Zoom: From Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees: How Everything Moves (33 page)

Laird, W. R. “Renaissance Mechanics and the New Science of Motion.” Canary Islands Ministry of Education, Universities, and Sustainability. http://www.gobiernodecanarias.org/educacion/3/usrn/fundoro/archivos%20adjuntos/publicaciones/largo_campo/cap_02_06_Laird.pdf.

Llinás, Rodolfo. “The Electric Brain.” Interview with Rodolfo Llinás conducted by Lauren Aguirre for Nova online. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/electric-brain.html.

National Weather Service National Hurricane Center. Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutsshws.php.

Nave, C. R. HyperPhysics. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hph.html.

Sachs, Joe. “Aristotle: Motion and Its Place in Nature.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-mot/.

Sengpiel, Eberhard. “Calculation of the Speed of Sound in Air and the Effective Temperature.” http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-speedsound.htm.

Notes

1. Edwin Hubble is credited with discovering the expansion of the universe in 1929, but there’s never a mention of the woman who lurked behind the scenes. Henrietta Leavitt was a brilliant astronomer in the early 1900s, at a time when women were so discriminated against that the best she could do was make thirty cents an hour performing menial “computing” at the Harvard College Observatory. Nonetheless, she single-handedly discovered star families and found she could determine a star’s absolute brightness from the colors it emitted. Hubble used her data and her method to calculate galaxy distances, which let him make the astonishing announcement that the universe is inflating like a balloon. Her credit? Nearly zero.

2. What might it mean if everything in the cosmos got larger simultaneously? Could you possibly perceive any change if your eyes, your body, the wavelengths of light, the room, the planet, and the whole universe suddenly tripled in size during the next few seconds? The answer is no. Such an alteration would be undetectable. Indeed, perhaps that is already continually happening. Maybe the cosmos keeps blowing up and shrinking down, so that a minute ago it was all the size of a single atom. The point is, “the universe is expanding” is meaningless unless it’s merely some parts of the universe that grow larger while others stay the same. That would be the only sort of occurrence that could be detectable or even have logical meaning. And, indeed, that is exactly what is happening. Galaxies and their contents stay the same size, more or less, as do clusters of galaxies. Only the gap between galaxy clusters is growing.

3. Despite the degradation in conditions due to light pollution, the observatory on Mount Wilson remains in operation today.

4. Plans are well along for an astounding superinstrument, the twenty-four-meter (thousand–inch!) Giant Magellan Telescope, which would far surpass everything else on the planet, although the European Space Agency is now planning a slightly larger telescope to stay one step ahead in bragging rights. The GMT’s first mirror segment is already completed, as are the on-site ground-clearing operations. The construction of the whole telescope is slated to be finished in 2020. It is located on Cerro las Campanas (Campanas Hill), a mountain in Chile.

5. You’d think the farthest visible galaxies would look the smallest, as they float way off in the yawning distance. But when their light started on its journey to us some thirteen billion years ago, the universe was much tinier, and these galaxies were actually not greatly separated from us at that time. They were relatively nearby and hence looked larger. And even though eons have passed since their images began to travel our way, through space that continually stretches to make the trip surrealistically lengthier, those galaxies’ apparent size remains the same. Bottom line: as their light arrives here, these galaxies look much larger than objects at their present great distance would logically suggest.

6. To the limit of what we can observe, the universe continually gets ten trillion cubic light-years larger each second.

To grasp the concept of the cosmos growing ten trillion cubic light-years larger each second necessitates appreciating what a “trillion” and a “cubic light-year” are. A trillion is a million millions. Despite the fact that we encounter this number from time to time (the US national debt was $14 trillion in 2012), it is staggeringly large. To merely count to a trillion, at the rate of rattling off five numbers a second, would require the time that has elapsed since the Pyramids were built. The cubic light-year is an equally mind-numbing concept as a measurement of volume. You’d have to picture a cube in which each dimension is one light-year. Each side would be as long as six million suns in a row, but keep in mind that the sun is itself one hundred times the width of the earth. Indeed, if one dropped Earths into a cubic light-year at the rate of a thousand a second, and began at the moment of the big bang, this colossal cube would not remotely be filled even today.

7. Actually, the nature and origin of consciousness—perception—is probably an even greater mystery than the source of the big bang or the makeup of dark energy. How awareness can possibly arise from chemical compounds or from colliding atoms is utterly baffling and defies even the most desperate guesses. But dark energy is right up there with the all-time greatest conundrums.

8. Though Greek and Roman scholars periodically cited Aristarchus during the next few centuries, virtually nothing is known about the very first person who said that our world moves. Nearly two millennia before Copernicus, Aristarchus of Samos alone declared that it makes more sense for Earth to orbit around the sun—the larger body—while spinning like a top than for absolutely everything in the cosmos to be whirling around us, even if either reality would produce the same observed visual effect: celestial objects crossing our sky. Sadly, his wisdom arrived at a bad time. Aristotle’s Earth-centered doctrine was already spreading far and wide. In a flash of determination and rash budget busting, I decided to go to Samos to unearth facts about Aristarchus that I couldn’t find in any domestic sourcebook or online. Thus in July of 2012 I traveled to that large island in the Aegean Sea. I hired an interpreter, interviewed the curator at the Samos archeological museum as well as dozens of other people, and tried to learn something new. I figured it would make a cool chapter. I was wrong. Although the odyssey started out hopefully enough—the Samos airport is called the Aristarchus airport—it turned out that nothing about his life, at least after his youth, is known even in Samos. It doesn’t help that all but one of his books have failed to survive. A record heat spell, where it hit 105 degrees each day, was the only reward for my efforts. Aristarchus, who first revealed that our world spins while zooming through space, remains a cipher. And your author, who’d expected to write a chapter crammed with revelations, ended up with no more than this footnote.

1. An old joke involves two campers surprised by a bear. One starts running away at full speed, the other follows. When they meet up, panting, the second guy says, “Why did you start running? Did you really think you could outrun a bear?” To which the first camper replies with a shrug, “I didn’t need to run faster than the bear. Just faster than you.”

2. A frustrating experience for any researcher, editor, or author is finding definitive data about something that ought to be well established. Some authorities say the Himalayas are rising by as much as 2.4 inches a year. Others say one-seventh of an inch annually. You’d think this would have been settled by now, in our modern era of GPS. Suffice it to say that over the course of each of our lives, Everest grows either a foot taller or sixteen feet taller.

3. A research competition has existed for the past eighteen years between scientists at NIST, the National Institute of Science and Technology, and Wolfgang Ketterle’s lab on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, at MIT. Each has successively outdone the other in periodically creating the coldest temperature ever.

4. For readers who’d like a more complete sense of being there during that famous cataclysm, here is a much fuller firsthand account from Pliny. This specific description became so widely read that in modern times volcanologists officially categorize all explosive volcanic eruptions as “Plinian events.” Pliny wrote:

Your request that I would send you an account of my uncle’s death, in order to transmit a more exact relation of it to posterity, deserves my acknowledgments… And notwithstanding he perished by a misfortune, which, as it involved at the same time a most beautiful country in ruins, and destroyed so many populous cities, seems to promise him an everlasting remembrance…

My uncle… was at that time with the fleet under his command at Misenum. On the 24th of August, about one in the afternoon, my mother desired him to observe a cloud which appeared of a very unusual size and shape. He had just taken a turn in the sun, and, after bathing himself in cold water, and making a light luncheon, gone back to his books: he immediately arose and went out upon a rising ground whence he might get a better sight of this very uncommon appearance. A cloud, from which mountain was uncertain, at this distance (but it was found afterwards to come from Mount Vesuvius), was ascending, the appearance of which I cannot give you a more exact description of than by likening it to that of a pine-tree, for it shot up to a great height in the form of a very tall trunk, which spread itself out at the top into a sort of branches; occasioned, I imagine, either by a sudden gust of air that impelled it, the force of which decreased as it advanced upwards, or the cloud itself, being pressed back again by its own weight, expanded in the manner I have mentioned; it appeared sometimes bright and sometimes dark and spotted, according as it was either more or less impregnated with earth and cinders. This phenomenon seemed to a man of such learning and research as my uncle extraordinary and worth further looking into… Meanwhile broad flames shone out in several places from Mount Vesuvius, which the darkness of the night contributed to render still brighter and clearer. But my uncle, in order to soothe the apprehensions of his friend, assured him it was only the burning of the villages, which the country people had abandoned to the flames: after this he retired to rest, and it is most certain he was so little disquieted as to fall into a sound sleep: for his breathing, which, on account of his corpulence, was rather heavy and sonorous, was heard by the attendants outside. The court which led to his apartment being now almost filled with stones and ashes, if he had continued there any time longer, it would have been impossible for him to have made his way out… It was now day everywhere else, but there a deeper darkness prevailed than in the thickest night; which, however, was in some degree alleviated by torches and other lights of various kinds. They thought proper to go farther down upon the shore to see if they might safely put out to sea, but found the waves still running extremely high, and boisterous. There my uncle, laying himself down upon a sail-cloth, which was spread for him, called twice for some cold water, which he drank, when immediately the flames, preceded by a strong whiff of sulphur, dispersed the rest of the party, and obliged him to rise. He raised himself up with the assistance of two of his servants, and instantly fell down dead; suffocated, as I conjecture, by some gross and noxious vapour… [T]he third day after this melancholy accident, his body was found entire, and without any marks of violence upon it, in the dress in which he fell, and looking more like a man asleep than dead. During all this time my mother and I, who were at Misenum—but this has no connection with your history, and you did not desire any particulars besides those of my uncle’s death; so I will end here, only adding that I have faithfully related to you what I was either an eyewitness of myself or received immediately after the accident happened, and before there was time to vary the truth…

Pliny also wrote, to Cornelius Tacitus:

There had been noticed for many days before a trembling of the earth, which did not alarm us much, as this is quite an ordinary occurrence in Campania; but it was so particularly violent that night that it not only shook but actually overturned, as it would seem, everything about us… Though it was now morning, the light was still exceedingly faint and doubtful; the buildings all around us tottered, and though we stood upon open ground, yet as the place was narrow and confined, there was no remaining without imminent danger: we therefore resolved to quit the town. A panic-stricken crowd followed us, and (as to a mind distracted with terror every suggestion seems more prudent than its own) pressed on us in dense array to drive us forward as we came out. Being at a convenient distance from the houses, we stood still, in the midst of a most dangerous and dreadful scene… The sea seemed to roll back upon itself, and to be driven from its banks by the convulsive motion of the earth; it is certain at least the shore was considerably enlarged, and several sea animals were left upon it. On the other side, a black and dreadful cloud, broken with rapid, zigzag flashes, revealed behind it variously shaped masses of flame: these last were like sheet-lightning, but much larger… Soon afterwards, the cloud began to descend, and cover the sea. It had already surrounded and concealed the island of Capreae and the promontory of Misenum… The ashes now began to fall upon us, though in no great quantity. I looked back; a dense dark mist seemed to be following us… It now grew rather lighter, which we imagined to be rather the forerunner of an approaching burst of flames (as in truth it was) than the return of day: however, the fire fell at a distance from us: then again we were immersed in thick darkness, and a heavy shower of ashes rained upon us, which we were obliged every now and then to stand up to shake off, otherwise we should have been crushed and buried in the heap… At last this dreadful darkness was dissipated by degrees, like a cloud or smoke; the real day returned, and even the sun shone out, though with a lurid light, like when an eclipse is coming on. Every object that presented itself to our eyes (which were extremely weakened) seemed changed, being covered deep with ashes as if with snow…