Amélie is six years old. Raphael Poulain's only physical contact with the child occurs during her monthly medical checkup. Deeply moved by the exceptional closeness, the child cannot prevent her heart from beating a mile minute... Henceforth, her alarmed father is convinced that she suffers from a cardiac anomaly.
Amélie is a shy young woman with a pronounced taste for all life's small pleasures. immersing one's hand in a sack of grain, cracking the crust of a crème brulée with the back of a teaspoon or skipping stones on the Canal St-Martin.
Amélie still seeks solitude. She amuses herself with silly questions about the world below, such as 'How many people are having an orgasm right now?'
Well it's been a long time, long time now Since I've seen you smile And I'll gamble away my fright And I'll gamble away my time And in a year, a year or so This will slip into the sea Well it's been a long time, long time now Since I've seen you smile
Nobody raise your voices Just another night in Nantes Nobody raise your voices Just another night in Nantes
- Oh non je t'en prie, nous ne sommes pas chez nous. - Oh je t'assures que ce n'est pas grave. - Non laisse moi ! - Mais qu'est-ce que tu as aujourd'hui ? - J'ai que les hommes me dégoutent. Vous ne pensez qu'à ça ...
(Translation) Woman: Oh no please! We're not at our house. Man: I assure you, it doesn't matter. Woman: No, let me go! Man: What's gotten into you today? Woman: I know that men disgust me. You don't think of anything other than 'that'.
M42 by Luis Santo, winner of the "Beyond Earth" Galilean Nights Astrophotography competition. SBIG ST2000, G11, TMB105 @ f5, 17x120s Lum + 7xRGB 2x2 60s, SDMask, DDP, CS2
"Milky Way Waterfall" by Masahiro Miyasaka, overall winner of the Galilean Nights Astrophotography competition. Location: Zengoroodaki Waterfall Norikura in Nagano Japan Camera: EOS 5D MarkII ISO 5000,F2.8, 44sec Taken October 10, 2009
Explanation: Driving along on a summer evening, near the small town of Weikersheim in southern Germany, photographer Jens Hackmann had to stop. He couldn't resist pointing his camera and telephoto lens at this lovely conjunction of a Full Moon and planet Jupiter looming near the steeple of a local church. Of course, 400 years ago, Galileo couldn't resist pointing his newly constructed telescope at these celestial beacons either. When he did, he found craters and mountains on the not-so-smooth lunar surface and discovered the large moons of Jupiter now known as the Galilean Moons. Jupiter's Galilean moons are just visible in this photo as tiny pinpricks of light very near the bright planet. Want to see the Moon and Jupiter better than Galileo? Look for local 2009 International Year of Astronomy activities and events during these next few Galilean Nights (October 22-24).
Explanation: The most distant object easily visible to the eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy some two and a half million light-years away. But without a telescope, even this immense spiral galaxy - spanning over 200,000 light years - appears as a faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. In contrast, details of a bright yellow nucleus and dark winding dust lanes, are revealed in this digital telescopic image. Narrow band image data recording emission from hydrogen atoms, shows off the reddish star-forming regions dotting gorgeous blue spiral arms and young star clusters. While even casual skygazers are now inspired by the knowledge that there are many distant galaxies like M31, astronomers seriously debated this fundamental concept in the 20th century. Were these "spiral nebulae" simply outlying components of our own Milky Way Galaxy or were they instead "island universes" -- distant systems of stars comparable to the Milky Way itself? This question was central to the famous Shapley-Curtisdebate of 1920, which was later resolved by observations of M31 in favor of Andromeda, island universe.
NGC 4565: Galaxy on Edge Image Credit & Copyright: Acquisition - Torsten Grossmann, Processing - Dietmar Hager
Explanation: Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy's bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane. An assortment of other galaxies is included in the pretty field of view. Neighboring galaxy NGC 4562 is at the upper right. NGC 4565 itself lies about 40 million light-years distant, spanning some 100,000 light-years. Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.
From childhood's hour I have not been As others were - I have not seen As others saw - I could not bring My passions from a common spring - From the same source I have not taken My sorrow - I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone - And all I lov'd - I lov'd alone - Then - in my childhood - in the dawn Of a most stormy life - was drawn From ev'ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still - From the torrent, or the fountain - From the red cliff of the mountain - From the sun that 'round me roll'd In its autumn tint of gold - From the lightning in the sky As it pass'd me flying by - From the thunder, and the storm - And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view -
A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow -- You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand -- How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep -- while I weep! O God! can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp? O God! can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?
In the following lecture, Lawrence Krauss discusses our remarkable, modern picture of cosmology. I took some notes below.
As Lawrence Krauss explains in the above video, our universe is expanding uniformly in all directions, and we can tell this by studying distant galaxies.
This diagram illustrates how galaxies recede from each other due to
the expansion of the Universe. (And yes, the swirls are the galaxies.)
As galaxies move away from us, the light (which is a wave) coming from the galaxies gets stretched out due to the Doppler-Shift. This stretching causes a shift of the wavelength towards the red end of the spectrum.
This is the visible spectrum (which is what the human eye is capable of detecting).
Galaxies that are more and more red shifted, are further and further away from us.
This red-shifted galaxy, called A1689-zD1, is from when the universe was about 700 million years old, not long after the formation of the first galaxies.
To better understand light and red-shift, imagine that a source of a light wave (such as a sun) is moving away from you (see image below).
Between emitting one wavefront and the next, the object emitting the light will have moved a little distance (Notice the dimmed representations of the sun above), and the second wavefront will have slightly further to travel. That means that the wave (or, the light) reaches you later than it would have done otherwise. (If, instead, the sun were moving toward you, the opposite would happen: The wavefronts would "smash" together, creating a shorter wavelength (the blue wavelength in the image above).
So, we know that our universe is expanding. The current rate of expansion is usually expressed as the Hubble Constant (in units of kilometers per second per Megaparsec, or just per second).
Empty space is not empty!
Check out the animation at about 20 minutes and 50 seconds into the lecture. Most of the mass of a proton comes from the empty space between the quarks of a proton. The fields popping in and out of existence produce about 90% of the mass of a proton. (Since protons and neutrons are the dominate stuff in your body, empty space is responsible for 90% of your mass.)
When we calculate the energy of nothing, we calculate that the energy of empty space is a gazillion times the energy of everything we see. We calculate that empty space should have an energy of 120 orders of magnitude more than the galaxies and stars and people and aliens and all the rest. The symmetries of nature, however, allow the energy of nothing to be 0. What's so beautiful about a universe with total energy 0? Only such a universe can begin from nothing. This is remarkable because the laws of physics allow a universe to begin from nothing. You don't need a deity. You have nothing- 0 total energy, and quantum fluctuations can produce a universe.
As Lawrence Krauss explains, "Nothing isn't nothing anymore in physics. Because of the laws of quantum mechanics and special relativity, on extremely small scales, nothing is really a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that are popping in and out of existence in a time scale so short you can't see them."
A growing number of scientific observations support the idea that dark energy is causing the universe to expand faster as it ages. The geometry of the universe adds more evidence to the case for dark energy.
General relativity tells us that space is curved (Space curves in the presence of matter.), and that because of this, the universe can be one of three different geometries: open, closed, or flat.
Weighing the universe tells us what the curvature of the universe is. Our universe is flat. It is flat because all the matter and energy that make up the universe creates a kind of universal balance. In other words, the geometry of the universe depends on how much total matter and energy it contains. If there is a lot of matter and energy, then the universe is curved at an angle that scientists describe as "closed." In that case, the universe would eventually collapse in on itself. With relatively little matter and energy, though, the curve is the other way, so it is "open" — it would expand forever, although at an ever-slower rate.
Our universe is expanding, but instead of expanding more slowly as it ages, it is expanding faster as it ages. The universe is flat, which means it must contain a lot of dark energy.
If you have nothing in quantum mechanics, you'll always get something. There is only 30% of the stuff in the universe needed to make it flat. Where is that other 70%? If you put energy in empty space, so that empty space weighed something, it would produce a cosmological constant, which causes the expansion of the universe to speed up over time. The amount of energy needed in empty space to make it speed up by the amount we measure it is exactly the amount we are missing (70%). Our new cosmological picture of the universe it that we live in a universe dominated by nothing.
Clusters of galaxies are the biggest bound objects in the universe so if we could weigh them we could weigh all the mass in the universe. We can do this with the theory of general relativity. (27:23 in video)
Gravitational Lens Galaxy Cluster 0024+1654 W.N. Colley (Princeton University), E. Turner (Princeton University) J.A. Tyson (AT&T Bell Labs) and NASA
The weird blue things in the above image are a phenomena that we now understand as gravitational lensing. Einstein told us that a mass will curve space around it. Einstein realized, therefor, that if you had a big enough mass, and you have a source of light behind that mass, the light can bend around that object and come back, and be magnified. Mass can act like a lense and magnify things and split images, and that is precisely what we are seeing (the weird blue things). All of these blue things are different images of a single galaxy located about 3 billion light years behind this cluster. Gravity is magnifying, distorting, and bending this image. Because we understand general relativity we can work backwards and figure out how much mass must be in that system and where it is in order to produce that image. We can weigh the system using general relativity.
The image at 28:28 in the video shows the results of weighing the system. The spikes are where the galaxies are. Most of the mass in this whole system of clusters of galaxies is not where the galaxies are. It's between the galaxies. About 5o times as much mass in this system and in all systems we can measure comes from stuff that doesn't shine. Physicists call this stuff dark matter. We now understand that 90% of the mass of galaxies and clusters, including our own milky way galaxy is made of stuff that doesn't shine. We know how many protons and neutrons there are in the universe. We can actually measure that. There aren't enough protons and neutrons in our universe to make up all this dark matter. This is why we are pretty convinced that dark matter is a new type of elementary particle. Taking normal matter + dark matter and weighing it, we now have determined how much stuff there is in the universe. Omega is the ratio of the total amount of stuff we know is in the universe, divided by the amount of stuff you need to make a flat universe. The universe has only 1/3 the amount of matter to make it flat. In a flat universe, the total energy in the universe is precisely 0. This is because gravity can have negative energy. So, the negative energy of gravity balances out the positive energy of matter.
The cosmic microwave background is the afterglow of the big bang. This is just one of the many reasons that we know the Big Bang actually happened. If we look far enough ( to the birth of the universe), we should see the big bang, but we can't. Why? Because between us and the big bang there is a wall. The radiation in the past was so hot, that that is could break apart atoms, creating a charged plasma that is opaque to radiation. We can't see past this time, simply because the universe is opaque.
The largest amount of energy in the universe (70% dark energy) resides in empty space. We don't have the slightest idea why it's there. We are more insignifigant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a 1% bit of pollution., in a universe that is 30% dark matter and 70% dark energy. This has changed our picture of the future.
Cosmic natural selection String theory
There is more we don't understand about the universe than we do.
Tidbits: • The universe is the way it is whether we like it or not. • Velocity is proportional to distance. • The universe is huge and old and rare things happen all the time, including life. • The energy of nothing. • Take empty space- get rid of all the particles, all the radiation- absolutely everything, so there's nothing there, and imagine that nothing weighs something • The universe we live in is the worst of all possible universes to live in.
"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded, and, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: you are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron- all the things that matter for evolution and for life weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode, so, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today." - Lawrence Krauss
Amélie is six years old.
Amélie is a shy young woman
Amélie still seeks solitude.
