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Notes for
9/9/14

Class 3
Tuesday
September 9, 2014

Homework is available Thursday after

class

About 5% of americans are scientifically

literate at the rudimentary level and half
of bills in congress are related to science
and technology.

Without education we are fed what we

should hear by congress.
Prof. Carl Sagan

We risk becoming
a nation of suckers
See: Sagan, Carl. 1996. The Demon
Demon--Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Ballentine
Press, 475 pp.

Technology and Science

are not one and the same;

Technology is all around us. It is concerned

with the production of useful products and
practical problem solving.

See: Wolpert, L. 1992. The Unnatural Nature of

Science. Harvard Univ. Press. 191 pp.

Technology is older than science.

Technology:

Perhaps the most important, weapons.

o
o

Science:
The organized quest to understand
the natural world
Thales of Miletos: Invented
(discovered) Science ca. 600 B.C.
There are laws controlling nature;
Those laws can be discovered.

Science is much younger than technology.

Invented or discovered by Thales of Miletos.
The first to attempt to explain the laws of
nature through reasonable ways.
There is no monetary reward in science like
there is in technology.
Science and common sense are not always
compatible. Our common sense is always

Present this to child.

Put in skinnier glass that rises glass more.
Children will always believe the second
glass is more full.
This is because common sense has failed
the child because they are young.

55 gallon oil drum. Cirumfrerence is 75

inches.
Insulated with 6 inch foam. The question is
how much longer does it have to be? It
turns out to be about 36 inches longer.
Do the same with the earth. The answer
remains 36. It does not matter what the
radius is. Only what the delta radius is.
This shows that we must open our minds to
perform science.

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To do science, we must break out

of our natural, common sense way
of thinking!

Aristotle said things will fall at a speed

proportionate to their size.
A big rock falls faster than a smaller rock.
Aristotle

What would happen if you tied them

together?
Galileo

No one tested it for 1900 years until

Galileo.

Scientific Method
Observation
Hypothesis
Experiements
Theory
Prediciton

Creator of the Scientific Method

Scientists cannot prove a

theory; they can only
falsify it,
it, by finding a
contradiction.

Lived in a time when the world was rampant

in pseudoscience.
Psychology of Freud was becoming
accpetable.

Karl Popper
(1902-1994)

Learned Einsteins theory of relativity as a

child.
Scientists can never prove something to be
true. They can only falsify it.
A good scientist is a skeptic.

To do science we must grow and learn.

As Wolpert reminds
us, it is important to
keep
an open mind,
k
d
but, he argues:

Perceptual Gestalt
& Paradigm Shifts
What a man sees depends both
upon what he looks at and also
what his visual conceptual
experience has taught him to see.
In the absence of such training,
there can only be a bloomin
buzzin confusion.
Kuhn, Thomas, S. 1970. (2nd Edition). The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. Chicago Univ. Press, 210 pp.

MAIN POINT: There is much more to science

than the scientific method. There is
exploration and discovery.
Science requires us to ahve an imagination.

The way you can identify family and friends

with little facial analyzation.
Music can look at music and hear it by sight.
Paradigm shifts, once our perception
changes, we never see the world in the
same way again.
There are some fields of science such as
ocean science that do not rely on Scientific
method as much.

Lemataitre- The Big Bang Theory

Hubble- Examined that the universe is
expanding through red shift.

Galaxy is moving toward us, the

wavelengths become compressed, the light
looks bluer. This is blue shift.
The opposite happens when the galaxy is
moving away. A red shift.
Once thought this would all continue until
we eventually all come back together.
Recently we discovered not only is the
universe expanding, but the rate of
expansion is accelerating. One of the
biggest mysteries of science.

This lead to theory of dark matter. A big

search is out for dark matter. This means
over time the light from stars will go black
because the red shift will go out of visible
light.
Hydrogen and helium were created first.
They began to condense. The gravity would
overcome the electrostatic charges and put
so many atoms together it created stars.
The gravity at the center morphed two
hydrogens in to helium in a process of
fusion releasing a ton of energy.
A star looks like its out of focus. Thats not a
star, thats a nebula.

NASA time
exposure
(Winter sky in my back yard)

The Orion Nebula close up.

Every molecule and every atom in your
body except for helium and hydrogen were
formed in stars.

Spiral Galaxy (Messier 101, similar to our

Milky Way Galaxy)
As seen by the
Hubble Space
Telescope

We cant take a picture of our own glaxy

because were in it.
We really have no idea what our own
galaxy looks like.

200-400 billion stars in the galaxy.

In 1996, the hubble space telescope

They kept zooming in on one of the darkest

regions of space.

Hella damn das a lot of glaxies.

In this single frame:

Its equivelant to looking at a period on a

piece of paper held at arms length.

1,500 to 2,000
Galaxies;
Each with some
200 Billion Stars!

The hubble ultradeep field shows some 10000

galaxies just in this one area.
There are 4 x 10^22 stars in the universe.
There are more stars in the universe than there
are grains of sand on all the worlds beaches.
7 x 10^17
There are 6000x more stars!!
One gram of hydrogen atoms= 6.02 x10^23
There are more H atoms in one gram than
stars in the universe.

An interesting idea, but not so?

Once thought that the oceans came from

comets. Now we see that it only could have
been 10% at most.

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WIhotu water on Earth we could not have had

life on Earth.
Spontaneous generation must have happened
at least once. But it is now impossible as there
is now O2 in the atmosphere.
Haldene radiation and lightning could have
acted in molocules to create the complex
moolecules needed for life.

Created the conditions of primitive Earth to

see if life might generate.

Stanley Miller

The Miller-Urey
Experiment (1953)

After a few days if was discovered that amino

acids WERE formed. (The building blocks of
proteins.)
More than likely life on Earth started in deep
sea vents.
Life has changed Earths atmosphere.
Another theory believes life was brought to
Earth from elsewhere.

NASA has been actively searching for

planets.
1516 planets have been found so far.
Around Orions nebula you can see bout 153
planetary discs, the building blocks for
planets.

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Protoplanetary Disks
in the Orion Nebula

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And within our own solar

system:

Europa has shown an ocean now covered by

ice.

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The cracks are believed to be pressure ridges

like ice on a lake.

There are plans to send a probe through the ice to

hit the water and

Water on the Moon:

Up to 6 billion tons of (water)
ICE on our moon

The moon has a 10x more water than we

thought.

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The mars lander foot print, that shadow is

water evaporating.

The Martian Meteorite

Science, Vol. 273; No. 5277; August 16, 1996

When another meteor hits mars hard enough

its sends pieces of mars out into space and
some even at us.
We found evidence of bacteria on the
meteorite.

Life in Extreme
Environments

Professor Thomas
Gold (1920-2004) of
Cornel University

Complex organic molecules: in

deep lithosphere;
Hydrocarbons: known to be
widespread in solar system;
(e.g., no need for oil fields?);
Diamonds: need 150km
pressure;
Helium: seeps to surface, same
as oil through cracks;
Biological molecules are
associated with oil;

Oil fields were thought to be created in

early eras.
Thomas thought it was created at the
creation of the Earth.

Hydrocarbons may have been

produced by microbes living at
same depths as oil wells (at
depths of 7-8 km) !?

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Text

USNews & World Report

Aug. 16/23, 2004
Vol. 137 (No. 5)

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