Stars named after atrocious dictators? Not catchy

Interesting map of an alternative grouping of stars into new constellations.

My guess is that any number of people have tried to come up with more modern constellations over the years.  Perhaps there are some interesting stories about such attempts.  I can't imagine any attempt would be met with anything but harsh backlash.  The history and mythology of the constellations is half of their appeal.

This will be an interesting research task in the near future.

Posted at 05:10PM Mar 13, 2008 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Anecdotes  | 

Dermatoglyphics

Unverified trivia (from wikipedia, which means copied from somewhere else, only I don't know where):

Dermatoglyphics and uncopyrightable are the longest English words with no repeated letters.

This came up whilst preparing to meet with a forensic chemistry class.  One of my favorite examples of controlled vocabulary is dermatoglyphics.  Which are...?

Answer: fingerprints.  Well, the study of fingerprints.  It's easy to get lost in databases searching for research on fingerprints, because searching for that term will get you all variety of research about any identifying characteristic of anything (e.g., magnetic fingerprints, chemical fingerprints denoting the presence of certain elements).  But not necessarily information about the actual prints from the ends of human fingers.

One way to deal with this is some databases is to use the controlled vocabulary term dermatoglyphics.  I think this one's easy to remember because it's an interesting word and a good example of the benefit of using it versus the common term.  Interchanging the terms in different databases provides different results.  Web of Science will give you decent results searching for 'fingerprints' but better results for 'dermatoglyphics'.  It's very clear what the advantage is within MEDLINE.

Posted at 02:33PM Mar 22, 2007 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Anecdotes  | 

Somehow makes even The Lord of the Rings seem short

It is hard to overemphasize the shocking suddenness of life's proliferation in the seas and on the lands of Earth.  Suppose some galactic civilization had evolved on planets of stars older than the sun, and they had sent out a dozen expeditions to visit Earth, spaced evenly throughout Earth's history.  The first ten expeditions would have found only lifeless craters, lavas, sand dunes, and highly eroded river channels on Earth's land surfaces.  The eleventh expedition would have arrived 380 My [million years] ago and would have found the land mostly covered by flourishing Devonian forests.  The twelfth expedition would find us.

From William K. Hartmann & Ron Miller's The History of Earth.  Recommended as a highly readable summary of the geological and biological evolution of the planet.  Mostly geology, since that's actually most of Earth's history--6/7ths of it, in fact, without any life whatsoever.  Human history is even more absurdly short, about 10,000 years, compared to 4,500,000,000 years of Earth history.  Which is to say the Earth has been human-free for 449,999/450,000 or 99.9998% of its existence.  (By comparison, dinosaurs were around for something like 150,000,000 years--15,000 times as long as us.)

Anyway, if at this point in your life you're not completely blown away by the staggering scale of geologic time, this is a nice book to fix that.

Posted at 11:26AM Nov 25, 2006 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Anecdotes  |  Comments[2]

Science is a trail of learning, littered with carcasses of failure

From Modern Mechanix (endlessly entertaining scans of old magazines), here's a theory that didn't quite have the legs:



(Transcription available at http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/07/26/light-gets-tired-and-turns-red/ )

Yeah, that's a nice little anthropomorphic theory, but no, light doesn't get tired.  For an overview of what actually causes redshift, have a look here.

"I just flew in from the origin of the universe, and...!"  ...nevermind.

Posted at 10:02AM Jul 27, 2006 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Anecdotes  | 

Albert Einstein disproves the existence of Vulcan

Nowadays debate about the number of planets in our solar system revolves around arguing about exactly which of the slightly-larger-than-average icy bodies should be included in the count.  Also, if you talk about the planet Vulcan, it is assumed you are simply a harmless Star Trek nerd referring to the homeworld of a fictional race of emotionless humanoids.

Consider a time when neither of those things were true.  Consider the 19th century.

In the 1840s, French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier began applying Newtonian dynamics to the problems of planetary orbits.  After noticing a discrepancy between his calculations and the direct observations of Uranus, he predicted that Uranus was being gravitationally affected by another more distant planet.  He was even able to predict where it was in its orbit before it was observed.  In 1846, Neptune was discovered where foreseen, lending credence to both Le Verrier and Newton. 

In the 1850s, feeling emboldened by his historic prediction, Le Verrier turned his sights on the other planets.  Similar to the perturbations he noticed in Uranus's orbit, he also found problems with Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system.  He concluded that there must be another planet even closer to the sun disturbing Mercury's orbit.  He named it Vulcan (after the Roman God of Fire). 

I won't draw it out here.  For decades he and others searched for Vulcan without success.  Le Verrier and other astronomers who supported the Vulcan theory died convinced it would be found.

So what happened?  Le Verrier had applied Newtons's laws correctly.  If the theory is correct, the outcome must be predictable, yet the prediction in this case ultimately failed.  Had Newton been wrong about gravitational laws? 

Nah.  It just didn't account for everything.  Turns out the inconsistencies between observation and prediction were actually a relativistic effect:

The advance of Mercury's perihelion was brilliantly explained by Albert Einstein in November 1915 at his desk in Berlin -- his general theory of relativity finally exorcised the ghost of Vulcan from the inner solar system. Einstein presented a new theory of gravitation that conceived of it as a warping of the fabric of space-time. According to his theory, Mercury should precess slightly faster than the Newtonian rate -- by 0.1 arcseconds for each orbital revolution of the planet, or 43 arc-seconds per century. This agreed exactly with the observed rate.  Vulcan became redundant.*

Unfortunately Le Verrier didn't know about relativity, and spent a good portion of his professional life trying to work on a problem that demanded its contributions. 

*Excerpted from "Vulcan Chasers" by William Sheehan and Richard Baum, Astronomy, volume 25, issue 12 (December 1997).  Read more of the story there, or the wikipedia article here.

Posted at 06:40PM Jul 25, 2006 by WILSON, JOSHUA in Anecdotes  |  Comments[3]