Total Perspective - You Are Here

"In an infinite universe, the one thing sentient life cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion."
-Douglas Adams

In Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe, the Total Perspective Vortex is allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected. The Vortex gives a momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here." The machine was originally invented by one Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife. Because she was forever nagging him for having no sense of proportion, he decided to invent something that would show her what having a sense of proportion really meant. Unfortunately the shock of being placed in the Vortex destroyed her brain, but Trin Tragula's grief was tempered by the knowledge that he had been right and she had been wrong.

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Now I don't want to destroy your brain but consider this photo. EVERY dot is a entire galaxy.

All things great and small

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small,

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

- Cecil Frances Alexander

Recently the Astronomy Picture of the Day website featured a classic science film from the 1960's that is now available on YouTube. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110201.html  The film is called Powers of 10 and zooms out at a steady pace to show the universe and then zooms in again down to the subatomic level. It's a wonderful thing to watch for a sense of scale.

When watching note the following.

1. It takes many powers of 10 beyond the solar system until the stars in the background begin to move. The empty space between stars is immense.

2. Once the stars do move, we quickly reach the level of galaxy and just another power of ten or so for nearby galaxies. The universe is dense with galaxies.

3. Since the 1960's science has expanded its view of the universe by quite a bit. Today the film could go on for a few more powers of 10 and show the amazing weblike filaments that galaxies form when viewed from far away.

4. On the small scale note the empty space from 10^-9 to 10^-13, from the electron shell to the inner nucleus. The nucleus is like our solar system, busy locally, then a LOT of nothing until we reach the next atom/solar system, at which point things appear crowded again.

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The film notes at the end that it traveled 40 orders of magnitude from quarks to the known universe. How curious that we fall in the middle with approximately 20 powers of 10 below us and above us.

What is Truth?

Pilate said to him, "What is truth?"
- John 18:38

Here is a clever quote that ties in with yesterday's topic of paradoxes vs knowing all things..

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened"

- Douglas Adam, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Over 2000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Euclid proposed five laws (Axioms) that could be used to prove "all" of geometry.

1. Any two points define a unique straight line
2. A straight line can be extended infinitely far
3. A center and a radius define a unique circle
4. All right angles are equal to one anothe.

These first four laws are simple and "obviously" true. The fifth law is not so simple:

5. The parallel postulate: If a straight line crosses two other straight lines and makes the same interior angles on the two lines, then the two lines are parallel, meaning they will never cross if infinitely extended.

These five Axioms worked very well as the basis for all of anceint Geometry. But the fifth law bothered mideval mathematicians. It is so wordy and complex compared to the others. Could it be simplified? Not really. Is it necessary? Yes, if you want to prove anything interesting. Could it be proved from the first four laws. No.

One method of proof is called "Proof by Contradiction". Geometrists said, suppose law 5 is false and the two lines do meet. Does this result in something impossible or inconsistent? To their surprise, it was consistent and created a stranger and more bizzare universe of mathematics. Today we call this non-Euclidean Geometry. The easiest example is a sphere or globe. The equator crosses all longitude lines at right angles so longitudes are "parallel" but contrary to Axiom 5 they meet at the north and south poles.

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It turns out that the fifth law is only true on perfectly flat surfaces and is independent of the first four laws which are "universally" true. So if asked if the parallel postulate is "true" the answer is, "it depends". This is an instance of a statement which can be true or false - both modes describes a different reality, both cases equally "real".

The Universe is HUGE

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here." - The Total Perspective Vortex from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy



Click for larger image

The image above might look like the night sky but it's much, much bigger. The 250 billion stars of our Milky Way Galaxy fall along the blue fuzzy bar in this computer plot. The white dots in this image are not stars, they are galaxies. Each of the 1.6 million white dots represents a known galaxy, each with hundreds of billions of stars. The total number of stars visible to us exceed 70 sextillion (7 x 10²² ).

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For me it is hard to see a picture like this and assume that we are alone. That all this exists and we are the only life amongst 70 sextillion stars?

Truth is stranger than fiction

“Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one's own being” - Carl Jung

Here are two pictures from one of my favorite websites, Astronomy Picture of the Day. What is it about orbiting particles that they flatten out and form a disk? Consider the solar system - the planets, asteroids, and most comets all lie in the same flat plane aligned with the equator of the sun. Why not spin about the sun at all angles? Two other examples are easier to visualize. The rings of Saturn are very thin as show in this photo. Note also the cool shadow of the rings on the planet.

Here's a photo of a distant galaxy that we see exactly on edge instead of the typical view from above with spirals. Observe how thin the galaxy is with a thin ribbon of bright stars.

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In college I studied mathematics up to a Doctoral Candidate level. (I did not complete a thesis, though I tried twice over two years. Both times another university disproved what I was asked to prove by my advisor.)  And yet the hardest "math" classes I attended were physics classes. One class used tensor (i.e. 3-D) calculus to study the curvature of space about black holes. Reality can get very weird when gravity and spinning are combined.

Last night I saw a film clip of the famous physicist, Richard Feynman, who was asked "why" magnets push on each other. He said he could not explain it unless you already had a solid grounding of physics. Not because he was a poor teacher but because the magnetic force is so fundamentally an aspect of the universe that there was nothing to compare it to as an example. One could compare it to the push/pull of the electrical force but physicists now know that magnets and electricity are the same force so this is merely comparing magnets to itself. He could over-simplify and say the force was like rubber bands. But then if you were to ask him why rubber bands snap back he'd have to admit that, at the lowest level, it was the electrical force behind the pull so we're back to explaining in circles.

This reminds me of the conundrum, how do you explain the taste of salt? What can you compare it to? 

Often we paint Science and Religion as opposites but as Feynman observed, science is built upon basic principles, statements of reality that must be accepted in order to work at higher levels of reality. One could think of these principles as a type of "faith". For example, do we really know that quarks exist? By theory they can never be observed in isolation only through their interaction. How different is this from Faith when defined as belief in something unseen (but felt)? Believers will say they have felt the interaction of God.

I was going to appease scientists by saying that Science differs from Religion in that the fundamental principles change over time as we learn more about reality through experiments and observations. We no longer believe that everything is made of earth, fire, air and water. We've moved from a particle theory of atoms to wave-particle duality. There is some evidence that the physical constants of the universe may not be constant after all but change over time or space. Scientists see themselves as willing to change theories when presented with the "facts".

But what is truth? Science, like Religion, can be influenced by majority opinions - is global warming real? If real is it man made? Scientists argue over this just like theologians with conflicting evidence and with as much venom and anger and emotions. Is string theory real? Is the universe 11 dimensions? What exactly is gravity? We don't really know how the universe works at its lowest levels but one can pick a theory and choose to believe it. Much like picking a Church to follow with its own unique rules and explanations for reality.

Blazing Star

Ev'ry man, has a flaming star
A flaming star, over his shoulder
And when a man, sees his flaming star
He knows his time, his time has come- Elvis, lyrics to Flaming Star

Here's an image that amazes me. A neutron star moving so fast it creates a shockwave in the interstellar gas. Not something I want to see over my shoulder or anywhere near our solar system.

From Billion-Year Old "Black Widow" Pulsar Ripping Through Milky Way at 1 Million KPH,

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I'm reminded that reality can be stranger than fiction. The universe has some very weird celestial object never imagined by the creators of Star Trek or Star Wars. Here's another oddity from DailyGalaxy.com

This faint pinwheel spiral is a rare binary star system called LL Pegasi. The spiral is a "pre-planetary nebula" which is being stirred up by partner star.

A Sunday Extra. The first picture of Earth taken from another planet,
i.e. from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit in 2004.

Look, up in the sky, it's???

"When it is darkest, men see the stars."-Ralph Waldo Emerson

On December 9, the spiral show at right was seen floating in the sky of northern Norway for 15 minutes. Was this an alien invasion? The time vortex of Dr. Who? The return of the Christmas Star?

No, Russia admitted this was a failed missile test of a submarine-launched Bulava ballistic missile.

"It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in colour to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end," eye witness Nick Banbury of Harstad said, according to Spaceweather.com. "This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to Earth."

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Truth is often stranger than fiction. Once as a young teen I got lost returning from a campground bathroom at night and wished that I had a light. Suddenly a meteor streaked across the sky and exploded - making the night as bright as day for a second or two. Just long enough for me to spot the path I needed to get back to the family tent. I've never experienced anything like that again.

Update

On the topic of odd but true, Cassini Sends First Full Images of Saturn's Mysterious Giant Hexagon

The Universe is Big!

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.”-Douglas Adams

In the book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe by Douglas Adams, the ultimate punishment is the Total Perspective Vortex. A person is shown a view of the entire universe and themself in relation to it. Only one person survives the experience.

If you'd like to experience this on a lesser scale, see the recent deep field Hubble Telescope picture at Astronomy Picture of the Day and understand the scale...

1. Galaxies are big with 100 billion stars on average. (see photo above) At the speed of light our closest star is 4 light years away. Our Milky Way is 100,000 light-years from edge to edge. The light we are now seeing from the center of our galaxy (50,000 LY) was emitted when homo sapiens left Africa to spread across the world.

2. The deep space image at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap091209.html shows hundreds, if not thousands, of galaxies. The oldest pictured are over 12 billion years old. Three times older than our Solar System.

3. Now for the kicker. The new picture by Hubble covers an amount of sky equal to a grain of sand held at arm's length. Imagine the photo repeated for every dot in the sky!

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It's not easy for the mind to grasp big numbers and large scales. I've read that there are an estimated 100 billion galaxies. So if the photo and grain of sand give you an idea of the vast number of galaxies, remember that I said above that our Milky Way has 100 billion stars. The same number as the number of galaxies. And many of those stars have planets. So what are the odds that in all the vastness of our galaxy, we are unique in having life?

Some scientists call this the Fermi Paradox - why haven't we found other life yet? Statistically it should exist in abundance.