GREENYGREY’S RAMBLES

There was a blog about the meditating and yogaing Yogi on BNT, and I added this comment:

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I saw that story and also came across a couple of related quotes/thoughts this week.

Firstly, on his new Discovery series looking at the universe, Stephen Hawking said that alien life forms might be beyond our comprehension and understanding, such as learning to live on things unknown on this planet, like the yogi might be doing.

Then I had a webzine newsletter with the following JFK quote:

‘The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.’

We know a lot more than our ancestors, but our descendents will know much more…

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So although Paper is the Planet’s Gold may seem a strange slogan at first, these are strange days…

An 83 year old India holy man called Prahlad Jani who claims not to have consumed food or drink for seventy years has passed a fortnight of being closely scrutinised inside a hospital by thirty medics with close circuit television observing his every move.

Advancing Medical and Theological Knowledge?

Test conducted on Prahlad Jani will hopefully benefit medicine. 

If Prahlad Jani continues to defy current logic, and no explanation can be found to explain his survival without food and drink energy, should his claim that he was given special powers by a goddess be believed?

And what repercussions would that have for monotheistic religious belief?

I just updated some of my Brave New Traveler articles with comments containing relevant recent news stories:

Ant Theory of Humanity

Just came across Indra’s Net, which is a buddhist idea similar to the one in this article, and of course precedes it by quite some time!:

http://www.heartspace.org/misc/IndraNet.html

First alerted to it in an article on metaphor by Bridget Holding in Writing Magazine, April 2010.

 God and Natural Disasters

An Iranian cleric has recently blamed promiscuous women for earthquakes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8631775.stm

 Space Exploration Compared with History

NASA is celebrating the twenieth anniversary of Hubble this week:

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/Hubble20/

There was some good news for hopes of finding extraterrestrial life in the universe when scientists announced rocky planets like Earth may be volumnous in our galaxy.  But hopes of finding life outside the galaxy took a knock when it was found that some exoplanets reverse orbit their stars, overturning theories that planets always orbited their suns in the same direction as the star moved.  Meanwhile, back on HQ, Planet Earth, President Obama was announcing an ambitious new space program for NASA to head further into space and onto Mars.

Have a univesally great weekend!!

After I rambled on about the solar system last week, this week’s Wonders of the Solar System had loads of relevance to this blog and the Folding Mirror poetry site.  For a start it had the Greenygrey proving that it can look beautiful when its angry, as Prof. Brian Cox searched for a tornado in the Mid-West of the USA.

Chaos, Tornado, Saturn and the Solar System

Then the title of the second part of the series was Order out of Chaos, and remember how this blog was fascinated by the Secret Life of Chaos doc last month, and I wrote a poem describing how the science works on the fmpoetry site.

I wrote a poem about a tornado, and the only planet I’ve featured is Saturn, and those were the two things Prof. Cox used to show how the solar system evolved into the circular order we know.

Apparently Saturn and its moons are like a mini version of the solar system, and the tornado’s physics on Earth work along the same lines, with chaotic clouds being pulled and formed into spherical structures over time.

So, maybe my poetry has gone that way too: from the chaotic early poems to the structured Folding Mirrors of late.  

Sorry for rambling…

So, here we are at the third dimension, at the very edge of current scientific theory, and possibly leaving our universe.  It has been quite some journey, and I’m glad to have had you on board probably the greatest space science saga since time began.

Horizon: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong?

Horizon: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong? started with a bang, the big bang, which is thought to have happened about 14 billion years ago.

But new discoveries and theories are questioning this, and what we really know about the universe.

Dark Flow: A Word Without Understanding

The major new discovery that the programme introduced at the start and explained at the end is that something seems to be dragging clusters of galaxies containing trillions of stars to one point on the edge of the universe.

As the programme synopsis explains: 

‘There’s something very odd going on in space - something that shouldn’t be possible. It is as though vast swathes of the universe are being hoovered up by a vast and unseen celestial vacuum cleaner.

Sasha Kaslinsky, the scientist who discovered the phenomenon, is understandably nervous: ‘It left us quite unsettled and jittery’ he says, ‘because this is not something we planned to find’. The accidental discovery of what is ominously being called ‘dark flow’ not only has implications for the destinies of large numbers of galaxies - it also means that large numbers of scientists might have to find a new way of understanding the universe.

Dark flow is the latest in a long line of phenomena that have threatened to re-write the textbooks. Does it herald a new era of understanding, or does it simply mean that everything we know about the universe is wrong?’

Other Useful Information in the Horizon Documentary

The journey from introduction to Dark Flow was interesting, informational and entertaining enough, so it was worth doing, and not taking a short cut through a wormhole.

It went through the standard model of the universe, which is based on mathematical theories, but works pretty well for the most part, although one astrophysicist, Saul Perlmutter, considers that we still only know 75% of what’s in the universe (Socrates comes to mind again…!).

Scientific theory used to think space between galaxies was just nothingness, but it now seems very likely to be dark matter, and there may be dark energy that is speeding up the universe, rather than it slowing down as previously thought.

There is a Wikipedia page about dark flow, and also ones about the other theories described above and in the programme if you want to do further reading.

Cheers, and have a spacetastic weekend!

For the second hour of my space journey this week I hopped on board the space shuttle BBC television programme Sky at Night, where they were debating the chances of finding extraterrestrial life.  Although we are making great technological advances, things don’t look good at the moment.

 Patrick Moore Introduces the Sky at Night and Discusses Life

Patrick Moore introduced the programme by stating that we don’t know if there is extraterrestrial life, or how life began on Earth; life on Earth could have been brought here by a meteor from space.

Dr. Lewis Dartnell UCL astro-biologist joined Patrick, and explained that: life survives in harsh conditions on Earth, so might elsewhere.  Life on Earth developed very quickly, couple of hundred million years, so might happen on other planets too.  But intelligent life takes a long time to develop, so we’re not likely to find anything as intelligent as humans.

Dartnell also confirmed that we have a massive gap in understanding.  Science is now good at understanding probotics like the building blocks of DNA, but not on how we get amino acids and DNA that can hold the genetic code and replicate itself.

Search for Extraterrestrial Life in the Universe

We found the first planet outside our solar system in 1995, and have now found 400.  But they are large gas giants, like Jupiter, so not likely to have life.

Talks to Kepler, who is leading the latest telescope mission hunting for planets around other stars.  It’s like a giant camcorder in space looking for habitable planets.  Looks at planets passing their sun, and judges how big they are by how much they dim the sun.

A habitable or goldilocks zone is where the temperatures are good for life because they are the right distance from a planet’s sun, as we on Earth are from our sun.

Dr. Jill Tartar of the Seti Institute later said she didn’t know if there’s life out there, and the main way we’d find anything out there is if they are using technology: that they are broadcasting messages as we are from Earth.

Dr. Alan Chapman then dismissed the search for life as like looking for fairies in the garden, and said he had to be blunt, and considered Seti’s work as a waste of time.

Life in Harsh Conditions on Earth Offers Hope for Life on Mars or Europa

Microbiologist, Prof. Charles Cockell also described how we only live in a small thin strip of the planet’s surface, with 90% of life depending on photosynthesis from sunlight, which had relevance for my Surface trilogy of poems.  However, some life such as microbes live by eating rocks two or three miles under the surface on Earth, and do not rely on photosynthesis, so that gives hope for life on rocky planets like Mars, and icy moons like Europa, which don’t look like they have life on the surface but might have underneath.

Conclusion

Dr. Chris Lintott joined Patrick Moore to give a hopeful conclusion, saying that they are probably only five or ten years away from finding a star with planets in the Goldilocks zone, and that will start a rush of investigation.

Wheew!  Last part of my Space Trilogy tomorrow.  This space travel is more tiring than it looks!

Tomorrow: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong?

Hi, was thinking about giving out my whole three hour space journey in one go, but will be too timely at moment, so just got the first hour/part today.  The Greenygrey hasn’t behaved itself today, so hopes of training it have diminished.  It arrived again in the afternoon, so I missed all the morning sunshine, and am going out into the grey.  Well, I suppose I have been neglecting it!

 Television Space Journey: Part 1

For the first hour of the three hour BBC space journey I was in Wonders of the Solar System.  Prof. Brian Cox introduced the programme by saying he thought we are in the greatest age of discovery ever, and that the laws of physics are the same in space as on Earth.

He travelled to Varanasi, an ancient spiritual city in India and watched a solar eclipse from the banks of the Ganges river.

He said he knew what time the eclipse would be, and named some others in the future, as he said science is different to other systems of belief: you don’t need faith, you can check it.

Our Planet the Only One with Perfect Eclipses

While eclipses are visible on other planets ours is the only one with a full one, as the sun is 400 times the diameter of our moon and 400 times farther away, so it gives perfect eclipses. 

The sun is one of 200 billion stars in our galaxy.

During the Earth’s eclipse you could see the sun’s atmosphere: the Corona.  It is a million degrees celsius: 200 times hotter than the surface.  They don’t understood why yet.

Sunset on Mars and the Aurora Borealis

The programme then showed pictures of the sun from different parts of space, including a sunset seen from Mars by a camera on the Mars Rover.

They then went to the north of Norway to see the aurora borealis, as the sun’s rays deflect off the Earth’s magnetic field at the poles.  They also showed images of the same phenomenon on Jupiter and Saturn.

Eventual Demise of the Sun and Solar System

Cox said the sun is over 90% of the mass in the solar system and its winds can be measured for billions of miles through space. 

The programme ended with Cox describing the eventual demise of the sun and solar system.  The sun will end as a red giant before burning down to its core.  But its life creating chemistry will escape into space and may create another world somewhere.

Tomorrow: the latest on the search for life in the universe.

As a relative newcomer to the Physics field, I didn’t think I would have a chance to make a contribution so soon.  But when I was out in the little freeze last week I saw some ice cracks on the canal that reminded me about the Secret Life of Chaos television documentary I liked so much a couple of months back, and wrote a poem about.

Ice Shapes Fit into Mandelbrot’s Patterns

On the documentary it was explained how Mandelbrot theorised that shapes replicated in ever smaller sizes in what he called self-similarity fractals.  Examples cited included rivers, tree branches, blood vessels and broccoli.

The same seems to be true with the ice cracks I saw, and one off the side of the bank even resembles a tree or stag’s antlers to me.  The four photos I took are on my picasa site.  Enjoy.

Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain Film

On a related in an abstract way topic, I watched a bit of a magical film on Film4 last night with an intriguing plot and beautiful cinematography. 

I’d never heard of Darren Aronofsky or The Fountain film before seeing it last night, but Aronofsky is also searching for life patterns and investigating the meaning of life and death. 

I was impressed with its complexity and imagery.  It reminded me of Crouching Tiger type Chinese films, and the apparent storyline for Terrence Malick’s planned next film: The Tree of Life.

There is a synopsis of the film on Rotten Tomatoes, and here’s a snippet:

Meanwhile, Izzi has been writing a book that she calls THE FOUNTAIN, but has left the final chapter for Tommy to write. As Aronofsky pushes and pulls his sepia-tinted film between the three time periods, he weaves a deeply thoughtful, special effects-laden story that touches on themes of mortality and self, and requires a great deal of work from the director’s audience. Movies such as Kubrick’s 2001 and Tarkovsky’s SOLARIS come to mind as Aronofsky gets deep into philosophical waters, and the various story strands of THE FOUNTAIN are as inconclusive and open to interpretation as the films that have clearly influenced it. The film makes for uneasy and sometimes confusing viewing, but will find its audience among intrepid souls who are fully prepared to let go and immerse themselves in Aronofsky’s peculiar, daring, and thoughtful cinematic universe.

As you may know by now, while this blog celebrates the great advances made by humanity over its history it also has a Socratian emphasis on questioning just how wise we really are in the great scheme of things.

Horizon: Don’t Grow Old…But You Will 

This week’s Horizon documentary on the BBC looked at scientific efforts to find an elixir to protect us against ageing.

It didn’t bring us news of anything yet available to definitely keep us young, but ran through the possibilities and theories quite entertainingly.

Evidence of a Documentary Providing Infotainment But Nothing Monumental

A lot of people watching will probably have hoped to receive some groundbreaking news about an elixir, but instead we got progress reports on the current science.

However, there were some interesting studies cited: such as the one where old people who’d been dependent on the welfare services were given more independence.  They improved most of their capabilities over a small amount of time.

That kind of empowerment is also the objective of Chipmunka, my book publishers.  I also believe that if people are treated with respect and patience they can perform much better than if they are continuously criticised and pressured.

That is partly why I have now included the Greenygrey on our website biography page.

Have a great weekend!!