By now you’ve probably heard of the extremely bright fireball over Utah last Wednesday, proving once again that really cool stuff happens when I’m on travel and can’t write about it. Worse, it was seen from Denver, which means I might’ve had a shot at seeing it myself.

Sigh.

Anyway, this meteor was so bright it overexposed security cameras, turned night into day, and cast obvious shadows on the ground. This video shows several different views of it:

Whoa.

The coolest thing about these videos is, to me, the way the shadows of objects move rapidly around as the meteor flashes across the sky. I describe this very thing in the opening vignette of the asteroid impact chapter of my book Death from the Skies! The video is pretty much exactly as I imagined it would be. Yikes.

Of course, not everyone thinks this was just a chunk of rock burning up harmlessly in our atmosphere. Because, after all, why assume it was a natural event that occurs quite often, when you can add layers of nonsense and conspiracy to it? Fark alerted me to the idea that this was actually a nuclear missile shot down over the US, despite the video, pictures, and eyewitness accounts completely contradicting the idea that this was anything other than a meteor. But for some people, facts won’t get in the way of a good story!

Anyway, while spectacular, the Earth is probably subjected to meteors like this several times a year. As I have said before, now that we have security cameras and phones with video, we’ll be seeing more and more of videos like this, which is a good thing: it’ll make people more aware of the sky. I’m all for that!

After a series of setbacks — some devastating, holding up the world’s largest scientific experiment for many months — this milestone achieved shows that the collider is heading back to full operations, which should get started again next year. There will be press conference about this on Monday November 23rd at 1:00 p.m. GMT, which will be webcast live.

And if you’re wondering what the crew at CERN think of this latest news, then take a look at this picture of them looking at the results of the start up:

That picture makes me smile. Those unemotional, cold, calculating scientists. Why can’t they ever reveal their true feelings?

Yeah, it’s Saturn, not the Milky Way, but still. That is made of awesome. I want to go to that coffee shop!

Via Reddit.

You might think that’s an alien spore, or a crystal of some kind. But it’s actually what appears to be a rendering of a three-dimensional fractal!

Fractals are very interesting. There are different ways to describe one, but one way to think of one is that it’s a shape that looks the same no matter what magnification you use. You can double it, triple it, make it 10,876,432 times bigger, and the object still displays (more or less) the same features. The term fractal was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot, and there is an entire subclass of fractals named after him. They are seen in nature (and art, like here) quite a bit. Coastlines are fractal, as are — seriously — some kinds of broccoli.

However, fractals are generally calculated in two dimensions. What’s new here is that the fractal pattern has now been calculated in three dimensions! That is, to say the least, a non-trivial procedure — I used to play with some of the 2D equations many years ago, on my old 512k Fat Mac, with code written in Pascal (yes, with the semicolons and everything) and it was fascinating if very complex.

But the 3D idea has been written up by Daniel White, who, along with others, figured out how to create and render such an incredible object. He even created a "fly-over" video to demonstrate the fractal pattern:

Wow. Even if the math of this makes no sense at all to you, the beauty of this should be apparent.

Which brings up a point: why are mathematical shapes beautiful? What makes them so pleasing to our eyes and brain; why did we evolve an appreciation for such things? I don’t know, and at some point I’ll have to research that a bit — understanding the principles behind this will help me appreciate it even more.

Tip of the fractionally dimension hat to Fark.

My fellow Hive Overmind blogger and astronomer Sean Carroll writes that it’s possible Fermi has done just this. The data are not conclusive, but very provocative nonetheless. He has the details.

But I can’t resist adding that on The Big Bang Theory a few weeks ago, Raj and Sheldon were investigating building a detector to look for this very type of dark matter. I wrote David Saltzberg, the science advisor (whom I met on the set last month when I was visiting LA; more on him and that at a later date) and told him this, and he noted that I was right. Well, how about that! It had to happen sometime. Now, to publish…

Not only that, but there have been lots of followup posts and articles about it:

Skepchick’s Jon Ronson interview (NSFW language in the interview and on the page)

An article in Spanish that I hope is favorable

Crispian Jago

More Little Atoms

Facebook photos!

Merseyside Skeptics

Pictures on Flickr!

Pictures on Picasa!

Hugs and Science

More Crispian Jago

The blog called Using Me!

Hampshire Skeptics: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 (with an awesome pic you’ll know when you see it).

So, will there be a TAM London next year? We can’t say just yet, but we’re looking into it. Stay tuned!

Ho hum.

But one very cool thing that happened was that while watching the taping of one of my favorite shows, "The Big Bang Theory", I met David Saltzberg. David’s a physicist and astronomer who has serious bona fides in science. All that is very cool and all, but most importantly as far as I’m concerned is that he is the official science consultant on BBT. This is basically my dream job, so I’m very jealous.

But not bitter, because David’s a great guy. We met up on the set and immediately started chatting and having fun. And to cement himself in my pantheon of Very Cool People, he gave me his copy of the script so I could follow along with the show. Whoa! [Bill Prady, the co-Executive Producer of the show, also gave me a copy of the script for my daughter; Bill and David are the ones in the picture, courtesy CBS, from a UCLA article interviewing David.]

When you watch the show, take a look at the whiteboards littering the character’s apartments and offices. They always show a barrage of equations, notes, and diagrams. Those are all real! Yup, David’s work. When Sheldon and Raj argue over dark matter detection, or Leonard spouts off a line about physics, the core science is from David’s brain.

In a very wise and fun move, David has started a blog tying the science in the episodes to what’s currently known in the field, using BBT as a springboard to explain real cutting-edge stuff. It’s called The Big Blog Theory (also available en Español), and is a great read. if you’re a fan of the show, and a total science nerd (and as I always point out, if you read my blog then congrats! You’re a nerd) then you should put Big Blog Theory on your must read list. It adds a dimension to the show that otherwise wouldn’t be accessible except through ten-dimensional matrix transformations of the standard general relativistic metric, and while those are trivial to do it’s a step you now don’t need to take.