Dark as the Night

What is day and night but just your experience while located on the surface of our planet.  Twenty four hours is the measure of the time it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis give or take some seconds.  In one full rotation of the Earth you will be bathed in the light from our sun directly or through clouds and the rest of the time you will be in the dark.  But is the night really dark?  Not exactly.  Step into a closet with a tightly closing door and turn off the light.  What do you see?  Nothing.  Without any light you can see nothing, not even your hand right in front of your face.  That is truly dark.

There are many reasons for the night to not be dark.  Even after you eliminating, fires, volcanoes or your porch light you will not have a truly dark experience.  If the moon happens to be above the horizon you will be again be bathed in the light from our sun reflected off of the moon.  Moonlight can be bright enough to see objects and your surroundings with no problem, though colors are reduced to drab shades of grey.  You can see your shadow and moonlight prevents most clear nights from being dark.  Take the moon away.  Would you then have a dark night?  As dark as the closet?  Actually no, quite far from it.   Turning out the lights and picking a moonless night ends the immediate glare but as your eyes become accustom to the dark, previously unnoticed sources of illumination become apparent.  Lights from a nearby town or city light up the sky, especially if there are clouds passing over the light source.  Light from cities reflect off clouds, moisture and dust in the atmosphere and can provide illumination nearly as bright as the moon.  This sky light can be bright enough to overwhelm the light from all but the brightest stars.

Get away from the cities, towns, airports shopping malls and highways and you will leave the sky reflected light behind and again presumably set the stage for a true dark night.  However, even after you have escaped from civilization and are out on a clear moonless night, especially in the summer, you will realize this is still no dark closet.  The sky can still be veiled with a hazy diffuse light.  This is called air glow.  The molecules of air in the thin upper atmosphere of the Earth, after a day of bombardment from the ultraviolet portion of sunlight, will absorb this radiation and in doing so loose some electrons to become ionized.  This is not a stable condition and as the night proceeds these gases calm down, recapture their lost electrons and in the process emit feeble light.  This sky glow can also overwhelm the light of dim stars and provide enough ground illumination to see clearly by.   A more energetic version of this light show is the Aura Borealis or Northern Lights.  Eruptions in localized areas of the sun's surface, called flares spew clouds of high energy particles and radiation that escape the sun's gravity.  A continuously flow of much lower energy level particles also occurs called the solar wind.  This energetic material is captured in the Earth's magnetic field as it travels away from the sun and is guided to the poles where it streams down into the upper atmosphere and collides with the Oxygen, Nitrogen and other molecules of which the air is composed.  This bombardment provides a much more sudden and violent shock to the air molecules than the ultraviolet bath of the noon day sun, particularly when a flare on the sun directs this material at the earth.  These shocked air molecules also lose electrons but more more of them and when the gas calms down recapture of the lost cloud of negative electrons provides a more significant burst of light.  The Aura are mostly green but can also be blue, yellow and red.  A sky charged with high energy particles will emit light nearly as bright or brighter than a full moon.

So eventually you find yourself in the middle of a desert in the southwest, hundreds of miles from civilization's lights and south of all but the highest energy and least frequent low latitude aural displays.  You are there preferably there in the middle of the winter when the sun's light is indirect enough to do little energizing of the atmosphere.  Now you expect a dark night right?  Well not so quick.  When the dust settles you look around and still see the ground, your hand in front of your face and very likely your shadow.  This is because all light has not been eliminated.  What remains is the light from the hundreds of thousands of points of light in the sky high above and the irregular milky white band of diffuse light that stretches from horizon to horizon all of which make up our Milky Way galaxy.  The light from the suns in our galaxy are shining brightly through trillions of miles of space to light our dark night. The sum of all these candles in the dark is a light that you can walk by and see nearby surroundings.  A "bright, starlit night" is exactly that, bright, and this brightness is due solely to the star light shining down from all directions above.

But this is a dark sky isn't it?  Even though it is covered by tiny points of light, none amounting to more than a twinkling point.  Even the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, though they outshine the stars, still do not exhibit more than the point source of light unless you observe them through the magnification of binoculars or a telescope.  This is our dark night.  But what if it wasn't like this.

What if we lived on a planet orbiting a star that was not isolated like our sun but a member of a group of suns all born from the same nebula of gas an dust.  If we lived on a planet where our sun was a member of a cluster such as this one that I photographed through my telescope, the only dark we would know would be what we could find in a closet, closed room or cave under ground.  On our planet orbiting a cluster sun, there would be hundreds or thousands of suns in our sky all farther away than our sun but close enough to have a visible disk.  Some might be reddish or yellow, bluish or orange.  Many shining brightly enough to be painful to look at directly and all shining their light down continuously from all directions in the sky.  Sources of light to fill the sky much brighter than a full moon all the time.  The only variance during the rotation of the planet would be when the sun that we orbit is above the horizon to join the many other smaller suns.
 

  No day and night but only bright and brighter. On a world orbiting a cluster sun the inhabitants would not know what night was, dark yes, but closet dark, not outside walking around in the dark.  Outside dark would not exist and the term "night"  would have no meaning or at least not the same as we give it.

It's About Time

I've been reading some books on the subject of time. All eventually discuss whether time exists separate from space and matter or if it exists at all.

The theory that time is some tangible thing seems wrong. Sand you can see running down in an hour glass but time is more like and adjective than a noun. To answer the questing; What is time? is in trouble immediately. It would be as difficult to answer the question; "What is fast?"

I would suggest that time in the colloquial sense is a measure of gaps between events such as sun rise and sun set and it implies that between those events something was happening. That something was time. Time was moving along or evolving or flowing between these discrete events or the events were embedded in the flow of time. But the gaps between perceived events are not time and in fact gaps between events are not really gaps.

If you peel back the layers of the physical world and look at ever smaller or ever larger scales, you realize there is always something going on and the gap we thought existed between events, for which we devised clocks to measure, are in fact full of activity and other events. I proposed that there are no discrete events. In actuality there is a continuum of activity, most of which falls beyond our ability to sense. Possibly as a result of our insensitivity to this micro and macroscopic sea of activity, we have created devices that section the gaps we perceive between observed events into increments of change and we call this keeping time. A clock is such a device with a visible display depicting changes that are regular and repeatable. The discreteness of its motion though is an illusion. A spring may provide mechanical energy or the chemical reaction of a battery may power a motor that causes a mechanical arm to pivot about a central pin pointing to numerals equally spaced around a circle. Long before the hand sweeps to the next tic mark on the clock face, there is a crowd of gears or clouds of electrons behind the scenes turning away or racing through circuitry, piling up pressure to move the hand. The hand then helps us section the day and night into apparently discrete intervals. What we are measuring, such as day and night are also just an artifact of our viewpoint. Night an day are just our side of the planet rotating in and out of the its own shade as it continuously spins on its axis in the light of our sun. This occurs as we continuously revolve about the sun and the sun orbits the center of the galaxy which is drifting closer or farther from the other members of our local group of galaxies all of which are linked to the fabric of an expanding universe. Nothing is discrete or still and there is no such thing as empty.

Nothing ever stops or is at rest and nothing is as exact or discrete as it appears to our limited senses. A resting "solid" object that appears motionless, is actually expanding and contracting with temperature differences across it's surface on a microscopic scale. If we look closer, the entire structure of the object is vibrating at the atomic level and electrons wander about the interior and exterior as electric and magnetic fields continuously pass through the object. Nothing is still.

Nothing is empty. Even a vacuum is not empty. If you go into deep space far from out sun, if you can see only one star you can be assured that energy from that star is continuously passing through every cubic inch of space in your vicinity. Even in the cold vast space between galaxies the vacuum is full of energy. Energy in the form of light, magnetic fields, electric fields and gravitational fields permeates all of the universe. At scales far below that of the scale of galaxies we have so called empty space again between and within the atoms that make up our bodies and all we see. On the scale of an atom there is vast, apparently empty space between the nuclei of atoms and the cloud of orbiting electrons. However, as we look at ever smaller scales we see that this apparent empty space again is not empty but a seething foam of virtual particles representing the energy that is locked into very the structure of the universe. There is no such thing as empty.

Thus all events we perceive actually are embedded in a continuum of mater and energy in motion. Events we perceive have developed to the point of our observation through a continuous sequence of events and will dissipate in a similar manner at dimensions or in forms beyond our capability to observe. If we could perceive all activity we would understand that existence is just a continuum of events, overlapping preceding and following unending.

The universe is full of continuous change. In a sense the universe was set in motion and will remain in motion unless there is a source of external influence. We perceive only a tiny fraction of the activity of the universe. Keeping time is our way to fill the gaps created by our limited perception. If we "saw" everything we would need no clocks, watches, sundials or calendars. We would know what has happened, what is happening and could extrapolate what will happen.

Time is just the human attempt to catalogue events we experience.

Species or Not Species

Species, is it a limiting label? Do we use this term to a fault? I think so. What is a new or different species? Something completely different right? I think not.

This blog came to me after something I was listening to yesterday while driving home from work. I had a news radio show on when I heard a statement that began "Modern humans first appeared approximately...." It seems like such an odd statement to make. I can envision the mother ship in orbit beaming these first modern humans onto the surface of the Earth to perform this appearance. These so called modern humans are considered apart from everything that has walked the planet before. The discussion around Neanderthals and Cromagnon humans invokes the term species to deal with the problem of finding fossil remains of both from estimated similar geologic time.


Given recent news of flu virus evolving to infect people from pigs on a 10 year time scale and not so recent human changes enabling digestion of lactose in milk developing on a 10,000 year time scale, what changes might be possible in 50,000 years or 100,000 years. Significant changes in physical and physiological attributes of living things can happen well within the time gaps in fossil evidence. Samples of fossilized life or life evidence are rare and represent spotty evidence at best along a continuous time line into the past. Most of the time it is sudden, infrequent events that trap remains in a manner that results in fossils. Can we say that we have complete visibility of how a living thing has changed over time. No, we have snap shots, some of which show things we recognize as similar to others and sometimes do not. Does that mean that a continuous set of minor changes did not occur leading from one fossil to the next. No. But we do not have the evidence to show this gradual evolution from one to the next. In reality there are no actual divisions. This includes in the evolution of humans. The terminology generated by humans to assist with the description of the observed variety in the world of living entities has divided life into species, phylums and so on for convenience.

So what do we really have. We have a continuum of life all representing variations on a theme. A spectrum of possible variations of common ingredients. Nothing just springs into being. Cromagnon and Neanderthal came from a common ancestor and represent subsequent waves of migration from a common source. Variations in life build up with time due to environment and pressure of interaction with that environment. Our scientists look back across the abyss of time and see millions of years condensed into a scale too dense to show transitions that occur over tens or hundreds of thousands of years, as other than instantaneous. This is our failure to see and comprehend the granularity on that scale. All life on earth has a common origin and in a sense represents one family. The appearance of modern humans, or the fossil evidence of these humans, is sudden in our condensed view if history but in fact occurred over hundreds of thousands of years. When Cromagnon ventured out of Africa were the Neanderthal long dead or did they mingle with their own ancestors who had become isolated in the northern colder regions so long they developed unique physical attributes. But calling them a different species is more like an effort to deny our heritage than a scientific fact.

When we meet life on or from another planet will we then truly see another species of life? If all life evolves from common ingredients we may eventually recognize in a sense all life in our galaxy or even universe is related and species is no more than tabbed pages in a book denoting chapters.



Latest From The Observatory



This is from a hand held simple digital camera. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Moon observers might recognize that this is from a reflecting telescope that inverts and reverses the image. The large impact basins, called seas, are obvious in this photo. Primarily basalt like rock, these higher density areas are believed to be the reason this side of the moon experiences stronger gravitational attraction to the Earth and thus always faces us throughout the moon's monthly orbit. In a recent guest lecture about the moon that I provided at the middle school I was surprised at how difficult it was to demonstrate this fact.

Stay tuned for new photos if I break down and invest in proper astro photographic equipment.

April 18, 2009

Solar Weather

Around 1963 I my parents called me outside the house in the warm summer evening to see something I had been told about but had never seen, the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights. I am not sure today if my parents had ever witnessed them before or how they noticed what was happening that night but upon stepping out the door it was immediately obvious something was happening in the sky that was very unusual for Connecticut. A yellow green arc stretched from horizon to horizon, east to west, directly overhead. North of this arc, the sky was hazy and blotched with purples and greens. About half way to the eastern horizon was a red blotch that looked like a star burst covering an area several times the size of a full moon and all of this was flickering or oscillating just beyond what I could perceive.

I lived in a subdivision and as I calmed down a bit and looked around I saw whole families setting up lawn chairs out in their yards in the light of this event to watch. The event went on for 2-3 hours with the last purple green curtains limited to the North and Northeast fading around 11:00 that night. From then on I have had a pact with my brother that if either of us was outside and saw the lights that we would call the other immediately regardless of the hour. We have done this two to three times since. The last occurring about four years ago. This was during a period of significant sunspot and flare activity that occurred at the end of the last solar sunspot cycle. I monitored this activity daily on the SOHO solar satellite observatory web site site. Some of the most powerful solar flares ever measured occurred during this period causing the site to revise the x-ray and proton flux line charts to show flare intensity above M and X class that would have gone off the page without the chart adjustment.

We are now supposedly climbing up the sunspot cycle towards a peek expected within the next 2-3 years, yet since the surge in events at the end of the last cycle this activity has seemed to go to sleep. I just looked at the SOHO site and noted not one sunspot or irregular area visible. The chart that four years ago showed a line chart regularly interrupted with spikes exceeding M and X class intensities was flat. It seems odd that there could be such dramatic variance when you consider the size of the sun and the violence and intensity of the "normal" activity occurring, Thermonuclear reactions continuously occurring held in check by the weight of the nuclear fuel itself. What would cause it to go from complete turmoil to quiescent uniformity in a short 2-3 year span of time? A view of earth at any time from space will not fail to show some stormy areas boiling up and spiraling to the north or south. How could the sun be so calm over most of its enormous surface? Is this something new that we have not witnessed to date?

Solar wind, the particle flow from the sun, enhanced by flares and eruptions that eject plasma in our direction, normally impact the Earth's magnetic field that protects us from what might otherwise be lethal radiation levels. The system overloads occasionally releasing of high energy particles along the magnetic field lines into the atmosphere, mostly over the poles, a resulting in the aurora. The lights are evidence of energy being deposited into the atmosphere on a global scale. In the rarefied air at the altitudes where the aurora normally occur, temperature does not have the same meaning it does on the surface of the earth. The speeding up of the air molecules caused by solar particle impacts technically is a temperature rise but not one that would sensed by our skin. However as the energy cascades down towards the surface the effect spreads out and can not help but raise the temperature even minutely of the ocean of air it is impacting.

For many years we have been experiencing large scale activity on the sun and heightened levels of particle and electromagnetic energy impingement on the Earth's atmosphere. Though there is no doubt that human activity is raising the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere, could there also have been a contributing factor from the sun? Now with the sun experiencing the least activity recorded in recent history, could there be a noticeable effect in the rate of warming or possibly even a reversal. Not immediately of course but over a period of months or years and the longer this quite sun persists could the effect become more pronounced?

For the past 1-2 million years, based on sediment analysis of deposits of pollen, river debris and other material laid down by wind and water, it is believed the Earth has experienced major glacial advances about every 100,000 years. The last major glaciation melted about 50,000 years ago. We are due for the beginning of the next cycle. What causes the cycle is not known. Latest theories of global warming have the next glacial cycle being delayed or cancelled. This is based on the trends in temperature rise observed in the past few hundred years. However, it has been hotter than it is currently in the past and glaciers still advanced. Assuming we can extrapolate recent past atmospheric temperature history through the next glacial cycle may not be as secure as we believe. Reducing carbon emissions is the right thing to do. We need to live in harmony with our spaceship Earth. However, the statement "we do not know what we do not know" may never be truer. We do not understand why the Earth plummets into cold periods lasting tens of thousands of years but we know this has happened many times in the past. Could this be as simple as a sustained reduction in solar particle and radiation impingement on the Earth and if so is a gradual cooling and refreezing of the poles as inevitable as a oil tanker hitting the reef hours after making the wrong turn?

Stay tuned.

April 13, 2009

In the begining

This is my first blog. Cerebral Contents is just that. Cleaning out the dust bunnies from my cranium. These thoughts are like seeds that I plant in a new medium to see if they take root.

Thought for today. Ever notice how relaxing it is to sit by a camp fire and stare into the flames. In fact does it seem that it is warmer just looking at a fire. I think that there is an ancient body knowledge that we tap into when we do this. Fire emits infrared radiation that obviously warms your body. Your brain needs to be warm. Is is possible that staring into a fire actually gets heat to the brain faster than warming the blood in your extremities? By warming the fluid in the eyes and the blood vessels in the retina that are in close proximity to the brain and of that brain the area you need to make decisions, the cerebrum, you maintain higher cognitive capability than might otherwise be possible in colder climates. When fire was tamed did it give prehistoric people with fire an advantage over those without. Were they warming their brains during cold nights thinking thoughts, expanding neural networks and intelligence in an extended operational mode from what might have been without fire.

We are some of what we were, we are and what we will be.

Oxide April 11, 2009