It's Late

A great technical photograph

This sequence of three photos were taken approximate one-millionths of a second apart,during in a nuclear test in Nevada in the 1950's.
In 1947 a firm called EG&G (Edgerton, Germeshausen and Greer) was founded by three MIT professors/affiliates to market their expertise and inventions (Harold Edgerton had in fact, invented the photograpic strobe light, although it's unsure is we ever went to discos.)
They did invent also the 'Rapatronic' camera, capable of taking the equivalent of one million frames per second,
and the means for synchronizing devices miles apart, down to the millionths of a second.
This sequence of three shots were taken by a ' telephoto' version of the Rapatronix, with a 160-inch (4064mm)
 focal length Cassegrain lens, looking directly into the shot tower at the device at 'zero time'.
The rectangular object seem is the actual weapon casing.
The 'light' seen around the weapon casing is called "Teller light' after the physicist Dr. Edward Teller.
When a nuclear device explodes, the first products of the reaction are X-rays, which penetrate the bomb casing without destroying it. When outside the bomb casing, the X-rays encounter normal temperature air,  which is opaqueto X-rays. So the X-rays are abssorbed by and excite the air molecules to a higher energy state for a very brief  period, after which they 'fall back' into a lower energy state and emit that excess energy largely as photons of light.

This is what is actually being photographed here: the bomb casing itself has not been destroyed since the 'physical' parts of the explosion/reaction travel far slower than light speed, but the X-rays race ahead, and the excitation of the air molecules and re-emission of light photons is the 'Teller light' being photographed.

Dark Energy Camera set to grt hauled off to chile

LHC at CERN Sets new record.

For all you 'Heavy Lifters' out there...

SpaceX - a private company - has just announced their Big Guy:
"Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket, represents SpaceX’s entry into the heavy lift launch vehicle category. With the ability to carry satellites or interplanetary spacecraft weighing over 53 metric tons (117,000 lb) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Falcon Heavy can lift nearly twice the payload of the next closest vehicle, the US Space Shuttle, and more than twice the payload of the Delta IV Heavy."

Let's go.
Let us not as a species, give up the dream of the Stars...
step by step.

January and Frebruary -- Months of Remembrance

On 27 January 1967, a fire in the cabin of Apollo1 during testing, claimed the lives of all three astonauts aboard.

Gus Grissom, Ed White II and Roger Chaffee were lost.

May they rest in peace, and their lives serve as inspiration to those who still dream of High Flight.

On 28 January 1986, the Space Shuttle  Challenger was destroyed 73 seconds after lift-off on STS-51-L.

Greg Jarvis, Christa McAuliffe, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnick, Michael J. Smith, and Dick Scobee were lost.

May they rest in peace, and their lives serve as inspiration to those who still dream of High Flight.

On 1 February 2003, The Space Shuttle Columbia was lost as it reentered at the end of a two-week mission, STS-107.


Rick. D. Husband, William McCool, Michael P. Anderson, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chowla, Laura B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon were lost.

May they rest in peace, and their lives serve as inspiration to those who still dream of High Flight.

The Microminiature Scultptor

Willard Wigan MBE, born in 1957 in Birmingham, England, is an artist and scultptor whose works can fit on the head of a pin, or in the eye of a needle.
He cannot read or write, as he has suffered lifelong from severe dyslexia. Partly to escape the bullying of schoolmates and his treatment by teachers and others, he began at an early age 'making houses' for ants: because he "thought they needed them', and since the works were so small, he thought no one could criticise them.
He works under a microscope, with tools he has made himself, some of which he can use to split human hairs multiple times. Taking up to eight weeks for each piece, he describes the process as 'torture' since at such tiny scales, the blood pulsing in a finger can destroy weeks of work. To get himself into a physical state where he can work, he uses relaxation techniques similar to Buddhist meditation or personal bio-feedback, and even then can complete only one scultptor's stoke -- or one miniscule bit of paint -- at a time, and always between breaths or heartbeats.
To paint his creations, there is no animal hair or fiber thin or small enough: even the finest sable hair is thicker than some of his creations; so, to paint them, he uses a single hair, plucked from the back of a housefly. However, he is opposed to killing any creatures, so he only uses the hairs from flies he finds already dead.
Much of the material he uses in his scultures he collects from dust particles, hairs, etc. which he finds floating in the air, illuminated by the sunlight shining into his studio.
His works have ordinarily sold for anywhere from 5,000 to 30,000 Pounds Sterling; but recently his collection of unsold works has been purchased for 11 million Pounds by a museum in London, to ensure that these works may be seen by the public, and not disappear entirely to private collectors.
Anecdote: he says he once lost a sculture of Lewis Carrolls' "Alice", when she disappeared while being transferred from one work surface to another, on the tip of his finger. "I think I inhaled her", was Wigan's comment...
Not believeable?: here are microphotos of some of his work:

The 'Butterfly Wings' and the Weather...

Please, enough with this "a butterfly flapping it's wings in [insert place here] can cause [some usually-weather-related issue] [there].
Never said, never meant, isn't true.
The whole phrase comes from a  paper provided by the mathematician Edward Lorenz in 1972 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?
Scientists and mathematicians are not above the normal human tendencies toward incisive humor, and not above the desire to present a paper whose very title would cause it to rise above of 'background noise' of other presentations. :)
In fact, the title of Lorenz' paper received far more press than the mathematical paper itself (and indeed, so still do variations of the title phrasing, although Lorenz and others meant no such thing as the popularized statement). Lorenz was intensely interested in the prediction of weather patterns by using mathematical modelling, and was one of the first to use early computers to help in the exceedingly long and tedious calculations involved. What suprised him was that in order to save time on one of his simulations, he wanted to start his calculations at a 'stoppage point' that he previously had come to, rather than starting over at the beginning. Since his computer system could only deal with three decimal places of accuracy (like a real value of 1.256445 would be rounded off to 1.256)  when he restarted his program, the end results were FAR different with the 'restart' than those given by the entire run. What he had numerically shown was one aspect of 'chaotic' systems: extreme sensitivity to initial conditions (this is only ONE of the required characteristics, btw). This is what led to the 'butterfly wing' metaphor -- in some completely deterministic systems, the sensitivity to initial conditions is so great that noise, margins of errors, instrument accuracy etc. all lead to solutions whose values greatly diverge over time. This is the reason why no matter how many more instruments and measurements or accuracy we have or could have, the prediction of the weather and its patterns is unlikely to get any more accurate for more than about a week out...
So, everyone please drop the 'butterfly wing' metaphor unless you want to spend a lot of time studying non-linear differential equations, Poincare maps, Euclidean and non-Euclidian mathematical geometry and all that stuff that'll make your head REALLY hurt.
(it does mine :(   )


PS: Wikipedia has good articles on fractals, chaos theory and related subjects, with a great bibliography.

And yet one more short Yeats bit.

From 'Supernatural Songs'
"There"


There all the barrel-hoops are knit,

There all the serpent-tails are bit,
There all the gyres converge in one,
There all the planets drop in the Sun.

More W.B. Yeats - the greatest poet to every write in English, requested by my friend Linda

The Circus Animals' Desertion


I
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

From "The Wind Among the Reeds; - 1899
--------------------------------------------------------
The Song of Wandeing Aengus
I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

"The Theory of Almost Everyhing

A highly recomended book by Robert Oerter, paperback ISBN 0-452-28786
From the Introduction:
"There is a thory in in physics that explains, at the deepest level, nearly all the phenomena which rule our daily lives. It summarizes everything we know about the fundamental structure of matter and energy. It  provides a detailed building block from which everything is made.It describes the reactions that powwer the sun and the interactions that cause fluorescent lights to glow.I explains the behavior of light, radio waves, and X rays.It has implications for our understanding of the very first moment's of our universe's existence,and for how matter itself came into being. It surpasses in precision, in universality, in the range of applicability from the very small to the astonomically large, every scientific theory that ever existed. This theory bears the unassuming name of "The Standard Model of Elementary Particles", or just the 'Stanbdard Model"...it is pehaps the pinnacle of human achievement to date. Some of the Theory' architects are perhaps more visible than the theory itself: the clownish iconoclast Richard Feymann, and the egotisitical polymath Murry Gell-Mann.
and other names, though are practically unkown outside specialist circles: Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, Geoege Zweig, Abdus Salam, Sten Weinberg, Yuval Ne'eman, Shalon Glashow, Martin Veltman, Gerard t'Hooft. There is no solitary rejected genius, no genius - no Einstein working alone in the Patent Office, no theory springing full blown in existence overnight. Instead the Stanard Model was cobbled together by many brilliant minds over the course of nearly the whole of the twentieth century."
--from the Introduction

What is made much of, and what is so important, woven into the very fabric and frame work our of universe on so many levels:  symmetry.
Yet the theory requires symmetty-breaking in very early universe, and gives us understanding of how all this 'IS' now...

The one thing -- the force that we feel every day even though it's about 10^38 (ten the the 38th power) weaker than the other forces -- gravity -- is not explained in the current version of the Standard Model. Various candidates exist to attempt to explain this and attempt to integrate their ideas and outright speculations into a more all-encompassing 'GUT' - Grand Unified Theory. This seem beyond humankind's reach at the present, although there are multiple competing 'string' theories and a promising theory of 'loop quantum gravity' -- we may not know the outcomes of these things in our lifetime.

Suggested:
"The Theory of Almost Everything", by Robert Oerter
"Not Even Wrong - he Failure of String Theory and the Search of Unity in Phyical Law:, by Peter Woit.
"The Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in the Twentieth Century Physics" bu Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann
terrific -- bk.