dr_phil_physics | Entries tagged with cosmos

Funny that after last week's episode, in which they tried to "visualize" smells and odor transport, that I ran across another attempt to visualize odors on TV -- and it wasn't a commercial. (grin) Meanwhile the weekend's Spring Break Clip Show version of NPR's news game show Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, did a section on Axe Body Spray, describing a junior high where so many boys had drenched themselves with Axe, that it set off the fire alarms... Smells. Molecules. Amazing stuff. Onward...

-- Once there was a man who went searching for the age of the universe.

-- Along the way he discovered a terrible threat.

-- Summer, California, 1966. Clare Paterson, geophysicist. He's determined to stop it, no matter the cost -- anime of people and dogs with splotches.

opening credits

-- You can't tell Pat (same as Clare) Paterson's story without a going back to where stars are created.

-- Iron (Fe) for the core of the Earth. Oxygen for water and breathing. Carbon for diamonds and life.

-- A star is born, in hours.

-- Once an object grows massive enough to have gravity, they begin pulling each other into crossing orbits.

-- This is how our Earth's surface looked when new. Show bombardments all over.

-- Nothing survived.

-- So how can we know how old the Earth is?

-- Archbishop James Usher did a calculation. Searched the Bible for events we had a date for.

-- Kings II -- 562 BC, the death of Nebuchadnezzar -- and then added up all the ages of the prophets and all the begats.

-- The Earth began on October 22, 4004 BC. At 6pm. It was a Saturday.

-- Up until we read from another book -- the rocks.

-- Grand Canyon -- layers. Oldest sediments at bottom.

-- Animation "expands" layers of Grand Canyon, so we can look at them one at a time in isolation.

-- Once upon a time, Pre-Cambrian, 1 BY ago, must have been shallow water -- blue green algae.

-- Bright Angel Shale

-- These tracks made 260 MY ago.

-- Age of the Earth, how long to make each layer.

-- But we know today that sediments layer at uneven rates. Some slowly, some in a catastrophic flood.

-- Used Grand Canyon and other sedimentary layers -- came up with 3 MY to 15 BY range.

-- Even deepest layers aren't the oldest rocks.

-- In space, it's another story.

-- I know a place where the unused bricks and mortar of the Solar System remain -- between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars.

-- 50,000 yr ago, journey ended for a small asteroid knocked out of its orbit by a collision, to blast out this crater in Arizona.

-- Fragments of the iron asteroid are still around. How can we know its age?

-- Some atoms in the rock may be radioactive.

-- In particular, after a long time, Uranium (U) undergoes a decay into Thorium, then more quickly into Praseodymium and ten more steps in the decay chain until it reaches stable Lead (Pb).

-- Pb will remain for eternity.

-- 20th century, big effort to measure the decay rates.

-- Nucleus is impervious to the outside world. You can boil it in oil or vaporize it -- the nucleus doesn't care.

-- There is a way to measure the U in original rocks, long gone.

-- Meteorites -- they were made at same time as the Earth.

-- 1947, Paterson a graduate student.

-- What started out as pure scientific research turned out to be something more.

-- Paterson was a wizard of the mass spectrometer.

-- Zircon crystals, the size of the tip of a pin, nothing goes in or out after formed.

-- Measure ppm of U inside.

-- Another graduate student, George Tilden measured amount of U.

-- Always the same.

-- But Pat's results of Pb content wildly different.

-- Made no sense.

-- Could the Pb have been contaminated?

-- Tried to cleanse the lab.

-- Still 100x too much Pb.

-- He'd been at it for two years.

-- He'd have to take stricter measures. Needed a whole new lab.

-- Cal Tech, Tilden brought Paterson.

-- Neil in bunny suit in first ultraclean lab room.

-- NOW could tackle the Fe meteorite.

-- Argonne National Laboratory. Most accurate mass spectrometer just went on line.

-- Vaporize sample. Now I'm going to ionize you -- what's an electron between friends? Mass spec uses magnets to segregate the atoms by mass.

-- The Age of the Earth -- 4½ BY old.

-- Paterson wanted his mother to be the 1st person to know. His reward? A world of trouble.

(Phone call from relative -- trying to take notes using Closed Captioning, so missing some bits)

-- Ship of the imagination, passing through the rings of Saturn.

-- Romans. These columns are the only remains of this temple to Saturn built 2500 YA.

-- No wars or executions during Saturnalia, the annual festival.

-- Early Church pulls in Saturnalia in winter to attract more people.

-- Saturn is the slowest planet, so named after the God of Lead.

-- Pb poisoning among the Romans. I'll give you a hint, plumbing comes from plumbum, Latin for Lead.

-- Widespread use of Lead may have contributed to the fall and decline of the Roman empire.

-- Cheap, easy to work with.

-- 80,000 tons of Pb mined per year in ancient Rome.

-- Pb mimics Zinc (Zn) and Fe, which we need.

-- Also blocks neurotransmitters, affecting memory and learning.

-- Turn of the 20th century, Glidden ad campaign to say Pb is safe to use for paint for children.

-- Pb production soared in 1920.

-- Tetraethyl Pb -- a gasoline additive.

-- Fat soluble.

-- 60 M tons per year.

-- Ethyl Corporation workers, some went insane.

-- 1st time the authority of science was used to cloak a problem.

-- Guy hired to promote Pb.

-- Pb naturally occurring. Sure, workplace could be bad, but that be self-regulated by industry. *** Everything is fine.

-- Until Clare Paterson starting looking for the age of the universe.

-- Leading expert on measuring trace amounts of Pb.

-- American Petroleum Institute looked at seawater.

-- Deep water, minimal Pb, but shallow?

-- It takes centuries to mix to deep water.

-- Estimated the rate of contamination.

-- Where's all this Pb coming from? -- The Pb in gasoline.

-- Well that's where the $ comes from for your research.

-- Published anyway.

-- What next? Thinking of measuring Pb in polar ice.

-- You've done Pb. We think you should look at other trace things.

-- When you ship tetraethyl Pb, you treat it like a chemical weapon -- there's a reason for that.

-- The National Science Foundation and others stood by Paterson.

-- In even the most remote locations, ice before the Industrial Revolution is different.

-- Pb levels in snow much lower several hundred years ago -- wherever he went.

-- Evidence of mass poisoning on an unprecedented scale.

-- Published findings.

-- Sent to an influential senator, Edmund Muskie.

-- 1966 hearings

-- Dr. Robert Kehoe, 1937 found no danger from Pb.

-- No evidence.

-- But on the 5th day of the hearing, Clare Paterson came in from Antarctica -- hadn't been expected.

-- You use actual measurements taken from the field? -- Yes.

-- Same numbers, different conclusions. -- We expect to hear from scientists, not lawyers.

-- At these levels, Pb is a chronic insult.

-- We've seen evidence of this?

-- Not if your purpose was to sell more gasoline.

-- Fought for twenty years.

-- Graph levels of Pb in human blood and levels of Pb in gasoline. (unsure of time scale)

-- They drop together.

*** Another red flag episode, I'm sure, with the gibe at self-regulation by industry. Where have we heard THAT before?

Also a dig at the idea of "presenting both sides" -- science funded with an industrial agenda can be tainted -- Cigarettes aren't dangerous, says the American Tobacco Institute. Or science versus non-science.

This is also, indirectly, an episode talking about the importance of general or pure research. You never know what or where research is going to go. And sometimes you find things you didn't want to know about -- or worse, things that other people didn't want you to know about. When people try to put a cost analysis on science, it's not always so easy. Many of the most useful discoveries were by accident or byproducts of something completely different. Deciding that funding should only go to applied science, to things that will be commercially useful, is so very shortsighted. Likewise, denying funding because you don't like a particular kind of science -- global warming, evolution, etc. -- also stifles real research and has consequences down the road.

Dr. Phil

I saw something on Facebook that the Kansas Legislature was going to ban the showing of Cosmos, but it was from The Onion or other satire source -- it's just that in today's climate it seems so believable. Sigh.

-- This week there was an intro before the Opening Credits, but I missed it dealing with a phone call from a student.

-- Dandelion seed floating along.

-- Atoms.

-- Every molecule of water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom -- which is why it is called H2O.

-- Vibrational movement.

-- That's all that temperature is.

-- Every motion. Condensation.

-- A dewdrop is its own world.

-- Paramecium is a hunter-killer.

-- It's mortal enemy... that's life in the dewdrop.

-- Tardigrade -- the water bear -- smaller than the head of a pin. Been around for 500MY, for every one of us, there's at least a billion of them.

-- Can live anywhere.

-- So tough they can survive in the naked vacuum of space.

-- Survived all FIVE planetary extinctions.

-- The bottom of moss leaf -- stomata, where the plant breathes.

-- Plants make food out of sunlight.

-- The good stuff -- chlorophyll.

-- The cosmos contained in a single dewdrop.

-- Trying to find the trade secret of the chloroplast.

-- Atomic scale.

-- "Heart of the molecular industrial complex." (Shows a sort of steampunk, clockwork atom.)

-- Submicroscopic solar battery.

-- 6x more energy than all our civilization.

-- Nature more efficient than our technology.

-- Photosynthesis is the ultimate power source and in fact is carbon neutral.

-- Doesn't contribute to global warming.

-- Orchid is among the first flowering species.

-- Charles Darwin fascinated by orchids.

-- For one species in Madagascar, pollen at the bottom of a long tube.

-- Predicted that there MUST be an insect with a long tongue.

-- 50 years later, a type of Hawk moth found with a foot long tongue.

-- The fragrance of lilacs.

-- Scents trigger associations of memory.

-- Odors are molecules -- gasoline, burnt toast or a field of lilacs.

-- Receptors sense molecules, trigger electrical signals to brain.

-- Why trigger powerful memories?

-- Sense of smell kicks in when olfactory nerve is triggered.

-- Close to amygdala, part of the primitive brain, and the hippocampus which forms memories.

-- Showing a "purple fog" from boy running with lilacs.

Still ahead... we travel to one of the cosmos' most stupendous events...

(I am SO tired of little spoiler snippets. Do they really think that 90% of their audience for COSMOS will turn away from the channel during a couple of commercials? Just save it and say it when we get there.)

-- Molecules visualized as we breath in and out.

-- The plants are softly breathing in CO2 and O2 out.

-- I'm doing the opposite.

-- Every breath contains as many molecules as stars in the visible universe.

-- There was a moment when we awoke to a new way of thinking.

-- 2500YA, East and West met.

-- Anime: Here were the first reenactments shown -- plays -- a way of seeing historical events.

-- First government by the people.

-- And the thought that citizens had rights.

-- And the idea that natural events were neither punishments nor rewards by the gods.

-- Thales, none of his writings survive, but his ideas did.

-- 100Y later, Democritus, a true scientist.

-- And a fun guy: proposed that a life without parties is like travel without an inn at the end.

-- Idea of atoms and infinite diversity of rearrangements.

-- A clay cup.

-- Mineral structures are fixed by lattices of just a few types of atoms.

-- Even topaz, with ten or so atoms, can only repeat the same pattern of atoms over and over.

-- Behold the Carbon atom, the essential building blocks of life.

-- Carbon is special. Can bind with up to four atoms, or itself, or curl into rings.

-- Even similar atoms, like Silicon, not as diverse.

-- Carbon is the backbone of molecules of everything alive on Earth.

-- And love...

-- Boy gives girl lilacs.

-- He touches her cheek.

-- Dad looks on.

-- Take it easy, Dad, he never really touched her.

-- As atoms approach, the boy's electron cloud pushes back on the girl's electron cloud.

-- 99.9% of mass is in the nucleus.

-- The nuclei never touch.

-- We only have a sensation of touching.

-- The nucleus is very small compared to the atom.

-- If atom = this cathedral, this mote of dust is the nucleus.

-- 100,000x smaller.

-- Hydrogen has just one proton, so it's element number 1.

-- Helium has two protons, but protons repel each other, so need neutrons to hold them together by the strong nuclear force. It's element number 2.

-- With six protons, element 6 is Carbon.

-- 79 protons = Gold.

-- It's the interactions between electrons and light that makes gold glitter.

-- Limit to how many neutrons you can put into a nucleus.

-- But I know a place where the nuclei actually touch.

-- The Sun, everything is in a gaseous state.

-- Why so hot? It's stupendous gravity squeezes...

-- ... and at the center, nuclei touch and fuse.

-- Balance has created stability that has lasted billions of years and allowed life on Earth to flourish.

-- Helium is the ash of the furnace.

-- At only 10M degrees, can't fuse Helium.

-- Larger stars can.

-- Even bigger ones live fast and die bright in supernova explosions.

-- Around one per century in our galaxy.

-- Magellanic Cloud is a nearby galaxy.

-- A supernova rivals brightness of whole galaxy.

-- Yet light is only 1% of the energy.

-- 99% is carried off by...

-- One of strangest places on Earth.

(Tyson is in a rubber dingy in a HUGE tank of water, the round walls studded with shiny hemispheres.)

Commercial for a new Windows 8 ASUS convertible tablet has run FIVE times so far in this show -- tired of it.

-- Stalking the wild neutrino is hard.

-- Japanese neutrino detector is 1/2 mile below surface.

-- 50,000 tons of distilled water.

-- Matter poses no barrier to neutrinos.

-- Could travel through 100LY of steel without slowing down.

-- Even the minuscule electron has a mass 1Mx bigger.

-- Supernova in Magellanic Cloud.

-- But it's in the Southern Hemisphere, so neutrinos aren't traveling through 1/2 mile of rock, but through the Earth.

-- The neutrinos arrived on Earth three hours BEFORE the light did.

-- But if speed of light is the fastest speed in the universe, how is this possible?

-- The ship of the imagination approaches a star.

-- This is a dead star walking.

-- Inside this blue supergiant has already exploded.

-- Neutrinos come out at the speed of light.

-- But the shockwave of the explosion can only travel at 1/10,000th of the speed of light.

-- Supernova SN1987A.

-- Took hours to expose the core.

-- Pauli thought up the neutrino.

-- Trying to hold conservation of energy and momentum.

-- Cannonball demo in a lecture hall -- Tyson holds a red cannonball on a rope to his nose, let's it go. It swings down and away, goes up, stops, swings back.

-- Tyson does not flinch.

-- The laws of science are not like the laws of man.

-- But do NOT give the cannonball a push.

-- Startled to find a supposed break in the conservation laws.

-- Electron ejected from atom, but the energy of the two pieces is not enough.

-- Wolfgang Pauli came up with idea of a tiny, impossible to detect particle that carried the missing energy and momentum.

-- A decade later, his neutrino was detected.

(Going to fifth page of notes -- all the other COSMOS Watches used just four.)

-- The Wall of Forever.

-- Our ancestors ran into it as soon as they came up with the idea.

-- 1300BC, Ramses II temple.

-- Falcon headed Ra, God of the Sun, in between four statues representing Ramses II.

-- In the chamber behind, the sun rays can enter only two days a year.

-- Ta, lord of creation, end of the line of gods illuminated by the sun on those days, still in shadow, as if creation should be forever hidden.

-- It takes 10MY for light to fight from the core to the surface.

-- 8'20" to get from the surface of the Sun to Earth when freed.

-- The Cosmos Calendar of 13.8BY -- 1BY/month, 40MY/day.

-- 10MY ago was just 6pm on New Year's Eve.

-- Our ancestors were still tree hugging apes.

-- 4500MY ago, Sun started fusing hydrogen into helium -- this was October 31st.

-- But something keeps me from going further back than 13.8BY.

-- The farther we see, the older the light.

-- This picture is of 380,000 year light -- 15 minutes into January 1st.

-- The glow from the Big Bang.

-- 1/trillionth of 1/trillionth of 1/trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was only 2-3" across. (Tyson holding a small glowing blue ball.)

-- Inconceivable crush of matter, neutrinos free to leave.

-- The neutrinos of creation are everywhere.

-- Leading on a road back to Thales and Democritus.

You know, I always start off my courses by explaining that "We are here to change the way you think." And I really mean that. Neil Degrasse Tyson refers to this in regards to when we awoke to the scientific method.

We have a bowling ball at WMU to use for the Conservation of Energy demonstration. It looks terribly scary.

And my usual size description of the atom is to take the Ring Road around the university as the electron orbit. A cherry pit by the Haym Kruglak sundial somewhere near the center of campus is the nucleus, a grain of sand on the Ring Road is the electron. The rest of the atom is empty space -- though the number one answer you tend to get is that the atom is filled with air. (grin)

As for the neutrino, my standard line is that a neutrino traveling through 750LY of solid lead would have a 50:50 chance of interacting with the lead.

Thanks to the Japanese for letting Tyson film in their neutrino tank. (grin)

Dr. Phil

Sunday 6 April 2014 21:00 EDT Channel 17.1 (FOX HD)

I can just hear the clucking head types complain about THIS episode. Making the Arab scientists of a thousand years ago into good guys. What were you thinking? Don't you know there's a war on? Sigh.

And the criticizing in some circles of COSMOS and Neil Degrasse Tyson continues. Who is this astronomer (astrophysicist, actually) who dares to talk outside of his field? He can't talk about X, Y or Z! As if those complaining actually LISTENED to scientists in X, Y and Z -- they just don't want anyone talking about evolution. Or what we're made of, etc.

-- Going straight into Opening Credits. Are they no longer doing a teaser introduction? Or is our station just not carrying it? Or was that just the first episode? Don't know.

-- The age and size of the cosmos are written in light.

-- The beauty of the cosmos and the laws of Physics were always there, until we could unlock the secrets, we didn't see them.

-- Someone long ago looked up to see light perform one of its magic tricks.

-- Anime of light coming through a crack in a cave and flickering an image on a cave wall while an early artist makes a cave painting.

-- Where did this all come from? (shows city) How did we evolve to form civilization?

-- Not one answer. Domestication of fire, etc.

-- Anime: camera obscura in China. Mo Tze, master of light, earliest signs of scientific method.

-- Against Fate, 3 point test.

-- Emperor Chin, for whom China is named, he of the 7000 terra cotta warriors, standardized weights and measures AND philosophy. Legalism.

-- World's 1st book burning. The works of the 100 scholars, including Confucius and Mo Tze. Cannot use history to question authority.

-- Some hid as many books as they could.

-- The Ancient Chinese and Greek knew light could do amazing things.

-- But no one asked Why? The very question of children and geniuses.

-- Basra, Iraq, a thousand years ago.

-- Light rays came out from eyes and reflected back...

-- ... except Al Hassin (?) realized stars too far.

-- Caliphs bought books, collected great institutes of Science.

-- Arabic numbers via India.

-- And zero.

-- "Comes in handy when you are writing 'billions and billions'."

-- Still use the star names in Arabic and the "al" in algebra, etc.

-- Light travels in straight lines, determined by experiment.

-- Need a small opening, an aperture.

-- New camera obscura. Needs a bright light.

-- A telescope uses glass lenses to use a larger opening.

-- Galileo's first telescope of 1609.

-- It has larger lenses than our eyes to collect more light.

-- Ibn Al Hassin's rules. Finding truth is hard. Don't trust in ancient writing. Submit only to argument and experiement. And avoid careless thinking.

-- Science has taken our robot emissaries to end of the solar system and beyond.

-- Doubled our lifespan.

-- We communicate at the speed of light.

-- Light has properties unlike anything else.

-- A photon, particle of light, is born at the speed of light. Nothing else accelerates so fast.

-- Matter can be accelerated up to near, but not AT, the speed of light.

-- I cannot reconcile its properties with everything else.

-- Don't even know why there's a cosmic speed limit.

-- Time stops at the speed of light.

-- Newton born in this house.

-- 1st to figure out the mystery of the rainbow. Split the light with a prism.

I should also point out that Newton ingeniously showed that such split light can be recombined to white light with another prism!

-- Named it the spectrum, Latin for phantom or spectre.

-- But Newton missed looking at the spectrum under magnification to see the secret code of the universe.

-- 100 years later, Herschel.

-- Everyone knows sunlight carries heat.

-- Used thermometers placed under parts of the spectrum to determine whether different colors of light carried more or less heat.

-- The thermometer he place outside the spectrum was the CONTROL.

-- Red light warmer than blue light...

-- ... but the control was warmer yet!

-- Discovered a new unseen type of light.

-- Infrared -- "below red".

-- At same time, young boy Joseph Fraunhoffer, standing over a hot toxic melt of glass.

-- Abused and overworked by owner.

-- Then the owner's house collapsed.

-- The future King Maximilian of Bavaria came to help. Including the boy.

-- But the owner went back to his old ways, until the Prince's aide came by and found the boy wasn't getting the offered education.

-- Plucked out of the glass works and into the Optical Institute, in an old monastery, then the top optical house in the world. In its day, this was top secret high technology.

-- What if we could see sound waves?

-- Organ pipes. Different lengths give different sound waves. (Visualized sound waves in air as if slowed down and we can see them.)

-- Short waves, higher pitch.

-- Distance between wave peaks is the wavelength.

-- Go from simple tunes to Carmen Barada, whose mss. was discovered in same abbey.

-- Light waves even smaller.

-- Fraunhoffer, the top optical man in the world, studying prisms of different materials.

-- In glass, waves change speed, violet more so than red.

-- Fraunhoffer and his theodolite witnessed the marriage of Physics and Astronomy = Astrophysics, my brand of light.

-- Saw dark lines scattered through the spectrum.

-- It takes a hundred years to decipher.

-- Fields of flowers, etc. Beautiful... why?

-- The colors of nature that dazzle us...

(Interrupted by something that had to be dealt with.)

-- To understand we have to go 10B times smaller.

-- Hydrogen is the simplest and most common type of atom.

-- Has one 1 electron and 1 proton.

-- We have entered the quantum realm -- common sense is of no help here.

-- It's as if quantum elevators move the electron and disappear between 2nd and 4th floor.

-- Only certain floors allowed.

-- Every larger orbit takes more energy.

-- To jump up, absorb light of one color.

-- To drop down, emit light of one color, though we don't know why.

-- Dark lines are the shadows of the atoms absorbing the light.

-- Sodium atoms have more electrons and protons, and are more complicated, with more transitions.

-- Iron atoms with 26 electrons and 26 protons. It's light is a musical with big production numbers.

-- Look at light from a star and I can tell you what it's made of.

-- When only 39, Fraunhoffer contracted a fatal illness, possibly from the toxic chemical exposure.

-- His rescue from being an orphan worker may have come too late.

-- They tried to preserve his secret knowledge on his deathbed. Director of the mint was the only person that could be trusted with this information.

-- Perfect optical glass formula kept secret by Bavaria for 100 years.

-- But his scientific work was widely published.

-- Everything is made of the same stuff. The planet, the stars, the galaxies, all of nature and ourselves -- same star stuff.

-- He made it possible to know what's in the atmosphere of a distant planet or star.

-- Spectroscopy.

-- Discovery of The Thing It Cannot See.

-- Universe of dark matter 6X greater than regular matter.

-- Many more kinds of light than we can see.

-- Like listening to music in only 1 octave.

-- In microwave light we can see all the way to the beginning of the universe.

-- (Symphony)

OVERALL: I'm missing a few notes, but it's a nice discussion of how we know what we know. Goes nicely with the previous two episodes. We are building up quite a universe here. (grin)

Dr. Phil

Sunday 30 March 2014 21:00 EDT Channel 17.1 (FOX HD)

Alas, I don't have an entry yet for Episode 4 -- we were running late last Sunday and had only sat down to dinner at 9pm, so it's hard to eat and make notes at the same time. Was going to catch the NatGeo rerun on Monday, but I was racing to finish my WOTF story.

Ah time.

The episode was about how damn big the universe is. The story of Herschel, who realized that looking into deep space was looking back in time. Hundreds and thousands of years. It would be a while before we understood it was millions and billions of years. Also, light and gravity and black holes.

I'll catch up with Episode 4 sometime and update this entry -- meanwhile, here's a placeholder.

Dr. Phil

Sunday 23 March 2014 21:00 EDT Channel 17.1 (FOX HD)

I knew this was coming. Certain people are now claiming their "right" for COSMOS to air their ideas as equal time. I am SO tired of people not understanding the First Ammendment, both in terms of freedom of speech and freedom FROM a government mandated religion. COSMOS is about science and the history of science. You want to talk of your ideas and beliefs, especially things which are not actual scientific theory, get your own show.

-- Opening credits. Did I miss the opening tease? But they're showing the TV ratings logo... might have missed part of the first minute.

-- Closeup of baby's face -- stars and Milky Way wheeling across the sky.

-- We were like an abandoned baby, with no idea how to end our cosmic isolation -- had to figure it out ourselves.

-- Our intellect -- our abilities at Pattern Recognition.

-- Different cultures devised different constellations, in order to be able to read the calendar of the sky.

-- Position of the stars versus the seasons. When to plant, when to harvest, etc.

-- Anime shows a newcomer. People took the apparition of a comet personally.

-- Every culture made the same mistake. That comets were a message -- a bad message. An omen, portents of doom.

-- The word disaster comes from the Greek for "bad star".

- 1400BC the Chinese began to systematically record comets. Determined that the number of tails meant different things.

-- We are very good at finding patterns, even when they aren't there. (I tell my students this all the time.)

-- We even have a term for it -- false pattern recognition.

-- Too easily deceived by the face in a grilled cheese sandwich or a comet.

-- 1LY from our sun lies a swarm of ice, rock, debris from the formation of the solar system, etc. The Oort Cloud.

-- Jan Oort in 1950s looking at so many ways for comets to die. If it is worn away by the sun, get an asteroid.

-- But there are still more comets.

-- Theorized a vast cloud of things out there to give comets.

-- Can't see it. (Same argument as in Ep. 1 -- distance between pieces like the distance between Earth and Sun.)

-- Oort also correctly estimated distance from Sun to galactic center. Also 1st to use radio telescopes to map the spiral arms of our galaxy.

-- That we know the names of mass murderers and not Jan Oort says something about us.

-- An icy rock begins a free fall of 100KY towards Sun.

-- Path bent by Neptune, Jupiter.

-- At the inner solar system, heat from the Sun bakes it. A beautiful transformation begins. The dark sooty rock forms a coma and a tail.

-- In 40,000 years of human civilization, probably 100K bright comets.

-- Anime: the friendship of Isaac Newton and Edmund would set us free.

-- The Comet of 1664 was particularly frightening, portending in England alone the Plague and the Great Fire of London.

-- To one child the comet was not the least bit worrying. It was beautiful. And he had a telescope.

-- Halley dropped out of Oxford at 20.

-- Traveled to the Southern Hemisphere and made the first map of the southern sky.

-- Halley came home with the other half of the sky and opened up the world to navigation.

-- The Latin motto of The Royal Society translates to "See For Yourself."

-- Robert Hooke's fascination with everything -- improved telescope, looked at cork with a microscope and called it a cell, law of elasticity (Hooke's Law for the spring force), perfected the air pump, experimented with cannabis, foremost experimentalist.

-- Coffee was the drug of choice in 17th century England. The Coffee House was the center of discussion and thought. Surprisingly democratic and classless.

-- Halley and Hooke met Christopher Wren. Elliptical orbits had been shown by Kepler. But why did the planet's speed up when closer to the Sun? What made them? What force?

-- Hooke said he had a solution, but could not do the math.

-- There was a math expert they knew of, a clever guy at 22 at Cambridge, who had invented the reflecting telescope.

-- August 1684 meeting.

-- Newton b. Christmas Day 1642. Father already left. Mother left @ 3, returned at 11 with a stepfather and a new family.

-- 1661 Trinity College at Cambridge. Lousy student.

-- Passionate about mysticism, secret knowledge, alchemy. Hidden messages in the Bible. Made elaborate calculations to determine date of the Second Coming.

-- Had gone into hiding for 13 years after public feud and humiliation from Hooke.

-- When Halley came, he had already calculated that the inverse square law, 1/r², of gravity was responsible for the elliptical orbits of the planets. He would reproduce this work and sent a letter.

-- Just when Halley wondered if Newton faking that he had a solution like Hooke, the letter arrived.

-- The beginning of modern science.

-- Problem. The Royal Society couldn't afford to publish Newton's book, the Principia Mathematica, because of disappointing sales of The History of Fish. They were even paying Halley in unsold copies of the book.

-- Without Halley's heroic efforts, Newton's genius would have remained hidden.

-- Halley resolved to edit and publish the Principia himself.

-- Volume III would settle the coffee house wager.

-- So what's the big deal?

-- When Newton was born in 1642, the heavens were viewed as the perfection of the universe -- a perfect clockwork universe. God, the clockmaker, closes the door to other questions.

-- Newton was a God-loving man who could write the laws mathematically. No more master clockmaker, just gravity.

-- Also included the basis for calculus, allowing space travel.

-- Newton envisioned a cannon, firing cannonballs horizontally with ever increasing charges. Gravity pulls the cannonballs down. But the faster the speed, the further they travel. Now the curvature of the Earth comes into play. Eventually, Newton showed if you could go fast enough you would fall around the Earth -- you would be in orbit.

-- This changed everything.

-- Saturn V launch. Animations of space and planetary missions.

-- Decoupled cometary motions from our fears.

-- If Halley hadn't been standing next to Newton, he would have been remembered for other things. Besides the comet.

-- After Principia published, King has Halley take 3 voyages. 1st to map Earth's magnetic field. Perfected diving bell and had a flourishing salvage business.

-- Inevented the weather map. Still use his symbols for prevailing winds.

-- Groundwork for science of population studied. Compared populations of London and Paris. Based on numbers of people who didn't have children, families needed to have four children in order to keep the population steady in those days.

-- Figured out how to measure the Earth-Sun distance by timing the Transit of Venus -- the time it takes Venus to cross the surface of the Sun. Cook's first voyage to Tahiti was to test the Transit of Venus.

-- Using observations dating back 1800 years, Halley showed that the stars are not quite fixed.

-- 1st clue to larger beauty of all stars in motion.

-- The Comet

-- June 1337, 1st proper observations of all comets. Determined by tour de force calculation that comets are in orbit around the Sun.

-- In 1687 showed that the comets of 1531 and 1637 were the same 76 year period comet. Triumph of pattern recognition.

-- Predicted, including date and path for next appearance in December 1763.

-- That's Halley's Comet, out past Neptune. Slows down until the Sun won't allow it to go farther. Everything falling around the Sun.

-- Robert Hooke had died of bad health decisions.

-- Newton replaced him at the Royal Society. Probably burned Hooke's portrait.

-- Halley worked to age 85.

-- His prediction not forgotten.

-- 1986 most recent return, 2061 next visit by the comet.

-- The baby in the basket is beginning to walk. And to know the cosmos.

-- In several BY, the Milky Way will collide and combine with the galaxy Andromeda. No actual stars are likely to collide.

-- But the will be a BY light show of the dance of ½T stars.

OVERALL: A nice episode, trying to cover a lot of people and advances. And the feuds. I'm sure some will find some of the commentary heavy handed.

Dr. Phil

Sunday 16 March 2014 21:00 EDT Channel 17.1 (FOX HD)

Most comments I heard about Episode 1 came to me in pairs: (1) Really good and Neil Degrasse Tyson has the right enthusiasm to follow Carl Sagan and (2) parts of it were a little much -- but then they were aimed at a different younger audience than the commenter, so good job. Lots of love for Carl Sagan's COSMOS, that those old enough were highly influenced towards science, but all admit it has gotten long in the tooth.

For those skeptical about FOX hosting COSMOS, along with National Geographic, consider the following: a report that "an editing error" resulted in an Oklahoma FOX affiliate excising the 15 seconds which mentioned evolution. Make of it what you will... but why was an affiliate editing the network feed?

-- This is a story of you... And me... And your dog.

-- There was a time when dogs did not exist? How did this happen?

-- Let's go back to a time before the last Ice Age.

-- Lived in fear of dangerous animals, including wolves.

-- Neil by a blazing campfire, wolves pushed back by waving flaming wood.

-- Wolves fear humans, but attracted by food.

-- Some wolves have a lower level of fear hormones. Don't threaten the humans and they'll let you scavenge their refuse.

-- The domestication of man by the wolves.

-- Survival of the friendliest.

-- Guards, interspecies cooperation.

-- Anime set in brief break in the Ice Age. Villages. Wolves have given up their freedom for food. Humans choose their mates, choose the ones who will accept training.

-- Artificial selection -- breeding.

-- Bred for prettiness, too. Most of our popular breeds are only a few centuries old.

-- Almost all our edible foods were artificially selected from rough wild forms.

-- It may not seem like it, but we've been living in an Ice Age for the past 2MY. We've just been in a warm spell.

-- Brown bear in the snow.

-- Something amazing is about to happen. We need to get smaller to see.

-- We'll take the subclavion artery thru the heart. (Shades of Fantastic Voyage)

-- Now shrink to the molecular level in our ship of the imagination.

-- If Life has a sanctuary, it's in the nucleus -- its scripture is written in the genetic code.

-- There are as many atoms in a single strand of DNA as the number of stars in the galaxy.

-- We are each of us a little universe.

-- Clockwork anime of DNA replication.

-- One mutation, a cub with a white coat. The white coat gives advantages to hunting in to snow and ice.

-- Mutations are entirely random and happen all the time.

-- That's what Darwin meant.

-- An individual doesn't evolve, a population does.

-- But when published in 1859, an uproar. Why?

-- Twinge of embarrassment of being related to apes.

-- what about our kinship with the trees?

-- Segment of an oak tree DNA, like a barcode.

-- Compare to my DNA, same sequence for metabolizing sugar.

-- But unless you have an identical twin, no one has the same DNA as you.

-- Metabolizing sugar is so basic, it happened before we branched too far.

-- The stuff of life is so malleable -- ½M types of beetles alone.

-- We have yet to make contact with most of the forms of life on THIS planet.

-- Tree of Life is 3½ BY old.

-- Science reveals all life on Earth is one.

-- Before Darwin, the idea of the Intelligent Designer -- life is too complicated for evolution.

-- Consider the human eye. Cornea, lens, retina, neural connections.

-- Can't be result of mindless evolution.

The COSMOS App available for download. (Which does what exactly?)

-- Go back to a time before eyes.

-- In the beginning, life was blind.

-- 4BY ago.

-- After a few 100MYs, protein evolved that was light sensitive.

-- Split screen of Creature's Eye View.

-- Can tell difference between surface, darker depths.

-- Pigment spot. Better sensitivity.

-- A dimple in the pigment spot -- deepens, socket.

-- Smaller opening with a cover.

-- Pinhole imaging.

-- Then a lens. Brightens and focus.

-- Then something terrible happened.

-- A straw seems to bend in a glass of water.

-- Eyes evolved for use in water.

-- First land creatures had lousy vision.

-- STILL can't see as well as water creatures -- what's in front of our nose or near darkness.

-- Why didn't we evolve new eyes? Evolution doesn't work that way.

-- Evolution just a theory? As if it's an opinion?

-- But it's a theory like gravity.

-- Because evolution is blind, it can't anticipate great events.

-- 5 great extinctions.

-- A monument, the Halls To Extinction, to broken branches of the tree of life.

-- For every 1 of species alive today, 1000 disappear.

-- In the past 500MY this has happened 5x.

-- One 250MY ago, end of Permian Age.

-- Trilobites, armored animals that propelled the ocean floors. (Always fond of trilobites, myself.)

-- Siberian volcanic eruption unlike anything seen.

-- Earth was very different then. One supercontinent, one giant ocean.

-- Molten rock ignited coal deposits, polluted the air, warmed the planet and stopped ocean circulation.

-- Noxious bacteria blossomed, but most of the ocean and land species died. 9 of 10 species.

-- So close to wiped out totally. Life took 10MY to come back.

-- Among the winners, the dinosaurs. 150MY until taken down by another cataclysmic disaster.

-- I know an animal that can live in boiling water, frozen in ice, 10 years without water and even the vacuum and radiation of space. (I remember when they published and showed the video of THAT the other year.)

-- The tardigrade or water bear has survived all 5 extinctions. Small, about the head of a pin.

-- What if life were different?

-- A world very different from Earth.

-- zoom past rings of Saturn.

-- Clouds and haze completely cover Titan.

-- No oxygen but atmosphere is also mostly nitrogen.

-- descend through a couple 100km of smog.

-- Only other place in the SS where it rains.

-- 100s of lakes, one larger than Lake Superior. Rivers carve planet.

-- Methane and methane. Natural gas on Earth, liquid in frigid Titan.

-- Lots of water, all frozen. Much of surface is hard water ice.

-- Carl Sagan and others have speculated on life in hydrocarbon seas. Might use acetylene instead of sugars for energy.

-- Ship of the Imagination descends 200m below surface into the dark.

-- Neil coyly plays with us -- did you see movement over there -- but wisely doesn't even try to illustrate this possible alien life.

-- Story of life on OUR world.

-- Earth 4BY ago, before life.

-- Most evidence of life destroyed by erosion, etc.

-- Maybe someone watching this will be the 1st to solve how life began.

-- Life may have begun...

-- Original computer animation graphic morphing sketches of life 4BY in 40sec. (True story: First time I'd ever seen morphing like that before. Impressed, I told one of my teachers. They pointed out that though interesting, it didn't PROVE anything. They could have morphed a fish into a toaster into a chicken, and would the seamless smoothness of that animation convince me that kitchen appliances once roamed the Earth? This was a seminal moment in my science education. It convinced me to not be swayed by flashy things even if well intentioned, but stick with the science and was one of the majors influences on my interest in science literacy.)

-- "These are some of the things that molecules can do, thanks to 4BY of Evolution." - Carl Sagan

OVERALL: Not pulling any punches, this second episode continues to stress the logical thread of development. Not quite as geewhiz as Episode 1, but true to the spirit of both science and Carl's original. Twice now they've pulled a major piece from the old COSMOS and kept it for the new.

No doubt this is The Red Meat episode, especially after Oklahoma. Why is an astrophysicist talking about evolution? Why is this scientist talking about sanctuary and scripture?

The answers those people don't want to hear are, Cosmos is everything, evolution is the engine of both large scale astronomical things and piddly little life, and COSMOS the show is about poetry as much as science.

Sunday 9 March 2014 21:00 EDT Channel 17.1 (FOX HD)

What follows are just notes I made. The series stands on its own merits.

-- There was an opening intro by President Barack Obama, which was clipped. Really FOX?

-- Carl Sagan's voice. "The Universe is everything that ever was and ever will be."

-- Switch to HD and Neil Degrasse Tyson begins. "A generation ago."

-- 1 adventure with many heroes.

-- A recitation of the Scientific Method.

-- Opening credits include Ann Druyan (Mrs. Carl Sagan) and Seth McFarlane (Yes, of Family Guy -- he helped jumpstart this.)

-- The Ship of the Imagination. Carl Sagan used this device -- Neil's has a window in the floor to the past and in the ceiling for the future. Very shiny, looks like the alien ship in Mission To Mars.

-- Putting us in our place. Earth, Sun, Mercury, Venus...

-- Mars has as much land mass as Earth.

-- Jupiter has more mass than all the other planets combined. The Red Spot is three times larger than Earth.

-- Saturn, the crown jewel. Uranus and Neptune, the outer planets, because Neil helped demote Pluto.

-- Beyond are 10s of 1000s of small frozen worlds. Pluto is one.

-- Voyager 1... farthest manmade object out there.

Sponsored by Samsung Galaxy. No-brainer there.

-- Oort Cloud. Leftover bits from formation of solar system. No one has seen it because so diffuse. Bits are about 1B miles apart -- distance between Earth and Saturn.

-- Empty space beyond? In the visible. But in the IR (infrared), a different story.

-- A rogue planet. A world w/o a sun. Molten core, frozen surface.

-- The Milky Way in IR.

-- Our Cosmic Address:
Earth
Solar System
Milky Way Galaxy
Local Group
Virgo Supercluster
Observable Universe

-- Limit: Cosmic Horizon. More than 13.8B LY away, light hasn't had time to get here.

-- We may be just one bubble in a huge multiverse. Worlds without end.

-- Cosmic perspective new since 400 years ago, before no telescopes.

-- One man envisions a grander universe. And on New Year's Eve 1600, he's in prison.

-- 16th century, idea of belonging to something greater than ourselves.

-- Copernicus, Earth not center of Universe.

-- 1st of a series of animations (one friend said Carl Sagan didn't use anime -- another said consider the target audience), of Bruno.

-- Reads a forbidden book: Lucretius, On The Nature Of Things. Argues for a universe unbounded.

-- Bruno assumes God is infinite, so should His creation.

-- For this he is excommunicated, thrown out of Italy, Switzerland, Germany and England.

COSMOS is shown Sundays at 9pm EDT on FOX (and NatGeo) and Mondays at 10pm on NatGeo. So if you missed this, you've got another chance.

-- Recklessly Bruno returns to Italy, taken by The Inquisition (Thought Police). 8 years in confinement. Guilty of questioning the Holy Trinity and Jesus Christ. Burned at stake. (The anime at the end is a bit much.)

-- 10 years later, Galileo has a telescope.

-- Bruno was no scientist, lucky guess. Glimpsed the vastness of space, but not of time, in a vision. Galileo had telescopic observations.

-- 13.8 thousand million years. Too big to comprehend.

-- Resurrects Carl's 13.8BY = 1 Calendar Year.

-- Every month ~ 1BY. Every day ~ 40MY.

-- January 1st, Big Bang. (Neil dons sunglasses.)

-- Evidence includes the amount of helium and background radio waves.

-- January 10th 1st stars ignite. January 13th stars coalesce into 1st small galaxies.

-- Small galaxies merge to form bigger ones. Milky Way in March.

-- Our Sun will arise from the death of other stars.

-- Stellar nurseries. Source of oxygen and other higher elements in the Periodic Table.

-- We are made of star stuff.

-- August, our Sun.

-- Moon formed, 100x brighter because closer.

-- September 21, life begins 3½BY ago.

-- November 9, life was breathing, eating. Microbes invent sex.

-- December 17, explosion of life onto land. December 28, 1st flower blooms.

-- Thick layers of dead vegetation form coal 300MY later. And we're using it all up very quickly.

-- 6:24am December 30th, asteroid. For 100MY dinosaurs ruled. Extreme contingency, chance of nature. No doubt that asteroid was nudged just enough long ago to arrive now.

-- December 31st, 11:59:46pm, all of recorded history in last 14 seconds.

-- We are newcomers to the universe. 9:45pm New Year's Eve, first footprints. Once we stood up, could look up.

-- 40,000 generations of wanderers, hunter-gatherers, all in last hour.

-- 1st paintings 60 seconds to go. Astronomy invented.

-- 10,000YA, revolution in how we lived. Domesticate plants, animals.

-- 14 seconds (6000YA), writing to record more stuff than we could carry.

-- Budha 6 seconds, Jesus 4 seconds, Mohammed 3 seconds to go.

-- Finally the two halves of the Earth discover each other.

-- Carl Sagan predicted methane lakes on Titan. Played a major role in every early planetary probe.

-- 1975 diary. Appointment with a 17 year old Neil Tyson. He spent a snowy day in Ithaca NY to meet Carl at Cornell. Sagan reached out to so many.

OVERALL: Great beginning. Crisp graphics. Mrs. Dr. Phil worries that so much CGI will convince naysayers that this is all lies, as they already believe. Nice homage to Carl Sagan the man and to COSMOS 1.0.

Later I'll tell you about Carl Sagan and Cornell and me.

Dr. Phil