Penumbral Lore; the Shadows of Science

Tonight will be a good night for planet gazing.   Saturn will be easy to find, and is putting on a show.

I bought my ‘backyard telescope’ a few years ago, and can count the number of times I’ve tried it out on one hand.   Maybe tonight I’ll give it a serious go (if the weather co operates).  Seriously, if I head to the western part of the county I should be able to avoid light pollution.

Since I’m thinking of the skies anyway, there’s been some really cool computer modeling of the Alpha Centauri system.   If current theories of planet formation are right, our nearest neighbor has really good odds of having a terrestrial planet in the ‘habitible zone’ of Alpha Centauri.  If I read it right, the model also predicts that the planetary system will be detectable from Earth.   This sounds like a job for Hubble to me.

I’ve been thinking of moving this blog to wordpress (to keep all my blogs on the same user account).   I’ll play around and see how hard it is to import old entries, or whether I should just continue from there.

Now that I’ve gone over the very basics of Quantum Theory, it’s time to talk about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is currently being built on the outskirts of Geneva, and it spans the Swiss/French border. The last of the ‘warm’ magnets have just been installed. It will be powered up in May of this year, and the first high energy collisions will happen this summer.

Future posts will talk more about what experiments will become possible, given the new technology. The ones which excite me the most at the moment are those which might move String Theory into the realm of experimental physics.

For this post, however, I’m going to bring up some of the objections to the LHC. The most notable are at the Large Hadron Collider Defense Site. The perceived risks of the LHC as expressed there are:

• Miniature Black Holes: the concern is that any miniature black holes created at the LHC would be moving slowly enough to be trapped by earth’s gravitational pull. In theory, Hawking radiation would bleed them away faster than they could ‘grow’, even in an atmosphere, but how solid is that rate?*
• Strangelets: Theoretically, there may be forms of matter which are more stable than normal matter, which might be created in the LHC. If such matter is created, and interacts with normal matter, will it trigger a ‘phase shift’ in normal matter.

Cerns response to these potential threats (check .pdf downloads for in depth discussions) seems, to my layman’s eyes, to be reasoned and thoughtful.  It also deals with metastable vacuum decay (which is related to string theory), and points out that the conditions created in the LHC are not more extreme than those in the observable universe, so if they could trigger vacuum decay we’d all be dead already.   There are two documents, one for US, one for Europe, and they’re worth reading.

It’s going to take me a little while to get back into the rhythm of writing in this blog, so forgive me if I start out a bit slowly. I was going to begin with a story about prehistoric fashion, but a search for primary sources showed that the archaeologist only published in Russian.

I found an interesting story about TB in Homo erectus, but it’s either too recent to have hit the web or is available with a subscription only. Just be aware that the inference that the infected Homo erectus had dark skin is questionable.

Then there’s the whole hobbit issue. Ever since they were discovered there has been debate back and forth about whether the Homo floresiensis were a race of humans or a separate species has been lobbed back and forth. A recent article in Science, “Mutations in the Pericentrin (PCNT) Gene Cause Primordial Dwarfism“, with over two dozen authors, suggests that the hobbits were humans suffering from a particular form of dwarfism. Here is some criticism by blogger Greg Laden, be sure to check out the comments.

In other news - some of you may have noticed that some of my web badges have gone. I’ve moved them to my new craft blog Eye of the Beholder. In the I’ll be adding ‘yarn work’ posts over there, so if that’s your interest update your blog rolls…

Oops. I really have been away too long. I just got this communication from the good doctor:

I’m not sure I’m ready to hand the blog over to Dr. Woo just yet. I think I’d better post more often (and, believe me, there are lots of things around just begging me to post about). For my own take on the movie, see my shared blog The Hidden Message.