Hollywood versus reality

Aw geeze! I just saw the trailer for "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown. I'm honestly astonished that it appears to be even more anti-Catholic than "The DaVinci Code" was. You hear the words "the truth" thrown around in the trailer alot, which is so ironic given the flimsy plots of all of Dan Brown's books.

It looks like it will present itself as some sort of heroic movie pushing the question of science versus religion driving the two things into a strict either/or situation rather than seeing their compatibility.

The plot of the story is just completely absurd. The whole irony is that people will get pulled into the whole "religion versus science" debate and have doubts about religion, yet will fail to miss all the poor science and non sequitur moments in the actual plot of the book.

This will be the new controversial film of the year because you can tell the studio is going to hype this with all the advertising they can. Of course the other irony is that the movie will try to tell people not to have blind faith regarding religion, but obviously if they are going to see the movie, they will have proven that they have blind faith about the advertising. Sadly, this film will be a blockbuster, mainly because of the advertising, not because of the content. Don't believe me, just look at what happened with "The DaVinci Code." The media and controversy surrounding it made it a blockbuster, but the critics and most moviegoers said the movie was lame. I'm sure this time the studios have hired actual writers to clean the script up. And people say that those who follow religion are just dumb sheep. Ugh.

I would say that this is the perfect time for the Church to emphasize more the compatibility of scienc and religion, as it always has.

For instance, do you know where the theory of the Big Bang came from? A Catholic priest named Georges Lemaitre.

Hopefully Amy Welborn is writing a new book as we speak. LOL.

RS

Science of Candles

The Periodic Videos guys have an interesting Halloween video on candles which is actually very informative ... at least from a Sacristy geek's perspective. What altar boy hasn't been fascinated by candles at one point or another.



RS

LHC now down until Spring of 2009

Wow, maybe the LHC is a time machine. Because the experiment is moving further and further into the future.

The warm-up period and ensuing investigations will bump up against the LHC's "obligatory winter maintenance period," according to a statement today from CERN. This brings us into early spring before commissioning can restart.

Whole article here:

Large Hadron Collider Down Until 2009

I did manage to find some video of some lower energy collision experiements.
(Remember, kids, don't try this at home, these are the world's top scientists working with the most complex machine in the world).



RS

LHC start delayed for at least two months.

Well, bad news on the science side of things. The LHC has had some mechanical failures and will be out of commission for at least two months according to a CNN article:

Large Hadron Collider down for 2 months

At this rate it looks like we'll get something for Christmas, either a Higgs particle, a new physics, or a just the end of the world. LOL.

See, if Congress hadn't canned the Superconducting Super Collider here in Texas, we probably would have figured all this science stuff out by now.

Here's a webcam of the LHC so you can watch what's currently going on if any are online.

LHC Webcams

RS

Abortion and Politics

The US Bishops have an excellent article addressing the issue of abortion and the political sphere in responding to Senator Biden's recent erroneous statements.

I recently had a small argument with a Catholic friend of mine who kept approaching the abortion issue from the angle of Church teaching. However, the abortion issue falls under natural law. Abortion isn't wrong just because the Church teaches it's wrong. Abortion is wrong because it is an intrinsic evil, that is, it is the termination of an innocent human life. Murder, the killing of an innocent human being, is something that all persons intrinsically know is wrong. The stage of development does not make a person any less human or alive. Thus the Church's teachings on abortion affirm this natural order. Abortion is not a religious issue per se, it is a human rights and justice issue.

Senator Biden was acting like abortion was an issue similar to the Immaculate Conception. A Catholic can't make laws that say everyone has to believe in the Immaculate Conception. But Catholics as well as any human person are obliged to follow the natural law and work to stop the killing of innocent human lives which happen in abortion. This is also why abortion is never morally permissible.

The US Bishop's article follows [with my emphasis]

Bishops Respond To Senator Biden’s Statements Regarding Church Teaching On Abortion

WASHINGTON—Cardinal Justin F. Rigali, chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Bishop William E. Lori, chairman, U.S. Bishops Committee on Doctrine, issued the following statement:

Recently we had a duty to clarify the Catholic Church’s constant teaching against abortion, to correct misrepresentations of that teaching by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on “Meet the Press” (see http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2008/08-120.shtml). On September 7, again on “Meet the Press,” Senator Joseph Biden made some statements about that teaching that also deserve a response.

Senator Biden did not claim that Catholic teaching allows or has ever allowed abortion. He said rightly that human life begins “at the moment of conception,” and that Catholics and others who recognize this should not be required by others to pay for abortions with their taxes.

However, the Senator’s claim that the beginning of human life is a “personal and private” matter of religious faith, one which cannot be “imposed” on others, does not reflect the truth of the matter. The Church recognizes that the obligation to protect unborn human life rests on the answer to two questions, neither of which is private or specifically religious.

The first is a biological question: When does a new human life begin? When is there a new living organism of the human species, distinct from mother and father and ready to develop and mature if given a nurturing environment? While ancient thinkers had little verifiable knowledge to help them answer this question, today embryology textbooks confirm that a new human life begins at conception (see www.usccb.org/prolife/issues/bioethic/fact298.shtml). The Catholic Church does not teach this as a matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact.

The second is a moral question, with legal and political consequences: Which living members of the human species should be seen as having fundamental human rights, such as a right not to be killed? The Catholic Church’s answer is: Everybody. No human being should be treated as lacking human rights, and we have no business dividing humanity into those who are valuable enough to warrant protection and those who are not. This is not solely a Catholic teaching, but a principle of natural law accessible to all people of good will. The framers of the Declaration of Independence pointed to the same basic truth by speaking of inalienable rights, bestowed on all members of the human race not by any human power, but by their Creator. Those who hold a narrower and more exclusionary view have the burden of explaining why we should divide humanity into those who have moral value and those who do not and why their particular choice of where to draw that line can be sustained in a pluralistic society. Such views pose a serious threat to the dignity and rights of other poor and vulnerable members of the human family who need and deserve our respect and protection.

While in past centuries biological knowledge was often inaccurate, modern science leaves no excuse for anyone to deny the humanity of the unborn child. Protection of innocent human life is not an imposition of personal religious conviction but a demand of justice.

RS

Church to have a congress on evolution

I've been waiting for something like this. Evolution has been such a hot topic with the extremes of pure scientism (those who think science is only the natural sciences and forget that philosphy and theology are sciences as well) and the fundamentalists (who ignore scientific data altogether). Both these sides think that faith and reason are incompatable. It will be good to have a look at the topic and get a better theological understanding of it.

CONGRESS ON EVOLUTION TO BE HELD IN 2009

VATICAN CITY, 16 SEP 2008 ( VIS ) - In the Holy See Press Office this morning, the presentation took place of an upcoming international conference entitled: "Biological Evolution: Facts and Theories. A Critical Appraisal 150 years after 'The Origin of Species'". The conference is due to be held in Rome from 3 to 7 March 2009.

The congress has been jointly organised by the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, U.S.A. , under the patronage of the Pontifical Council for Culture and as part of the STOQ Project (Science, Theology and the Ontological Quest).

Participating in today's press conference were Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture; Fr. Marc Leclerc S.J., professor of the philosophy of nature at the Pontifical Gregorian University; Gennaro Auletta, scientific director of the STOQ Project and professor of the philosophy of science at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and Alessandro Minelli, professor of zoology at the University of Padua, Italy.

"Debates on the theory of evolution are becoming ever more heated, both among Christians and in specifically evolutionist circles", Fr. Leclerc explained. "In particular, with the approach of the ... 150th anniversary of the publication of 'The Origin of Species', Charles Darwin's work is still too often discussed more in ideological terms than in the scientific ones which were his true intention".

"In such circumstances - as Christian scientists, philosophers and theologians directly involved in the debate alongside colleagues from other confessions or of no confession at all - we felt it incumbent upon us to bring some clarification. The aim is to generate wide-ranging rational discussion in order to favour fruitful dialogue among scholars from various fields and areas of expertise. The Church has profound interest in such dialogue, while fully respecting the competencies of each and all. This is, however, an academic congress, organised by two Catholic universities, the Gregorian University in Rome and Notre Dame in the United States , and as such is not an ecclesial event. Yet the patronage of the Pontifical Council for Culture serves to underline the Church's interest in such questions".

RS

Next step at LHC successful.

Well, the proton beams are apparently working at the LHC.

Large Hadron Collider: subatomic particles complete first circuit

I had forgotten that those would be started early this morning until I noticed that even Google has LHC fever.


EDIT - you know, upon looking at the Google logo more and more here, it almost looks like Google is getting sucked into a black hole. LOL.

Actually it's not surprising Google is showing the LHC. Google was started at Stanford University, which is also home to one of the earliest "atom smashers." Their linear accelerator "discovered" many of the heaviest elements we know (by "discovered" I mean artificially created).

You can visit their website here:

Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC)

Still, the main experiment at the LHC has not actually begun yet, ie the high energy collision of particles. That is expected to happen in about 30 days. That's when we'll see if anything "bad" happens or not.


It's funny, over a year ago when I jokingly posted on the LHC it used to be that if you searched for "large hadron collider end of the world" my blog would be on the front page of google. Now it looks like everyone is copying me. Remember, folks, you heard it here first.* And since I'll be in Italy when they start the high energy collisions, I'll try to let you know if I get sucked into a black hole or turn into a strangelet.

LOL.

*(I'm not predicting it, I'm just having fun with it.)

RS

LHC update and other neat physics machines

I was bumping around teh internets, and got a bit of a status update of the LHC.

They've been in a cooling down process, and have gotten the ring down to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero.

On September 10th they are going to start the first proton beam to get things sync'ed up.

I also found they have a live webcast with a few "channels." It's pretty boring right now, just a bunch of scientists talking about details of this and that. But they are broadcasting the first beam at 9:00 AM CEST, which would be 2:00 AM Texas time.

The video feed is here:

CERN Webcast Service

Here's another summary of the LHC, although it's not nearly as cool as the LHC rap



From what I've heard, they plan to actually begin the main experiements of colliding particles sometime in October. I'll be in Italy in October, so if there's a black hole or strangelet problem, I'll try to let you guys know ASAP. LOL.

Just to have fun, someone made a computer simulation of what would happen if the LHC made a black hole.



But over in Japan, they have made a much cooler looking machine called a Large Helical Device (LHD) which is designed to make the same conditions as the inside of a star in order to study nuclear fusion. It makes a superhot ionized plasma which is contained by magnetic fields which squeeze the particles in the plasma together to cause nuclear fusion. If nothing else, it looks a lot better than a boring ring. LOL.


More info on the Large Helical Device can be found here:

Large Helical Device Information

RS

Theories about time travel

Just happened to stumble upon this little thing looking at time travel, which has been one of the best explainations I've seen of the scientific theories related to it.



May make your head explode. LOL.

RS

Scientific toys

As I mentioned Monday, I did some nuclear physics research. I started as a physics major, but at the end of my junion year decided to switch to theology. But, that gave me two summers doing nuclear research. Although it was my professor who was doing the main research, she would always have students helping her during her summer research times. Although a majority of the work was being a data monkey, working on the actual experiment was interesting.

Working with a two story tall Van de Graaff generator was kind of cool!

Univ. of Kentucky Accelerator description Page 1
Univ. of Kentucky Accelerator description Page 2

Basically, we'd get a beam of protons from the big modified Van de Graaff generator.
Then we'd bend them with a huge magnet.
Then we'd have the protons slam into a tritium sample, which would knock one of the neutrons of the tritium loose (making a helium isotope in the process).
These neutrons would then hit our target sample. On the atomic level, the neturons would hit the nuclei of the sample, and would give them some of the energy, which would excite them into a higher energy state.
Eventually, the nucleus would go back down to it's ground state and give off a gamma ray.
We would measure the gamma rays (the big copper looking camera thing in the link) and this along with knowing the initial energy of the neutrons, would help us figure out the various energy levels of the nucleus.
It's sort of like atomic billiards and measuring how loud the sound is that comes off the hits, to give a really weak analogy.

Pretty fascinating stuff though. The web is great to be able to find pictures of all this stuff since I never had a camera when doing the research.

As a side project, when we were waiting on somethings to be set up, we put my Russian military watch in front of the detector for about 24 hours.

I had gotten the watch in Berlin from a street vendor selling Soviet military stuff. We put it in front of the detector because I was really concerned that the luminescent points on the dial seemed to be pretty luminescent for much longer than I expected. So we tested it to see if it had any "abnormal" radiation, ie if it had radioactive paint on the dial. It didn't. So I should be safe.



LOL.

RS

Geeky Periodic Table Videos

So, I was talking with The Engineer and his wife yesterday about chemistry and physics, specifically my experience with some nuclear research working with Cerium and Neodymium which my professor was using to study the Interacting Boson Model.

Interestingly enough, I came across a great find the day before. Some of the chemistry professors at the University of Nottingham in the UK have made videos about every element on the periodic table.

One of the topics we talked about yesterday was hydrogen:
(You have to love the one professor's hair style and periodic table tie! LOL.)



What I found fascinating was the video on Bismuth, especially that it actually has a half-life and how long that half-life is.



If you want to check out all the elements, you can go to their website and just click on the element you want to see:

The Periodic Table of Videos

RS

Can Solemn Masses make you happier than Low Masses?

Got a letter from my friend, the brewmeister, about a recent Johns Hopkins study on a chemical in incense.

"...the report was saying that frankincense—the incense traditionally burned in religious ceremonies—can act on the brain to lower anxiety and diminish depression.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Hebrew University administered incensole acetate, a component of frankincense, to lab mice and learned that it lit up areas of their little mouse brains that control emotion, including nerve circuits affecting anxiety and depression."

---

Their observation that frankincense smoke “augments the euphoric feeling produced during religious functions” is likely to resonate with many among the faithful.

“There was a strong visual and olfactory effect, and I liked being around it,” says Vince Corso, a New Jersey-based priest with a degree in divinity. “I don’t know if it aligned those parts of my brain to the magic and mystery of the experience, but I was entranced by it.”

Whole article here:

Frankincense and Mirt: Is that psychoactive smoke wafting through the pews?

Ah, so that's why the aging hippy set who threw out the incense are so bitter and hateful towards tradition.

RS

Grizzly news

"Avid reader" Ronny sent me some grizzly news, well, not grizzly as in gruesome, but grizzly as in my mascot ... perfect for some Monday levity.



I personally hate it when people set up barbed wire to get my hair. In one sense I feel it is rather ironic. In this age of "animal rights," who does the US Geological Survey think they are to violate our grizzly privacy with their CCTV's!?!?! Are US national parks turning into London's 1984 becoming real with today's CCTV proliferation?

You humans need to quit assuming we want rights. We just wish you'd leave us alone and quit using us animals for your political agendas. PETA, LEAVE ME ALONE! The Onion has a point (LOL):



Of course the minute I saw the MSNBC video, I had to search youtube because I knew that somebody would do something like this:





Which eventually reminded me of the dancing bear in this video. I love the way these guys flip the usual "thug" image of rap and make it more "fuzzy."



RS

Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope is online.

Just found out that Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope is now live.

Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope

Imagine something like GoogleEarth for the sky, but using the best images available from the scientific community.

I'm downloading it now ...

RS

levart emiT

"What's really going to bake your noodle later on is would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything?"

A BBC "special" on Time Travel.



It still begs the question, if time travel will work, can't we say it already has worked?

Kind of weird documentary, especially at the ending.

The "computing" section I find to be full of illogical assumptions. Of course I guess dealing with time travel does open up lots of illogical questions. I would still think that even though computing is increasing, you will hit a wall or plateau at which you are stuck. Maybe quantum computing will prove that wrong, although I read that it can only be used to solve certain types of problems.

Funny how scientists spend their whole lives studying "reality" but end up only looking at the physical reality. Although I enjoy science, I don't worship it. It is merely a tool.

I once heard the statement, "'no statements are true unless they can be proven scientifically' cannot be scientifically proven." Interesting.

The "best" explaination I've ever heard is here:

"One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is no problem with changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

The major problem is simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you, for instance, how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be descibed differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is futher complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations while you are actually traveling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own mother or father.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up; and in fact in later editions of the book all pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be."

So, yes, I know, this post was odd too. I guess my phone cord was too tight around my forehead, and my electromagnet was getting hot and distracting me. Oh well, back to reality. And for some reason I crave pizza.

RS

The End of the World As We Know It?

I really enjoy nuclear physics and at one time wanted to get into particle physics. In fact, before I became a theology major, I was on the path to nuclear physics. I even helped my professor do some nuclear experiments to study the structure of the Ce-142 and Nd-144. Admittedly, I didn't understand much about the "IBM model," but it sure sounds cool to say you helped with research in the Interacting Boson Model and the shell model of the N=84 isotones.

The actual experiment was kind of cool. Getting to play with one of those van de graaff generators. You know the one where you put you hand on the ball and it makes your hair stand on end:


Well, imagine having a van de graaff generater that was two stories tall! We used it to shoot protons into a block of something I can't remember. But the protons would collide with the substance and shoot neutrons of a specific energy at the sample (either Ce-142 or Nd-144). The neutron would hit the nucleus of the atom and transfer some of it's energy to the nucleus of the sample, making it go to a higher energy level. It would then decay, releasing a photon. We would measure this photon's energy and be able to use that data to see various energy levels. My job was to help babysit the experiement, then crunch numbers and do computer analysis to find the energy levels as accurately as possible. It was pretty cool how you could predict some things just by the data. Anyway, science has always interested me.

So why the title to this post?

I came across a documentary on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

I love the "frightful" opening squence of the video. Will it destroy the world?

I guess there has been concern. In looking at the LHC web page, if you look at the public web pages of CERN and it's description of the LHC, tucked at the end of the pages is a page that deals with the "safety concerns."

Are LHC collisions safe?

Microscopic black holes will not eat you...
Massive black holes are created in the Universe by the collapse of massive stars, which contain enormous amounts of gravitational energy that pulls in surrounding matter. The gravitational pull of a black hole is related to the amount of matter or energy it contains – the less there is, the weaker the pull. Some physicists suggest that microscopic black holes could be produced in the collisions at the LHC. However, these would only be created with the energies of the colliding particles (equivalent to the energies of mosquitoes), so no microscopic black holes produced inside the LHC could generate a strong enough gravitational force to pull in surrounding matter.

If the LHC can produce microscopic black holes, cosmic rays of much higher energies would already have produced many more. Since the Earth is still here, there is no reason to believe that collisions inside the LHC are harmful.

They even point out other articles that deal with this from other experiments:

Review of Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at RHIC (pdf file)

The video is a pretty good video about the purpose of the LHC at CERN and the physics behind it. It also gives a very good overview of the relationship between cosmology and particle physics; two seemingly opposite areas of physics: study of the whole universe and study of the basic building blocks that make it up.



There's also some interesting video of just one of the detectors on the LHC the Atlas detector (sort of a crash course in particle physics ... pun intended ... "crash" course ... super collider ... nevermind)

I can't embed these particular videos, but you can see the videos on youtube:

The ATLAS Experiment - Mapping the Secrets of the Universe 1

The ATLAS Experiment - Mapping the Secrets of the Universe 2

It looks like the November 2007 date has been pushed back, so I think the LHC won't go online until 2008. Still, interesting stuff.

RS

Islands and Lakes

So, have you ever wondered what is the largest island ... or what is the largest lake ... or what is the largest island in a lake ... or what is the largest island in a lake on on island ... or ...

The Island and Lake Combination

RS

Rome Reborn

In one sense the title of this project doesn't really work, since Rome is the "Eternal City."

However, SemperFiCatholic, pointed out the project to me. Looks pretty cool. Hopefully they can put it online. It seems like with some time, you could make a virutal Rome that could work in some type of 3D game engine. That would be an easy way to fund the project. Make a 3D engine and allow people to be able to "walk around in it" virtually.

Of course, if you don't want that and want to build your own Rome, there's always the games Caesar IV (Caesar III was pretty fun, haven't played IV though), CivCity: Rome, and Glory of the Roman Empire. Rome: Total War looks impressive too.

It looks like they want to make other "versions" of Rome to show how the city developed by making models of the various periods of Rome's history.

You can find the project here:

Rome Reborn 1.0

RS

More Plane Safety

It's an airplane extravaganza!
I've already shown some safety testing from Boeing at this post:

Is it the plane or the pilot?

I found some more interesting plane safety videos of engineers testing the limits of new engines and planes. Makes me feel a bit safer about flying.

Jet engines are pretty powerful ... but just how powerful?
[Huh, huh, hippie car, huh, huh]



So, with that in mind, can your brakes handle slamming them on at 210 mph with a full load and full throttle then continue to work for 5 minutes without catching on fire?



So what if a blade in the engine suddenly comes loose?



The high speed cameras used in this similar test are amazing.



What if a bird strikes the engine?



How do you like your poultry sliced? How about a flock of birds?



Finally, this is just neat. One of the most famous plane watching beaches in the world, Maho Beach at Saint Maartin. Ever play chicken with a Boeing 747?



Here's a cockpit view.



RS

Information the new weapon of mass destruction?

Living in the information age is very intimidating. Have you thought about how much you have to know just to function in modern society? You have to be able to operate a car, use a cell phone, be familiar with a computer, keep track of finances, etc. If you don't know something, you have to be able to know how to learn to teach yourself what you don't know. Think about all the details that go into being able to figure out financial things like loans, mortgages, insurance, investments, etc. And that is just the more necessary or practical information. Then think of how much leisure information we take in. Sports trivia, Hollywood news, TV story lines, best websites, trivia, etc. It's pretty overwhelming when you think about it. Man is becoming more inundated with the things of this world that he often forgets the bigger picture. Even though we are becoming more technologically advanced, we have to know more and more just to survive.

It is pretty amazing when looking at all the "predictions" of the future there was always the staple of hover cars, space craft, and video phones. But who would have predicted that it would ultimately be communications and information that would be so dominant and would grow so exponentially. Remember when the concept of a small communications device or a micro camera were strictly for James Bond? Now we have both of those together an not only that, they can access an almost limitless supply of information by being able to connect to the web.

Not only is money power, now information is. However, information is just that, merely information. There is a difference between accurate and false information. Accurate information gives you an advantage over those without it. And even false information can give you an advantage over those with it. Sort of puts the culture wars in more perspective. That is the danger of the information age. Although you can spread the truth with greater efficiency, you can also have lies spread to you as well.

I can't vouch for how factual the information is in these videos, but they start to make you think. If you are into conspiracy theories, you might want to turn back now. LOL.

SHIFT HAPPENS


WEB 2.0 ... THE MACHINE IS US/ING US


EPIC 2015
(Note: this was made in 2005, so the information "after" that is prediction)


GOOGLE MASTER PLAN


And to think ... Blogger is owned by Google ... if you have read this, you are now under watch ... by THEM! :o

Paranoid yet? :)

RS