Cool stuff this week (15/9)
So it turns out that writing regularly in my blog is sort of impossible at the moment. I thought instead I might try and focus all my energy into at least one posting each week, on a Monday. And seeing as today is Tuesday, I’m doing great so far.
So what’s exciting this week? One very cool thing is the mysterious object that Hubble recently detected. It appeared out of nowhere, brightened for 100 days, dimmed for 100 days, then vanished. Wowsers! One really neat thing is we don’t even know how far away it was (*). Personally, I’m hoping it was a mothership from an alien civilisation, but I don’t think it quite fits the data.
Also making news is yet another hair-tearing story whereby Prof Michael Reiss, the Director of Education of Britain’s Royal Society (a major scientific body), called for the teaching of creationism in science classes. “What what?!” I hear you say? How could this be? It helps if we use his full title: Reverend Professor Michael Reiss - he’s an ordained Anglican priest. In charge of the education arm of the Royal Society. Admittedly he’s advocating a gentle approach: “in certain classes, it can be appropriate to deal with the issue“. Fair enough, but what about this? “Evolution and cosmology are understood by many to be a religious issue because they can be seen to contradict the accounts of origins of life and the universe described in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Scriptures.”
I just can’t agree with that. As many have discussed, science is not a religion - it is based on reasoning and observations, not on faith, and can be changed, revised or thrown out at any time. But it gets worse:“I feel that creationism is best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view.” And worse: “Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson”. Actually, that would seem like a very good reason to me.
Not surprisingly, scientists are apoplectic and calling for Reiss to be fired. The ever cutting Richard Dawkins sums it up perfectly:“A clergyman in charge of education for the country’s leading scientific organisation - it’s a Monty Python sketch.”
And now for something completely different…my recommended Wikipedia article for the week. And it is…the Hubble Space Telescope! Due for its final and controversy shrouded service in under a month, it’s an exciting read about the history of one of the most amazing pieces of scientific equipment of our time. Brush up now so you can be in know at the water cooler!
And that’s it for now - I’ll write more next week!
(*)To determine distance in astronomy you can (with ridiculous over-simplification) use two things: parallax or magnitude-distance calculations. Parallax is what you see when driving - nearby objects move lots, far away mountains barely move at all. In space, the “driving” is the Earth moving around the sun. We observe how much a star moves compared to stars we know are really distant. The more the star (or whatever) moves, the closer it is. Unfortunately, it’s not very precise and at best it tells us that the object is further out than 130 light years. The magnitude calculation is something fairly intuitive - the closer a light is, the brighter it appears. But unfortunately, it requires you to know the “intrinsic” brightness of the object - otherwise, a light could be could be a close but dim candle, or a bright but far away super-candle. In the case of this object, we don’t know much about it at all, so best estimates are between 130 light years and 11 billion light years. Neat!