Category Archives: Science

“Cosmos: Possible Worlds”, 10-13: Goodbye to a Losing Season

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When your favorite team is not so good, sometimes the end of the season can come as a relief.  That’s doubly true when the last couple games of the season go especially badly.  This Cosmos fan finds himself happy to see this season come to an end.  There is always next season, maybe, and hope for better days to come. “A Tale of Two Atoms”, the 10th episode of Cosmos: Possible Worlds, was a win.  I liked the overall discussion of scientists involved in nuclear physics, especially Neil deGrasse Tyson’s clear-eyed view of those scientists.  He notes, for example, that even after World War II ended, scientists kept right on working on atomic weapons.  Apparently, many scientists were willing to continue work on weapons of mass destruction even after the crisis of war and its perceived threat of German nuclear technology had passed. But the highlight of the whole Cosmos: Possible Worlds series for me was the animated feature in … Continue reading →

JWST update – Hexagons in Space

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My small group at Space Camp in Louisburgh. Proud of their new James Webb replica mirror and knowledge !! What an exciting week regarding the JWST announcment that the launch date is set for October 31st 2021 !!! Am shareing my previous blog about a workshop I did back in September 2019 and in addition I am including a video about the announcment. Something to look forward to in the year ahead. Of course anything can happen when it comes to launches but the perparation is done. We are on the verge of the launch of  space programs most exciting telescope ever built   Hexagons As far as I know, hexagons in space are not common. The only natural hexagonal shape I know of out there is the extraordinary storm cloud on the north pole of Saturn. However here on Earth, this shape is everywhere, bees use hexagons in building their hives. Hexagons hide in plain sight within our bodies, … Continue reading →

Bah! Humbug. Science.

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This post comes from a “Science in the Bluegrass” column I wrote for The Record, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Louisville, Kentucky. John Adams, the second president of the United States, surely was no fan of Advent. Writing to Thomas Jefferson in January of 1825, he complained of people who “believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe… came down to this little ball [Earth].” He added that, “until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.” Some people today feel the same way, but rejecting not just the Incarnation, but God as well. These modern Scrooges have been sold the idea that science says we humans are nothing more than a finite number of atoms in motion, with no soul, and that the world is merely an uncreated result of random happenstance. They reject belief in anything that can’t be measured and verified through experiment. And so, … Continue reading →

Specola Guestbook | April 12, 1923: Walter and Willoughby Cady

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This entry is part 72 of 78 in the series Specola Guestbook

Since its founding in 1891, many people have passed through the doors of the Vatican Observatory.  A quick perusal of our guestbook reveals several Names, including Popes, Nobel laureates, astronauts, actors, and saints. Today’s guestbook entry is from April 12, 1923, when Walter Cady made a visit with his son Willoughby. Next to his name, Walter Guyton Cady (1874-1974) wrote, “Middletown, Conn, U.S.A.” He was an electrical engineer and physicist.  He was a professor oat Wesleyan University in Middletown CT. In 1921, he developed the first quartz crystal oscillator, a piezoelectric device that became the timekeeping basis for quartz clocks and watches. As part of his research, he worked to develop international frequency standards. What was he doing in Rome in 1923?  That year, he was comparing the frequency standards of various countries: England, France, Italy, and the USA.  This apparently involved travel to the respective countries. In 1932 he served as president of the Institute of Radio Engineers. He … Continue reading →

Another dome home.

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This entry is part 36 of 39 in the series Lunarcy

When the Moon is not quite 10 days old you can get a good look at a few of the more obvious domes in the Mare Nubium area south of Bullialdus. The first key is to locate Kies, the 46km diameter crater at the top of this image with the little tail pointing down. Notice the mild swelling just to the left of the crater. This is Dome Kies Pi or K1. It’s 10km in diameter with a little 2km craterlet at the summit, just barely visible here. Going further to the left there are two small clusters of mountains. Just above the farther one is another mild swelling, K3. A third dome is just off the end of the tail of Kies but I never have gotten a good image of it. It may be just to low a feature. Below Kies you see a graben-like rima, Rima Hesiodus that runs some 309 km from Hesiodus just south of … Continue reading →

ⓜ Faith and the Cosmos III

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This entry is part 3 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… the conclusion of my mystery article (where did it get published?) about cosmology and how what we think about the universe shapes the way we study it… Newton’s  immense deterministic system seemed unshakeable. And the only role left for God in such a system is to set the initial conditions, to be (in the Aristotelean sense) the “Prime Mover,” the Great Watchmaker who perhaps built the watch, wound it up, and set it running in its inexorable course.  What is a “Rational” Explanation? Beyond the obvious fallacies of such a system in the light of contemporary physics (according  to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the “exact knowledge” of a particle’s position and momentum, for example, is meaningless because they cannot both be determined at the same time), there was a more subtle problem with this cosmology. It insisted that every unexplainable experience must have a “rational” explanation, where “rational” was quickly limited in practice to mean the common … Continue reading →

NASA Confirms New SIMPLEx Mission Small Satellite to Blaze Trails Studying Lunar Surface

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A small satellite mission to understand the lunar water cycle – detecting and mapping water on the lunar surface in order to investigate how its form, abundance, and location relate to geology – has received NASA approval to proceed with the next phase of its development. On Nov. 24, the Lunar Trailblazer, a mission selected under NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, passed its Key Decision Point-C (KDP-C) milestone, obtaining agency-level endorsement to begin final design of hardware and build. The milestone also provides the project’s official schedule and budget determination. “Lunar Trailblazer will confirm whether water on the Moon is tightly bound in crystalline rock, as recently suggested by NASA’s SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) observations, or loosely bound and mobile as a function of temperature,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “This SIMPLEx mission bolsters our portfolio of targeted science missions designed to test pioneering technologies while … Continue reading →

ⓜ Faith and the Cosmos II

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This entry is part 4 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… part II of an article that dates from 2011 but I have no idea where it ever got published… The Physical and the Spiritual: Even after the adoption of a cosmology based on a spherical earth, a common feature of most cosmologies was the belief that the physical universe mirrored the spiritual realm.  This often involved positing a “chain of creation” in which different levels or aspects of the physical universe were assigned to different elements, different gods, or different ranks of angels. Those different ranks were given names (thrones, dominions) and are what St. Paul was referring to in his letters, cited above. By the Middle Ages, it was assumed that the home of the saints and the biblical firmament were the outer spheres of the universe; below them were the spheres of each planet, moved by angels, and their perfect eternal circular motions stood in contrast to the irregular and finite movements of objects on … Continue reading →

“Cosmos: Possible Worlds”, 4-6: Screaming from the Bleachers

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Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: Possible Worlds is on TV this fall.  It is great to see a popular show about science and scientists—a popular show that is educational.  I am a big Cosmos fan.  But of course, the show could always be better!  Maybe a lot better. Episodes 4 (“The Cosmic Connectome”) and 5 (“Vavilov”) were about the brain, and about genetics and agricultural science, respectively.  On these topics I have little expertise.  Nevertheless, I found troublingly narrow the discussion in Episode 5 of Soviet scientists who during the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War preserved the seed bank at Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov’s plant industry institute.  The show praised how these scientists preserved “several tons of edible material” even as 800,000 people starved to death in Leningrad—including the scientists themselves.  Tyson ends the episode with the following: So why didn’t the botanists at the Institute eat a single grain of rice?  Why didn’t they distribute the seeds and … Continue reading →

Skyward by David Levy: November 2020

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This entry is part 27 of 27 in the series Skyward by David Levy

Hello, Bennu! Not long ago OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft sponsored by the University of Arizona and flown by NASA gently touched the surface of asteroid No. 101955, an asteroid named Bennu, tried to grab some material, and then quickly took off again. It was the first try, but it was a huge success! The craft gathered more than twice what was expected—so much that some small pieces of material started to leak out. Of course, if all the sample leaked out, then there was no sample. But that won’t happen. NASA plans to transfer the material to a safe storage container earlier than expected, and then the sample will be safe. The mission, run jointly by NASA and the University of Arizona, cost the U.S. taxpayers about eight hundred million dollars, plus about 185 million for the launch aboard an Atlas V rocket. OSIRIS-REx is an acronym for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer. Asteroid Bennu is an interesting … Continue reading →

ⓜ Faith and the Cosmos: I

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This entry is part 5 of 55 in the series And Then I Wrote

And then I wrote… So, this is an odd article; not in that it’s unusual, itself — it is typical of the stuff I have written about faith and astronomy. In fact, it’s a nice summary of my ideas. What is odd is that, though I find three or four different versions of this in my files for “stuff I wrote in 2011” and I can see that it was edited (by someone named “Mike”) I have no record of where it was actually published. If anyone reading this can find it in print anywhere, that would be great! I don’t always remember to update my CV with non-science publications. Anyway, what I do see it that it originally was written in the fall of 2011… and the version I am publishing here is actually more or less my original draft, which I think is the freshest if not the most polished version. As with earlier articles that I have published here, this whole … Continue reading →

OSIRIS-REx to Gather Sample from Asteroid Bennu on Oct. 20th

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On Tuesday October 20, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will gather a sample from the surface of an asteroid – a first in U.S. space exploration history! The OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL); the spacecraft has been in proximity to the asteroid for quite some time, mapping the surface in great detail. Asteroid Bennu’s unexpectedly rocky surface made selection of a safe sample location difficult, but eventually 4 candidates were selected and a final site chosen. The spacecraft has done two test-runs of its sample collection maneuver in August, getting to within 131 ft (40 m) of the asteroid’s surface. OSIRIS-REx has made several discoveries as it has surveyed the surface of asteroid Bennu – it saw particles being ejected from the asteroids surface. We’ve also learned a lot about Bennu’s gravity field. Using the natural supply of mini gravity probes (ejected particles), the team discovered that the interior of Bennu is not uniform. … Continue reading →