Sigh. I’m getting my dander up talking about all this ID nonsense, so how about some real science for a day or two, OK? I’m gonna talk about air here for a minute. Just as a breather (harhar!).
Air bends light. But you knew this: you’ve seen pictures of mirages, and you’ve seen the weird shimmering reflection over hot asphalt in the summer. You’ve read my web page about why stars twinkle.
As you look closer to the horizon, the air gets thicker; you’re looking through more air (that’s because the Earth is curved, and the atmosphere curves with it– draw yourself a picture!). Right near the horizon, the amount of air you look through changes the most, and so light gets bent the most there. As the Sun sets, its light gets bent upwards, squashing the bottom of the image of the Sun up into the top.
Earth is not all that special; other planets have atmospheres. Take Saturn, for example. It has a very thick atmosphere. If you were floating in space, and looked at something just beyond the planet’s surface, its light would get bent as well, distorting your view of the shape of the object.
Well, we have something floating near Saturn: the Cassini probe. And it has cameras on board, and it can see this bending of light. The picture below shows it! The camera takes pictures in the infrared, and where methane strongly affects the light. The rings seen in the image go behind Saturn (the planet itself is the bright vertical band on the right), and just as they go behind the top of the atmosphere, the light gets bent in the same way sunlight does at sunset here.
This image is very cool. But it’s also useful: scientist can measure the amount that light bends, and get the vertical distribution of methane in Saturn’s atmosphere.
Science is beauty. Don’t ever doubt it.
August 10th, 2005 at 4:30 am
That’s awesome!
Looks like those ribbions of wire that are atached to calculater grade LCD’s
Love it how it taperes off like that
August 10th, 2005 at 4:46 am
Science definitely is Awesome and will absolutely always be the incredible mind rush that it is.
Unfortunately, one also needs to have a mind of scientific thinking complexity.
Suggestions of SF to buy and read and re-read:
Robert Reed’s “Marrow” and “The Well of Stars”;
Alstair Reynolds SF series: “Revelation Space”, “Chasm City”, “Redemption Ark” and “Absolution Gap”.
And, another mind rush: Scott Westerfeld’s “Evolution’s Darling” (for Adults only 18 and older) and “The Risen Empire/Killing of Worlds”.
I’d like your other bloggers to just say “No to Religion” and think for themselves. We should be dealing with Science issues. And, SF.
August 10th, 2005 at 6:02 am
But it’s also useful: scientist can measure the amount that light bends, and get the vertical distribution of methane in Saturn’s atmosphere.
I’m constantly amazed at the ways scientists find to tease knowledge out of scant data. It ranks up there with Sherlock Holmes’s ability to deduce a man’s stock portfolio from a fleck of mud on his shoe, with the added advantage of also being true and often useful. And that goes double for astronomers, who basically only have light to work with.
August 10th, 2005 at 11:32 am
This is cool.
Have there been any results on the atmospheric breakdown yet? You mention methane specifically, is it possible that other atmospheric components might skew the results?
August 10th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
Chet: Don’t forget, plenty of people also use science (popular, serious, up-to-date or out-of-date) as a substitute for independant thought as well. The religiously blind don’t have a corner on the “check your brain at the door” market.
August 10th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
He of the noodly appendage is smiling upon the cassini mission.
Great pic. Thanks for posting, BA!
August 10th, 2005 at 1:35 pm
Very nice piece, BA.
Fantastic photos – the Cassini-Huygens mission has been a huge success already, and Cassini still has a couple more years of orbiting Saturn and swinging by its moons. Is that brilliant or what? It reminds me of the feeling I got when our astronomical society at Uni got a set of slides from Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune.
August 10th, 2005 at 2:45 pm
Hi, BA,
Thanks for getting off the ID horse. I find ID just as ridiculous as you do, but I come here for the astronomy. ID’s a great thing to pummel occasionally, but there’s plenty of anti-ID talk at Pharyngula and elsewhere…
August 10th, 2005 at 8:02 pm
ON a comepletly unrelated topic WTH happened to the format of the BABlog? It’s messing me up!
August 10th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
Very cool.
Would visible light bend even more (being shorter wavelengh)?
August 11th, 2005 at 4:56 am
Neb,
I will only just comment on your absurd reply to me:
The Sciences are our greatest intellectual acheivement (maturity) of a Universal objective knowledge providing us with incredible, as I like to state, Mind rushes or natural endorphin “highs”, “goosebumps”, and technological advances. It all just keeps getting better with time.
Science improves because new discoveries or re-evalutation of evidence may shift or cause a revamping or revision of a hypothesis or strengthen or weaken a theory. It happens all the time.
Just head over to the Astronomy Picture of the Day website or read this BaBlog from Phil, or science books and magazines and websites because every day there is another discovery.
Sceintific thinking requires both critical and independent thinking because it is “Universal”, meaning, it has “Universal” applications.
Monotheistic religons {just say NO to it] have been and will always be the baddest of humanity–the only species on this planet with “religious” faith beliefs. They have been preaching the same “message” for about three thousand years only now have a greater and greater audience of the faithful through our advances in media technologies. And, they will be getting more extremist and intolerant and destructive until ….
We haven’t, most unfortunately, encountered another extraterrestial species to compare ourselves to …
So, why don’t we all just marvel at our scientific, medical, and technological achievements as well as our musical, artistic, architectural, cultural accomplishments; reflect on the wonder and diversity of the other species on our planet; and work together for a planet (and off planet) civil maturity that will eventually let us become a great species expanding outward into the Milky Way (whoa, science fictional and utopian).
Religion will just lead the masses towards brutality and ignorance.
Enough written about this!
*****************************
Just in, the Kansas Public School board has voted to include the teaching of I.D. so that public school teachers will feel “free” without intimidation or harrassment or legal actions if and when they teach Creationism, Intelligent Design, or other “theories” critical of Darwinian Evolution.
August 11th, 2005 at 5:38 am
Chet Twarog, are you talking about organized religion, or just religion as in a belief in God? Because while I believe in God, I certainly don’t beleive in the bible, because I realize it is not the infailable word of god that it is touted around to be. This is the case with most people I know.
I think it is organizd religion that needs to be dropped. Belief in God never hurt anyone, but people who would manipulate that belief in God certainly did.
August 11th, 2005 at 9:15 am
”Just in, the Kansas Public School board has voted to include the teaching of I.D. so that public school teachers will feel “freeâ€? without intimidation or harrassment or legal actions if and when they teach Creationism, Intelligent Design, or other “theoriesâ€? critical of Darwinian Evolution.”
Time for a return of the Cobb County anti-stickers!
http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/textbookdisclaimers/
(Originaly posted by Eric on 14th June… but they’re just soooo funny!)
August 11th, 2005 at 9:33 am
Samara,
Which “God”?
August 11th, 2005 at 9:46 am
Leaving aside rationality and science just for this:
The 8 August 2005 Air Force Times has a two page article about whether the US military should field combat boots made from tanned pigskin.
Air Force Chaplain Hamza Al-Mubarak, a Muslim, stated: “It is impermissible for a Muslim to eat or use the tanned skin of a pig in any form of clothing.”
“Wearing pigskin is forbidden for Muslims because the impurity of a pig’s skin is not removed even by tanning their skins, as pigs (the meat, blood and any food over which the name of other than Allah has been invoked) are impure in themselves.”
Some moderate Muslims have countered that the skin from any animal is “pure” after it is tanned.
The chaplains and the Defense Department have developed a “unique concern” for religious accomodations.
The US military wearing pigskin would be an offense to Muslim sensitivities and could give extremists further reasons to state: “the West does not respect Islam.”
No other comment needed.
See, can we just blog about science?
August 11th, 2005 at 11:15 am
Hi, Samara,
I agree — it’s organized religion that’s the problem, not belief per se. I think it’s really interesting when biblical literalist robots spout their nonsense… then you find creed statements like this one from Falwell’s (misnamed) Liberty U. that show they don’t know what they’re talking about: We affirm that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, though written by men, was supernaturally inspired by God so that all its words are the written true revelation of God; it is therefore inerrant in the original and authoritative in all matters.
The key words are obviously in the original… something I’m quite certain (almost?) none of them have ever read. How many people do you know who can read Aramaic?
August 11th, 2005 at 12:14 pm
Didn’t I mention we were leavng ID aside for a moment in this entry? Oh well.
I have more stuff coming. This is an important issue, relates to astronomy, and relates to BAD astronomy. I’ll be writing more about it in the future.
August 11th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
Sorry BA. When something’s as bad as creationism, when you get started you just can’t stop.
Chet, I’m talking about the pantheist God – one who is not simply watching creation across a vast gulf but is part of creation itself.
And that’s the last word I have to say on the subject, since this is such a voliate topic.
August 11th, 2005 at 1:28 pm
Sorry, Jay but you are not so well informed as you arrogantly think so.
The Old Testament’s material was originally only oral Hewbrew revisionist tribal history passed from generation to generation through “song poetry” until the Hebrew Rabbi scribes penned it in Hebrew as consonants only like:
I am Chet as “MCHT” with no spaces between words.
My comment on Aug 11th at 04:56 am meant “all religions” and “belief per say”.
So, can you reply to my inquiries: “What God”; “Whose God”; “Which God”?
Perhaps Phil would just as much like us to do this off Bablog at our own email addresses?
August 11th, 2005 at 1:59 pm
I know this sounds cowardly, but I don’t think we will ever come to an answer to the debate about God – as atheists claim you can’t prove God, believers will retort that you can’t disprove God. And so it will go until the Big crunch. In the end, it is a matter of personal choice. Therefore, I think it is rather useless to continue this debate, as it would only descend to an “is so-is not” arguement.
Sorry, but it had to be said.
August 12th, 2005 at 11:42 am
Samara,
No disagreement with your assessment.
However, (oh geeze, there he goes, again!”) I have been an Atheist since 1970 simply because there is no “God”.
I continuously find it really difficult to understand why monotheists do not “know” that there were gods/goddesses of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Incas, Mayans, North American natives, hunter/gatherer tribes, etc., that were worshipped, sacrifieced to, temples and sacred places built to, fought and died over, poems, songs, festivals, etc., for far longer and just as devotely as you monotheists worship your own “God”.
Have you not read any of the Ancient Mythologies or enjoyed the movies “Voyages of Sinbad”, “Jason and the Argonauts”, etc.?
So, were these ancient gods/goddesses/demigods existing Immortal Gods, Goddesses and Demigods like your own God you worship, too? If monotheists consider them to be mytholgoical, make-beleive, imaginary and creations of the Ancients, it also logically and rationally follows that the monotheistic God is also mythological, make-believe and created.
That is how I became an Atheist in 1970. And, that’s how I “know”.
Did you know that the planets are named after Roman gods and a goddess: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto?
Just know yourself and be true to yourself.
August 12th, 2005 at 10:47 pm
I largely agree with you, Chet, although I’m not a strict atheist. More agnostic; to me, whether a god as in creator exists or not doesn’t matter (and isn’t very likely). From what I’ve seen, all of the gods throughout history were simply expressions of basic human traits or basic relationships among humans or between humans and other lifeforms on earth.
Most literalists don’t have a clue where their documents come from and refuse to accept their myths are stolen from much older myths. My reference to Aramaic was sarcasm. I’m not sure Aramaic was even a written tongue, and I do know that the early Bible tales were passed down orally for centuries before being written. That’s true of every religion except, maybe, for Islam, Mormonism, and some of the more recent offshoots of the major religions, and even they claim to have ancient roots.
The big problem with monotheistic faiths is that all of them are essentially tribal religions that have been stretched to cover people and situations they were never “designed” for, creating huge holes. At some level, their proponents recognize those holes, but some deny that truth and project their own misgivings on to others, blaming them for the fact that the religion can’t possibly cover everything.
Since this is a science blog, I’d like to toss out a question: What purpose does religion serve in terms of evolution? (It’s not likely it would’ve become as widespread as it is if its effect on human survival chances was wholly negative.) What keeps it going?
August 13th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
Oh well, just for the heck of it:
Jay – my sister’s husband happens to be from a Lebanese family. His mother, father, grandmother, sister, uncles, aunts, etc., all speak Aramaic.
August 13th, 2005 at 4:55 pm
Beck to the rings of Saturn…
BA, how did the scientists calculate the methane distribution from that pic?
August 13th, 2005 at 5:08 pm
Saamra, I don’t know. I’m not an atmospheric scientist. But they say they can, and they’re pretty smart folks.
August 15th, 2005 at 7:20 am
Jay,
“What purpose does religion serve in terms of evolution?”
Absolutely none! Though maybe in the “evolution” of societies.
Biological evolution is strictly the biological organic evolution of all species.
Religion is fundamentally social, cultural and traditional for only one particular species–Homo sapiens sapiens. It had its functional uses pre-lightenment because we did not have the scientific revolution and scientific thinking before then.
But I will remark that in my studies of polytheistic cultures such as the Ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, etc., they were capable of scientific thinking until monotheistic faiths slaughtered them while stealing their religious traditions, holidays, and sacred emblems from them.
A good book would be Alan Cromer’s “Uncommon Sense”.
There are also other books about this, too.
August 15th, 2005 at 3:59 pm
Chet Twarog Said:
> Jay,
> “What purpose does religion serve in terms of evolution?�
Absolutely none! Though maybe in the “evolution� of societies.
Biological evolution is strictly the biological organic evolution of all species.
That’s a bit simplistic an answer. Biological evolution includes social activities of animal species. Sexual selection is a big driving force, for instance, giving such things as the peacock’s tail. The social behavior of animals is a strong influence on their evolution, so ruling out human culture as an evolutionary driver is unjustified. In fact, there’s a whole field trying to study the effects of culture and social factors on the evolution of humans, and vice versa – Evolutionary Psychology.
There actually have been attempts by people to answer that question. Richard Dawkins has written an essay on the topic, and I’ve seen some others.
Consider that Neanderthal graves have been excavated with flowers included in the graves. This has been interpreted by some scientists as suggesting Neanderthals were concerned about dying and perhaps had religion of sorts. If that is how far back the origins of religion stem, they have played a long role in the development of Homo Sapiens sapiens (i.e. modern humans).
One explanation is that when early humans/ancestors were first developing self-awareness, they began to ponder the big questions – Where do I come from? What is death? What happens after death? How does the world work? Etc. Without formal science or even a culture of thought, they made guesses based on observations. By noting that things happen because of causes, and noting that living things were good causes, especially themselves, they extrapolated the events of the world as being caused by beings. Since those events were beyond their own meager abilities, the causers must be more powerful and hidden than mere mortals. Ergo, gods, demons, spirits, elves, whatnot.
How did this influence human evolution? It has been noted the role plays in defining a societies morals and codifying acceptable behavior. Will of the gods, divine retribution, placating spirits, etc become powerful tools for establishing controls on society, encouraging social behaviors that are better for the group if perhaps not particularly advantageous to the individual. Things like sharing food or water in times of scarcity, sacrificing life and limb to defend the tribe, etc. While one can understand the genetic influence and instinct to protect one’s offspring, it is less certain about instinct to defend one’s cousin, uncle, sister’s children, etc. However, biologically it makes sense (from a gene transfer standpoint, your siblings have similar genetic makeup to you, their offspring about a 1/4 your genes, etc). Social dynamics have been shown to develop from purely social interactions independent of biological imperatives. (Game theory for the “prisoner’s dilemma”, for instance.)
However, an important part of social order is establishing the “in group”. Consider the effect of freeloaders on society – those who take the benefits of cooperation and sharing, but don’t give the sacrifices themselves. Such as taking someone else’s food when offered but hoarding one’s own, or living in protection of the group but never helping defend from predators or opponent groups. Society has a need to establish who are the real insiders, the one’s likely to cooperate and share, and who are the fakers, taking the benefits without the sacrifice. Thus the development of elaborate rituals and codified behavior, things that require commitment and can’t be easily faked. Getting your face pierced by a stick through the nose or getting tattoos and piercings are less likely to be done on whimsy, and are efforts of group cohesion. Esoteric knowledge of rituals that require practice and effort to perform build a person’s individual commitment to the group, and serve not just as easy visual cues, but also as community builders that make the person more likely to feel committed.
Religion, therefore, plays a strong role in uniting a community, not just by defining the morals and providing the justifications for following the rules and the threats of punishment/offers of rewards, but also by building social cohesion and group dedication in the membership and serving as outward signs of group membership. In this way, religion actually has an active role in the biological evolution of humanity. After all, we all are aware the dangerousnous throughout history of not complying with the local religious beliefs. At a minimum, it can get you kicked out in times of distress, if not blamed for the distress. At a maximum, it can get whole populations exterminated. Thus, believing becomes selected for by natural selection.
This is, of course, speculation, but makes a lot more sense than just dismissing the question without any consideration.