming was more likely fan tribute. About a week after 2675 Tolkien was discovered Mr. Watt discovered another asteroid. It’s now known as 2291 Bilbo.

This is not 2675 Tolkien, but this is what it looks like in my mind ...

 

Tabby’s Star

 

I used to be in the know with this kinda stuff, but sadly not of late. Ever since my physics days, mid-90s, I subscribed to Astronomy and, later, Sky & Telescope. I knew the constellations, the stars within them, how to locate the planets and such phenomena as Cygnus X-1, the likeliest candidate for a black hole. A pal and I would regularly motor up north to the woods in the frigid cold of winter or in the middle of a buggy summer night, drink a few beers and point my telescope all over the night sky. But not for a long time. The magazines became politicized about a decade ago and I did not renew my subscriptions. Other things bullied for my attention, and despite a desire to keep up with astronomical doings, I haven’t.

Then I heard about Tabby’s Star.

I won’t tell you the source of my initial information about Tabby’s Star, as it’s somewhat less reputable than Astronomy or Sky & Telescope. But Tabby’s Star is a real thing. It’s a real star, first discovered back in 1890. It has an official name, KIC 8462852. It sits 1,480 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, visually a little past halfway between the star Deneb (the “head” of the “Northern Cross”) and its first bright star on the right arm. But don’t try to find it, as it can’t be seen by the naked eye. It can’t even be seen by my telescope (it requires a 5-inch or greater to be viewed).

What makes Tabby’s Star so special is that its brightness fluctuates on an irregular basis, up to 22 percent in brightness, something highly irregular in our universe.

What might cause this?

Well, in September of 2015, a group of “citizen scientists” searching for exoplanets, described the dimming problem in detail and offered some suggestions. Among those are –

   * An uneven ring of dust and debris orbiting the star

   * Some strange, currently unexplainable difference in the star’s photosphere

   * Similar to the ring of dust, a field of cold, dirty cometary fragments in highly eccentric orbits about the star

   * Or a large number of smaller masses circling about it in a tight formation

   * Or on a larger scale, perhaps Tabby’s Star is orbited by a single large planet with several oscillating rings of its own

   * Or for a more grimmer take, perhaps Tabby’s Star is in the slow process of devouring a large planet

But my favorite potential explanation, and those of many on the fringe, is –

   * Perhaps intelligent life is constructing a Dyson Sphere about the star.

Whoa.

What is a Dyson Sphere?

Picture a highly technologically evolved race in the process of constructing a sphere enclosing and encapsulating its star. Such a sphere would necessarily be a hundred or a thousand times the diameter of the star itself. And why would such a sphere be built around a sun? To capture a large portion of the energy radiating from the star, to power and fuel an interstellar civilization which had the means to do such an incredible feat of engineering.

Scientists convinced SETI – that part of NASA concerned with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – to point its radio telescopes at Tabby’s Star in light of this last possibility. And for a whole two weeks they did so, and found no evidence of alien transmission of radio signals.

So the search, and the mental quest for what exactly is happening about Tabby’s Star continues …

Oh, and you’re probably wondering why it’s called Tabby’s Star. It’s for the lead author of that 2015 paper – astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. KIC 8462852 also goes by several other names. Boyajian’s Star, naturally. Also the WTF star, which can informally stand for “where’s the flux?” or “what the f***?” Some refer to it whimsically as LGM-2, in honor of the first pulsar discovered, which was casually known as LGM-1, for “little green men.”

What do I think?

Well, I can’t lie and say that the whole Dyson’s Sphere angle does not intrigue me to the point of shivers. But there’s this thing called Occam’s Razor …

 

Apple Pie

  

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, first invent the universe.”

- Carl Sagan

I love that quote.

While I was never into Sagan as a kid, I knew of him. For a kid in the 70s, with one teevee with seven channels in the house, his face was ubiquitous. As was the mock phrase “billions and billions,” though I understand he never actually said it. As a young padawan who loved physics I knew him; as a teenager struggling with calculus in high school I knew him; as a college student contemplating a major in something ending in “-ology” I knew him.

Despite all this, though, I never saw Cosmos. Thought about renting it over the years, but felt that it wouldn’t live up to the hype with its dated special effects. (Though it might have some weird type of never-experienced nostalgia for me as a big fan of Nimoy’s In Search Of). But I did read the paperback version of Cosmos during my time at Seton Hall, followed by either Dragons of Eden or Broca’s Brain. Can’t remember which one. Might have been both.

I also read his science fiction novel, Contact, and found it somewhat entertaining. There was a really good idea in there, something about how the aliens either communicated with us or enabled us to travel to them. Don’t remember, unfortunately. And now that’s making me think I should re-read the book. Saw the movie in the 90s and was underwhelmed. First in a long line of the girl-scientist cliché as well as the religion fanatic with a bomb cliché.

Anyway, this is all just some random warblings from me. No ulterior motive behind this post, written only because I came across that apple pie quote.

Now I need to keep my eye out for a Sagan next time I’m at the used book store.

N.B. A “sagan” is the tongue-in-cheek scientific unit of any number greater than four billion – “billions and billions” translates to at least two billion plus two billion, or four billion. Example: Bill Gates, the second richest man in the world, is estimated to have a net worth of around 22.5 sagans of dollars.

What if the Moon...

was replaced by other planets in the night sky at the same distance?

I’ve often wondered – and have had pretty neat dreams – about this…

(Best watched on full screen)

No Saturn, though, which is kind of a bummer. But there are plenty other videos like this out on that youtube thing.

Point Nemo

No, it’s not my hidden undersea lair from which my minions plot my megalomaniacal machinations. Nor is it some Vernesian secret society aiming to restore Victorian triumphalism throughout the globe. And it’s not even the hottest surfer spot in Australia, or Hawaii, or Southern California, where dudes mix it up with multi-metered monster waves, nor the stoner bar where they relax and tell tall toked-up tales of the pipelines that got away.

Point Nemo happens to be the furthest point in the ocean from land.

It lies in the central Pacific Ocean, nearly 1,500 miles or so from Pitcairn Island in the north, Easter Island in the northeast, and Maher island in the south, which lies just off the coast of Antarctica. Eggheads refer to it as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility.

Should you wish to plug the coordinates into your motorboat’s GPS (not recommended), you’d use 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south by 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west. From what I understand, H.P. Lovecraft used the coordinates in his infamous story The Call of Cthulhu, it being the location of the Old One’s ancient and terrible eldritch city. But I’d have to look that up; haven’t read it in four or five years.

My interest in Point Nemo was piqued upon reading a short article on the Tiangong-1. What? You don’t remember the Tiangong-1? That was the school-bus sized Chinese space station that plummeted to earth this past Easter. If you remember, “experts” were predicting it could come crashing down anywhere between latitude 43 degrees north (Hopper’s current hidden lair is at 41.01 degrees north) and 43 degrees south. That’s a wide swath of real estate. But, strangely enough considering there was no way to control the station’s crash, it landed very very close to Nemo. I say strange because, due to its isolation from shipping lanes and population centers, Point Nemo is chosen fairly regularly as a crash landing zone for artificial space debris, so much so that’s it’s informally known as the “satellite graveyard.”

Now, apparently there are these things called Gyres out on the seven seas – well, actually five of them. Gyres, not seas. One each in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Indian, North Pacific, and South Pacific oceans. Major currents, “mega” or even “meta” currents we can call them, to be overly hip, form a swirling Coriolis Effect due to the spin of the planet, and each, logically, has a center. Point Nemo forms the center of the South Pacific Gyre. And these things are big, thousands of miles along the furthest outer regions.

Unfortunately, gyres have two downsides. One is the swirling tides tend to keep nutrients from the center regions. So these centers tend to be lifeless. But worse, they also tend to accumulate all the ocean junk that’s out there: plastic bottles, other floating man-made debris, sludge and oil from spills, the occasional Chinese space station, and whatnot. So much so that Point Nemo also has the informal label of the South Pacific Garbage Patch. Yuck.

So now you have three new terms to dazzle your friends and acquaintances: Point Nemo, the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, and the South Pacific Ocean Gyre. Go forth and dazzle! And I shall abscond to my hidden undersea lair to plot how to use them all against mankind!