The wonderful, talented, and fabulous Jennifer Ouellette (with whom, though I know she reads this blog, I would never, of course, try to curry favor by calling her wonderful, talented, and fabulous — but I will admit to having an animated crush on Jen-Luc Piquant) of Cocktail Party Physics has written a fun essay on the history of calculus. Yes, I said "fun". She writes poetically about the beauty and internal wonder of epsilon, the infinitesimal jump from one point to the next in a function that makes calculus possible. If you love math, you should read her essay, and if you hate math, you should really read it, because she might change your mind.

And at the end, she posts a little math trick, which I unceremoniously dissect in the comments.

In memoriam.

For habeas corpus. And for the moral high ground.

… initially, that was all I was going to write, but I can’t let it stand there.

In a circumstance so ironic I can hardly stand it, I went to United States Senate home page to look into the passing of this bill which, in my opinion, will do more damage in the long run to the United States than almost anything this government has done. This is what I was greeted with on the Senate page:

“We the People”
Celebrating the Constitution

Written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and in operation since 1789, the United States Constitution remains a vital and living document. Having been strengthened by amendments, the Constitution serves as both guide and protector of U.S. citizens and their elected officials.

A dark day indeed.

This is simply too cool: Reykjavik, Iceland is turning its lights out on Thursday night. Why?

Authorities in the capital Reykjavik will turn off street lights on Thursday evening and people are also being encouraged to sit in their houses in the dark, writer Andri Snaer Magnason said on Wednesday.

While the lights are out, an astronomer will describe the night sky over national radio.

What a wonderful idea! It’s only for a half hour, so there won’t be a big negative impact, and that’s long enough for people to get dark adapted… in fact, I bet a lot of them will be disappointed when the lights go back on.

What an amazing thing to do, and how I wish it could happen here in the States. I think one of the problems in our society today is — seriously — we’ve lost touch with nature. As an amateur astronomer, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve let people look through my telescope, only to have them disbelieve what they are seeing (more than once I’ve seen kids look into the top of the telescope, thinking I hung a picture of Saturn there).

Most people in this country have no idea what a truly dark sky looks like. The ironic thing is, without seeing it for yourself, you have no idea what you’re missing. It’s truly an awe-inspiring site, one that can move you emotionally, bring a lump to your throat. I’m not just blowing smoke here: I’ve seen this reaction in people many times. I wrote about it, a few years ago.

I wonder– maybe the Dark Sky Association could try to do this here. Small towns, or maybe ones that lean toward the green end of the spectrum, would be more willing to try it. I think I’d be happy to throw my weight, FWIW, behind something like this.

For quite some time, a lot of scientists have been ringing the alarm bell over the torturous policies of the Bush Administration and Congress when it comes to science. I’ve been talking about it quite a bit on this blog and in some public fora. I told other scientists to get involved; after all, if the Administration doesn’t like activist judges, imagine what they would do about activist scientists!

It’s time to organize, and it looks like the groundwork has been laid. Michael Stebbins of the Sex, Drugs, and DNA blog has started a new organization to get scientists and engineers to fight back. It’s called

Scientists & Engineers for America

It’s a good idea, and it’s high time for it. They have even created a Bill of Rights for scientists and engineers. It’s an interesting list of what kinds of freedom scientists need — yes, need — in order to help everyone understand the Universe better. My favorite:

The federal government shall not support any science education program that includes instruction in concepts that are derived from ideology and not science.

Damn skippy.

I joined up, and I plan on finding out how I can help more. You should consider it as well.

Another Skeptics Circle is out!

How could you ever doubt it?

I just found out that the new Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast is out– and I’m on it! I talked about Pluto, Eris, and other fun astronomical goofiness.

Oh– and some guy named Randi is on it too.

I’m working on a huge project for my day job right now, and it involves writing a lot of basic material about dark energy. I’m supposed to be brief, but how do you concisely describe dark energy?

You can’t. Even at 900 words I think I’m giving it too short a treatment.

I’ll forgo the details about dark energy is for now because it’s not directly related to what I want to say here –and anyway, when the project is done I’ll be able to link to it.

In the course of reading up on DE so that I understand it well enough to explain it simply (ha! Sure!), I came across a technical paper called Measuring Cosmology with Supernovae. It’s written by Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt, two astronomers. But not just any two astronomers! They were the heads of their respective teams, both of which independently figured out that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.

The reason I’m bringing this up is because, for one thing, I wouldn’t have expected them to write a paper together. They don’t hate each other or anything– in fact, they’re both very nice fellows. But in the years leading up to 1998, their two teams were rivals, and the competition was fierce. But in science, even rivals for such a big goal — and figuring out the fate of the Universe is maybe the biggest — can be on friendly terms.

But there’s another reason why I’m writing this.

Back then (and still, today) they were both trying to observe very distant exploding stars, technically called Type Ia supernovae. This particular flavor of star, it so happens, explodes with a total energy that is almost entirely predictable. Well, "predictable" is the wrong word. Really, when you observe how the brightness of the explosion changes over time — days, weeks, and months — you can calculate the total energy released. This in turn tells you how bright the supernova really is. When you compare that to how bright it appears through the telescope, you can determine the distance– and that’s one of the Holy Grails of astronomy. These things can be seen at tremendous distances, billions of light years. This in turn can be used to figure out all sorts of interesting things about the Universe at large, like its overall shape, what it’s made of on the grand scale, and how it’s expanding.

In the late 1990s, both teams were bagging lots of supernovae. When they compared the distance they got for the supernovae versus how bright they were, they got a surprise: the supernovae were all too faint. It was as if they were farther away than expected. As they so succinctly put it in their paper:

Both samples [from the two teams] show that [supernovae] are, on average, fainter than would be expected, even for an empty Universe, indicating that the Universe is accelerating.

Don’t be fooled by the dry declarative nature of that sentence: a huge amount of work went into being able to say it. They had to eliminate a host of other things that could be making the supernovae look fainter, like dust between us and them, possible chemical differences between supernovae we see locally and ones that are far away, and lots of other esoteric causes. After much work, they scratched everything else off the list one by one, until they were left with the weirdest idea of all: the Universe was not just expanding, but accelerating.

Weird.

But even that is not why I’m writing this entry. In the paper Brian and Saul wrote, there is some math that involves relativity and such. It goes on for a while, relating such things as the expansion rate, the density, and the pressure — which, believe it or not, is fairly standard stuff for cosmologists. Finally, though, the equations are put together in a way that tells you something very important… and in the paper, Saul and Brian make a statement so astonishing that when I read it, I exclaimed out loud (using words I won’t write here). I literally stood up from my desk and had to tell everyone in my office about it. The authors said:

Combining Eqs. (4 – 6) yields solutions to the global evolution of the Universe.

Read that again. "Combining Eqs. (4 – 6) yields solutions to the global evolution of the Universe."

This is a review paper, so they skipped the several hundred steps to get to equations 4, 5, and 6. But still, in the end, this is what they are saying: you can write down some relatively simple equations, and from there determine the ultimate overall state and fate of the Universe.

How frakking cool is that? The whole Universe, from end to end, stem to stern, port to starboard, the whole enchilada, the sum total, the whole nine yards, the complete package, the whole kit and caboodle… and if you’re smart enough, work hard enough, and have enough smart and hard-working people before you lay the groundwork, you can calculate the global evolution of the whole shebang!

That’s I’m writing this entry.

Science!

Man oh man. I love this stuff.