our tiny world

I had the opportunity and pleasure today to listen to a live-streamed lecture from Professor Brian Cox, at Manchester University, about the LHC, exploring space, and curiosity-driven science.

He talked about the LHC, and the math involved in research of subatomic particles, quarks, Higgs, a little about electromagnetism. He pointed out Earth in one of my favorite solar system photographs.

He reminded his listeners that it's important to know why we're doing what we're doing, and that for him, like for Sagan, one must start with the beauty and wonder, then get into the details as part of that. Richard Feynman was another scientist who held that mastery, who was delighted at the world, the universe, and for whom science was an expression of that delight.

Prof. Cox wound down his lecture with this, from Carl Sagan, who was responding to a photograph taken from Voyager, as it looked back on the solar system it had just traveled through:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.



It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

I was going to put together an Earth Day post today, and I might still -- it's a busy day, I wasn't prepared ahead of time.

But I think that Sagan had it all, right there. The rest is just detail, it's about how to do it. That's what I'll get into later.

In Science We Trust?

Put on the headphones if you're at work. It's worksafe, but there's music. The first few seconds of the video explain the point of it all:

on my honor I will try

Thanks to my friend Lisa for pointing me at these badges.

(Admittedly, I only claimed the kid science one because these weren't available when I was little.)

FOR SCIENCE! ... and for beauty

This looks so completely CGI I can hardly blame people for assuming it's not real:



Yes, this is on youtube, it might go down some day. Unlike NASA, the Japanese space agency JAXA retains rights to its images. But they don't seem to enforce that too hard.

I don't really expect I'll get to see the earth rise from the moon, I'm old enough now that I'll likely be dead before the general public gets to visit. But I'm still glad we're interested enough in pure science to explore it, and I'm glad there are people who record it on video and share it for us for the sake of beauty alone.

can there be enough cephalopods?

One third of the way to the moon -- wow

Aurora australis
Originally uploaded by Antarctic M.

Years ago, when I was an exchange student in rural Australia, my host mother woke me in the wee hours, one night, to bring me into the back yard. She pointed off to the south. The sky was full of light, a shimmering green gauze shower curtain, it seemed, billowing in the steam and air currents of the night sky. "This is unusually far north for it," she said, and it was, at about 32 degrees south of the equator.

The aurorae have been mysterious to humans throughout history, but we're learning more -- and the learning doesn't ruin the magic, for me. It reminds me of Richard Feynman's famous footnote within the Feynman Lectures on Physics. It reads like a poem:

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination— stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern— of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent.

From a NASA press release:

NASA Satellites Discover What Powers Northern Lights

GREENBELT, Md. — Researchers using a fleet of five NASA satellites have discovered that explosions of magnetic energy a third of the way to the moon power substorms that cause sudden brightenings and rapid movements of the aurora borealis, called the Northern Lights.
The culprit turns out to be magnetic reconnection, a common process that occurs throughout the universe when stressed magnetic field lines suddenly snap to a new shape, like a rubber band that's been stretched too far.

"We discovered what makes the Northern Lights dance," said Dr. Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles. Angelopoulos is the principal investigator for the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission, or THEMIS.

Substorms produce dynamic changes in the auroral displays seen near Earth's northern and southern magnetic poles, causing a burst of light and movement in the Northern and Southern Lights.

Substorms often accompany intense space storms that can disrupt radio communications and global positioning system signals and cause power outages. Solving the mystery of where, when, and how substorms occur will allow scientists to construct more realistic substorm models and better predict a magnetic storm's intensity and effects.

"As they capture and store energy from the solar wind, the Earth's magnetic field lines stretch far out into space. Magnetic reconnection releases the energy stored within these stretched magnetic field lines, flinging charged particles back toward the Earth's atmosphere," said David Sibeck, THEMIS project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "They create halos of shimmering aurora circling the northern and southern poles."

Scientists directly observe the beginning of substorms using five THEMIS satellites and a network of 20 ground observatories located throughout Canada and Alaska. Launched in February 2007, the five identical satellites line up once every four days along the equator and take observations synchronized with the ground observatories. Each ground station uses a magnetometer and a camera pointed upward to determine where and when an auroral substorm will begin. Instruments measure the auroral light from particles flowing along Earth's magnetic field and the electrical currents these particles generate.

During each alignment, the satellites capture data that allow scientists to precisely pinpoint where, when, and how substorms measured on the ground develop in space. On Feb. 26, 2008, during one such THEMIS lineup, the satellites observed an isolated substorm begin in space, while the ground-based observatories recorded the intense auroral brightening and space currents over North America.

These observations confirm for the first time that magnetic reconnection triggers the onset of substorms. The discovery supports the reconnection model of substorms, which asserts a substorm starting to occur follows a particular pattern. This pattern consists of a period of reconnection, followed by rapid auroral brightening and rapid expansion of the aurora toward the poles. This culminates in a redistribution of the electrical currents flowing in space around Earth.

THEMIS is the fifth medium-class mission under NASA's Explorer Program. The program, managed by the Explorers Program Office at Goddard provides frequent flight opportunities for world-class space investigations in heliophysics and astrophysics. The University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., managed the project development and is currently operating the THEMIS mission. ATK Space (formerly Swales Aerospace) of Beltsville, Md., built the THEMIS satellites.

The THEMIS team's findings will appear online July 24 in Science Express and Aug. 14 in the journal science. For more information about the THEMIS mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/themis

Gizmodo has a great animation of the bursts of energy related to the aurora.
NASA has a wealth of other videos.