Image created by Brook Boley

Remember the scene where Charlton Heston finds the remains of the Statue of the Liberty? In The Planet of the Apes, I mean. Sorry, I just gave the ending away. It’s a classic trope (the “Earth all along“). And it’s a classic pop culture reference to time dilation.

I recently ran across Carl Sagan’s explanation of time dilation, the phenomenon in which perspectives of time can vary–the concept of relativity that Einstein laid out. The most famous example being the relative slowing of time as you move faster—basically, the reason why Charlton Heston’s mission aboard the Icarus was 18 months for him but more than 2000 years back on Earth, during which time apes evolved, learned English, and took over.

Relative velocity isn’t the only cause of time dilation, but it’s the one Carl Sagan discusses here. The other big factor is gravity—the closer you are to a major source of gravity, like a planet, the slower time passes for you relative to objects farther from the planet.

This is from episode 8 of Sagan’s famous Cosmos series (which I’ve never actually seen). I like the pastoral Italian setting, and especially the opening scene in which Sagan uses a near-collision to illustrate his first point about the speed of light. And while the time dilation thought experiment has a certain poignance, I love the way Sagan supercharges his pronunciation of the Italian names Paolo and Vincenzo. He sounds more Italian than the Italian kids.

[Photo illustration by Brook Boley from Gizmodo's "50 of the Most Insane Things Never Seen on Google Street View"]

Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine featured a profile of the physicist, now in his 80s, as its cover story. He’s been ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Study for the last several decades.

I liked the piece. There are some questions, which I’ve heard a couple of editors express, about why he merited such a long profile, and the cover, no less. But that’s really a question of editorial inclinations.

The great strength of the article is the sensitive portrayal of Dyson himself. He is a character, a charming and sweet man whose life experience reads like fiction. Nicholas Dawidoff, who wrote the piece, describes Dyson’s smile, and his laugh, “so hearty it shakes him,” which is absolutely true. The global warming controversy seems secondary, though I’d guess it was originally the big reason this story was picked up by the magazine. Ultimately, we have this story of a man who is happy with his life, and has always done whatever suited him, rather than whatever the establishment expected. After all, he did switch from being an Englishman to being an American, and from mathematics to physics to activism and writing.

I interviewed Dyson almost nine years ago, in April 2001. As the years pass, I keep thinking how fortunate I am that my first in-depth, sit-down interview with anyone was with him.

You can see a kind of blueprint for the magazine story in my interview, from the series of Dyson’s greatest hits of applied scientific craziness (Project Orion, the so-called Dyson sphere, major genetic re-engineering), to his deep sense of humanity and obligation to the less fortunate.

I was also introduced to Dyson’s skepticism in that interview. He criticized people who were wary of genetically modified foods. He applauded gentrification. He recounted a story about NASA’s emphasis on public relations over science. He dismissed sustainability, “because what does it mean?” As far as Dyson was concerned, “sustainability” was—and, one could contend, still is—vague enough to mean whatever its promoters want.

You can download my interview, conducted for the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science, as a PDF here.

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At the bottom of my web site, in the footer section, there is a phrase: “It is a great big world.” After my interview with Dyson, as I was about to leave, Dyson told me about flying to China, and sitting next to a boy who spent most of the trip staring out the window. At one point, the boy turned to him, and said, “It’s a great big world!.” Indeed, it is. Easy to forget.

The piece is called “California Goes Planet Hunting,” and was produced for California magazine’s recent astronomy issue.

Artist’s conception of the 55 Cancri system courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech and W. M. Keck Observatory.

In the image below, we see three shots of the galaxy NGC 2770. The typical spiral galaxy might have one supernova in a century; this one has had three in the last ten years.

If we were to go to a hydrogen fuel cell economy and we produce a lot of hydrogen, and some fraction escapes (because it’s notoriously difficult to contain that small molecule), then we might see emissions equal to or greater than what’s produced naturally. Because it’s such a reactive gas…that could change the balance of chemistry in our atmosphere.

You can read it here.

This morning, NASA and the Exploratorium webcast live from Xinjiang, China. You can watch their hour-long production at the Exploratorium’s Total Solar Eclipse web site. (That’s a photo from the Exploratorium blog above.)

The broadcast starts about 30 minutes before totality, when the moon completely blocks out the sun. The first fifteen minutes include a lesson from scientists on the ground about what happens during an eclipse. That’s followed by some back-and-forth between the scientists and a local Chinese news anchor, which includes a few minutes of classic Chinese journalism/propaganda/travelogue that touts the wonders of Xinjiang. Xinjiang has quite a few ethnic minorities, notably the Uighur, some of whom agitate for independence from China. Words like peace, harmony, and unity are sprinkled in this section of the show. The astro-drama begins at about the 33-minute mark.

Ah, to be in China again. The story I want to see stemming from this is the story of Yiwu County, perched among desert and mountains, a 16 hour drive from Urumqi and its airport, with, according to Wikipedia, 20,000 inhabitants. Over the last couple days, busloads of telescope-toting nerds and media have laid siege. In anticipation, the government set up a tent city to accommodate all 10,000 of them (as well as what one scientist calls a “Gobi Stonehenge.”). All that planning leading up to a two hour show. And now that this place has had its moment in the sun, so to speak, what next?

Here’s what the moon’s shadow looks like on earth during a total solar eclipse. Taken on the Russian Space Station Mir, 11 August 1999.

The next total solar eclipse is scheduled for 22 July 2009. Totality will occur from northern India, across Bhutan, and along the Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) to Shanghai.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Posting will be slow, er, slower, until the home internet thing is straightened out.

They come from the Fertile Crescent, their domestication coincides with the rise of agriculture, and they can be divided into four geo-genetic groups: Europe, Mediterranean, East Africa, Asia. (Why not West Africa? How did they get specific on that, especially in comparison to Asia?) The Persian is apparently not Persian; the Japanese bobtail probably isn’t Japanese. Also, cat breeds aren’t so terribly inbred as certain dog breeds.

In India last January, I saw plenty of dogs, but no cats (or none that I recall). Some rats, which makes me wonder what happened to the cat rung in the animal hierarchy. In China, a few cats, mostly pets. Here in San Francisco, I rarely see cats on the street, though the SPCA is overflowing with them.

I don’t come from cat people, but my girlfriend is one, so I live with a cat (pictured here). My girlfriend’s expert guess is that Mosaic is some blend of calico and tortoiseshell. Which seems reasonable enough. We got her at the SPCA, origins unknown.

And then Heather Smith writes in Slate about why maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised or so worried. Because the honeybee that we’ve come to think we know and love is already long gone. Smith notes, “The only honeybees left—i.e., the ones that started disappearing in October—had become the cows of the insect world: virtually extinct in the wild, hopped up on antibiotics, and more likely to reproduce via artificial insemination than by their own recognizance.”

Illustration from Slate by Robert Neubecker.

But first, some news. Mr. Wizard died this afternoon. I thought he was great. Some have disagreed with me about him in the past, citing unhappy memories of being forced to sit through his show in class. But I didn’t see it in class, and only had cable for a couple of years as a kid when he was on Nickelodeon, all of which to say that I rarely saw the show, which made it all the more interesting.

Mr. Wizard made science real. How else would I have learned that you can drink grape juice while standing on your head?

And he left his impression. I didn’t grow up in a place with big museums or, frankly, creative or curious people. This may be why I’m so ambivalent about criticizing television. It was shows like Mr. Wizard and 3-2-1 Contact and numerous public television programs that instilled in me a childhood sense of wonder in the wider world.

And that sense is what I’ve been chasing the last several years. It’s helped me get around on a couple of continents and into a couple of professions.

I suppose I’m sending a note of thanks, then, to Mr. Wizard and those people who produce shows like his. We’re watching.

Cold as hell. Or is that, cold as Hell? That seems like a contradiction in terms. Hell is hot, right? So if it really is cold outside, it’s probably not as cold as Hell. Somewhere along the line, we divorced the simile “as hell” from its literal meaning (insofar as any location described by a religion is literal), and lower-cased the word in the process. Now it seems to mean “extremely.”

But what is the temperature of Hell? If you Google “temperature of hell,” you’ll get a hell of a lot of results, many having to do with the no doubt apocryphal student’s answer about whether Hell is endothermic or exothermic, and the much-cited calculation of the temperatures of Heaven and Hell based on Isaiah 30:26 and Revelations 21:8. (Apparently Heaven is hotter.) But maybe Hell really is cold. Parts, anyway. Dante, in his Inferno, describes individuals trapped underwater, cursed to wallow in mud under cold rain and hail, and frozen in a lake. Why not? Those all sound pretty miserable, too. (He also describes people gnawing on each others heads.)

I am not so familiar with the Bible, but the Christian concept of Hell seems to leave a lot of room for interpretation. Maybe our ideas of Hell are the constructs of a culture or the ideas of an individual (like the belief that souls are immortal, which, my friend Will tells me, was not always the case). It seems likely that, for example, the vision of Hieronymus Bosch—whose third panel, “Hell,” from the Haywain triptych is displayed here (see also the Garden of Earthly Delights and the Last Judgment on that page)—that Bosch’s vision is a determinative element in our modern conception of Hell. But his Hell is also populated by lots of interesting creatures, little kiwi birds and strange musical instruments.

The San Francisco Chronicle science writer Keay Davidson published a story Tuesday about this season’s Bay Area weather. He notes, for example, that as of March 1, San Francisco’s winter rainfall is 135 percent higher than average. And, “a forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Md., said in early February that Californians could expect a slightly drier, warmer period into April because of La Niña,” a point I repeated on this blog when we had a spell of famously Mediterranean weather. (That NOAA forecaster could not be reached for comment in time for Davidson’s story. He or she is probably just not answering the phone.)

“In recent days, average Bay Area temperatures have been about 15 degrees below normal,” according to the article. That’s why we’ve had snow at higher altitudes and icy road conditions leading to accidents all over the place, including last Saturday morning’s 28-car pileup on the 101 between the Golden Gate Bridge and Sausalito. The article on that accident includes a handy list of tips for driving in cold-weather conditions, which most people here never have to do. For residents of the Bay Area, true winter weather is something to which we choose to subject ourselves, not something we are forced to endure. And then, we subject ourselves mainly in the name of having fun on ski slopes—those of us who can afford it, anyway. We aren’t used to shivering through the streets; doesn’t matter that most of the nation deals with this for at least three months of the year. And I’m numbering myself among the afflicted, because although I’ve spent years in Alaska, New Hampshire, Maine, and Nebraska, four years in San Francisco have spoiled me for winters.

It’s raining, it’s snowing, it’s windy, it’s hailing, it’s icy. It’s miserable. It’s just cold as hell.