Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Most Astounding Fact

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The most astounding fact about the Universe

IF there is one thing we all want in life, it is to feel connected. We want to feel relevant. We want to feel like participants in the goings on of activities and events around us. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive…

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist and science communicator who is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Neil deGrasse is also a research associate in the department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has hosted the educational science television show called NOVA scienceNOW and has been a frequent guest on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Jeopardy!. In 2011 it was announced that Tyson will be hosting a new sequel to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

During an interview with a TIME magazine journalist, Neil deGrasse Tyson was asked what the most astounding fact about the universe was. His response was so well put that a freelance videographer (MaxSchlick) has created a video using spectacular footage from NASA and various other sources.

The video clip “The Most Astounding Fact” is both emotionally moving and hugely insightful. Neil deGrasse Tyson has a knack for explaining cosmological events with such passion and simplicity.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: The Most Astounding Fact

As quoted from the video link, Neil goes on to say: “For me, that is the most profound revelation of 20th century astrophysics and I look forward to what the 21st century will bring us, given the frontiers that are now unfolding.” One of my favourite quotations is from Neil deGrasse Tyson, which goes as follows:

“We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically”
~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

If you are interested in cosmology, quantum physics and more about how our Universe works, here is some interesting reading:

• About Time …
• What happened before the Big Bang?
• The evolution of stars in the universe
• Choices and the Uncertainty Principle

The Botany of Desire – Part 2

BOTANY: The tulip, marijuana and human desire

** Read the first part of this article here **

Cannabis
MARIJUANA gratifies the human desire to experience an altered state of consciousness. We are all born with an innate drive to experience other mind states periodically, whether this manifests into singing, dancing, experimenting with substances or jumping out of an aeroplane.

The genius of marijuana is to appeal to this human desire and it has mastered the art of biochemistry. Through it we have discovered a wealth of information regarding how memory, emotion and consciousness all work.

Marijuana’s world domination strategy involved producing more of the chemical (THC) that appeals to the human creature in order to be spread its genes and be given more habitat in which to thrive. Anthropologists posit that the only human culture never to have been influenced by this plant were the Inuit.

Most cultures have historically used cannabis to relieve pain. In Western culture marijuana was the driving force behind the jazz era and set alight the social revolution of the sixties.

The banning of marijuana in the United States led people to splice the genes of Mexican­ and Indian marijuana to produce a short, resilient and fast-growing plant that could be produced indoors. This has resulted in an almost entirely new species of plant, which now largely lives a cushy existence removed entirely from the foothills of Mongolia and China where it originated.

The Tulip
The tulip, like many flowers, has evolved to gratify our desire for a certain kind of beauty. Flowers have been flaunting their beauty for more than 100 million years since the rise of the angiosperms. These plants form fruit and seed and have male and female types, which allows for the mixing of genes. This creates greater variety, which means greater adaptability and ability to survive.

When the tulip caught our attention and began to be cultivated, this plant underwent some startling changes. Its new forms bewitched the sultan of the Ottoman Empire and engulfed the Dutch in “tulip mania” during the 17th century. The tulip fast became one of the most valuable commodities in the world and spurred one of the biggest investment bubbles in human history.

The tulip came to denote wealth and status and it became fashionable for the prosperous to grow flower gardens. One tulip variety, the Semper Augustus, fetched as much as R70 000 in today’s money. Soon there was more money outstanding on tulip bulbs than there was in circulation, which caused economic collapse. It was later discovered that the most sought-after tulip varieties were actually infected by a plant virus. Today, more than 19 million tulips leave Holland for flower shops around the world.

In a nutshell, plants are pretty amazing. The central lesson we can take from these four species is that we need to stop trying to control nature­ and rather learn to work with it.

• Video footage, interviews with Michael Pollan and more about The Botany of Desire can be explored online at www.pbs.org

The Botany of Desire

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PLANTS: The apple and potato of desire

THE banana plant can ‘walk’ up to 40 centimeters in its lifetime. Many herbal plants can warn each other chemically when predatory herbivores are nearby. The sunflower is able to extract radioactivity from water.

Plants really aren’t appreciated enough in our hi-tech, modernised world. Many humans like to believe that we somehow exist outside the web of nature rather than living within it. From an evolutionary point of view, plants are just as advanced as humans. Time and time again nature proves that it is stronger than any of our designs as we constantly try to control it.

A friend of mine who has just come back from the United States told me about a fantastic book by bestselling author, Michael Pollan, called The Botany­ of Desire. The book tells the story­ of human desire and is about the domestication of four specific plants from the plants’ perspectives (metaphorically speaking). The apple, tulip, cannabis and the potato have all been integral to the human tale and have influenced history, economics, politics, religion and technology and raised debate over genetically modified food.

The Apple of Desire
Apples have evolved to gratify our desire for sweetness — an innate, hardwired desire that is simply a part of our biology. From an early age we learn that bitter plants are often poisonous while sweet ones are calorie-rich and therefore good for us.

The apple first sprouted into existence in Kazakhstan. To migrate to all four corners of the globe and spread its genes, it had to appeal to mammals as a sweet food source. This brought the apple to the New World.

However, what was unknown to the early pioneers is that every apple seed within an apple contains different genetic material and will produce a completely different variety of apple if planted from seed. These tend to be very bitter and New World apples were primarily used to make hard cider, which put rural America into a great binge.

Today there are thousands of apple­ varieties and it is still arguably the universal fruit. It even influenced artists of the Renaissance to imagine the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden as being an apple.

The Potato of Desire
The potato represents our desire to control nature and cultivate a staple food source. It led to the rise of the Incan Empire and helped fuel the Industrial Revolution. It changed the course of European­ history and led to a huge population­ boom. For civilisations in and around Europe potato crops freed more people from tilling the fields and allowed them to focus their attention on other pursuits.

The potato was also a godsend for the Irish who were unable to grow much of anything. This was until a fungus caused the great potato famine in the 19th century — killing over a million people.

The potato has taught us a valuable lesson in biodiversity and illustrated the risk of monocultures. Growing just one species of an edible plant makes entire crops vulnerable to disease and infection. However, the demand today for a certain kind of McDonald’s potato chip has resulted in farmers once again growing mostly just one kind of elongated potato.

Attempts to prevent another potato famine has led several farmers to genetically modify potatoes. Splicing a gene from a bacterium that lives in the soil with the potato leaf kills insects, but has also led to huge consumer uprisings against genetically modified foods.

• Read The Botany of Desire Part 2 here

Related articles

• The Botany of Desire
• Wild versus Cultivated
• Michael Pollan : Cannabis Forgetting and the Botany of Desire

Choices and the Uncertainty Principle cont.

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Read part 1 of Choices and the Uncertainty Principle here

THE reason that the laws of general relativity break down at the Big Bang is that it does not incorporate the most basic tenet of quantum theory – the uncertainty principle – the element that Einstein could never accept.

Quantum theory tells us that the very early Universe must have had a multitude of choices. It could have formed a black hole, there could have been no expansion of the Universe, the strength of gravity could have been stronger or weaker and there could have been no matter in the Universe, only radiation. All of these choices would have resulted in a still-born Universe.

The multitude of choices and resulting uncertainties form the basis of quantum theory. But the Universe, as big as it is today, is still subject to the uncertainties. It is like a gambler throwing the dice – there are a large number of possible rolls of the dice. It is interesting to note that in a large object such as the Universe, the multitude of choices average out to something we can predict. That is why we can apply Einstein’s theory so successfully to the Universe as a whole.

Scientists also refer to the multitude of choices as multiple histories. The well-known American theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman, has developed a mathematical framework to calculate the most probable outcome of multiple histories. The same formulae can be applied to determine the most likely position of an electron. Again, the closer we determine an electron’s position, the larger its velocity will be.

The uncertainties of the quantum world are not imaginary; they are real. Feynman’s multiple histories idea of the Universe is now incorporated into general relativity to form a unified theory which could be used to calculate how the Universe will develop if we know how the histories started.

Perceptions of time

What does quantum theory tell us about time in the Universe? Time does not exist in quantum theory! At least it does not exist in the sense that most of us think about it. There is no clock out there ticking no matter what happens in the Universe. Time in quantum theory is simply the measurement of a process, like the decay of radioactive matter.

Clocks developed to measure such processes cannot measure any duration of time smaller than a billionth-billionth of a second. This is more or less the size of an atom or, more precisely, the time it will take a photon to cross the size of an atom. This interpretation of time is in line with Einstein’s general relativity. Measurement of the duration of processes at the quantum level is subject to the uncertainties and fuzziness typical of quantum theory.

We cannot measure the duration of time it takes a particle to acquire a certain amount of energy. The more accurately we measure the energy, the less accurate can we measure the time it took the particle to gain the energy. This is why the formation of particles (matter) in the early Universe is subject to the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

Feeling uncertain?

People do not like uncertainties and therefore most do not like quantum mechanics. As a scientist put it: “I do not like quantum mechanics, but I use it because it works”. The velocity of particles in the early Universe must have been incredibly high due to the high energy levels. If you use such a particle to determine time, you would find that a particle traveling at the speed of light gives you the age of the Universe as NIL.

All particles must have been traveling at very close to the speed of light. It becomes clear that every particle had its own time. Whose time is correct? All readings of time are correct depending on your velocity and the gravitational pull. Einstein said: “every observer’s time is correct”. There is no intrinsic unchanging time.

What is reality?

I want to end with a few thoughts about our relationship at the macroscopic level with the microscopic world. In everyday life you never see a single photon and the microscopic world seems so remote and unreal. If you think further, you realize that almost everything in our everyday world is the way it is because of the quantum world. Matter has bulk because atoms have size. The colours, textures, hardness and the transparency of materials all depend on the exclusion principle regulating the behaviour of electrons in atoms. The list could go on, but ultimately the macroscopic world is what it is because of the microscopic world.

The quantum world is not something remote. It forms part of all matter. Take this page; look at it at ever smaller distances and time scales and the apparent mad world I have described above will unfold before your eyes. The problem is, currently we can only access the quantum world theoretically because technology has not developed so far that we can access it in any other way.

Frikkie de Bruyn is the Director of the Cosmology
Section of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa

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• What happened before the Big Bang?
• The evolution of stars in the Universe

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The Quantum Universe and the Uncertainty Principle

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Guest post by Frikkie de Bruyn

SUPPOSE you want to order breakfast in a restaurant and the waiter gives you a menu of thousands of different choices. Some of the choices may be closer to what you want to order but every choice is subject to a probability that you may or may not get it. One choice may offer you bacon prepared in thousands of different ways, another an egg prepared in thousands of different ways. Every probability is subject to a chance that you may or may not get it.

You wonder if you’re still on Earth and leave the restaurant in disgust. What’s going on? This is an example of quantum logic and uncertainty.

In the quantum world, this logic reigns supreme. At the quantum level, the principle of uncertainty manifests itself in the form of quantum fluctuations. These may be seen as fluctuations in the energy levels and the formation of virtual particles and anti-particles annihilating within the limits set by the uncertainty principle. The greater the energy fluctuations, the greater the energy borrowed by the virtual particles. This means that the times for the energy to be repaid by the particles are getting shorter and shorter.

However, generally provided that these exchanges take place in times between the Compton time (10-23 s) and the Planck time (10-43 s) all is well. This is important for the very early Universe as we shall see below. We are not aware of this apparently chaotic scene because of what some scientists calls decoherence.

Traveling in an aircraft high above the ocean you are oblivious to the high waves on the ocean far below because your eyes cannot see the waves at that altitude. The same happens to uncertainties at the quantum level. You may not be aware of the quantum fluctuations and uncertainties, but it is very real indeed. All computers use the tunneling effect at the quantum level; without it there will be no computers. But what has this to do with the Universe?

If we follow Einstein’s equations to the end, the Universe started out from a point of infinite density, gravity and temperature. This is the conclusion Prof. Stephen Hawking and Dr. Roger Penrose reached and for which Hawking received his Doctorate. They also concluded that the size of the Universe in the beginning must have been smaller than the nucleus of an atom, in other words, a quantum object.

In quantum mechanics there are, however, no infinities! Hawking further reached the conclusion that the principles and laws of general relativity break down at the Big Bang. He realized why these apparent discrepancies between general relativity and quantum mechanics occurred and he subsequently conceded that it was wrong to apply general relativity to a quantum object, since Einstein’s equations cannot handle the incredible densities, gravity and temperature at the quantum level.

We must replace the word ‘infinities’ with ‘incredible’ and we have to conclude that the Universe started out as a quantum object subject to all the uncertainties, laws and principles of quantum mechanics.

The quantum object from which the Universe originated can be described as a primordial quantum vacuum. A chance quantum fluctuation, also described as false vacuum energy, released an incredible amount of energy causing the Universe to expand exponentially. Hawking described the origin of the energy as the quantum vacuum having borrowed the energy from gravity, meaning that there is no need for the energy to be repaid in the present epoch of the Universe. Was there a minimum size of the Universe at the Big Bang? Quantum mechanics tells us that there probably was; the Planck length of 10-33 cm. But we have to be careful.

How can we know?

We cannot determine experimentally if that size even exists and what the energy levels will be. Even if it does exist then the energy levels were probably so high that any chance fluctuation could have pushed it over the limit to form a black hole. Current theoretical research seems to point more and more to the probability that the very early Universe had a minimum size. But it must be emphasized that temperature, gravity and densities were so enormously high that it cannot be recreated in even the most advanced particle accelerators on Earth.

The very early Universe can therefore only be theoretically studied. Any conclusions that the very early Universe may or may not have had a minimum size are always subject to the uncertainties of quantum mechanics. It will nevertheless be of considerable significance if the conclusions turn out to be correct.

Continue Reading …

Frikkie de Bruyn is the Director of the Cosmology
Section of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa

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• What happened before the Big Bang?
• The evolution of stars in the Universe

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