For new content, follow me at: http://tessastrain.tumblr.com
Email:
strain.tessa@gmail.com
Twitter:
http://twitter.com/tessastrain
Essays about the San Fernando Valley:
http://valblog.tumblr.com/
Art:
http://number1pennumber2thoughts.blogspot.com/
Quote reblogged from Out of Context Science with 15 notes
We’ll either see neutrinos, or something will be strange with the universe.
Source: outofcontextscience
Photo reblogged from Love & Radiation with 45 notes
I want this so, so, so badly.
Gurrrrrrrrrl.
Source: love-and-radiation
Post reblogged from GARLAND with 30 notes
RobotRollCall spins a tale of entering a black hole
Imagine, just for a moment, that you are aboard a spaceship equipped with a magical engine capable of accelerating you to any arbitrarily high velocity. This is absolutely and utterly impossible, but it turns out it’ll be okay, for reasons you’ll see in a second.
Because you know your engine can push you faster than the speed of light, you have no fear of black holes. In the interest of scientific curiosity, you allow yourself to fall through the event horizon of one. And not just any black hole, but rather a carefully chosen one, one sufficiently massive that its event horizon lies quite far from its center. This is so you’ll have plenty of time between crossing the event horizon and approaching the region of insane gravitational gradient near the center to make your observations and escape again.
As you fall toward the black hole, you notice some things which strike you as highly unusual, but because you know your general relativity they do not shock or frighten you. First, the stars behind you — that is, in the direction that points away from the black hole — grow much brighter. The light from those stars, falling in toward the black hole, is being blue-shifted by the gravitation; light that was formerly too dim to see, in the deep infrared, is boosted to the point of visibility.
Simultaneously, the black patch of sky that is the event horizon seems to grow strangely. You know from basic geometry that, at this distance, the black hole should subtend about a half a degree of your view — it should, in other words, be about the same size as the full moon as seen from the surface of the Earth. Except it isn’t. In fact, it fills half your view. Half of the sky, from notional horizon to notional horizon, is pure, empty blackness. And allthe other stars, nearly the whole sky full of stars, are crowded into the hemisphere that lies behind you.
As you continue to fall, the event horizon opens up beneath you, so you feel as if you’re descending into a featureless black bowl. Meanwhile, the stars become more and more crowded into a circular region of sky centered on the point immediately aft. The event horizon does not obscure the stars; you can watch a star just at the edge of the event horizon for as long as you like and you’ll never see it slip behind the black hole. Rather, the field of view through which you see the rest of the universe gets smaller and smaller, as if you’re experiencing tunnel-vision.
Finally, just before you’re about to cross the event horizon, you see the entire rest of the observable universe contract to a single, brilliant point immediately behind you. If you train your telescope on that point, you’ll see not only the light from all the stars and galaxies, but also a curious dim red glow. This is the cosmic microwave background, boosted to visibility by the intense gravitation of the black hole.
And then the point goes out. All at once, as if God turned off the switch.
You have crossed the event horizon of the black hole.
Focusing on the task at hand, knowing that you have limited time before you must fire up your magical spaceship engine and escape the black hole, you turn to your observations. Except you don’t see anything. No light is falling on any of your telescopes. The view out your windows is blacker than mere black; you are looking at non-existence. There is nothing to see, nothing to observe.
You know that somewhere ahead of you lies the singularity … or at least, whatever the universe deems fit to exist at the point where our mathematics fails. But you have no way of observing it. Your mission is a failure.
Disappointed, you decide to end your adventure. You attempt to turn your ship around, such that your magical engine is pointing toward the singularity and so you can thrust yourself away at whatever arbitrarily high velocity is necessary to escape the black hole’s hellish gravitation. But you are thwarted.
Your spaceship has sensitive instruments that are designed to detect the gradient of gravitation, so you can orient yourself. These instruments should point straight toward the singularity, allowing you to point your ship in the right direction to escape. Except the instruments are going haywire. They seem to indicate that the singularity lies all around you. In every direction, the gradient of gravitation increases. If you are to believe your instruments, you are at the point of lowest gravitation inside the event horizon, and every direction points “downhill” toward the center of the black hole. So any direction you thrust your spaceship will push you closer to the singularity and your death.
This is clearly nonsense. You cannot believe what your instruments are telling you. It must be a malfunction.
But it isn’t. It’s the absolute, literal truth. Inside the event horizon of a black hole, there is no way out. There are no directions of space that point away from the singularity. Due to the Lovecraftian curvature of spacetime within the event horizon, all the trajectories that would carry you away from the black hole now point into the past.
In fact, this is the definition of the event horizon. It’s the boundary separating points in space where there aretrajectories that point away from the black hole from points in space where there are none.
Your magical infinitely-accelerating engine is of no use to you … because you cannot find a direction in which to point it. The singularity is all around you, in every direction you look.
And it is getting closer.
Source: reddit.com
Link reblogged from Geoffrey is Working
Scientists Confirm Existence of 'Kirby Krackle' - ComicsAlliance | Comics culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews →
YOU GUYS
Source: geoffreyisworking
Link reblogged from Oh...sure with 2 notes
Attention Tessa (part two) →
Photos from the opening of Tycho Brahe’s tomb.
In which Tycho Brahe continues to be one of my favorite people ever, even though I’m still unsure how his name is pronounced.
Source: roseveleth
Photo reblogged from slow motion crawl with 2,126 notes
Researchers have discovered the first potentially immortal jellyfish, a species called Turritopsis nutricula. They can revert to the polyp stage after becoming sexually mature, periodically restarting its life-cycle. The rejuvenation relies on transdifferation, the transformation of one mature cell type into another. All evidence suggests that Turritopsis can repeat this process indefinitely, meaning that it will never die as a consequence of aging. Researchers suggested that studying the Turritopsis could lead to breakthroughs in reversing the human aging process.
holy mother of merlin
WHAT
“Potentially immortal”—have you ever heard anything more seductive?
Source: blogs.theeagleonline.com
Post reblogged from Oh...sure with 3 notes
ATTENTION TESSA
You should be aware of this person: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe
Select highlights:
1. Nose lost in duel? No problem, I’ll just have my people make a silver replacement which I will glue onto my face.
2. The entire section dedicated to “Tycho’s Moose (Elk)”
3. In his death throes all he kept saying was “I hope to not have lived in vain” to the point that it actually got annoying to people.
4. Modern autopsy found extremely high levels of Mercury, IN HIS MUSTACHE.
Enjoy.
THIS IS ALL SO IMPORTANT.
Source: roseveleth
Post with 2 notes
Two things I like, in the somewhat embarrassing order of how much I like them
- fake science
- real science
Link reblogged from Best of Wikipedia with 53 notes
Quantum mind →
The quantum mind hypothesis proposes that classical mechanics cannot fully explain consciousness, and suggests that quantum mechanical phenomena such as quantum entanglement and superposition may play an important part in the brain’s function and could form the basis of an explanation of consciousness. (via @cyberu)
Source: bestofwikipedia
On the Scientific Method of the Artistically Inclined
One thing that we artsy/current-or-former-humanities-major/Molskine-owner/”I-guess-you-could-call-me-a-writer” types love to do is talk about science. We do. We love it. We maybe even love it more than scientists do.
The problem for us is that we often don’t know all that much about science. Not that we know nothing, but that our information is often piecemeal and inconsistent. Which is why we do science by consensus.
Science by consensus is a pleasant social activity and also incontrovertible proof that Socrates was wrong when he said that interlocution is the best way to get at the truth. Science by consensus is not really about getting at the truth, but rather at getting at an explanation for a scientific phenomenon or concept that all involved parties deem satisfying enough.
Take, for example, quantum physics.
“So Schrodinger’s cat, is like, alive in this universe but dead in another.”
“Oh yeah! I remember something about that from Justice League!”
“Wasn’t there a New York Times article about how they disproved that?”
“Oh yeah, I think I read that article!”
“No, no, you guys, it’s not about the parallel universes thing, it’s that we don’t know if he’s even IN the box, because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle!”
“Oh yeah, that sounds familiar, I vaguely remember learning about that in high school. Like, something about how if an unstoppable force meets an immovable object it creates a time paradox?”
“Isn’t that Newtonian though?”
“No, that’s a whole different thing! See, we know he’s in the box, but we don’t know if he’s still a cat or not. Trust me, I saw the NOVA on this.”
And that is the END of discussion, because the person who saw the NOVA is the expert, and therefore, you DO trust said person. Put those iPhones away, you’ve got all the answers you need right here.
One of the things I love about science by consensus is the tacit agreement to pretend that we are all actually talking about science. In fact, it might be the greatest unspoken party game ever invented, and if you’ve played it right, perhaps the next day you may feel compelled wake up, do the research, learn the actual truth of what you were talking about, and have one hell of a good laugh.
Page 1 of 2
