What happens in the event horizon stays in the event horizon
Here’s a really cool “map of science” by Crispian Jago:
500 Years of Science, Reason & Critical Thinking via the medium of gross over simplification, dodgy demarcation, glaring omission and a very tiny font.
The map of modern science was created to celebrate the achievements of the scientific method through the age of reason, the enlightenment and modernity.
I hope your Tuesday is going well so far. Should you feel the need to ruin it, though, just watch this series of interviews with participants of Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally held on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s historic speech, “I have a Dream”:
“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
– Winston Churchill
The picture above wasn’t taken out of a movie adaptation of a J.R.R. Tolkien story. No, in fact it is a very detailed image of a sunspot taken by New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Big Bear Solar Observatory. That only leaves me slightly more disconcerted.
Here’s a time-lapse video showing asteroid discoveries from the past three centuries. Quite interesting to see this game of cosmic Pong:
The significantly higher number of detected asteroids in 2010 is due to more precise observations from the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
Sometimes I catch myself merely living because I don’t have anything better to do. I wake up from a long slumber and realize that a year of my life just went by. I think about what I did in that year. Then my mind wanders. I think about life.
When some of Earth’s organic molecules first came together to form nucleic acids some four billion years ago, a sequence of events that would affect me rather significantly was set in motion. I’m talking, of course, about natural selection.
The first microbes evolved into cells, the cells into amoebas, the amoebas into multi-cellular organisms, they into plants and plant-like beings on the sea floor, these beings into fish, fish into amphibians, into reptiles, into rodents and other warm-blooded creatures, into monkeys, and, eventually, just a couple million years ago, monkeys had evolved into humans. All we animals spread across the Earth, adding, in an inconceivable enormity of small but decisive events, to the tree of life that had set its first roots four thousand million years before.
Somewhere along that line, on a normal November day, I won the biggest game of dice. I swam fast on that day, just like my mother and father had before, and as the collective of their parents had, and as their parents’ parents, and as their parents, continuing down the line of crucial events all the way down to when the first human opened its eyes, and through every line in the history of each of all the species that came before us; through every minuscule genetic mutation; through everything that led to the creation of Earth itself: The expansion of the universe, the formation of galaxies, the creation and violent death of a billion billion stars, the chance creation of the Milky Way galaxy and, in that, our Solar System, and, finally, within that, the Earth. A very long process had simultaneously ended and begun anew. I was coming to life.
It is the most humbling and, at the same time, the most inspiring thing I can think of. Of all the humans who could ever have been, you are. You are here. You are alive. You had the greatest streak of luck. Instead of a thousand trillion other forms of life that could have been, you are. You are floating through a vast and magnificent universe on a small, blue marble with comparatively few, equally fortunate others.
You enjoy an instant of consciousness. Don’t waste it away.
Update: Just as I was writing this my wife went into labor. What are the odds?
My son, too, goes on to enter his initials on the high score table for the longest and greatest game of all — Life.
Here’s another chapter from Carl Sagan’s book, Pale Blue Dot
Thanks to Callum Sutherland for putting these videos together.
Here’s Carl Sagan reading the chapter ‘Wanderers’ from his book, Pale Blue Dot
This artistic montage of our solar system — 30,000 pixels wide, 18MB in size — might be the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time:
It’s not scientifically correct, to be sure, but awe-inspiring nonetheless. To think this is but one solar system in a universe where there are more stars than grains of sand on all of the beaches on Earth!
From NASA APOD:
This beautiful cosmic cloud is a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius. Eighteenth century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged the bright nebula as M8. Modern day astronomers recognize the Lagoon Nebula as an active stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years distant, in the direction of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Remarkable features can be traced through this sharp picture, showing off the Lagoon’s filaments of glowing gas and dark dust clouds. Twisting near the center of the Lagoon, the bright hourglass shape is the turbulent result of extreme stellar winds and intense starlight. The alluring view is a color composite of both broad and narrow band images captured while M8 was high in dark, Chilean skies. It records the Lagoon with a bluer hue than typically represented in images dominated by the red light of the region’s hydrogen emission. At the nebula’s estimated distance, the picture spans about 30 light-years.
Credit: Steve Mazlin, Jack Harvey, Rick Gilbert, and Daniel Verschatse (Star Shadows Remote Observatory, PROMPT, CTIO)