(Part 3) Best astronomy & space science books according to redditors
We found 2,788 Reddit comments discussing the best astronomy & space science books. We ranked the 758 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 41-60. You can also go back to the previous section.
Black holes are sometimes portrayed as something like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, sucking things into them. That's the most important myth to get over. They attract by gravity, the same as stars or planets. The effect on other objects is exactly the same: they're not sucked in, they just go into orbit.
If you want to fall into a black hole, you have to deliberately head straight for it. It's not as easy as you'd think.
Having said that, there are two mechanism by which things that aren't heading directly towards a black hole can end up falling into black holes. The first is friction and collisions within the cloud of material orbiting the black hole, which would tends to result in you gradually dropping into lower and lower orbits until you cross the event horizon. The second is gravitational radiation, which will cause anything to gradually spiral inwards, even without friction.
So the question is: could these mechanisms overwhelm the expansion of the Universe?
That's really easy:
No.
Our Universe is expanding in an accelerating way, ripping apart everything that is not already gravitationally bound together.
But clusters of galaxies are gravitationally bound together... so you could ask: could the black hole have enough attraction to eventually consume all mass in our local cluster of galaxies?
Still no, because of Hawking radiation.
The inspiralling of matter towards a black hole from a large distance is ridiculously slow. If you look at the largest supermassive black holes (which are billions of times the mass of the Sun), you can compare the rate at which stars are spiralling inwards towards them to the rate at which the black holes themselves would evaporate - which is also ridiculously slow. It turns out that the evaporation would happen first, by a long long way.
If you waited for all stars to die and turn to cold cinders, and then waited a few trillions of times longer than that, they still wouldn't be falling into black holes. But the black holes would be evaporating, and given 10^100 years or so even the most massive of them would have gone, long before the rest of the galaxy had a chance to fall into it.
This book is the classic for this kind of deep time stuff. Worth a look. Also this one - very readable and very highly recommended.
Yes, I do find it disturbing. Anyone who cares about the truth should be.
Carl Sagan wrote a spectacular book on the human tendency to jump to bad conclusions.
> "Hidden Dimensions" by Lisa Randall.
Just for clarity, I think you mean:
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, by Lisa Randall.
https://amzn.com/0060531096
"Turn Left At Orion" by Guy Consolmagno and Dan M. Davis. Can be found on Amazon here.
EDIT: Apparently there is an updated version of the book (5th edition).
EDIT 2: watch the delivery time - the link in my former edit says ships within 1-3 months. Might not be the best choice for under the xmas tree.
This thread has been around for a few hours so I'm afraid this comment might get buried, but since nobody who has commented so far on this thread is actually Catholic, I'll bite.
There are a few fundamentals that need to be cleared up before I can progress to considering the four questions you posed.
Firstly, I am not sure as to whether or not Catholics are actually required to believe in the existence of a literal Adam and Eve. Though in Humani Generis Pius XII wrote that the faithful were to affirm the historicity of "a sin truly committed by one Adam," John Paul II made no mention of a historical Adam and Eve in his "Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Evolution" (typically when a pontiff disagree with previous pontiffs, they do not call them out directly, but rather omit that with which they disagree from their own teaching).
The story of Adam and Eve is meant to implicate all humanity: before the fall they do not even have proper names but are rather referred to in the Biblical text simply as "man" and "woman" (seriously, go take a look). It is, then, entirely correct to affirm that these two literary characters, this primordial couple who disobeyed the will of God represents all humanity. Whether or not we can therefore claim that the story is completely allegorical and that Adam and Eve as such did not exist is beyond my competence, but for my part I do not think that the belief that they exist is technically required.
Secondly, original sin is a descriptive term for the fact that human beings are born with something deficient in their wills. This fact is obvious: human nature includes a desire to seize, possess, to advance the interests of the self over the interests of others, to elevate the ego (as Augustine observes in his Confessions). This, I think, is indisputable, and this deficiency, this willingness to prioritize the self over other people and over the good, is precisely what the term "original sin" means. The word "sin" in the term "original sin" does not mean that people are born with personal sin, that people enter the world already guilty of wrongdoing; rather, the word "sin" refers to a condition in which not everything is as it should be, in which something is lacking.
Perhaps the greatest revelation that Christianity brought into the world, the greatest "religious innovation," so to speak, is this notion that God is love. God wishes us to be united with him in love and does not wish to punish. Yet love to be real must be freely chosen; a love that is forced is by its very nature not love. If God allows us to participate in his being by loving, he is required to give us the choice of not loving.
Thus I think the "sin" component of "Original Sin" is entirely coherent. The difficulty lies instead with the "original" aspect—how exactly is it that previous sin entails that the rest of us also enter this world in a state in which something is lacking in our wills? I am not entirely sure (and the Catechism itself says that "the transmission of original sin is a mystery"), but my personal theory is that any sin, by its very nature as a turning-away from God, effects a separation between the physical and the divine realms such that when sin entered into the physical world, the physical world became imperfect. If this realm of existence has become tainted, we who come after the tainting enter a world of imperfection, of lackingness and thus are conceived in lackingness. Something—some element of salvific grace proper to the divine realm—is missing.
Perhaps the point at which human beings became capable of obeying or disobeying God was the point at which one of our ancestors was capable of giving him- or herself fully away, of surrendering himself not for his own good (and not for the survival of his genes either; as Dawkins brilliantly observed before he dabbled into fields beyond his competence, it is the gene that is truly selfish and thus we can observe seemingly "altruistic" behavior in animals like bees, who sacrifice themselves to protect their kin and thus perpetuate their genes even though they die) but rather for the good. The point at which a human being was able to surrender him- or herself for a good cause simply and exclusively because it was the right thing to do seems to be the point at which true love becomes possible, and thus relationship with God as well.
Says Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI:
> The clay became man at the moment in which a being for the first time was capable of forming, however dimly, the thought of "God". The first Thou that—however stammeringly—was said by human lips to God marks the moment in which the spirit arose in the world. Here the Rubicon of anthropogenesis was crossed. For it is not the use of weapons or fire, not new methods of cruelty or of useful activity, that constitute man, but rather his ability to be immediately in relation to God. This holds fast to the doctrine of the special creation of man ... herein ... lies the reason why the moment of anthropogenesis cannot possibly be determined by paleontology: anthropogenesis is the rise of the spirit, which cannot be excavated with a shovel. The theory of evolution does not invalidate the faith, nor does it corroborate it. But it does challenge the faith to understand itself more profoundly and thus to help man to understand himself and to become increasingly what he is: the being who is supposed to say Thou to God in eternity.
-Ratzinger, In the Beginning...
Firstly, God is timeless. Therefore the span of time between the creation of the universe and the appearance of the first rational/moral agent is of no consequence.
Secondly, it appears that this universe is unusually conducive to life. Now, I'm a theologian, not a physicist, and so I may be talking out of my ass here, but as Martin Rees writes in Just Six Numbers there are six fundamental constants that "constitute the 'recipe' for a universe," such that if any one of them were even slightly different, this universe would be utterly incapable of producing the advanced forms of life capable of rational inquiry and moral reflection that are relevant to our discussion. For example, the value of the fundamental constant ε is 0.007, and "if ε were 0.006 or 0.008, we could not exist." Thus I don't think we can say that this is the case of a "laissez-faire" creator; rather, it would seem that this creator ensured that rational beings would eventually come to exist in the universe that he created and that we were thus intended.
Thirdly, God does not disappear from the scene at the point at which beings are capable of acknowledging him. He makes his presence known and is active in history (and with the incarnation he even enters history).
There is an excellent book called The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity that talks about the far, far, far, far, future of the universe (on the order of 10^1500 years and longer), and talks about how long it will take for every proton to decay, every black hole to evaporate, and more, until absolutely nothing is left anywhere.
This book convinced me that immortality would be undesirable.
Physicists take the idea of additional unknown dimensions seriously. I think the implication is that some unusual phenomena share a common physical mechanism that isn't very well understood but that science is at least aware of. It's interesting to consider that some religious or spiritual phenomena might have an actual physical basis. I think we're culturally conditioned to believe that some supernatural phenomena are non-physical but increasing evidence points in the opposite direction.
http://www.amazon.com/Warped-Passages-Unraveling-Mysteries-Dimensions/dp/0060531096/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1375151231&sr=8-4&keywords=Lisa+Randall
Not OP, just helping out with some formatting (and links!) because I like these suggestions.
> 1) The Magic Of Reality - Richard Dawkins
>
> 2) The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
>
> 3)A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (Any Book By Daniel Dennet)
>
> 5)Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
>
> 6)From Eternity Till Here - Sean Caroll (Highly Recommended)
>
> 7)The Fabric Of Cosmos - Brian Greene (If you have good mathematical understanding try Road To Reality By Roger Penrose)
>
> 8)Just Six Numbers - Martin Reese (Highly Recommended)
To build on doc_daneeka's answer, I'll try to recollect an explanation I read about 4D objects in 3D space.
An object existing in n dimensions may be represented in n-1 dimensions. This representation may be called a shadow.
So, a 2D representation of an object existing in 3 dimensions is called a shadow (and is a shadow as we know it). Looking at a 2D representation alone, one might be able to reconstruct what the original object looks like in 3D.
Say, you see the shadow of a clear glass vase. If you know where the light source is placed, you might be able to ascertain what the vase looks like based solely on its shadow. Spin the vase, and the shadow will show some movement as well.
What we're looking at is a 3D representation of an object that exists in 4 dimensions. For a moving object in 3 dimensions, its shadow would also show movement albeit only in two axis. Similarly, objects in 4 dimensions would show movement along three axis.
From what I gather, we haven't yet developed a sophisticated way to think or even explain (to the layman at least) what an object might look like in 4D. Most of our brains aren't wired to think that way. Kinda like the characters in Flatland - really nice read, BTW.
You know...I may have come across this explanation while attempting (and failing miserably) to read and understand Lisa Randall's Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.
There are similarities with Stephen Wolfram's "new kind of science", even though it's not exactly the same thing. What Wolfram did is more akin to philosophy of science (and it's quite controversial with scientists), whereas this article refers to actual cutting-edge research in fundamental physics.
There are many thinkers nowadays converging on vaguely similar ideas. E.g. Max Tegmark is asking whether the Universe, at the very bottom, is perhaps just pure math - read his book "Our mathematical Universe", it's engaging, well written, and he's careful to separate scientific fact versus scientific hypothesis versus scientific imagination (you do get all 3 kinds in the book, he just makes a note at the beginning, explaining where each category begins and ends, which is nice).
https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Cosmology-Barbara-Ryden/dp/0805389121
> I think you'll be surprised by how much this helps.
I personally only leave gentle, new age/ambient type music (or some gentle classical, etc) channels on at home in the background now. Only rarely bother with a movies, and if I do, it's a DVD I bought from a older movie, usually decades old films. You can completely see the difference between today's filth media, and anything else, even from 20 years ago. It's sickening how bad it's become.
>For example, it's easier than ever to find and buy an old book that you want to read
I've wanted this book for at least 25 years, and just finally got me a copy to read, or at least add to by library for now.
>Also, don't forget that there are still lots of good people out there in the world.
Thanks. I personally needed this.
Even though you want the full tensor treatment, I would first go through Ryden and make sure you understand the basics well. This is a great undergraduate standard written at the level for those who know "calculus, linear algebra and classical mechanics" and teaches the undergraduate level basics as well as anything.
After this, the standard modern graduate texts are Modern Cosmology by Dodelson and Physical Foundations of Cosmology by Mukhanov. Both use tensors and the full GR treatment with the former, in my opinion, being an easier text (which I think have some great initial chapters describing GR) but Mukonov going through some very advanced concepts like renormalization in quantum field theory, etc...
In addition to textbooks, Baumann's lecture notes on inflation are very good.
Good luck.
These:
How to Read the Solar System: A Guide to the Stars and Planets by Christ North and Paul Abel.
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.
Cosmos by Carl Sagan.
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan.
Foundations of Astrophysics by Barbara Ryden and Bradley Peterson.
Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program by Pat Duggins.
An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything by Chris Hadfield.
You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes: Photographs from the International Space Station by Chris Hadfield.
Space Shuttle: The History of Developing the Space Transportation System by Dennis Jenkins.
Wings in Orbit: Scientific and Engineering Legacies of the Space Shuttle, 1971-2010 by Chapline, Hale, Lane, and Lula.
No Downlink: A Dramatic Narrative About the Challenger Accident and Our Time by Claus Jensen.
Voices from the Moon: Apollo Astronauts Describe Their Lunar Experiences by Andrew Chaikin.
A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin.
Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA by Amy Teitel.
Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module by Thomas Kelly.
The Scientific Exploration of Venus by Fredric Taylor.
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe.
Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White and Richard Truly.
An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Bradley Carroll and Dale Ostlie.
Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space by Willy Ley.
Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John Clark.
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking.
Russia in Space by Anatoly Zak.
Rain Of Iron And Ice: The Very Real Threat Of Comet And Asteroid Bombardment by John Lewis.
Mining the Sky: Untold Riches From The Asteroids, Comets, And Planets by John Lewis.
Asteroid Mining: Wealth for the New Space Economy by John Lewis.
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris.
The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe Report by Timothy Ferris.
Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandries by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon by Craig Nelson.
The Martian by Andy Weir.
Packing for Mars:The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach.
The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution by Frank White.
Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.
The Science of Interstellar by Kip Thorne.
Entering Space: An Astronaut’s Oddyssey by Joseph Allen.
International Reference Guide to Space Launch Systems by Hopkins, Hopkins, and Isakowitz.
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene.
How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space by Janna Levin.
This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows.
The Last Man on the Moon by Eugene Cernan.
Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz.
Apollo 13 by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.
The end
Some general searches through the Phil Sci archives might turn up papers related to your interests here. In particular, there might be something under the general topics of cosmology, quantum gravity, or relativity theory.
Within that archive, some that stand out to me in relation to your question are: this paper on anthropic reasoning about many worlds, this paper summarizing unification arguments for string theory, this paper on the ethical implications of many worlds, this paper on general trends in philosophy of physics (one of which is the cosmological many worlds), this paper on whether or not string theory posits mereological simples that are extended, and this paper on what is involved in deriving GR from some string theories.
Some theoretical physicists who work on string theory or quantum gravity in general and who come to my mind as conscious of history & philosophy of science as well as metaphysics are: Lee Smolin, especially his books The Trouble with Physics and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity; Sean Carroll, perhaps even his lectures on time and his book The Big Picture; and Carlo Rovelli, especially his books Reality is Not What it Seems and Quantum Gravity. Again, I don't mention them to point to philosophical work on those topics but only to mention some physicists who work on those topics and who have a more philosophical bent.
I know Alexander Blum has looked into the history of quantum gravity but I don't know what he's written on the philosophy of quantum gravity or specifically on string theory. Tim Maudlin and Craig Callender do quite a lot of work on philosophy of space-time but I don't know that they have specifically discussed string theory. In general, you might find some interesting papers in the philpapers browser for the philosophy of string theory or of cosmology.
Also, Jeffrey Barrett has done quite a lot of work on quantum interpretations and Everettian many-worlds, which is not to be confused with the string-theoretic landscape of many worlds but you might find some of his work interesting.
Hope that helps!
I was homeschooled as a child/young adult using strictly Christian coursework. My first year of college, some liberal studies course I was required to take forced us to read Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution. That small book changed my life. I started reading more and more, talking with the professor, and questioning everything I was taught.
Needless to say, I am now an atheist.
Try this book.
Except if you read the literature evidence for the conventional notion of dark matter heavily outweighs evidence for "Modified Newtonian Gravity."
That being said, no is claiming we understand the true nature of gravity yet, as we haven't invented a Grand Unified Theory. Mind you, the conventional notion of dark matter entirely takes into account the effects of general relativity.
For an introduction to the subject, read this.
An 8" Dobsonian reflector telescope, such as the Orion XT8i with Intelliscope to help you find your way around the sky. $640.
The book NightWatch, $20.
The Backyard Astronomer's Guide, $30.
A planisphere. Get one appropriate for your latitude. $10.
A comfortable camping stool for sitting at the eyepiece, or your back will quickly complain. ~$30.
SkySafari for your iPhone/iPad, $3.
A pair of good binoculars, 8x50 or 10x50, $120.
A nice wide-field (62-degree) eyepiece, like the Explore Scientific 24mm. $140.
That's about $1000.
One more thing to add: a dark sky. Priceless.
If this interests you, you might enjoy warped passages by Lisa Randall. It’s a few years old now, so I’d bet the science has evolved, but she does a great job of explaining these kinds of concepts in lay-terms.
No, not really. First of all the Big Bang was not an explosion of light and heat that we could "see" (unlike, say, a supernova) but a rapid expansion of space. That's all space, including the bit we're riding along on. Space is expanding everywhere - so everywhere we look, galaxies are rushing away from us. It's really hard to wrap one's mind around; try to think of a bunch of magic marker dots on a balloon you're blowing up. What direction would an ant on one of those dots look to find the origin of the expansion?
As far as the time travel idea, a crude analogy might be to suggest that when you look at the sun - the light from which is eight minutes old - you aren't traveling backwards in time; it just took a few minutes for the sunlight to reach you. Likewise when we see the light from far away stars, it just took a really really fucking long time to get here, so we're seeing light as it was emitted aeons ago.
We can detect cosmic microwave background radiation, which is pretty interesting stuff. It's also relevant here because it's uniformly distributed everywhere we look. Where is its origin if it's uniformly distributed?
[edit] I highly recommend you read Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos for starters.
Actually, I am
Regarding Phil Plait (an astronomer's) Bad Astronomy book:
> Mr. Rutkowski starts with some polite comments about my site, and then gets into my UFO chapter. In it, I relate a story about how I mistook a flock of ducks under unusual circumstances for a UFO. I was never seriously thinking they were alien spaceships, but I was pretty befuddled by what I was seeing, until they were pretty close by and obviously ducks.
(emphasis added)
Note that this is a professional astronomer. He has spent an absurd amount of time looking at the night sky. Yet he was still fooled by a pretty mundane object. He was not the only one, in fact one of the main explanations of the original "flying saucer sighting" is pelicans much closer to him than he expected.
Please everyone, read this book.
It is written conversationally and with very simple mathematics, but is extremely thorough in explaining most of the WTF?! bits of relativity.
Also Einstein had a great sense of humor.
TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol 1-3, W. Richard Stevens.
The Art of Electronics 3rd Edition, Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill.
Gravitation, Charles W. Misner, John Archibald Wheeler, and Kip Thorne.
>So I was thinking to myself that Dark Energy seems like a seemingly, for someone like me at least, silly concept
oh thanks for your assessment on 50 years of cosmology research.
come back when you have read a book on cosmology.
https://www.amazon.com/Cosmology-Steven-Weinberg/dp/0198526822 (or your local library).
that book also discusses alternative explanations of observations in detail and shows why they can be rules out.
>As in, "Big Bangs" occuring across multiple regions, very far apart, couldn't the gravity of these individual "universes" cause something similar?
very sophisticated suggestion. tell me how that is different from "i dunno, it doesn't fit the equations, i haven't even checked, i just blabber random stuff that seemed to sound good."
>I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, so forgive any logic fails I may have made. :I
the only thing you can be blamed for is not bothering to read up on what research has been done, yet commenting on it, calling it silly, and providing 3 vague half-baked sentences of how you would explain it. that's arrogance.
have a nice day.
When I was in seventh grade my math teacher lent me some books to read:
I credit these books for sparking my interest in math.
Other books I'd recommend include Imaginary Numbers by William Frucht, Flatland/Sphereland by Edwin A. Abbott/Dionys Burger (and Flatterland by Ian Stewart), The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers by David Wells, A Passion for Mathematics by Clifford A. Pickover, The Mathematical Tourist by Ivars Peterson, and any book by Martin Gardner or Raymond Smullyan. Also most books by Ian Stewart would be good, but he also writes higher-level math textbooks, so watch out for that.
With out a doubt the best intro cosmology book is Barbara Ryden's intro to cosmology
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Cosmology-Barbara-Ryden/dp/0805389121/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1372720990&sr=8-1&keywords=barbara+ryden+cosmology
Norman Bergrun, one of the leading space and aeronautics scientists of American history (and still alive and lecturing at 92), published a book called Ringmakers of Saturn where he claimed the rings of saturn are not complete. They are not complete because they are plasma exhaust being created by electromagnetic vehicles roughly 33,800 miles across, and therefore there is a gap at the base of the rings where the vehicles are.
If you dig I'm sure you can find a .pdf of it, his CV is as long as my arm. Guy has serious chops.
7,918 miles (earth's diameter) 2 is 15,836
7,918 miles 5 is 39,590
Yes his analysis is near the top of your range, but within it (4.27x). He also has images of them near the surface of the Sun.
I don't see how it's bunk? It explains the double slit experiment perfectly well and doesn't go deeper than that. Matter can be both a particle and a wave. It begins as a 'wave function' of probability. The particles location within the wave just isn't destined until it is measured/observed through an experiment. The measuring of such a wave forces it to collapse into a single location of matter. I will say that this is not an "Observation" in the traditional sense that it needs a living being to observe it (the giant eye in the video is misrepresented). It's all about the measuring of the wave through Mathematics.
It's still unknown why this occurs and is coined the 'Measurement problem'. The best explanation is that it supports the many world's theory of reality, in which all outcomes occur and we are but one of an infinite amount of outcomes.
I am no expert but it's insanely interesting stuff, I encourage people to look up the Quantum Wave Function on YouTube or grab a decent book outlining Quantum Mechanics.
Edit a few good options:
https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/1101984252
https://www.amazon.com/What-Real-Unfinished-Meaning-Quantum/dp/0465096050
https://youtu.be/OFwskHrtYQ4
https://youtu.be/p7bzE1E5PMY
Some people like this scope, but IMHO, this isn't a telescope I'd recommend: you pay too much for too little telescope and too much for mediocre electronic and mechanical mount components. If it's not too late, my first recommendation would be to return it and purchase an 8" Dob.
BUT, if you're not able or willing to do that, and this is the scope you have, then that's that.
My next recommendation is to join an astronomy club in your area. There most likely is one, and it's the BEST place to learn more about how to use your telescope and what to see. Membership in most clubs in the US costs $50 or less per year. If you let us know where you're located, I can try looking up clubs that are local to you.
Now, as for add-ons and other accessories... the first thing I'd recommend is a copy of Turn Left at Orion. It's a great introduction to using a telescope, and very user friendly.
Next, camera mounts: none. There's plenty available, but this isn't really a telescope designed for or good for astrophotography. You could possibly capture some decent images of the moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. But that's about it. This telescope has an alt-az mount, which is not anywhere near accurate enough for the long-exposure photography required for deep sky objects (nebulae, galaxies, clusters, etc...). If you're limited to 4 targets, then it seems a bit of a waste to me to buy an adapter. Also, using a DSLR would not be recommended, as the mount isn't designed to add a lot of additional weight to the back end, and it will likely decrease the tracking accuracy, and, depending on the weight of the camera and adapting components, could potentially damage the mount's components (unlikely, but possible). Since these mounts aren't well-constructed anyway, I wouldn't recommend this. If you really badly want to try imaging planets or the moon, I'd pick up a cheap webcam and modify it (there's plenty of tutorials online for this) to use with the telescope. There's also some low-cost planetary imaging cams (basically glorified webcams) on the market. They would be a better choice than trying to connect a DSLR.
For eyepieces... that's a bit more tricky. You get a couple lower-end 25 mm and 9 mm
plossl eyepieces. Plossl is a type of eyepiece design that is fairly common these days. They tend to provide pretty decent views, depending on the specific design, for a fairly affordable price. To determine your magnification, you take the telescope's focal length (1,500 mm in your case) and divide it by that of the eyepiece. For your eyepieces, this gives you a magnification of 60x with the 25 mm eyepiece and 167x with the 9mm.
Magnification is a funny thing, however. You can, in theory, magnify an image as much as you like. However, the telescope can only produce so much useful magnification, depending on a number of factors. The key factors are the telescope aperture, the steadiness of the air, and the transparency of the air. When light enters the telescope, it begins to diffract, which manifests itself in blurring of the image. At lower magnifications, it is far less noticeable than at higher magnifications, and the larger the aperture, the more you can magnify before the diffraction creates so much blurring as to be useless. I created this example to show what happens. While this is photographic, and has a slightly different cause, the overall effect is similar. As you continue to magnify, you lose sharpness of detail until the image becomes so blurry as to be useless. In the case of your telescope, under fairly good atmospheric conditions, you might get as high as about 250x magnification before blurring is too severe. Under normal conditions, however, 150x is a more reasonable limit (the rule of thumb is to multiple the aperture in inches by 30x for normal viewing and 50 or 60x for ideal atmospheric conditions).
Thus a higher magnification eyepiece probably won't do much for you except on very good nights, in which case a 6 mm eyepiece would really be pushing your limits. On the other hand, with the 25 mm eyepiece, you don't have a very wide field of view, so you might consider something like a 30 mm, maybe a 35 mm, eyepiece to get a wider field of view (though the 35 might be too long for this scope to use effectively).
Whatever you do, do NOT buy one of those inexpensive eyepiece kits that have 3 or more eyepieces and filters. The eyepieces are usually very low in quality and you really don't need all of them. You can buy separate filter kits for less, and a Barlow lens will not be particularly useful at all to you.
This telescope will be best for planetary observation. A set of basic filters might be useful. With planetary observation, these help to increase contrast to pull out specific details. This site and this one have some pretty good information concerning which filters are best for what. For lunar observation, a neutral density filter (aka moon filter) is also helpful to cut down the brightness and glare of the moon (essentially it's sunglasses for your telescope). For deep sky objects, colored filters are not desirable, though there are some filters that do help with observing particular types of objects. In particular "nebula" filters, which are combinations of narrowband filters to allow common wavelengths of light specific to different kinds of nebula emissions to pass through. An OIII (Doubly-ionized Oxygen) filter can also be helpful for certain nebulae. I wouldn't rush out to buy one right away, however, until you get a bit more experience. This is another good reason to join an astronomy club: going to star parties will give you a chance to talk to other people about what they use and see how filters can help you.
Another filter you might come across is what we call a Light Pollution Reduction (LPR) filter. These are a mixed bag, and more of a personal choice. They do not make viewing from a light-polluted area like viewing from a dark site. They do, however, for some objects, help increase contrast to make them more visible. This is another place I'd experiment before buying.
If you're interested in solar viewing, you do have some options, but proceed with caution. You can get a white-light solar filter (or make one yourself) for simple solar viewing. These will only show you the disc of the sun, sunspots, and, every few years, a transit of Mercury (the next transit of Venus isn't for another 100 years or so). These will not show you the solar granulation (the texture of the sun), nor solar flares/prominences. For those, you would need a dedicated solar Hydrogen Alpha kit (which is NOT the same as an Hydrogen Alpha filter for deep-sky observing). The white light filters can be made for under $30 and purchased for around $100 or less. The Hydrogen Alpha solar equipment would be several hundred dollars for your telescope. Whatever you do, do NOT use an eyepiece filter for solar observation. Some companies have produced these (I don't know if anyone still is), but they are NOT a safe option.
Ok, lastly, you asked about software. There's not much you'd need. One option is Stellarium. I believe Stellarium has drivers for Celestron telescopes, so you only need the cable connection equipment (sold separately, of course) from Celestron. However, I don't see much need for this. The hand control on your mount is just fine for finding objects, assuming you're properly aligned. A good phone or tablet app for determining what's above you right now would be helpful, but you don't need a computer connection unless you're doing imaging, and, as I said above, that's not highly recommended.
In the long run, I'd still recommend an 8" Dob instead - the 8" aperture is capable of showing you quite a bit more and doesn't require power (nor is there much to break down). But if you intend to keep this scope, you can make the most of it.
Good luck and clear skies.
> People seem to tell me to just stop asking these questions because it's impossible to ever know...
It's definitely not that you should stop asking the questions, it's that the only people who are genuinely qualified to answer them are cosmologists. So while it's fun to speculate, the only way to make real progress on these questions ourselves would be to get a PhD in physics. Which I'm pretty sure I'm not going to do at this point in my life. :-)
It's interesting to read what people who actually do have a PhD in physics have to say about these questions, though. That's why I linked you to a few articles/debates in my other reply. And there are plenty of books out there that look at the origins of the universe and how it could have arisen (for example The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll or A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss).
One thing to keep in mind is that quantum physics is not just counterintuitive but wildly counterintuitive. So even though we may have beliefs like "everything needs a cause", and even though that principle is reasonable in everyday life, it doesn't necessarily apply in quantum physics, where the very notion of causality is debatable. That's why non-physicists (definitely including philosophers and theologians) are just not qualified to answer these questions -- because our intuition leads us astray, and the rules that work for us within the universe fall apart when we're looking at the origin of the universe.
I've been exploring this recently. I'm not an expert, but I'll do my best to explain it.
The shape or object represented in the gif you posted is called a tesseract or a hypercube. You can search for these terms for more information.
To explain this, some basics about 2D and 3D must first be established to understand how to continue the explanation to 4D.
A super-brief explanation of the gif above as the four dimension object (spatially) is that it is a representation or projection of viewing a 4D object/shape in a 2D view. (That gif as displayed on our computer screens is 2D because our screens are 2D and it's not encoded as 3D to be viewed with 3D glasses) and a 4-D object or shape actually appears to us to be 3D objects inside of 3D objects, just as if we look at a 2D object - say a square drawn on a piece of paper - we are able to see inside of the 2D object and see additional objects drawn inside of it and just as we are only able to draw a 3D object on a piece of paper if it is drawn as a transparent outline, this gif shows the 4D object drawn as a transparent outline in which we only see the many sides folding in and outside of itself. A being that is capable of seeing four spatial dimensions would be able to look at you and see inside of you. The following demonstrates this concept pretty well:
Fourth Spatial Dimension 101 (video, 6:27)
To better understand the concept of the fourth dimension, read on. I also included more videos below, including an excellent one by Carl Sagan.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
First, some facts / definitions:
--------------------------------------------------------------
Conceptualizing the limitations and advantages of dimensional perception:
We are able to perceive objects spatially in 3 dimensions (3D). By spatially, we mean that we're interpreting the environment or world's space, and not considering the fourth dimension as something other than space, such as time. (The gif linked above is of a four-dimensional object of which the fourth dimension is also space.) When we look at a drawing of a square on a piece of paper, we are able to see not only its length and width, but also inside of it because we are viewing it from above - from height. If we look down at it and draw a triangle inside of it, we can see both at the same time. We are able to see inside of 2D objects. A 3D object is comprised of several layers of 2D objects stacked upon one another. So imagine the 2D drawing, and stacking many papers on top of each other until it's several inches or centimeters tall. That's a 3D object now. Then, shape it into a square at each sheet of paper (so cut through all sheets) and you will end up with a cube of paper. Shape it into a triangle and it will be a triangular, pie-like shape. Angle it more narrow on the way up and it will be a pyramid-like shape. With any of these shapes, we cannot see inside of it. But now imagine this: just as we in the 3rd dimension looking at a shape in the 2nd dimension can see inside of it, a being in the 4th dimension looking at a shape in the 3rd dimension can see inside of the 3D object. That is because just like there is only length and width in the 2nd dimension, but no height; in the third dimension we have length width and height, but no __. I'm unaware of whether there is a name for the additional direction that would exist in the fourth dimension.
I also don't know whether a 4th spatial dimension actually exists or is just an abstract concept, nor do I know whether it is possible or known to be possible to detect. As far as I am aware, the fourth spacial dimension is only known of abstractly, meaning that there is no evidence for it actually existing.
------------------------------------
These videos explain how to understand what the 4th dimension would look like:
Dr. Quantum explains the 4th dimension (video, 5:09)
An oversimplified explanation from the movie "What the bleep do we know: down the rabbit hole" in which the character, Dr.Quantum, first explains what an (imagined) 2D world (flatland) would look like to us - who are able to see the 3D world, as a way of understanding (or extrapolating) how a being that could see in the 4D world would be able to see through and inside of 3D objects. (note: I've been warned that this is part of a video that goes on to some cult-like recruiting, so please be forewarned about the video's conclusion and entirety.)
Cosmos - Carl Sagan - 4th Dimension (video, 7:24)
Carl Sagan explains how to imagine what the 4th dimension looks if we were able to see it and how it would allow us to see inside 3D objects. An important part of this video is explaining and showing exactly how and why we can only see a distorted version of 4D objects since we only see in 3D
4th Dimension Explained By A High-School Student (video, 9:05)
An excellent description of the first through fourth dimension and how we can perceive them.
Unwrapping a tesseract (4d cube aka hypercube) (video, 1:39)
Hypercube (video, 3:18)
Watch the above two videos to see how we can conceptualize a 4D object in 3D space.
Videos mentioned elsewhere in this comment:
Fourth Spatial Dimension 101 (video, 6:27)
Flatland (video, 1:39:56)
--------------------------------------
Videos, Books and Links mentioned by other redditors:
Flatland: a romance of many dimensions (Illustrated) by Edwin Abbott Abbott (book, free, ~230kb)
Amazon description & reviews
hat-tip to /u/X3TIT
"Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions" by Lisa Randall (Amazon book page)"
Looks interesting.
hat-tip to /u/karoyamaro
-----------------------------------
(Edited: 1- to add video lengths; 2- added book links, 3 - readability more videos, 4 - a warning about the Dr. Quantum video.)
Let's say that there is a hypothetical observer 10 billion light-years away. If that observer travels toward us at a speed of 10 km/hour, the observer's 'present' exists about 200 years in our future. Conversely, if the observer travels away from us at the same velocity, its 'present' is the same distance in our past.
Note that this doesn't allow that distant observer to ever see our future before it happens, as the speed of light prevents any information from our future from being communicated to the observer until well after it has become our present.
Source.
life everywhere
rare earth
origins of life
a brief introduction
also some taped talks scroll down and click blue "seminar" links.
Honestly, I don't think life often makes it past the single cell stage. We went for a billion years of single-celled life, and as far as can be determined, complex eukaryotic cells only developed once in all of the billions of years of life here. Just a freakish fluke accident, probably so rare that if it happens more than once, we'll never know because it will be millions of years separated from our time, and probably some other galaxy unimaginably far away. We are alone in a vast, dark, purposeless void.
Interesting book on the topic
The author Nick Lane also gave a nice summary on NPR's Radiolab which is worth a listen.
Also there is the rare Earth hypothesis and more detailed book on the subject.
"Pure energy"
E = mc^2 means "matter can be converted into energy."
No... just, no.
As for interesting ideas, there's a thought experiment in the famous Gravitation textbook where they imagine a civilization living on the surface of an artificial ring around a rapidly rotating black hole. They drop their garbage into the ergosphere of the black hole and use the Penrose process to extract energy from the rotation of the black hole.
That's just freaking cool! Why hasn't anyone used that idea as a sci-fi setting yet?
Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations for that:
If the black hole is about three solar masses (about the minimum required to form from gravitational collapse), a ring with a radius of about 1000 Earth radii (about 6 million km) would have a surface gravity of about 1g just due to the black hole's gravity. This would be well outside of the radius of the ergosphere (about 10 km). I haven't done the math, but I'm pretty sure it puts you well outside of any significant relativistic effects. And it's still less than 5% of the radius of a Niven ring.
This was the one that we used for Cosmology. It starts pretty gentle but moves into the metric tensor fairly quickly. If you don't have the maths I don't know that it'll help you to understand them but it'll definitely have all the terms and equations. As with Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics, the funny haired man himself actually had a pretty approachable work from what I remember when I tried reading it.
​
This one has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. Given the authors reputation for popularizing astrophysics and the title I think it might be a good place to start before you hit the other ones.
Don't jump to conclusions but there are a number of witnesses and speculations that suggest that our Moon harbours something other than random cuspids and barren wastelands.
My favourite tesimony is this guy - Karl Wolfe
Relevant reading material:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Somebody-Else-Moon-George-Leonard/dp/1522838678
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ring-makers-Saturn-Norman-R-Bergrun/dp/0946270333/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498592323&sr=1-1&keywords=ringmakers+of+saturn
Einstein: His Life and Universe
The Black Hole War
The Trouble With Physics
Parallel Worlds
The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe
Warped Passages
The Singularity is Near
Not sure if you've played then, but haven't: Kerbal Space Program is the best way to get an intuitive understanding of orbital mechanics. If you like to play God you should also try the Universe Sandbox, and if you want a really really hardcore space sim you should play (or wait, it's still in alpha) for Rogue System.
As for actual books, OpenStax recently published their free astronomy book, and it's quite good for an introduction. From there, it depends entirely on what you're interested in, there's literally a universe's worth of information about
Astrophysics,
Astrochemistry,
Astrobiology,
Astrometry and
Orbital mechanics (for the aspiring galactic navigator),
Cosmology,
Planetary geology and
Cosmochemistry (careful, these last two lead to geology and meteorology which are equally disastrously addictive fields!)
Also, feel free to follow NASA's, ESA's, and JAXA's blogs. And spend a minute each morning checking the astronomy picture of the day.
Just don't end up llike me and annoy all your friends.
Many physicists subscribe to the many worlds theory of quantum mechanics in which this randomness isn't random at all. Instead it states the each outcome of the wave function exists and is realized but they overlap for a while and produce some interesting effects but it's intimately unstable and we find ourselves with only one of the outcomes via a phenomenon called decoherence (as opposed to wave function collapse).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
Max Tegmark does a great job explaining about all the different types of parallel universes: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html
The type we're talking about now is a level 3 universe. There's a few good links on his MIT page, I do highly recommend his book which is written for the average person to understand: Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307744256/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awd_9rrBwbFHTHFAS
>...is it acceptable to consider a four dimensional object as being composed of an infinite number of three dimensional 'slices'?
This is perfectly acceptable and absolutely correct. The analogy holds for all dimensions. A line is composed of an infinite number of points. A plane is an infinite number of lines.
>If it's only a dimension, then we are just objects existing in that dimension and have a predetermined 'volume' and our existence at any instant in time is one of an infinite number of values in a Riemann sum.
Yea, something like that. Some physicist view it that way.
Maybe this can help you. The previous 4 pages of the chapter aren't available, and most of the images are blocked, so I'm not sure, this may not help, but start reading here.
I believe you made more sense than you think.
If FD want to adhere to the science, it seems likely that while microscopic life may be ubitquitous on planets wihin habitable zones, macroscopic life like Earth's may be very rare. Common M-class habitable worlds may be tidally locked storm-worlds, rarer O,B,A and F class stars may leave the main sequence before their Cambrian explosions, and the limited number of terrestrial, tectonically active worlds in non-eccentric, continuously habitable orbits around G and K class stars of the right age (4-5.5 B years for macroscopic life on Earth, til our own runaway greenhouse), and that haven't been sterilized by cometary impact or nearby supernova, may severely limit independent origins for macroscopic life. See Rare Earth, How to Find a Habitable Plant, Lucky Planet, and Where is Everybody for further constraints.
Hence most of the macroscopic life found on HZ worlds in human space may be seeded during terraforming operations. Inhabited Earth-like planets may mostly have Earth creatures, borrowed from the 101 wild animals of Zoo Tycoon, but also the domesticated animals humans bring everywhere they settle.
Truly alien macroscopic plant and wildlife may await till peace accords with Thargoids allow us to land on their own thargaformed worlds.
Feynman's QED
Asimov's non-fiction is good
Godel, Escher, Bach
Einstein's original book
Maxwell's book (lots of math)
According to Dr. Phil Plait in his book Death From the Skies, a powerful enough solar flare has the capability to overload power lines and transformers, which is why I said essentially. Because obviously if every power line and transformer is blown out or snapped it's not going to be a simple repair.
There is no way Phil Plait said the asteroid "is going to hit us in 2029". I think you may have misheard or misunderstood the show and I highly suggest reading Death from the skies! where he explains the different probabilities of different doomsday scenarios occurring.
I'm not at this level yet, but Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler is a well known for being a great and thorough book on the subject and you can get a used one for $28.
https://www.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/0691177791#customerReviews
It is also known as MTW Black Book of Gravitation.
You can get some good views of the gas giants. Assuming you are in the continental U.S., Saturn should be viewable shortly after sunset and Jupiter should be viewable shortly before sunrise. Saturn would probably look better than Jupiter with your binoculars.
You should also be able to see Andromeda's galaxy around this time of the year. I can't say for certain how much detail you can get out of it but with good light conditions, I'd be willing to bet you'd be able to see the disk.
Star clusters are where binoculars really shine (sometimes even providing better views than telescopes), you might want to take a look at the list of Messier objects to find some good star clusters to look at. Make sure that you take a look at the Seven Sisters this fall, it is definitely my favorite star cluster.
If you are new, you should really invest in a good planisphere such as this one. Just make sure to get one for your correct latitude. You should also get some sort of red light, whether a red LED flashlight, a regular light with a filter, or just a flash light you have lying around with some red cellophane or brake light repair tape on it. There are even books specifically for binocular astronomy that might be a good investment.
Most importantly, have fun and clear skies!
I mostly read non-fiction, and am interested in politics, morality and how smart people can come to construct completely different versions of reality... soooo if any of that kind of stuff is your bag, I can recommend:
​
One Nation, Two Realities
The Myth of the Rational Voter
Stop Being Reasonable
Mistakes were made by not by me
The Big Picture
​
The first two are are semi-academic texts, so there is some experiments/data in there that you can skip over. The second two are meant for popular consumption about how people come to form and change opinions, and the big picture is a really approachable summary about everything from epistemology, quantum physics and consciousness. It's broken into lots of very short chapters so great to read before and after going to sleep.
The absolute best telescopes for beginners is a good 8 inch dobsonion. If you are willing to take the time to learn the night sky and don't need goto a good one is 400 or so new. For 650 you can get a push to 8 inch scope that allows you to tell it what you want to see and it will tell you how to push the scope to see it. True motorized ones are much more expensive
The reason 8 inches is the best starters is it's big enough to provide great views of everything from the moon, the major planets and all the brightest deep space objects. The dobsonion type scope is easy to setup,very stable, and light enough that it's not a big production to get it out and ready.
If you get a scope order the book "turn left at Orion" on Amazon. It is a great book that gives you easy to understand directions on where to point a scope any time of the year to see the best objects currently in the sky. Also see if there are any astronomy clubs in your area because they are normally very willing to help you get started
Astrophotography is a whole other can of worms and requires specialized telescopes mounts cameras etc
Below are some examples of Scopes and good reading:
https://www.amazon.com/SkyWatcher-S11610-Traditional-Dobsonian-8-Inch/dp/B00Z4G3PRK/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=skywatcher+dobsonian+8&qid=1569033244&s=gateway&sprefix=skywatcher+dobs&sr=8-3
https://www.telescope.com/mobileProduct/Telescopes/Dobsonian-Telescopes/Classic-Dobsonians/Orion-Limited-Edition-SkyQuest-XT8-Classic-Dobsonian-Bundle/pc/1/c/12/sc/13/101452.uts
https://www.telescope.com/mobileProduct/Telescopes/Dobsonian-Telescopes/IntelliScope-Dobsonians/Orion-SkyQuest-XT8i-IntelliScope-Dobsonian-Telescope/pc/1/c/12/sc/27/102012.uts
https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Left-Orion-Hundreds-Telescope/dp/1108457568/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=turn+left+at+orion&qid=1569034887&s=gateway&sprefix=turn+left&sr=8-1
Turn Left at Orion is by no means outdated! In fact, it just recently got a revised fifth edition out!
Besides, the night sky doesn't change that fast, and guides/atlases written 20-30 years ago are just as good now as they were on the date of their publishing.
For cheap/free accessories, here are my recommendations:
Find a local astronomy club and go to a few meetings. Astronomy clubs love new members, and they'll answer every question you have. If they have an open observing event, bring your telescope and you might even get to try a few of the accessories others have mentioned. You may get to see what Saturn looks like in your telescope with a 10mm EP and barlow before you buy.
Also, there are club members with old EPs for sale. Somebody's always upgrading their collection and looking for a new home for their old Plossls.
If you have basic woodworking skills, you can make a Denver Observing Chair for <$30. I think I made mine from these plans, but there are plans and how-to's all over the web. It beats hunching over the eyepiece for hours. Your back will thank you.
An accessory case is nice to have. Keep all your stuff in one place, and you won't accidentally forget something when you go out to observe. I use this 4-pistol case for $20 from Amazon.
If you're learning the night sky, get a planisphere and go out with it for 10 minutes once a week for some naked eye observing. Learn a new constellation each time. I think WV is in the 30-40 degree north range? Or for free you can download and print the map each month from SkyMaps.com
For getting started finding interesting stuff in the telescope, a book like Turn Left at Orion was a great help for me. Step-by-step instructions for star-hopping to the best and brightest stuff in the sky.
The best book I’ve found for locating things in Sky is Turn Left at Orion. Has illustrations for where to look for different objects, what they should look like so you know when you’re there, as well as ease of seeing based on type of telescope.
As for collimating, there are a few ways to, and plenty of YouTube videos on how to. Easiest is with a laser collimator. But unless you know someone who has one, cost money. Another involves lining up with a bright star, usually Polaris as it doesn’t move, moving your focus out until the star looks like a donut, then adjusting your collation into the “hole” is in the center.
Another option is to look up any local astronomy clubs to you and see if they have any public outreach events. The purpose of these events is for the general public to come out and view. Those with new gear are always welcome to come out to be helped with their new stuff as we (as amateur astronomers) would rather have someone with an interest know how to use their gear and enjoy the experience than get frustrated and give up the hobby altogether.
Hope this helped.
I think that it's firstly important to make a couple of distinctions regarding what we are seeking to answer.
When Christians talk about God, there are many attributes given to God that cannot be proven, but are revealed through the Bible and the tradition of Judaism and Christianity. God's existence here is also considered revealed. Whether it is reasonable to believe in what is considered revealed knowledge, i.e., knowledge that is not gained from verifiable empirical proof, is a separate discussion.
But, Christian philosophers argue, since the early Middle Ages, that that the existence of a being from which all of reality springs can be known by the use of our reason.
So, the next question is then, is there a being who is the highest in the order of all beings in reality and who created everything. Framed differently: Where does reality come from? Or, how is it that reality came to be? This leaves out any discussion of what is God like, such as is he good or is he an evil tyrant. We are simply concerned with is there a being which accounts for all of reality.
Many materialists will simply say the existence of the universe -- whether this is simply it, or this universe is part of a multi-verse -- is a brute fact. Scientists such as Sean Carrol make this claim. There's an excellent debate between Frederick Copleston and Bertrand Russell, who are both philosophers, where at some point Russell declares that the beginning of the universe simply is, no further explanation is needed.
When we try to prove the existence of God, or what we could call God, by the use of our reason, we are doing so by logical proof. This type of logical proof is inductive, rather than deductive. Science relies on inductive reasoning. For instance, Newton’s laws of motion are a product of inductive reason. When we see that a billiard ball at rest moves after being hit by a moving billiard ball, we infer that this happens every time a moving ball strikes a still ball. We can then make predictions about how balls will move under certain conditions, thus making the game of pool possible, challenging, and fun. If we could not predict such action based on inductive reasoning, then the game would be absurd, and we would walk away frustrated and then disinterested. The same reasoning applies to the design and construction of bridges, buildings, cars, and all the technology we use as the material basis for our society. Without inductive reasoning, our reality would simply be absurd and chaotic.
The reliabilty of how the universe works can also be projected backwards in time and logically backwards (i.e., independent of time, e.g., the design of a ladder which requires a first rung; the first rung exists at the same time the last rung does, but is logically prior to the last rung when we consider how ladders work). So, through observation, we see that something cannot come from nothing. You came from your parents, and your parents came from their parents and so on. Some scientists claim that when sub-atomic particles pop into and out of existence, they are coming from nothing. But that has more to do with the definition of nothing and what causes this sudden appearance of particles.
It might be helpful to learn about the [5 logical proofs for the existence of God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas) as put forth by Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher/theologian from the 13th century. The proofs are more comprehensive than what is in the linked Wikipedia article, but it gives a good gist of what these proofs are.
When a philosopher then argues for the existence of God, he is only arguing for a very basic idea of God, that there is a being who accounts for the existence of the rest of reality. Again, this is a logical conclusion, not one that is found through empiricism alone.
I’m not a big fan of proving “pink unicorns” or “the Flying Spagetti Monster,” because they serve to mock more than promote sincere discourse.
The first step in sincerely discussing these issues is coming to a mutual understanding of your starting point, and then being open to listening to all evidence and logical argument.
Edit: Cleaned up spelling and grammar.
I can go over some of the math too. That telescope has a 130mm primary mirror, hence the 130 in its name. In inches that's about 5", this is also called the aperture. The maximum magnification on a very clear night is 50x your aperture. 50 x 5=250. So you don't want to go above 250 power. I looked up the focal length and it is 650mm. This is important because you divide the focal length by the mm of the eyepiece you're using to get magnification. Your telescope will come with a 10mm and a 25 mm, so 650/10= 65x and 650/25= 26x. These will be good for viewing the moon, and a decent view of the planets but not for galaxies, nebulae or star clusters. Reversing the math, if you wanted an eyepiece that gave you the full 250 magnification that you can theoretically get you'd need about a 3mm lens. 650/250=2.6.
The Svbony or similar Gold Line series is highly touted on here. Under $100 for 4 lenses that are very good you get a 6, 9, 15 and 20 mm lens. If you pair that with a 2x Barlow, which is a lens you put your other lens into that doubles its magnification, you can stretch those 4 lenses into also being 3, 4.5, 7.5 and 10 mm. So for ~$130 you can get the most out of your scope and not have to buy anything for a long time.
What I've been getting the most use out of is a Celestron zoom lens. It can go from 24mm to 8 mm by just twisting the body of it. At its lowest magnification it can't see very much of the sky, so it isn't super popular because it's hard to find what you're looking for, but when you zoom in it really opens up what you can see. If I can't find what I'm looking for I switch to a 25 mm lens with better field of vision then put the Zoom back in. The zoom is ~$70.
Lastly buy the book Turn Left at Orion. Note: Don't accidentally buy Turn Right at Orion!! This book gives you history, cool facts and will help you find hundreds of cool objects in Space. If you just cruise around without a guide you'll lose interest quick. Best advice I got for using this book is to rotate the book in your hands until it matches what you're seeing in your scope. Don't assume up is up or left is left. The book is on sale right now for a better price than I got, might want to scoop it up now. It's the current edition and just came out this year.
If I confused you with anything I can clarify!
Svbony Goldlines
2X Barlow
Celestron Zoom
Turn LEFT at Orion
I have the same unit but w/o the motor drive.
William Herschel said that using a telescope is like a musical instrument - you have to PRACTICE.
I found the directions for setting up the equatorial mount tripod not very user friendly (makes sense if you already understand it, though!).
There are other videos, but I found this one hit all the bases:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plx6XXDgf2E
...and he's a regular Redditor.
I also found, with this same unit, that the finder was completely useless. Even adjusting the knobs, the finder didn't zero onto the subject! I ended up removing it. These Telrad finders are considered tops for a reason. You may luck out with the factory supplied one, however, your time will be a total waste of time if your finder doesn't work.
Turn Left at Orion. Yes, it's that good.
Get Stellarium and find out what's going on!
Get a planetsphere. You may get that Star Atlas with Pegasus on the cover, but I have yet to use it.
PLAN your sessions. Using Stellarium look at what the night's going to look like and pick some objects. Do some research on them. Honestly, you're not going to find the 6th moon of Pluto, but you can see the rings of Saturn and the blue hue in Alberio. Learn to find the constellations, certainly the big ones. Read up on their lore. It's fascinating.
ALL good science requires a LOG. Get a nice notebook and write down what you do.
Before I go out, I take the planetsphere and make a copy of the sky that night (I have a scanner/printer) and put circles where the planet(s) and other targets will be. Write a date on the printout, the location, and label the targets with numbers.
Nothing like going through everything and then packing up and driving home THINKING you forgot something. Make a checklist of the telescope parts!
Also, take a pair of binoculars with you.
I hope your first nights go more smoothly than mine!
Am reading Henrietta Lacks ATM and really liking it.
I also recommend ...
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
The Demon Haunted World - Carl Sagan
God Is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens
Risk - Dan Gardner
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre
Why People Believe Weird Things - Michael Shermer
How We Know What isn't So - Thomas Gilovich
EDIT : MOAR
Quirkology - Prof. Richard Wiseman
Tricks Of The Mind - Derren Brown
59 Seconds: Think a little, change a lot - Prof. Richard Wiseman
How to Lie With Statistics - Donald Huff
I love this question, and "to where?" is definitely one of those things where people a lot smarter than me say "I have no idea."
I read a book about it once that covered this at one point, Warped Passages if you wanted to know the name.
Anyway, she presented a few options for what the universe might be "shaped" like, in terms of curvature. Since we're talking about multiple dimensions here, i'm going to use a more understandable 3d version first.
In a shape that's (uniformly) positively curved, you get a sphere. At every point on the sphere, no matter which way you look, the surface always bends down (or up, if you're on the inside of it.) More importantly, if you travel in a straight line along its surface, you'll end up exactly back where you started, travelling all the way around the sphere. Another interesting property of being on a sphere is that there are no parallel lines, any straight line will have to intersect at two points. with any other straight line you can draw along the surface of the sphere. In this picture, the red line isn't straight, that's a circle. The green and black lines are straight. So if we're on the surface of a higher-dimensional universe that is a hypersphere, then if we travel in a straight line for long enough, we'd end up back right where we started. The "no parallel lines" thing ends up being "no parallel planes" they'd intersect at two. . . Lines? At opposite ends of the 4-sphere? This is where I get lost.
If the curvature of the surface were 0, then we'd have a large, flat, plane. It wouldn't curve. This is the realm of geometry that we all know and love. We have exactly one line that passes through a point and is parallel to another line. It doesn't matter how big a shape you draw, the sum of the angles of their sides will always add up to the same number, and the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle is constant. Lines don't roll back to themselves, they just go off to infinity. It's also boring.
The third option is negative curvature. And you end up with. . . Hyperbolic surfaces. As you'd expect, this is pretty much the exact opposite of positive curvature. There are two lines that pass through a given point and are parallel to each other, and an infinity of them that don't remain a constant distance away, but still never intersect (these have the fancy status of being "ultraparallel"). For example all of these lines are straight if you were to draw them on a hyperbolic plane, and none of the black ones would intersect the blue one. Bring this up to 3d, and you have an infinite number of planes that (pass through a given point and are) parallel to a given plane. And way more that are ultraparallel.
So. . . Yeah, these are the simpler ways that the universe might be configured, and i'm already in way over my head. Most of this information was from that book, some googles and some guesses. Randall Munroe recently gave a nice overview of dimensions, too.
Coming Of Age In The Milky Way is a fantastic book on the history of astronomy
There's also Chasing Venus which is a bit more specific than general astronomy, but the history of the 1761, 1769 Venus Transit.
Here are some books about astronomy. (Not how-to on astronomy)
Coming of Age In The Milky Way
Chasing Venus
The Hole In The Universe
Atom
Miss Leavitts Stars
Pale Blue Dot Sequel to the original book, Cosmos.
Death By Black Hole
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris
Risk by Dan Gardner
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (in 6 volumes)
Be sure you have 2 or 3 years freed up before you start that last one ... :)
> Are there any current experiments in the works that might give us a better idea of the nature of this stretching? I fully accept that people smarter than me have worked on this model, but I just don't see how that conclusion was made?
There's a lot of factors involved (like the cosmic microwave background etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space#Observational_evidence ) in how we arrive at the conclusion and if the above overview doesn't convince you it will be the best if you go to a library and get a book on cosmology and read through it. These are several 100 page thick tomes that summarize the science that has gone into this (including experimental, also including alternatives that have been checked and ruled out). Obviously there's a lot of details involved in this (which will be hard to fit into a reddit post) and you will have to look into this research in detail to judge it. Wikipedia gives an overview over the experimental evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space#Observational_evidence
These are two good books that cover this.
https://www.amazon.com/General-Relativity-Introduction-Physicists-Hobson/dp/0521829518
https://www.amazon.com/Cosmology-Steven-Weinberg/dp/0198526822
Have you read Weinberg's Cosmology?
Once you have read that you will probably be thirsty to dig a bit deeper. Weinberg hast to be a good option. He is probably one of greatest physicists of our time. Andrew Liddle has another book that takes things much further. It is still very accessible even though it goes into quite a lot of depth. The one downside is that there are quite a few mistakes in it.
I'd really recommend Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. The entire purpose of the book is to explain relativity and quantum physics to laymen. Has some really good explanations and great "scenarios" that can help describe the physics.
FWIW: In 2011 I was lucky enough to attend a public lecture with SETI's Seth Shostak's link to reddit comment summary which itself links to a video of the entire lecture
And a few months later SETI's Jill Tarter gave a lecture about extra terrestrial life here's a long reddit comment summary
PS: I think we're all going to kill off civilization farily quickly (possibly global warming, possibly overpopulation there are lots of possibilities) and Sir Fred Hoyle's argument is that once civilization collapses it wil not be able to restart..
> "With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only."
But simple life is probably everywhere.
If you support the Principle of mediocrity which most people who believe in alien life do. Than you should be thinking that Earth is average, hence why you believe with no evidence that there is alien life. With that logic you can gather a lot of data from Earth and apply that to other worlds. The way we evolved on this planet, how long it took, ect. Even without that thinking, its logical and consistent with what we know if you assume say, if the planet has a light source than the being will have a device to collect it (eyes). Its evolutionarily advantageous to see where prey cannot. Its also a good idea to be able to examine the food your eating. So not only will the being most likely have a mouth to ingest it food, it will probably be near its eyes so it doesn't eat something that will kill it. This is also evolutionarily advantageous. And ect.
Im leaning towards Rare Earth, and there are a LOT of reasons and very logical ones in which why I believe this. Not gunna go on and on, first one that comes to mind is a simple one. Its ourt location, no not within our Solar System but within our Galaxy. Not only do we need to be in a goldilocks zone form our Sun but also within the Milky way. Too close and we probably wouldn't last long with all the bombardment from cosmic rays, gamma rays ect. Too many star systems bunched up and with dangers from super novae, pulsars, quasars ect we would be toast before we evolved. Too high or too low in the Milky Way and we get pelted cosmic rays as well ( I believe). We are travelling at such high velocities as a Galaxy that we are in danger if we leave the protective regions in which we are shielded.
I really suggest before making the assumption that "green men" are out there, you read some discomfiting evidence and specifically on the Rare Earth Hypothesis. Great book is here. There is just so many factors that the average person doesn't realize aside from the one fact you often hear. "So many stars, must mean so many life forms"
Just wanted to add that the Fermi Paradox is very relevant and isnbt to be taken lightly. Truly after 14.6 billion years there4 has been plenty of time to a race to advance and leave its solar system to colonize the Milky Way. Why haven't we seen them or artefacts of them? If I had to concede that there are Aliens than my answer to this question is, we are all stuck in our own solar systems. Space travel inst practical or efficient and faster than light WILL NEVER HAPPEN. So even if you think they are out there, we probably will never see them
http://www.amazon.ca/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387952896/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1347110530&amp;sr=8-11
**By Alien life I mean sentient/intelligent/technology ect. The Rare Earth hypothesis doesn't argue about microbial life.
Ah, but no experts would dare claim that such advanced ET's can be found in our solar system or anyplace that is reachable by humans. As far as other solar systems, I can pretty much guarantee that the only contact we would have would be via radio or laser transmissions. There basically zero chance of a face-to-face meeting. As SETI continues its radio sweeps of the closest stars and finding nothing, the distance for such a contact keeps getting pushed out, way beyond any place that humans can ever get to.
As far as sources, the best is the Rare Earth book.
The Wikipedia Rare Earth page is a good summary of the pros and cons.
It is an interesting argument and I could go either way, but it is becoming increasingly clear that there are no ETs near (say 10 light years) Earth.
Pistachio butter Would make a great unique gift.
Cosmos and Neil DeGrasse Tyson related
One of Louis C. K.'s DVDs. All his DVDs are pretty cheap on Amazon.
Mets wallet
So much Licorice!
Fun book all about New York.
You're sweet to want to treat him to gifts. Happy early Birthday to your dad! I love shopping for others.
Edit to add coffee Community Coffee is made in New Orleans and living in South Louisiana it's the coffee king down here. Where I live there is a CC's coffee house on every corner like Starbucks in Seattle. I had to recommend this coffee to you for your dad. The Cafe El Special is the smoothest greatest coffee.
I took an entry-level astronomy class in which we read this book which outlines this idea.
That's a very tortured reading of just one of the stories of a post-resurrection appearance.
I was thinking about what you said about us deserving more proof. Frankly, I think we've got far more than we have any right to when compared to previous generations.
In Jesus' day, only a few thousand people saw him work a miracle. Only a thousand at most saw him after the resurrection. In all of human history, seeing the supernatural has been confined to a relative handful of people.
Today, though, every single person in the developed world has access to
No, we don't get to see Jesus in the flesh -- walking on water or otherwise -- but we've got more than any generation since his has had. Far more. And we're going to be held responsible for what we did with that privilege.
first thanks a lot, great comment. since it's obvious you are increadibly knowledgeable, i want to ask you a question: isn't the multiverse theory basicly a response to books like
https://www.amazon.com/Just-Six-Numbers-Forces-Universe/dp/0465036732
that basicly says that the fact that we live in an inhabitable world in no shorter than a miracle? doesn't this theory try to explain in scientific way the unprobability of our very existence?
There's a number of fundamental constants to our universe. If any of them were even 5% or more different, the universe wouldn't be capable of supporting life.
This book is a very accessible explanation of (some of) them.
There is a book called The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity that talks about EXTREMELY LONG spans of time, far beyond a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years. Eventually everything decays and disappears, including supermassive black holes, all stars everywhere, protons, neutrons, everything, including diamonds (and graphite).
I am going to strongly recommend that you read a book that might help you deal with the scale of the universe, and that is The Five Ages of the Universe, which takes you from the inconceivable tininess of the beginning to the unfathomable immensity of the far future, and imparts a sense of wonder and hope to the whole thing: it is possible that, no matter how big it gets, how far apart everything is, how dim the lights become, complex life can still exist and thrive. The book is like $10 for your Kindle and it's glorious.
Just throwing this out there, but the book THE FIVE AGES OF THE UNIVERSE covers this topic extremely well. (http://www.amazon.com/The-Five-Ages-Universe-Eternity/dp/0684865769)
The five ages are: The Primordial Era, The Stelliferous Era (current), The Degenerate Era, The Black Hole Era, and The Dark Era. It's that last one that you're interested in.
Basically, all matter decays, all energy is scattered, and no new events ever occur.
I'm no physicist. My degree is in computer science, but I'm in a somewhat similar boat. I read all these pop-science books that got me pumped (same ones you've read), so I decided to actually dive into the math.
&#x200B;
Luckily I already had training in electromagnetics and calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra so I was not going in totally blind, though tbh i had forgotten most of it by the time I had this itch.
&#x200B;
I've been at it for about a year now and I'm still nowhere close to where I want to be, but I'll share the books I've read and recommend them:
&#x200B;
I'm available if you want to PM me directly. I love talking to others about this stuff.
Nope, some guy named Ian Stewart, according to Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Flatterland-Like-Flatland-Only-More/dp/073820675X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1247600995&amp;sr=8-1
It was kind of a mindfuck since I was 13 when I read it, but it helped me understand geometry, abstract math, and space-time later on.
Did you happen to learn this reading Warped Passages? Because I just learned it yesterday!
(Simplification and semi-mediocre understanding of a high-school student)
Essentially, it's a particle that, through fundamental interactions with other particles such as leptons and quarks and the so called "Higgs Field" cause inertia (mass) to arise. I would consult Wikipedia if I were you and would check out some readings.
Warped Passages by Lisa Randall
A Brief History of Time+The Universe in a Nutshell - Stephen Hawking
The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
Personally, I'd recommend the first because, if a little bit dry, Randall explains the Higgs theory better. (The second book was what got me obsessed in science two or three years ago.) Happy Trails!
excellent recent "progress to date" science book on implications of hidden dimensions in the universe
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060531096?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=reddit0e-20"&gt;Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions</a>
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
"Coming of Age in the Milky Way" by Timothy Ferris:
Linky
Great, glad you find it useful. I cannot recommend it highly enough - it's very soul-enriching, especially in the modern technology age where it's about cramming as many megapixels of saturated color into your retina as quickly as possible. If you are fortunate enough to live in an area with low light pollution, you should definitely consider taking it up!
There are many excellent books out there, and also a pair of good binoculars cannot be beat (like a solid pair of 10x50s from an astronomical manufacturer like Meade or Celestron). For alignment, you can get one of the fancy GPS-guided "go-to" telescopes, or you can get an old school Tel-rad. My favorite books for learning the hobby when growing up were the Peterson's Field Guide to Stars & Planets, the Backyard Astronomer's Guide by Terence Dickinson, and a couple of books on star-hopping. There may be better ones now, definitely check Amazon. I also find the various tablet "Virtual Sky" apps really fun, although you can't really take a tablet out with you because it'll ruin your night vision. Red marker + saran wrap + low power flashlight is the key.
And if you want a nice, easy-to-read and enlightening book to ground yourself in the rich history of several millennia of human astronomy, you should check out Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way - it was accessible and engaging for me, even as a 13 year old.
Thanks. The Timothy Ferris book sounds fascinating -- exactly the kind of stuff I love reading about. I can't believe I had never heard of him or this book until now.
I found out Galileo's mentor had a metal nose while reading Coming of age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris. Great book, and essentially tells the stories of all the lives that have contributed to what we know about our universe today. Not to mention Timothy Ferris is an amazing writer.
> ind me a source that says we know for a fact that the universe is an infinite sheet.
Weinberg's book shows a proof that that the only flat, homogeneous and isotropic manifolds is the infinite sheet.
Also, the only person who would say that manifolds only have to have local properties like the universe we see are those that have no problems with fairies filling the universe as long as they don't locally. Think about it. Since homogeneity and isotropy for you only have to hold locally, there is nothing wrong with postulating the universe is full of fairies, just not locally.
Sure, if to make your case all you require is that the physics we observe only holds locally than there is nothing wrong with globally the universe being filled with fairies, Santa Clauses, not being isotropic or whatever floats your boat. But there is no reason to take these universes seriously and so there is no reason to conclude anything other than the universe is infinite, since this is the only universe that is compatible with observations, unless we say anything goes as long as it is not local.
> It still can and is still evidence
When the vast majority of correlated sequences are not causually related, correlation alone is not evidence. It provides a safety test used to discard ideas early. Since the majority of correlated sequences are not related, taking correlation as evidence is more likely to represent non-casual events as opposed to causual events. Only when there is an underlying mechanism and/or all (or most) other competing theories have been discredited through experiment or observation do we conclude that the events are casual.
Think about that carefully: the vast majority (precisely, all but a set of measure zero on a suitable space) of correlated sequences are not casual. Picking a correlated sequence uniformly at random from empirical measurements has a 0% chance of being casual. 0%.
This link demonstrates the ludicrousness of claiming correlation is evidence. In this case is the correlation evidence that the hypothesis is true?
> Tons of theories are supported by nothing more than correlation. For instance, the main methods for finding distances to other galaxies are the Tully-Fisher relationship and the Fundamental Plain. Neither of these methods has any theoretical backing, both are merely empirically observed correlations.
Yeah, except that's wrong. Both have significant theoretical explanations underlying the mechanism. For example, grabbing Weinberg's Cosmology off my shelf explains the mechanism behind Tully-Fisher on page 25, and the Fundamental plane is an extension of the Faber-Jackson relation (page 27), which follows from theory (virial theorem, derived from basic physics on page 66). In both these examples we believe the correlation is from causation precisely because we have a solid theoretical back, and we have eliminated other competing theories. Saying "Neither of these methods has any theoretical backing" is nonsense. For one thing, if it were true, there'd be some PhDs available to anyone explaining it, and no one is working on explaining it anymore - it's done. People work on newer methods, or refinements.
You're right. Read Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe" for more details.
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307744256/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;sr=1-1&amp;qid=1407273658
Max Tegmark - Our Mathematical Universe
> That would mean that whatever is outside the universe would also have to be infinite
That's my understanding, yes. Altho depending on your definition for "universe" the phrase "outside the universe" makes no sense. My very very lay understanding is that there's an infinite amount of non-dilutable (?) stuff growing at an exponential speed, and that something happened to precipitate out our piece of universe, which was followed by inflation, which caused the big bang, which resulted in an infinite-sized universe proceeding infinitely far into the future.
But again, I recommend a text book for such matters over a reddit comment by someone who read the textbook. https://smile.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307744256/ref=sr_1_1 which I need to read a few more times before Im sure I understand what I think he's trying to say.
Relevant: http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/life-is-a-braid-in-spacetime
And his book: https://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Reality/dp/0307744256
I religiously identify as Buddhist. I agree that "God" is the universe, but I tend to take a very large view of what could be meant by "universe". I accept the "supernatural" as being natural because I think that the part of the universe we inhabit, Sagan's "Cosmos", is simply a low-dimensional subset of a greater multiverse, with a specific set of rules, and that the rules may not apply "elsewhere". For me, this helps explain weird shit that credible people report having happened to them. Max Tegmark offers a Saganesque explanation for the multiverse concept which somewhat justifies this for me. But, anyway, I'm not trying to convert anyone to believing one way or another. And I'm fine with Christians as long as they're not douchebags about civil rights.
You've already read some classics, so I'd wager you're beyond lay-person "introductory" level.
My absolute favorite is Max Tegmark's Our Mathematical Universe. Starts out with a well-written, step-by-step intro to cosmology and our current understanding, but then ends up in some heady, and fascinating territory toward the end.
As for your location, I've visited Missoula (great and super friendly city!), and although it will have light pollution, you're surrounded by a lot of wilderness outside the city, so you should still have some great nights for home observation, or you could travel just a short distance outside the city for great views.
The way I thought of time travel isn't so much ripping someone from spacetime at a certain point and plopping them back in at another point. Although I remember reading about how it can be done with wormholes, but I would imagine if we had artificial wormholes for this sort of thing, they'd be anchored and your destination would be wherever it's anchored to. It was this article in the Daily Mail.
If time travel is possible, I would imagine it's more like speeding through time rather than "teleporting" in time. Before I continue, I want to emphasize that the ideas I'm putting forth is based on spacetime being an intertwined "entity".
If we were to simply speed through time, we'd still be in the same location we started (with a margin of error). This does assume that we can't travel faster than the speed of light (assuming that it's still a constant), and general relativity had determined that gravity's influence moves about just as fast as light. With those assumptions, gravity will keep you anchored to the planet. Since you were already moving to begin with in relation to spacetime and you're still influenced by your environment to some degree, it should stand to reason you're going to be on that same patch of ground you were on when you started (assuming you've stood still the entire trip).
With that idea though, you're still in danger of coming back to normal time speed inside a concrete wall (or whatever material they choose to make their buildings out of by that point). However, tectonic shifts would only be an issue if the fault opened up right below you. As for mountain forming, you should be...relatively okay depending on how far in time you go. The earth itself should be pushing up on you. That's if you were to stand in one place the entire time.
Now, if you were to teleport through time (without the help of wormholes), I would imagine you'd be able to control WHERE in spacetime you end up.
I'm not a physicist, so I'm sure there are holes in my logic somewhere...but this was a realization that occurred to me when I was reading The Fabric of the Cosmos.
It's also a great book :)
The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene
>If you know as much about science as I hope, then explain how everything came out so perfect out of (insert atheist way of creation)!
I will refer you to 3 books for that one, but then I will explain why that is not a valid argument and then explain why god does not answer that question either.
First the books: the first two will explain the big bang and inflationary cosmology (this is actually what took over or heavily modified the big bang theory from its original form) they are both by Briane Greene and I highly recommend them if you are interested in physics at all (they are not about god) the fabric of the cosmos and The hidden reality. There are also NOVA specials you can watch from the Fabric of the cosmos and his earlier book the elegant universe though I do not remember if they cover the big bang or inflation. The third book is specifically about the argument you just put forward. It is The fallacy of fine tuning:why the universe is not designed for us by Victor Stenger.
The reason that the argument you made is fallacious involves logical fallacies. Now, I don't want to seem like I'm talking down to you at all (I'm not) but I'm not sure how familiar you are with the intricacies of logic. Basically every argument has a premise, logical steps, and a conclusion. The argument you made (that the universe is perfect) has three flaws.
1: False premise - The universe is not actually perfect, far from it in fact. The reason why we are accustomed to the universe as it is is due to evolution. We evolved to fit the universe, not the other way around. If you mean something specific like how could the constants have got to the exact values we have please read the hidden reality, it answers that question by explaining multiple instances of how the universe can be fractured into slightly variable universes. The god delusion also answers this question but from my experience most theists are not willing to read it.
2: False premise - The burden of proof is not on me to prove or explain anything. I don't know is a completely acceptable answer if I had no evidence to put forward (We do actually have evidence, see the three books). Saying that I don't know how the universe came about does not immediately cede the argument to god. God has to answer to the same standards of logic and evidence that I would require of my own pet hypothesis. Burden of proof was explain in analogy by [Russell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot "This is why our logo is riding in a teapot")
3: Logical fallacy - Argument from ignorance. I already explained this one a little but basically this is the part that says you cannot use what we both do not know as evidence. If we come to a cave, and you ask what is in the cave and I say that I don't know but I bet it's a dragon then I would be using our shared ignorance to try and put forward the idea of a dragon as the inhabitant of the cave (sorry this analogy is bad, I have a flu right now so I'm kind of worn down)
Now, the reason that god fails the logic test (before he fails the evidence test, which he also does) is that if you say that god created the universe then you have put a terminator on the infinite regression that is causality (there are some hypothetical reasons that causality could be violated before the universe but I am skeptical of many of them and it would take me too far off track to get into them). The problem here is why do you give god a break from needing a cause? If we both agreed that there must be a first cause, why the hell should we give it sentience, and intelligence, and supernatural powers? If we also put forward a first cause that did not have those things then we would have an explanation that used fewer assumptions (many fewer assumptions). One of the best logical tools is occam's razor, which says that when we have multiple competing hypothesis we remove the ones with the most assumptions. Now it is only a logical tool and does not guarantee we will be correct but it is still a good probability chooser (remember how I said science is about probabilities).
So anyways, if you read this far I really hope that your takeaway is at least to read the three books i recommended (they are complicated but very interesting). I would also ask that you read the FAQ and probably The God Delusion (as it covers more of the faux science arguments for god than God is Not Great).
You're on the right track. I find that cosmology, astronomy, biology, and geology are a millions times more interesting then any book of stories written long before men had the capability to understand the world around them. Keep asking questions and keep learning. And they have the added benefit of being true.
Yes. If you're reasonably intelligent you can.
http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Cosmos-Space-Texture-Reality/dp/0375412883
> Neither you nor I can accurately predict the course of technological development over the next century.
What can be predicted is that there will not be technology that violates the laws of physics. Technology that can circumvent it was imagined decades ago, but would require more energy than humans could ever hope to have access to.
> the construction of self sufficient colony ships to last the 100+ year journey between stars is entirely within the realm of known technology and our current understanding of physics.
As I said previously, I am dubious of the wisdom of such an undertaking regardless of the technical feasibility of a colony ship itself. Finding a suitable exoplanet, if one exists, poses a huge challenge with regards to time. Probes traveling at the speed of light would likely take decades, if not centuries, if not millennia to discover another Earth-like planet. It’s also very possible, perhaps even likely, that Earth is unique in the cosmos. In other words, it’s incredibly foolish to fantasize about leaving Earth prior to a suitable replacement being found.
> It is demonstrable that at every point in human history, what we thought was fundamentally impossible has been proved to be possible time and time again. This does not mean all things are possible or that even necessarily interstellar travel is possible. It does mean though, that my claim that it may be possible in the future is not irrational as I have a completely logical basis for my beliefs.
I’m sorry, but no, it is illogical, plain and simple, to believe that something might be possible in the future on the basis that “what we thought was impossible proved to be possible in the past.” It would be like me arguing against colonizing space because “what we thought was possible proved to be impossible in the past.” You know, things like Journey to the Center of the Earth.
> My friend, people from 100 years ago would have viewed our civilization with what we have achieved as veritable gods on earth.
In the past 100 years we have witnessed the useless slaughter of untold millions of innocents through war. As I write this, innocents are being uselessly slaughtered. Most of the world’s population lives in deplorable conditions. We have caused our own biosphere possibly irremediable damage. Tell me, what have we achieved?
> You have no place to say what will become feasible within the next hundred, thousand or hundred thousand years.
Once again, the laws of physics are as they are, and will not change in a hundred thousand years. Therefore I can come to conclusions on the basis of those laws which will hold true for n years into the future.
> I fail to see how you can even begin to possibly say human acomplishment is not astounding. How the hell can possibly be so deluded? We have split that atom, walked on the moon.
Our splitting of the atom has only led to the useless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents, stockpiles of nuclear waste, and a world held hostage by the threat of nuclear armageddon. If these are the consequences of our opening new technological vistas, God help us if we ever do unlock hidden secrets of the cosmos.
> Totalitarian is a system of government. How can an assertion about the nature of discovery be totalitarian?
No the nature of discovery, simply your opinions and style of discourse.
> Humanity is unquestionably the most important thing to have happened in our corners of the universe for quite some time. That fact cannot be denied, and I am not vain for stating it.
It can easily be denied, and has been by any number of prominent philosophers. Therefore, using language like “unquestionably” is why I call you out for being illiberal.
> Hiroshima and Nagasaki were triumphs.
This is a gem on par with your “Earth is pointless” quip.
> We don't have a perfect understanding of the laws of physics, not even in the slightest.
Yes, surely in the slightest. In fact, our lack of understanding is only incomplete in the slightest.
> So many times in the past we have thought they were completely understood and our understanding of them was turned completely on it's head.
No, I don’t think any man of science ever believes anything is completely understood. You keep making this claim, but its unsubstantiated and I’d wager apocryphal.
> It's arrogant to assume that we of all people in history have finally gotten it right,
That’s not what I’m assuming. I’m assuming the laws of physics will hold for the next 14 billion years as they have done for the past equal span of time.
> It's incredible vain on your part to claim that we have such a complete understanding of the laws of physics to rule out the possibilty of interstellar travel
As I’ve repeatedly said, even supposing interstellar travel was feasible, terraforming isn’t. Fantasizing about leaving Earth is foolish.
> But the sun will expand and swallow the earth far sooner than heat death will plunge it into darkness. That's so far into the future though, nobody can even begin to accurately predict where we'll be in even a thousand years, let alone a million or several billion.
Yes we can. The Earth might be uninhabitable in just a few centuries at the current rate of pollution.
> Regardless, if human life can truly be made interplanetary, the sheer rise in the number of human lives who will be able to appreciate the universe we live in, and the wonders they will see alone make the endeavor worth undertaking.
Most of the humans on Earth today live in deplorable conditions. It is silly to fantasize about utopias in space if we can’t even achieve it on Earth.
> You clearly do forget the limitations of your own knowledge, as our understanding of the laws of physics is so incredibly flawed and incomplete, even at our current level of advancement.
No, I don’t. I approach everything I think about through somewhat of a Socratic method. It’s possible to arrive at justifiable conclusions with incomplete knowledge.
> Even so as I said earlier, interstellar travel is entirely possible at sublight speeds within the laws of physics.
But terraforming isn’t.
> Your arrogance is so steadfast that you have somehow fooled yourself into believing that you, and you alone in history understand the limits of possibility.
No, I’m sure there are others who share my opinion and could defend it with far greater voracity and substance than I.
> If you told a man 100 years ago that we'd be flying across the planet in hours on metal birds, destroying entire cities with atomic weaponry, communicating instantly across the world with handheld devices and walking on the moon, you know what he'd call you? Insane.
Not if you told it to Jules Verne.
> I've spent too much time discussing this regardless. See you on mars mate.
You’re right, you have clearly made up your mind and can’t be reasoned with. That’s why in my original comment I made the quip about Earth-leavers scaring me almost as much as religious zealots, since they have quite a bit in common.
Ernst Mayer, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins have written some decent books broadly covering the evidence for evolution. Donald Prothero's Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters fits into that general category, and does a good job of outlining the evidence for evolution as well, in particular from a paleontological perspective.
Astrobiologist / Paleontologist Peter Ward has written a ton of fantastic books. I'd start with Rare Earth, which outlines the Rare Earth hypothesis, ie complex life is likely rare in the universe. If you read Rare Earth, you'll come away with a better understanding of the abiotic factors which influence the evolution of life on Earth. If you end up enjoying Rare Earth, I'd highly recommend Ward's other books.
Terra, by paleontologist Michael Novacek describes the evolution of the modern biosphere, in particular from the Cretaceous onwards, and then discusses environmental change on a geological scale to modern environmental challenges facing humanity. It's one of those books which will change the way you think about the modern biosphere, and the evolution in the context ecosystems, as opposed to individual species.
Another book by a paleontologist is When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, looking at the Permian mass extinction, which was the most catastrophic mass extinction of the Phanerozoic wiping out 95%+ of all species. More focused on the geology than the other books I mentioned, so if you're not into geology you probably wont enjoy it so much.
Biochemist Nick Lane has written some great books. Life ascending would be a good one to start off with. Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life is really excellent as well.
The Origins of Life and the Universe is written by molecular biologist Paul Lurquin. It mostly focuses on the origin of life. It's pretty accessible for what it covers.
Another couple of books I would recommend to people looking for something more advanced are: Michael Lynch's Origins of Genome Architecture, which covers similar stuff to much of his research, although takes a much broader perspective. Genes in conflict is a pretty comprehensive treatment of selfish genetic elements. Fascinating read, although probably a bit heavy for most laypeople.
Your question is way above my pay grade. I can only refer you to Neil Degrasse Tyson for that one.
>What do you think created our universe? The big bang? where did that stuff come from (open to any answer, just please no extremist anger driven posts please)
Origins: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith
Read this book if you want a clear, in-depth answer about the Big Bang and the expansion of our universe right after it. (It doesn't necessarily answer the question: "How did the Big Bang get started?" It does offer a lot more detail than a theist would, though.)
>(obviously not god since this is the atheist reddit but if someone who believes in a god of some sort is trolling here, where did your god come from? if he created everything, what created him?)
Infinite Regression
This is an excellent book that covers most major scientific subjects. More than that, it's a great read.
If you're looking for more physics related stuff, this is a pretty easy read and even has a NOVA series that accompanies it.
This book answers that question quite well.
If you're going for subtle, something by Neil deGrasse Tyson perhaps?
Book
The sensitivity of this ε value (and the values of other dimensionless constants) is explained by Martin Rees in this book.
Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees
Here you go. This book explains in detail why people believe in the above listed things, and also why they're wrong. I love the book. It covers other topics, too. Also, the Mythbusters covered at least the flag thing. I'm sure you can find it by searching for "Mythbusters Moon" on Youtube or something.
Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed by Philip C. Plait
Fun and accessible. Most of what's covered is basic but I learned quite a bit reading it.
I remember reading about that, and yeah, Phil Plait calls the bullshit out in Bad Astronomy. Hmm. Just out of curiousity, what is your favorite science book written for laymen?
It was a hot chocolate at Caribou. Reading material:
All in all, a pretty decent afternoon.
I recommend Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" by Philip C. Plait. It dispels a number of common misconceptions in a clear, entertaining style.
As someone who has read both your books Bad Astronomy and Death from the Skies, I first wanted to thank you for writing a book and maintaining a blog that opened my mind to science and skepticism. I highly recommend the former book as a classic in teaching scientific method mixed with awesome humor.
And now for the question, can you tell me what is your prediction for the status of skepticism in the future? Do you think there ever will be a world where at least most are skeptics and don't readily believe in superstition?
I can't believe no one has mentioned Einstein's book, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory. Actually, people may have not mentioned it because it could be a little light for a math major, but if you "prefer to not work to hard in [your] casual readings" then it could be perfect for you. Einstein kind of glosses over the difficult math, but if you know that stuff already then this book will give you a great intuitive understanding of relativity.
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-The-Special-General-Theory/dp/0517884410
This is a nice one for visualization:
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters_2015_Jan_1/Special_relativity_rel_sim/index.html
Going deeper than that, I'd just look for a cheap textbook on relativity that mentions simultaneity in the table of contents, or read Einstein's math-free book on relativity:
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-The-Special-General-Theory/dp/0517884410
(One reviewer there is saying that that version is missing the crucial images, so make sure you find one that has them.)
One thing I suspect you're getting hung up on is that this ought to make time travel a possibility. It doesn't.
Essentially, events can be separated in two ways: timelike and spacelike. So you should think in those terms instead of simultaneous or not simultaneous.
If events are spacelike separated, then they can be seen as either occurring simultaneously, A before B, or B before A.
If events are timelike separated, then event A precedes event B, always.
The difference between the two types of events is simple. If light has enough time to make it from one event to the other, they are timelike separated.
If light doesn't have enough time to make it between the two events, they are spacelike separated.
This is actually why faster than light drives ALWAYS implies the possibility of time travel, no matter what hand-waving warp drive, hyper drive, or what ever a sci-fi author tries to introduce. If you can travel between two spacelike separated events, you can travel backward in time. They are identical.
Put another way, with spacelike separated events, you can ALWAYS find a reference frame where the events occurred simultaneously, but you can NEVER find a reference frame where the events occur at the same place.
With timelike separated events, you can ALWAYS find a reference frame where the events occured in the same place, but NEVER a reference frame where they occurred at the same time.
When you say "clock in motion", you really mean in motion relative to an observer. The distinction is important, as it is the reason you can observe the time dilation phenomenon.
Example: I have a clock, and you have a clock, which are synchronized to begin with. You and your clock board a spaceship which after a relatively brief period of acceleration (this is to simplify the math), is traveling at 0.5c (that's 0.5 times light speed) relative to me. Now lets say that your spaceship passes by me, and I have a way to compare the ticks of your clock with those of mine. I will observe that your clock is ticking slow. However, you on your spaceship, at rest relative to your clock, will observe that my clock is ticking slow.
So which of us is right? Actually, we both are. By using the Lorentz transformation, we can convert our times to agree with each other. What it really means is that time can only be measured relative to frames of observation. There is no universal flow of time. Time and space are linked.
This is just one part of special relativity, and if you are interested in learning about it, I recommend Einstein's Relativity. It is written for the non-scientist and can be clearly understood, albeit with some difficulty and patience. If you really want to understand it, take a class.
Edit: spelling and grammar
This. Easily written for people with basic science backgrounds, builds on itself, and explains some more advanced scientific principles along the way.
Buy this book: http://www.amazon.com/Death-Skies-These-Ways-World/dp/0670019976/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1220913560&amp;sr=8-8/badastronomy
(Waits for Phil Plait to post, because he covered the real meaning of eternity so well in "Death from the Skies." (Hint: start with trillions of years, then proceed exponentially from there.) Highly recommended, two thumbs up, I am not related to the Bad Astronomer in any way, shape or form.)
https://www.amazon.com/Death-Skies-These-Ways-World/dp/0670019976/
Death From the Skies is an awesome book, btw.
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Skies-These-Ways-World/dp/0670019976/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1240177223&amp;sr=8-1
I read a book about that sort of thing years ago. I remember something about all protons decaying, which would put an end to matter. But I think that comes after the end of universal expansion anyway - at a point in time where every molecule is so far apart from every other that they never interact, and nothing ever "happens" again.
Either way, it's a loooooong time from now. Vastly longer than the age of the universe so far. Here's the book I mentioned. It's a good read.
Correct, both ending are interesting to read about.
I recently started reading the book The Five Ages of the Universe by Adams. It's pretty interesting.
The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity https://www.amazon.com/dp/0684865769/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_-g03Cb8EQ6DPP
There will definitely be a time when new stars
startstop forming, yes. It's a very long time from now, but even then, the universe will go on.Read the Five Ages of the Universe.
If you want to go down a more unconventional path there's always Gravitation. It's self contained and you'll be learning from the masters.
I am literally a physicist and I literally studied those things you're describing (the structure of accretion disks given some stochastic dynamics).
Again. We don't care about the why. We care about the how. And we already know how mass-energy causes spacetime curvature.
Read these, then we will have a discussion about the how of gravitational physics:
https://smile.amazon.com/Gravitation-Charles-W-Misner/dp/0691177791
https://smile.amazon.com/Introduction-Differential-Geometry-Curves-Surfaces/dp/1546735895
> Flatland
To which I would add Flatterland, which brings the mathematics of Flatland up to date.
You also might enjoy reading Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So
So, how about some entertaining math fiction?
Flatland, by A Square
http://flatlandthemovie.com/
Flatterland,starring Victoria Line, Granddaughter of A Square.
http://www.amazon.com/Flatterland-Like-Flatland-Only-More/dp/073820675X
As far as free school goes, nothing beats www.khanacademy.org, as long as you are just looking for knowledge, and not degrees. They've got everything.
This book is my standard door stop. Been meaning to read it for a while but for now it serves a purpose.
Ahh I see. Well since you've got a science degree already, you're better prepared to start learning than most people out there.
If it's any help, I strongly recommend Barbara Ryden's Introduction to Cosmology as a nice upper-level undergraduate intro to cosmology. As long as you have a decent grasp of calculus, and remember some fundamental electricity and magnetism, it should be readable.
Amazon Listing here
It's nice because it assumes no knowledge of GR (she presents some equations/results from GR, but you just basically have to treat them like law, basically the same way they introduce F=ma in physics 101). The book really tries to work off logical arguments and physical reasoning than it does lots and lots of math.
There's actually a large amount of different models you can come up with using the Friedmann equation by playing with the density of matter, radiation, and the cosmological constant. If you're interested in learning about cosmology, check out the book by Barbara Ryden. It's a very gentle introductory text that's accessible to anyone who knows a bit of calculus.
>'You're saying there is some particular plane in space about which the entire universe is mirrored'.
Precisely!of all the replies we got, this.You identified the crux of Prof Okolo's argument -if not , why not ?If you are aware of any asymmetry which coud cause this, could you point it out to us ,(online resources and books or monoraph welcome too)
Not only that: why isn't the universe symmetrical with respect to every plane? Why is it not completely uniform and homogeneous throughout all space and indeed time, so that if you mirror across any plane (or for that matter uf you rotate about any axis, or choose a reference frame with any velocity, etc.) it still looks the same? Surely this would be the maximum possible symmetry.
The standard answer to both of our questions is that in the very early universe this was indeed true, but the symmetry was destroyed by the randomness of quantum mechanics. For instance a proton and antiproton might pop into existence in one place, but not in another place under identical conditions. Of course these random events would in general be independent; there need not be any correlation between events occurring on one side of some particular plane and events occurring on the other side.
The resulting deviations from perfect symmetry would be tiny at first but gradually became larger. If one area of space were very slightly denser than its surroundings, its gravity would pull in more matter, further increasing the density. The expansion of space itself would also magnify these tiny fluctuations to a much larger scale, forming galaxies and superclusters and all the other interesting structure we see in the universe.
The primary tool for studying this is what's known as the Cosmic Microwave Background. This is a pattern of radiation that was emitted in the very early universe, but is still "visible" today (in the same way that we still receive light from ancient stars that are now dead.) From this we see that the early universe does indeed appear to have been extremely homogeneous. But when examined very closely it exhibits the sort of very slight fluctuations and patterns you might expect from the earlier discussion, and these patterns are still studied closely for information about this era of the universe.
Here's a review article on the state of cosmology and CMB research up to 2001. Although the majority is quite technical, note the introduction, which outlines our current model of cosmology:
>that he universe is spatially flat, consists mainly of dark matter and dark energy, with the small amount of ordinary matter necessary to explain the light element abundances, and all the rich structure in it formed through gravitational instability from quantum mechanical fluctuations when the Universe was a fraction of a second old.
If one has some physics background at the undergraduate level, Ryden's Introduction to Cosmology is a good starting point.
Last, I should recognize that of course there is still some debate about whether quantum mechanics is truly random at all. If for instance you adhere to the "many-worlds" interpretation of QM, you would say that any apparent randomness is merely a result of our own limited perspective. In that case, it would probably follow that the "multiverse" in its entirety is completely symmetrical. But of course proponents of the quantum many-worlds interpretation already believe in multiple parallel Earths and so forth.
>Ouch!Ouch! That hurts,especially as Prof Okolo is a relation. However this is no reason to exclude him from harsh but valid criticism,: so, why do you think the paper is low-grade ,if so?(note,if you read the comment attached to our question, Prof Okolo mentions in a supplement he is aware of symmetry-breaking in certain physical interactions ,but this is no reason to suppose it wuld affect the paper)
Apologies for any personal insult. Of course to come to places like this looking for constructive criticism (or enlist friends and relations to do so) is probably not the behavior of a crackpot.
I also hate to come to a philosophical forum and lambast philosophers of physics for not being physicists; there's too much of that going around already! But that being said, if the thrust of Prof. Okolo's argument is to assert the existence (or lack) of any particular type of symmetry as a theoretical prediction, this seems very much a question for physicists, and it's unlikely one will be able to answer it without a strong familiarity with the current state and methods of cosmological research.
Ringmakers of Saturn
https://www.amazon.com/Ringmakers-Saturn-Norman-R-Bergrun/dp/0946270333
Also Google helps a lot.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/703387/Former-NASA-whistleblower-s-shock-claim-space-agency-hid-PROOF-of-UFOs-orbiting-Saturn
https://www.amazon.com/Ringmakers-Saturn-Norman-R-Bergrun/dp/0946270333
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/mercurynews/obituary.aspx?n=norman-r-bergrun&amp;pid=189470263
19Alcibiades87: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link
Norman Bergrun, one of the leading space and aeronautics scientists of American history (and still alive and lecturing at 92), published a book called Ringmakers of Saturn where he claimed the rings of saturn are not complete. They are not complete because they are plasma exhaust being created by electromagnetic vehicles roughly 33,800 miles across, and therefore there is a gap at the base of the rings where the vehicles are.
If you dig I'm sure you can find a .pdf of it, his CV is as long as my arm. Guy has serious chops.
7,918 miles (earth's diameter) 2 is 15,836
7,918 miles 5 is 39,590
Yes his analysis is near the top of your range, but within it (4.27x). He also has images of them near the surface of the Sun.
There’s a lot to see out there. In the daytime its wildlife and scenery, but the night skies are clear and dark away from towns and you’ll see more stars and planets than you can at home... so bring along a good pair of binoculars.
These, from Celestron look promising, but you should probably do some research and shop around. A star finder is also a good idea.
Provided your dad didn't grow up in a big city he is old enough to have more or less taken for granted seeing the milky way on good nights when he was a kid. If you get far enough from city lights he's likely to see it again.
I love Carl Sagan's The Demon-haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark
Yes... I recommend this book first. Sagan is like a shakespear of science.
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/1439505284
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/1439505284
The Tzimisce Teacher:
&#x200B;
Carl Sagan warned of a world of scientific ignorance where illogical superstitions like the anti-vaccine movement and religious tribalism increasingly took hold.
&#x200B;
John Allen Paulos warned of a world of mathematical illiteracy where pyramid schemes and predatory lotteries increasingly took hold, reflected perhaps even in the popularity of the non-mathematical D&D5e and v5 VTM tabletop games.
&#x200B;
In an increasingly hostile environment for the Kindred, where through the ages, not only a secretive cabal of academic vampire mages attack the clan, but a zealot-led Second Inquisition and a beckoning spell to remove former leaders, the Tzimisce have to be more intelligent and clever than the huge population of psychotic, self-serving, technologically-adjacent humans to preserve the clan's secret affairs, and excel mentally beyond the ranks of the enemy clans and factions in order to ensure survival.
&#x200B;
In countries across the world, the populace are encouraged through effective emotional manipulation to become mindless, passive consumers, docile, disposable workers, and uninformed citizens, an inclination infecting even the most vaunted of intelligentsia, so while a prospective candidate member for the clan (even among the revenant families) may be admired for certain strengths of personality and courage or a unique perspective or fetishistic abberance, such individuals still remain the product of successive centuries of refulgent anti-intellectualism, and as such, must be taught or destroyed if not able to meet the challenges of membership.
&#x200B;
To this end, The Tzimisce teacher dedicates their unlife to a calling of judgement. The teacher pays visits to members of the clan one can find with auspex through the world (a personal specialty from the teacher's experience), and tests them and corrects holes in their understanding of the kindred or the world or political ensnarement. If the Kindred is receptive and willing to improve and shows reasonable progress they are allowed to live, and if they are intellectually stagnant, recalcitrant, or umasterful to a degree beyond redemption, then they are executed, along with any sires or packmates or regional Sabbat leaders that attempt to stop this from happening.
&#x200B;
There are some Tzimisce that completely remove themselves from the reach of other clans through adapting their bodies to hostile environments far beneath the Earth, within the oceans, or even outer space (to still contend with other supernatural creatures), but for those that remain at risk among the humans, The Teacher has culled a huge number (perhaps thousands or tens of thousands) of unacceptable clan-mates. The Teacher has not been previously spoken of much through clan histories because many fail to live to tell of meeting The Teacher.
No problem! Only other thing I'd recommend is this book -
Turn Left at Orion: Hundreds of Night Sky Objects to See in a Home Telescope - and How to Find Them https://www.amazon.com/dp/1108457568/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_S5w4DbPS7Q07S
To help them find things in the sky.
If you wind up getting all this, you'll have some extremely happy parents and you will probably find yourself making some trips out to enjoy it with them 🙂
> Would the Star Adventurer be controllable by ASCOM?
To the best of my knowledge, no...I don't know of an ASCOM driver for the SA, it not being a GoTo mount. However, if memory serves, it DOES have a guide port, so it's possible there's something out there.
> How would I use APT, Stellarium, and the tracking mount to do automated plate solving?
No experience with APT, so I can't speak to details of configuration. I know it will DO plate solving though.
Stellarium doesn't really enter into the equation here as far as plate solving goes, though I suppose you could use its Sync command to sync the mount once you found where you were.
---
Without a GoTo mount you're unlikely to have any success automating the plate solving process. While there's dozens of different utilities to DO plate solving, and dozens more for sequencing and ASCOM device control and so on, the general process is going to be the same...and require a GoTo mount :
What you CAN do however is exactly what you asked about, manually :
> So I guess I’m looking for guidance with finding, framing, and focusing with a motorized mount.
---
Is this "better" than "Take a long exposure and hope you see the target"? Who knows? Depends on a zillion variables like "How faint is the target?" and "How sensitive is the camera?" and "How patient is OP?" and "How good is OP at recognizing other objects/star patterns/indications nearby?" and so on. None of us can know all those variables.
Some of us enjoy "star hopping". Maybe you're one of those. If so, then ignore all this and just...shoot a pic, find the same pattern in stellarium, and move where you need to. Don't sell this method short..it's a great way to learn your way around the sky, and you never know what other cool thing will show up as some faint fuzzy in your frame, and distract you from your intended target!
However, platesolving is a repeatable and exact method of finding your target that eliminates a great many of those variables. Plate solve an image your camera took, and you will know, with no doubt or uncertainty, exactly where your telescope is pointed. 99% of success in this hobby is removing uncertainty and guesswork wherever you can. :)
Get "Turn Left at Orion" first.
https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Left-Orion-Hundreds-Telescope/dp/1108457568
It will help you make sense of what is where and what is possible to see.
It has examples of "realistic" things you'd expect to see through binoculars or a telescope.
His book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself is my favorite book that I've read this year. I highly recommend it. I'm about 15 years out of college, so was worried I wouldn't be able to keep up, but he does a fantastic job keeping concepts clear. I find it (while much longer) a more enjoyable read than A Brief History of Time.
Cosmologist Sean Carroll explains Bayes' theorem and applies it to scientific method and everyday life throughout his book The Big Picture. This book is intended for a wide audience and is very well written.
> [...] isn't the whole point of honest dialogue to learn from one another and test one's theories against those of others?
Nope. Theories are tested against evidence.
> If cause isn't a thing, then I need a better vocabulary and a better understanding of reality to describe why my car accelerates when I push the gas pedal [...]
This is a misunderstanding of scope. Cause is an emergent concept not found in the laws of physics similar to how baseball is an emergent concept not found in the laws of physics. "Baseball" can be a useful way to describe the macro world we inhabit just as "cause" can be a useful way to describe the macro world we inhabit. Does that mean the universe plays baseball?
> I honestly entreat you to help me learn what I am missing, and what I should read to correct my misunderstanding.
Please: https://www.amazon.com/Big-Picture-Origins-Meaning-Universe/dp/1101984252
You don't have to venture past page 4 to read that "[w]e find it natural to use a vocabulary of causes and reasons why things happen, but those ideas aren't part of how nature works at its deepest levels." The first section of the book elaborates.
> My supposition is that in claiming that something is unknowable we deny ourselves the ability to completely refute the unknown.
I didn't say it was unknowable. I said I didn't know.
> In other words, between atheism and agnosticism, atheism is a stronger claim, but is not defensible to the degree that agnosticism is.
This is venturing off point, but I disagree. If someone came to you and said, to use baseball again, that they know because of the existence of baseball that the universe plays baseball, would you find that to be a strong argument? Would you be agnostic on it, saying we could never know whether the universe plays baseball? Or would your response be similar to, "No, baseball is a complicated phenomenon inside the universe. What does it even mean for the universe to play baseball? That doesn't really make sense."
Your interlocutor would, of course, come back and point out that if baseball really isn't a thing in physics then he or she needs a better vocabulary and a better understanding of reality to describe nine men wearing pajamas on a field.
---
There is a distinct feeling from your writing that you can't understand why I'm closed off to the concept of "cause" to the universe. Isn't it at least possible that there was a cause? That there is a God? etc, etc? My response is you have no reason or evidence for it other than a sort of intuitive physics, which I should remind you is not necessarily a path to truth (see the famous single photon double slit experiment).
Let's read more Bertrand Russell (from "Why I am not a Christian" published in 1927):
> Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God). That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: ‘My father taught me that the question, “Who made me?” cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, “Who made God?” ’ That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, ‘How about the tortoise?’ the Indian said, ‘Suppose we change the subject.’ The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
I'll give Richard Feynman the last word on a similar, but again tangential, topic:
> Now if the world of nature is made of atoms, and we too are made of atoms and obey physical laws, the most obvious interpretation of this evident distinction between past and future, and this irreversibly of all phenomena, would be that some laws, some of the motion laws of the atoms are going one way — that the atom laws are not such that they can go either way. There should be somewhere in the works some kind of a principle that uxles only make wuxles and never vice versa, and so the world is turning from uxley character to wuxley character all the time — and this one-way business of the interactions of things should be the thing that makes the whole phenomena of the world seem to go one way.
> And yet we haven't found it yet. That is, in all the laws of physics that we have found so far there doesn't seem to be any distinction of the past and the future.
Climate's always change, that's a strawman label. But I agree with Craig that man-made global warming extremism is way over-hyped and a big problem. These climatemongers are very dangerous to the human species, far more dangerous than CO2, (which plants use by the way to make Oxygen which we breathe). The truth is the Earth along wth the sun and moon's influence create complex balancing mechanisms for climate. Volcanism comprises most of the CO2 production. We are more in danger of slipping into a runaway iceage. I suggest Calvin and you read this book Rare Earth, chapter 6 titled Snowball Earth and you will get a much clearer picture of what is going on and start to see through the bullshit propaganda.
Why not start with Einstein's own book on the subject? Less than $10. Amazon link.