astro picture for the day

ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope

youtube for the day/ Science and Islam

I've noticed this over the last couple of weeks; i just watched all three episodes over the last two days; i hope to watch it a few more times before commenting.  It is part trying to make Islam interesting to the modern world after the whole terrorist stuff; but, the majority is pretty good in terms of showing the scientific history of the Arabic cultures during the Medieval period; while Christian europe was in a dark ages(yes, they were; they had to rediscover Euclid's Elements, Apollonius Conics, the collective works of Archimedes, Diophantus, Ptolemies Almegest and so on and so forth; hence, they went through a dark ages).  It gets better as it goes.  At the end, he says some stuff I thought was interesting which I just want to go over through my mind somemore before trying to put my thoughts down on paper.

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Jim Al-Khalili argues that the Muslims decoded the Egyptian language long before the Rosetta stone.  Whether they did or not matters little in my opinion.  The effort to translate as much knowledge of all surrounding cultures interests me more.  The Greeks also went around taking in all the surrounding cultures knowledge - both mathematics and mythology. I've argued on this blog that this mixing of mathematics and mythology led to christianity.  Mathematics sticks to facts and logic, or what can be proved under certain axioms.  Mythology tends to evade the issue - sometimes by refusing to look through the telescope figuratively speaking!  Dictators tend to use mythology to say they get to rule by divine right. This series tends to avoid the fact that early Muslims destroyed the last remnants of the Library of Alexandria around 600 A.D.  Mythology tends to not want to progress when new facts and logic comes to the attention(even despite the episode 1 above having a Phd saying Islam does, or did). The facts of the downfall of Islam after like 1200 is not crystal clear.  Jim doesn't mention anything of what happened in Andalucia.  He does say something interesting though.  He says that when printing came, the Arab language had to many symbols; so, English, French, German and other languages which could fit the printing press progressed in science much more than the Arab world.  However this may be, Arabian science, mathematics stopped progressing far earlier than the 1400s.

There's more to be said about the analogies between the Greeks and the medieval Arabian culture. But, I want to point out another analogy between the Arabs of the Medieval period - a comparison t the Byzantines.  The Byzantine's, after their initial building projects in the 500s, stopped doing anything.  About all that was interesting was argueing over iconography and warfare. During this time, the Arabian culture was doing all the mathematical progress.

This is one picture of the inside of the Hagia Sophia.  No picture can take it all in!  Before you go in, there's doors that are like out of a Lord of the Rings movie; i really need to find a picture of these doors!

I found some pictures of the doors going into the main Hagia Sophia room.  The Byzantine's also had these great aqueducts leading to cisterns; underground water reservoirs held up by underground rooms of arches.

Once again, after these aqueducts, cisterns, and the Hagia Sopha was built like around 500 A.d, that was it; the empire did nothing architecturally or scientifically; Islam was the only real shining light of the Medieval period(Venice actually didn't do too bad; but, as Jim in the video shows episode 3, Venice and Islam had commerce and trade with one another during this time).

I would argue that the mystics and mythologists grow jealous of mathematics and start rationalizing why they are superior to the mathematics that cann't solve everything in one go. Because the mythological mysticism is easier to comprehend(you don't really have to even comprehend it most of the time; most churches just say, if you pay us, you can come in and believe anything you want), they get more people; more people, more money, more power.

I've seen many different accounts of the decline of Medieval Arabian culture; nobody seems to know what happened.  I'm not sure that Jim's explanation of the printing press making Islamic language obsolete adds up to why they stopped progressing.  I'd go back to the Greek comparison.  The Greeks had a great idea of deductive logic and geometric algebra.  Once they had done their thing, they were done.  Similarly, some Arabian intellectuals hit on symbolic algebra; once they had done that work about as far as they could, they were done.

I'd like to bring up that 99% of people born in a given culture end up believing and speaking that cultures language and thought.  Few people criticize and think; if your born in a christian culture, your a christian; if you're born in a Arab culture, you're a Muslim; if you're born in an Oriental culture, you're a Buddha, or Taoism, or Hindu.   Some cultures are better at experiment; some in theory. Ideas get tranlated back and forth; what one culture couldn't do, the other does eventually.

astro picture for the day

ESA/NASA Hubble Space Telescope image . . . of the bipolar outflow of a star just starting to be born; this is actually one of Hubble's first images; there's still no new Hubble pictures much better of this stellar beginning.  I saw it brought up again today; so, I decided to go ahead and post it!

youtube/thought for the day; nanoera coming fast; industrial era about to be obsolete and recycled!

I don't think I posted these; there's like seven more coming before the end of the year!  They're kindof fun(the eso youtubes above). ESO has done great stuff down there. One should recall some telescope history.  I'm sure I could use some review; but, I can recall some points.

Galileo turned the recent magnifying lens of a north europe person to make the first astronomical telescope.  He made a few ever more powerful telescopes as well; so, one should not imagine that he just took what was given to him and pointed up at the night sky. The Galilean discoveries hopefully don't need to be recalled here. 

Isaac Newton invented the reflector telescope as oppossed to the Galilean refractor.  These two types would compete back and forth till the twentieth century Mount Wilson and Palomar reflectors.  But, that's getting ahead of the story a little bit.

William Herschel in the 1700s made a do believe a reflector.  He actually deduced infrared radiation, or some kind of energy(he didn't know what it was).  I need to look that up.  I don't think his reflectors were aluminized or had any kind of top reflective material.

In the 1800s, the parallax of stars was measured by telescope for the first time.  Spectroscopy developed in the 1800s which allowed Helium to be discovered on the surface of the sun in 1868 before it was discovered on Earth first.

And of course, the reflector telescopes pretty much ended the refractor telescopes life in the 1900s.  Or did it!  Cloaking technology is one of the hottest fields of research today.  It could help to make perfect optics; well, maybe they'll only be used on microscopes.  When the Palomar telescope was built, they thought they'd reached the limit of size there.  But a bunch of design innovations has allowed astronomers to bury the Palomar telescope; even today, the Palomar telescope is an antique!  The ESO has been a major partipator in making the Palomar telescope obsolete.  There was others, like the twin kecks, but because of Hawaiian religion, the Twin Kecks were not able to reach their potention; to make the Hubble space telescope obsolete.

What could be remarkable in all this is that the ESO four telescope optical interferometer(radio astronomy innovated combining the light/radiowavelength of several dishs into one; i remember astronomers saying optical interferometry was impossible; but, through theoretical/mathematical breakthroughs, we live in optical interferometric astronomical telescopes era!) can become obsolete faster than ESO thinks!  A new company "Space Resources" who plan to mine the materials of asteroids plans on building a hugh space optical interferometer; we're talking about hundreds of space telescopes spread miles apart.  Talk about making the Palomar telescope obsolete!  The Russians as reported here already have made astronomy 'astronomical' with their spacebased radio interferometer with a diameter almost to the moon!  They're making progress.

Gravity wave astronomy should be mentioned in the light of space based astronomical observatories.  Astronomers have built and improved ground/earth gravity meters; but, even if they detect one, plans for a spacebased gravity meter will almost certainly dwarf anything possible here on Earth!

If the astronomical possibilities of the near future isn't enough, nanotechnology just keeps on progressing!  Today, i saw reported automated precise stm patterning of graphene(one atom thick pieces of graphite; hence, they are already nanotechnology and on the atomic scale).  I've also seen a week or so ago that graphene piezos have been successfully made; they were used to make kinetic energy devices; just wear these devices and your movement alone generates electricity.  So, piezo graphene works.  I'd expect Nano-Stm's based on these graphene piezos sooner than later.  With those and this ability to automate the manufacture of precisely cut(by stms) graphene, graphene nanotechnology should take off in a big way.

The above picture are just some( probably) pictures of graphene(single atom thick materials) cut to precise automatic specifications by an Stms.  Build a nano-Stms(the Stm that did this was not a nano-Stm), make chips of millions of Nano-Stm's cutting graphene nanoparts, are we can have nano-manufacturing happening sooner than later!

At the current pace of nanotechnology, Space Resources could have more competition than they may have thought!(not to mention spacex and everybody else).  In fact, all today's most advanced technologies can be made obsolete in a few years time of whenever nano-Stm's get made. Just this past week there was also reported scalable photon quantum computers(they make quantum computers out everything, ions, quantum dots, superconductivity; they all have their advantages and disadvantages; in fact, some were trying to combine them all together to keep the good and negate the bad with some progress).  Quantum computers could make nanomanufacturing look like animal powered mills.

Needless to say, there was also recent dna-nanotechnology reported; within the day of the article being reported, they took it down!  The article is still up in their personal websites; so, i don't think it was because a flaw was found; it was because somebody decided that pathway to effective nanomanufacturing looks promising!(I'll admit, i'm biased!)  But, I'm not lying about an interesting dna-nanomanufacturing article being posted yesterday or the day before and it being taken down!

astro picture for the day

Image Credit & Copyright: John Davis

thought for the day/ the generation problem(s)

For Humanity, there's a new generation(minus overlapping growths) every fifteen to twenty years(when a human being becomes fully capable mentally).  Problem?  Well, there wasn't much of a problem two or three generations ago; but, today, the information is so large, each new generation cuts off what it needs to learn. In some sense, they abstract, for good or bad, the amount of information they need to survive or get the job done.

One of those learned men that I feel has been abstracted out is Jacob Bronowski and even James Burke.

  Mathematics and mathematicians have a trick to deal with information overload; they sum them up in vast generalizations as theorems.  Mathematicians argue each generation whether learning mathematics through axiomatics or much thicker, more concrete tombs gets the point across; they end up writing both.

   Non-mathematicians tend to just learn the tricks of some previous generation; this was the way it was done in the my Navy experience; my generation guys didn't really know electronics; they just learned what often goes wrong and what often seems to be the answer; if something novel happened, they'd guess and guess and guess some more; then, first the chiefs would come in and then the officer pilots would come into the shop wondering if they have competent avionic technictians!  Of course, the fault goes to how they trained us to learn electronics for nine months in the first place - non-mathematically; always just rough descriptions; why?  Because none of them knew electronics, or could deduce all the principles of electronics(like series, parallel, and series parallel lrc circuits) from Maxwell's equations(it can be done; i'm talking about how Newton deduced Kepler's laws from his inverse square law; or Quantum mechanics can derive the atoms of the periodic table).

Isaac Asimov through his robots, empire, and foundation stories had the best sense of these historical matters.  James Burke certainly tries to convey some of it.

James Burke shows how the Astrolabe was used to create precise measuring instruments and then machine tools; he later on shows how the astrolabe turned over created a device for military guys to measure the angle of elevation for their cannons.  The point is that the astrolabe could not be created by anyone of them; if civilzation had fallen, and the astrolabe never got learned from generation to generation, they would have had to relearn the night sky; it takes years if not lifetimes - consider trying to learn the night sky when bears and leopards are trying to eat you; also waring with other tribes; then, there's environmental catastrophes . . . ; similarly, the geometry that allowed the astrolabe to come about was dependent on learning astronomy.  And the geometry?  The mathematics of the astrolobe was that of projection of the hemisphere of the night sky onto a plane(the astrolabe). 

Look, at any one point, to learn any one of those things, astronomy, or geometry took the right social conditions to raise someone with the mental/emotional fortitude to think out of the box.  Some people can't stand running because they don't like wearing shorts.  Likewise, some people don't like thinking because of some social reason; they get fear mongered by people wondering why you're running around with a book or something. Learning is similar to running; when you run, your body learns to run; without preparation, the run is unsuccessfull; similarly for thinking; without the proper preparation, the astronomy isn't learned, the geometry isn't learned, the astrolabe isn't learned, the precise instrumentation for the machine tools cannot be learned.  But then, after the machine tools are made, they can teach the next generation to use and make those machine tools without learning the astrolabe, astronomy; the next generation doesn't have to grow up with those experiences; what happens if the problems posed by the use of those machine tools and the steam engine doesnt' get solved?   The next generation doesn't know where to begin!  They don't have the general perspective.  Today, we're a lot more steps beyond those formative stages that allows our push button society to get their money, food, and knowledge.

Further, nano-manufacturing is about to turn the agricultural class structure society on its head.  In a nano-manufacturing era, every man can live on his own for free.  He doesn't need money to get food.  He just needs the skills to know how to ask the right questions, to get his nanomanufacturing system to made the food for him, the medical knowledge to solve his medical problems. They can bootstrap to get themselves out of whatever situation they find themselves in. But, without understanding the true nature of mathematics, they are lost! 

Don't think nanomanufacturing is going to happen?

Here, we have molecules brought together to make functional molecule assemblies.  It was done using stms(scanning tunneling microscopes) and in this case rna tips.  Nanomanufacturing engineers should be able to make fast progress now!

astro picture for the day

ESA/NASA Hubble Space telescope image

of an irregular galaxy