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What's your mindset like? A flash in the pan, or rich enough to sustain through eons?

Interview with Tom Mueller, SpaceX

http://magazine.lmu.edu/archive/2011/rocket-man

This is an interview by Doug McInnis with Tom Mueller, one of the brains behind SpaceX, next to Elon Musk.

"I loved reading about the stars, black holes, anything that had to do with space."

MY LIFE.

So pumped!

From NASA: "NASA conducted a key stability test firing of the J-2X rocket engine Dec. 1, marking another step forward in development of the upper-stage engine that will carry humans farther into space than ever before (NASA/SSC)"

This gets me so pumped!!

Ron Garan's Request...

...is my goal.

Man's Greatest Feat of Engineering | Part 1

It's quite incredible how tightly relationships can remain no matter how vast distances become. For this post, I'm going to take a short break from A Brief History of Time and move into a little bit of engineering. The science channel has a series entitled Through the Wormhole that is hosted by Morgan Freeman. I think this show is absolutely wonderful in that it merges science with celebrity to bring knowledge to the public. The information given on the show is clear and concise and definitely inspires me to continue pursuing engineering.

I've been watching the episodes online, and the most recent episode I watched was called "What Are We Made Of?" This episode dives into the world beyond atoms, protons, neutrons, and electrons.

One of the most amazing machines built by man today is the Large Hadron Collider located in Geneva, Switzerland. It is probably the crowning achievement of engineering in this century and definitely a huge inspiration for me. I also love the fears that it conjures: SCIENTISTS SEEK TO DESTROY THE WORLD BY RECREATING THE BIG BANG | ANTIMATTER WILL ANNIHILATE EARTH | DAN BROWN NOT FAR FROM THE TRUTH

I love it.

So let's first describe this machine and what it does. Again, this is pretty basic info that many people already know. But, many don't exactly spend time reading Science journal everyday or combing through science blogs, so it's still worth discussing.

The big question is: what are we made of? What is everything around us made of? Long ago, this answer was simple: Earth, Fire, Air, and Water. Although some still believe this, ideas have drastically changed since then. Even not too too long ago, we were all taught that everything is made of atoms. Even in middle school we were taught this. But within the last few decades, scientists have looked INSIDE the atom and found that things weren't as simple as they seemed. "Despite all of our knowledge, we still don't understand the true nature of matter."

So how do we look for the components of matter? Everything that we observe is built up and packed together, something like a car, for example. Sure, we can use microscopes, but the truth is that microscopes simply don't pack enough energy for us to peer way down into the heart of matter. Just like a put-together car, it's difficult to see the nuts and bolts inside with so many bigger components surrounding it. But what happens when we slam two cars together? Let them race toward each other at high speeds, driver-less of course, and let them crash into each other. Well, the parts and components of those cars come flying out as debris, and what was once inaccessible and hidden inside are now revealed, flying in every direction.

This is exactly what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) does. We know that atoms are made of a nucleus containing protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons. But what are these components made of? Further, how is it possible that they even stick together? What's keeping these parts together and why isn't every piece of us flying apart into space?

The LHC is a 27km circumference tunnel buried underground run by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. We have one here in the United States at Fermilab, but it's only a mere 6.5km long. What's the difference? Well, this answer is common sense. What happens when you accelerate your car having only, say, 50 meters to work with? You ain't getting much acceleration, are you? Thus, the speed at impact won't break the car apart as much as we would like. Pieces will probably stay together and we won't get to see everything inside. However, give a car maybe 250 meters and it'll be going significantly faster. The faster the cars are going, the more debris comes out at impact and the more individual parts we can see. It's pretty simple.

http://deadwildroses.wordpress.com/tag/lhc/

(Credit: CERN/LBL)

Brief History

Before Ernest Rutherford came along, it was thought that atoms were made of electrons in a sea of positive charge, a positive "soup" or "cloud", if you will. The negative charge of electrons was balanced by the positively charged "cloud". This model was called the "Plum Pudding Model", developed by J.J. Thompson in 1904. Rutherford, however, came along and decided to confirm this claim. He performed his experiment, known as the "Geiger-Marsden Experiment". In it, he fired alpha particles (positively charged helium nuclei obtained through the radioactive decay of radium) through a thin gold sheet of foil. If atoms were indeed like the "Plum Pudding Model", then these alpha particles would either go straight through the atom or deflected only slightly due to the presence of the positively charged cloud. What was found, to his surprise, was that some of the alpha particles actually bounced back a complete 180 degrees and some particles when straight through. Rutherford's conclusion was that there had to be something heavier and dense inside the atom that caused this to happen. Thus was the discovery of the central nucleus in an atom surrounded by a vast region of empty space. From this came the further probing into the atom, leading to the discovery of the proton, neutron, and electron. Now we know that atoms form molecules and molecules form even more complex shapes like DNA, leading to the makings of you and me.

(Wikipedia)

Later physicists built machines such as the Large Hadron Collider to smash the components of atoms together. One of the resulting particles found was what is known as "antimatter", the complete opposite to matter. As stated in the episode, if matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other, triggering an enormous explosion. Less than half a gram of antimatter will trigger an explosion as big as the Hiroshima bomb. In comes the public panic a result of rumor, misinformation, misunderstanding, and gullibility. This is not something new.

So how does one find antimatter?

When you accelerate protons to near the speed of light and accelerate them toward each other, they release and incredible amount of energy and the impact produces the antiproton and the antineutron. These crashes are happening "millions and millions and millions of times every second". If things were made of antimatter instead of ordinary matter, they wouldn't look any different, except they'd mirror exact mirror copies of everything that we know. If we were to collide with that mirror world, we would annihilate each other. But relax, it would take a lot to produce enough antimatter to end the world. You would need to run the colliders for over a thousand years, maybe even tens of thousands of years, to produce even a few grams of antimatter. So relax, the world is safe.

Infinite vs. Finite Universe | Solidifying the Basics

It's also time to note that this book (and my journey through it) is a book "about God...or perhaps the absence of God." A touchy subject as always, but at this point in my life, I am a man of science, but still very respectful to other views.

So continuing our journey through the wormhole, let's get to some (relatively) weirder things. Again, this is all still very basic and just for me to keep my ideas together.

Here's the thing: Newton knew all the math that dealt with gravity, but he didn't actually know how it worked. His numbers matched observations all around, but he had no idea why there was gravity in the first place. That's when Einstein steps in.

But before we get into that (which will be left for the next post), here are some questions he asked using the information he did know. What's the universe actually like? Is it finite or infinite? Had it existed forever or did it begin at a particular point in time?

If all bodies attract one another, that means all bodies should be in a constant state of motion. So, that would also mean that they should all fall together at some point. This scenario would occur if there were "a finite number of stars distributed over a finite region of space". However, if there were actually an infinite number of stars distributed over an infinite spacial region, then this would not occur since there would be no central point for stars to fall toward.

Whoa, hold up. So either everything falls to a single point or space is infinite?

In an infinite universe, every point would be the center of the universe since there would be an infinite amount of STUFF on all sides of that point. Instead, it was realized later that the correct way to approach this dilemma was to consider the finite scenario, in which all stars fall in on each other. What happens if we add more stars on a more or less even distribution outside of this region? Well, according to Newton's law, it would make no difference to the average gravitational attraction on all the other stars, so everything would fall in just as fast. Thus, it's quite impossible to have an infinite static model of the universe where gravity is always attractive.

No one in the past suggested that the universe was either expanding or contracting. It was assumed that it always existed in an unchanging state. Here's why this can't be:

Another reason why the universe cannot be infinite and static: think about it, if the universe were endless in all directions and was never-changing, then every line of sight into the sky would eventually land on a star. That's just the definition of "infinite". Direct a straight line from your eyes to the sky and eventually, being an infinite universe, that line would end up on a star. This means that there should be light coming from every single point in the sky and our sky should be lit up brighter than the sun. That's obviously not what we see. Therefore, the stars had not been burning for eternity. Rather, they were turned on at some definite point. In this case, some stars' light simply may not have reached us yet.

And we come to it at last: How did these stars turn on?

In 1929, Edwin Hubble peered into his telescope and discovered that distant galaxies were rapidly moving away from us. This means that the universe is expanding, which also means that at some point in the past, everything was much closer together. It can further be said that once upon a time, all points were the same point. At this stage, the universe will have been infinitely dense.

Hubble's observations suggested that there was a time when the universe was infinitely small and infinitely dense. Under these conditions, all laws of physics and science familiar to us break down, including concepts of time. The idea of cause and effect, it is claimed, is nonexistent. Anything that occurred before this state had no influence on events that followed. After this point, however, time was "created" from the event known as the Big Bang.

So the final, ultimate, rewarding, heavenly-angel-choir-resounding goal here is to find a Theory of Everything (TOE), a theory that works to explain all of the workings of the universe, from the scale of galaxies to the most elementary particles of matter. It turns out, though, that it's pretty tough to find that theory in one go. For some reason or another, the laws at the very very very large scale behave differently than the laws at the very very very small scale. These two behaviors are the main categories of theoretical physics: the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, respectively.

A (Very) Brief History

In the matter concerning cosmology and theoretical physics, there are three books I'd like to discuss. One is The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, another is A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, and the third is The Hidden Reality also by Brian Greene. I've finished The Elegant Universe, but plan on going through it again, due to some things that I didn't quite understand. The best book to begin with would be A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, I think. It lays the foundations for everything that ensues, including those beyond our wildest imaginations.

In the first chapter, Hawking begins with the earliest beliefs of the Universe, from ancient superstitions that say the Earth sits upon the back of a giant tortoise to various religious beliefs. Whatever belief holds for a particular age, one truth always remains: we as human beings constantly yearn to know our place in the Universe and to know how, when, and why things began. "Did the Universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time?" These questions have startling answers for those who haven't yet been exposed to the true nature of space and time. Many of us live our lives without any thought to exactly how our environment behaves and what it is made of. Many live and die without even glancing up at the cosmos and wondering how everything came to be.

Scientific revolutions allow us to leap forward towards the truth about nature. Once upon a time, man believed Earth to be flat (some still do...). But through simple observation, scientists of history were able to deduce simple truths that made all the difference. For example, Aristotle deduced that the Earth is round instead of flat by looking at the moon during a lunar eclipse. He saw that the shadow cast upon the moon during an eclipse was always round. If the Earth were a flat disk, the shadow would actually appear as an elongated ellipse with its shaped determined by the position of the sun behind the Earth. The only way a flat-disked Earth would consistently cast a round shadow on the moon is if the sun was positioned exactly behind the center of the Earth every time an eclipse occurred. Second, Greeks noticed that the North Star appeared in different locations in the sky depending on where they were on the planet. For example, viewed from the North Pole, the North Star would be located directly above the observer. But to someone observing from the Equator, the star would be closer to the horizon. Thus, the Earth could not be flat.

Aristotle, however, did believe that the Earth was the center of the Universe and that all observable planets moved in perfect circles around us. This model was shared by Ptolemy and this view, of course, has religious roots, as man did indeed believe that humans are divine creations. And because it held with the writings of Scripture, the church adopted the model, placing Earth at the center of the Universe. However, there were some questions that the model could not answer and that were left unanswered, such as why the moon sometimes appeared twice as big in the night sky. "Eh...let's not worry about that...moving on!"

Then came the Copernican Revolution. Nicolas Copernicus proposed (rather anonymously and for good reason) that instead the planets orbited the sun. It wasn't until later, when Kepler and Galileo came along, that he was taken seriously in 1609. Kepler went further to state that planets don't necessarily move in circles, but in ellipses. But the question of how this is even possible eluded him. Although Kepler wondered if planets were held through magnetic forces, he could not reconcile his observations of the planets' movements with this theory.

Then in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in which he "postulated a law of universal gravitation according to which each body in the universe was attracted toward every other body by a force that was stronger the more massive the bodies and the closer they were to each other." This showed that "gravity causes the moon to move in an elliptical orbit around the earth and causes the earth and the planets to follow elliptical paths around the sun." Newton also devised a brand new complex branch of mathematics in order to analyze the motions of planets: calculus.

This will be the end of this post because after this, things get a little messy. Well, more like enlightening. But that was a very brief history of how man viewed the Universe. We now know that everything revolves around the Earth in perfect celestial circles and that Harold Camping will lead believers to salvation.

Wait...