Yo, Brian Stelter!

When I was a kid, I got nicknamed “Bald Eagle” because I actually was getting notably thin “up there.” Of course today “Bald Eagle” might be a cool nickname, but in Junior High School, it definitely was not a cool thing.

Fast forward to today, and now here I am over twenty years older than you are, and even in spite of that poor start, I have better hair than you do.

And I am not a piss-guzzling, shit-gobbling communist “journalist” (what a sick joke) either.

On both accounts you must absolutely hate looking into the mirror.

And Oh By The Way probably more people read my physics posts than watch you bloviate on air.

RINOs an Endangered Species?
If Only!

According to Wikipoo, et. al., the Northern White Rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is a critically endangered species. Apparently two females live on a wildlife preserve in Sudan, and no males are known to be alive. So basically, this species is dead as soon as the females die of old age. Presently they are watched over by armed guards 24/7.

Biologists have been trying to cross them with the other subspecies, Southern White Rhinoceroses (Rhinoceri?) without success; and some genetic analyses suggest that perhaps they aren’t two subspecies at all, but two distinct species, which would make the whole project a lot more difficult.

I should hope if the American RINO (Parasitus rectum pseudoconservativum) is ever this endangered, there will be heroic efforts not to save the species, but rather to push the remainder off a cliff. Onto punji sticks. With feces smeared on them. Failing that a good bath in red fuming nitric acid will do.

But I’m not done ranting about RINOs.

The RINOs (if they are capable of any introspection whatsoever) probably wonder why they constantly have to deal with “populist” eruptions like the Trump-led MAGA movement. That would be because the so-called populists stand for absolutely nothing except for going along to get along. That allows the Left to drive the culture and politics.

Given the results of Tuesday’s elections, the Left will now push harder, and the RINOs will now turn even squishier than they were before.

I well remember 1989-1990 in my state when the RINO establishment started preaching the message that a conservative simply couldn’t win in Colorado. Never mind the fact that Reagan had won the state TWICE (in 1984 bringing in a veto-proof state house and senate with him) and GHWB had won after (falsely!) assuring everyone that a vote for him was a vote for Reagan’s third term.

This is how the RINOs function. They push, push, push the line that only a “moderate” can get elected. Stomp them when they pull that shit. Tell everyone in ear shot that that’s exactly what the Left wants you to think, and oh-by-the-way-Mister-RINO if you’re in this party selling the same message as the Left…well, whythefuckexactly are you in this party, you piece of rancid weasel shit?

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system. (This doesn’t necessarily include deposing Joe and Hoe and putting Trump where he belongs, but it would certainly be a lot easier to fix our broken electoral system with the right people in charge.)

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is pointless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud in the system is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

This will necessarily be piecemeal, state by state, which is why I am encouraged by those states working to change their laws to alleviate the fraud both via computer and via bogus voters. If enough states do that we might end up with a working majority in Congress and that would be something Trump never really had.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

While We Wait…and Wait…and Wait, for The Storm

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is called the Pastoral symphony, because its theme was a day spent in the country. The fourth (of five) movements depicts a storm, and is subtitled ‘Thunder Storm.’

The fifth is subtitled “Shepherds’ Song. Happy and Thankful Feelings after the Storm (Allegretto).” The fifth movement is the first thing I listened to on Thursday before Thanksgiving as it appeared that the wretched “poo flu” was finally going away. (It finally was gone a day later.)

Beethoven’s Fifth (dah dah dah daaaaah….) and Sixth symphonies both premiered at the same concert on 22 December, 1808 in Vienna. The entire four hour program was filled with new Beethoven music, conducted by Beethoven himself. It’s an almost infamous moment in music history as the whole thing bordered on being a fiasco. The orchestra was lackluster, and one of the other vocal pieces suffered by being sung by a teenager with stage fright. The original performer had quit after Beethoven insulted her. Fellow composer Antonio Salieri (the same Salieri depicted so unfavorably [and unjustly so] in Amadeus) was holding a benefit concert the same day, and he and Beethoven nearly had a falling out over the schedule conflict.

Purism Phones–Do NOT Purchase

I know for quite some time I have been looking forward to the Purism smart phone, entirely open source with hardware kill switches for the camera, mike and other things. They’re basically Linux boxes with call capability. I’ve touted them on this site. I now wish I had not.

Alas they have been slow coming onto the market, and their main page says “Shipping Now” (for the USA version of the phone.

The implication is that if you order your phone it will be shipped soon.

Multiple people, me among them, have been waiting over half a year for the phone that is “shipping now” and, candidly, I don’t expect ever to receive it. Unfortunately the fine print in their order policy says you can’t get a refund until they’re ready to ship the phone. So I am out the money as well.

I don’t expect anyone ordering today will get their phone any faster.

I can no longer recommend this company, even though I’m happy with the laptop they sold me three years ago. Their technical people are solid; their sales/web people, on the other hand…

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1774.20
Silver $22.61
Platinum $940.00
Palladium $1900.00
Rhodium $14,850.00

This week, 3 PM MT on Friday, markets closed for the weekend

Gold $1,783.20
Silver $22.27
Platinum $950.00
Palladium $1,852.00
Rhodium $14,800.00

At the end of the week: not a lot of movement this time, and all in different directions.

Part XXX (and the last)
Acceleration! Surprise!

A couple of go-backs and review

This is a video I should have included a couple of weeks ago.

Especially starting at 1:43, this is of interest because it lets you see how a nearly-uniform early universe “clumped up” over time. You focus on the same volume of space, and your field of view expands with the universe, so what you are looking at is basically the same matter following the history of the universe.

The filaments and lumpy areas contain millions of galaxies.

This is a computer simulation, of course, but at the end they compare it to what we actually see when we survey the universe. It’s a pretty close match, so this simulation (unlike climatological models) is probably pretty close.

(Even though the simulation has a much, much bigger physical scope, the system is mathematically a lot simpler than a good climate model should be.)

And some reminders:

The critical density is the overall density of the universe that would be necessary for space to be flat (large triangles–and I mean large triangles, millions or billions of light years in extent–have inside angles that total to 180 degrees). Higher than this, and those triangles have total angles higher than 180 degrees, lower than that, the angles are less. Generally this gets set up in such a way that 1 equals the critical density and you’ll often see a ratio quoted. Judging from the matter and dark matter we are able to detect, the density is Ω = 0.3; i.e., the universe is at 0.3 times the critical density.

Energy also makes a contribution since it is equivalent to mass. But in our current universe, there is far more mass than there are photons, once you do the conversion. We live in a matter-dominated universe. Once upon a time, it was actually dominated by photons. But when the universe doubles in size, the amount of matter per cubic meter is 1/8th what it was before (because the volume is 2x2x2=8 times as much). But the same thing happens to the photons, when you count photons. But, because their wavelengths have stretched, each individual photon is now half as energetic as it was before, so the amount of energy from photons is 1/16th what it was before. If you run that tape backwards, and go back far enough, eventually photons dominate over matter.

The critical density also determines the ultimate fate of the universe. If Ω > 1, the universe’s expansion will eventually halt, reverse, and there will be a “big crunch” at some point in the future.

If Ω < 1, the universe will continue to expand forever, and the expansion velocity will always exceed zero. At time infinity the expansion velocity will still be some positive number.

If Ω = 1 exactly, as time goes to infinity the universe expands slower and slower, and the speed of the expansion will go to zero at time infinity.

(These cases are analogous to a rocket being fired at less than, greater than, and exactly at escape velocity.)

The cosmic redshift, Z, of some galaxy or galaxy cluster, will be some number greater than zero. It’s directly related to the ratio of the size of the universe back when that galaxy emitted the light we are now seeing, and the size today (which is set to 1). [See part 27] If a galaxy’s redshift is Z=1, then just add one to that number (getting…let me see here…where’s my calculator? Ah!) 2, and you know that today’s universe is twice the size it was when that galaxy emitted the light, or alternatively, it was 1/2 the size then that it is now.

OK, now on to new stuff.

The Quest to Plot the History of the Universe

I mentioned recently that actually plotting Hubble’s Constant versus time has been an important preoccupation of astronomers and cosmologists.

As it sits right now, near our own galaxy space seems to be expanding at 70 kilometers per second, per megaparsec distant from here. Galaxies one megaparsec away are receding at 70 km/sec, those two megaparsecs away are receding at 140 km/sec, and so on. That’s the speed due to the expansion of space itself, the so called “comoving speed.” Galaxies might also have some additional velocity because they’re gravitationally attracted to some other galaxy; this is how it is that M-31, the “Andromeda Galaxy,” is actually moving towards us (and will collide in about 5 billion years, about the same time CNN finally broadcasts a truthful news story, probably by mistake).

This was actually used, for a while, as the next rung on the cosmic distance ladder. If you couldn’t see any Cepheid variables in a galaxy because it was just too darn far away, you could measure its redshift, compute its velocity, and divide by Hubble’s Constant, and get a rough estimate of how far away the galaxy is.

The problem is, no one actually thinks the Hubble Constant is, well, constant. They usually call it the Hubble Parameter, and its current value is labeled H₀ to denote “Hubble’s Parameter right now.”

It’s expected that it was higher in the past, and will drop in the future, because the galaxies all attract each other, which puts the brakes on the expansion. One of the big questions has been whether the galaxies will eventually stop receding, then reverse and start coming back together into a Big Crunch, or whether their speed will reach zero as the separation reaches infinity (just barely not a Big Crunch, like being exactly at escape velocity), or whether there’s extra speed and the galaxies will always be moving apart from each other.

So if we can measure the red shift (easy–in fact it’s the only easy thing to measure), and the distance to the galaxy, we can determine what H was back then, or equivalently, be able to plot the scale factor versus time.

What we know to start with is the scale factor of the universe (by definition, it’s 1) and today’s Hubble parameter. And the time can be set to 0, arbitrarily. Negative times are times in the past, positive times, are in the future.

We can set up a graph like this and plot the one point we know on it and (since the Hubble parameter is a rate of expansion) the slope of the line it’s on, right now:

But now we don’t know what the rest of the line is.

If the density of the universe is Ω>1, the slope should decrease rapidly in the future (and should have decreased up until now, quite rapidly); we can draw a notional line for that case, and as you can see the universe expands (distances between galaxies increase) up to some time in the future, then it shrinks again. But this line must cross through our one known point representing the present time and present size of the universe; and where it crosses through our point it has to be at the same slope.

We can add two more lines for Ω = 1 and Ω < 1. And even a third for Ω = 0, in which case the expansion rate is constant–the same as our original slope. In all three cases the conditions for “now” have to match what we actually see.

One thing to notice–the faster the universe’s expansion is slowing down, the closer in time to today was when the universe had zero size…in other words, the more recent was the Big Bang.

In other words if we can plot the scale factor versus time, we know how old the universe is and we find out what the Hubble parameter was at different times in the past…and because we will now know for certain what Ω is, we can extrapolate into the future.

Although we can currently see back to fairly low scale factors, we don’t know where in time those scale factors are, so we don’t know the shape of the line we want to plot.

And in order to know the time, we need to measure the distance. Because, with light carrying the image, the distance is proportional to how long ago the light was emitted. A galaxy a billion light years away is being seen as it was a billion years ago–and the redshift it has represents the universe’s scale factor, a billion years ago. This is called the lookback time and it directly correlates with distance.

So we need, for every galaxy, a scale factor and a lookback time.

The scale factor relates easily to the redshift, and the red shift is easy to measure.

Lookback time relates easily to distance, but distance is, as I said a few weeks ago, a cast iron bitch to measure. For very distant galaxies, all of the methods I’ve mentioned so far are useless. Even the Cepheid variables are unusable, because at those distances they’re too faint to pick out from the rest of the galaxies they are in. (And simply extrapolating the current Hubble parameter–well, that’s the gross approximation we’re trying to replace.)

We need a new standard candle, one much brighter than a Cepheid variable.

Once we have that, we can fill in the lines, and it’s pretty much expected it will look like the green, blue, or purple lines.

As it happens, we do have a brighter “standard” candle, but it’s rare and evanescent. If one is in a galaxy now, it’ll be gone in a year and it might be decades before another one appears in that galaxy.

The Other Kind of Supernova

A few weeks ago I talked about supernovas. Specifically, I talked about core collapse supernovas–ones that result from a large star finally losing its battle against gravity as it begins trying to fuse iron to generate energy–and it turns out that reaction consumes energy.

But those aren’t the only type of supernova. There are two major types and core collapse supernovas are actually labeled Type II. What’s Type I, then?

Consider a binary star. One of the stars is a white dwarf–basically a star smaller than or maybe just a little bit larger than the sun, having run out of hydrogen and helium, now shrunken down into a very dense ember that will take billions of years to finally cool off.

The other star is, perhaps, a red giant, because it’s a star that hasn’t quite reached the end of its life…yet.

The outer layers of the red giant may very well be so close to the white dwarf that the white dwarf strips them away and adds that material to itself.

The only problem is, there’s an upper limit to how massive a white dwarf can be; about 1.44 times the mass of the sun. (This isn’t quite the same thing as Chandrasekhar’s limit, but it is related.)

If enough matter gets pulled into the white dwarf, it could cross that limit. A star that exceeded that limit in the first place would have become a neutron star (or perhaps even a black hole if it really busts that limit). In this case, though, it’s a bit different and what ends up happening is a large proportion of this “dead” white dwarf suddenly undergoes a chain reaction and the gas from the other star, plus the carbon and oxygen already in the white dwarf, fuses.

All at once.

There’s a big explosion, known as a “Type Ia Supernova.” (That’s supposed to be a Roman numeral I. Sans serif fonts can be stupid sometimes.)

It turns out that every Type Ia supernova is identical in brightness. If you see two of them, and one looks a quarter as bright as the other, you know that the fainter one is twice as far away. Also, they follow the same luminosity curve. So even if you don’t catch it at its brightest, you can watch it fade for a while match that curve to part of the full curve for a Type Ia, and then figure out how bright it had been.

(And I need to be clear, you can tell from the spectrum what kind of supernova it is–no one will mistake a Core Collapse for a Ia.)

And a supernova of either type can outshine the galaxy it’s in. Very easy to see, as easy as the galaxy is.

So if we look at a galaxy and happen to catch a Type Ia supernova in progress, we can measure the distance to that galaxy by measuring the brightness of the supernova, and match that distance with the redshift.

As I indicated before, though, these are fairly rare occurrences; any particular galaxy might not have a Type Ia supernova for decades. But for our purposes, we don’t need to measure every galaxy’s distance, just a representative sample of them.

And there are a lot of galaxies. The usual estimate (based on the Hubble Deep Space Field, a photograph taken by Hubble where it simply “stared” at one part of space for months, to bring up even the faintest objects in that direction) is 100 billion galaxies that we can see from Earth. I’ve even seen some articles go ten times higher to an even trillion.

What we want to do, then, is hunt for Type Ia supernovae in distant galaxies, and use those to get a distance and redshift reading for those galaxies. We do this by photographing thousands upon thousands of galaxies, then going back later to look at them again. If we see a new “star” there, it is a candidate supernova. Further observation will hopefully establish it’s a Type Ia supernova.

This project was undertaken by two separate teams in the 1990s. When they spotted a Type Ia supernova, they’d look again a while later to see how much the supernova had dimmed. They could then figure out what part of the fading of the supernova they were witnessing, and know how bright it had been originally.

Here’s just one example.

Often when they show pictures of a supernova, there will be two arrows pointing to it, added in post-processing, so they often joke that all you have to do is look for arrows in the sky to find one.

The two teams were the High-Z Supernova Search Team led by Brian Schmidt and Nicholas P Suntzeff, and the Supernova Cosmology Project led by Saul Perlmutter.

The rivalry was friendly.

Both teams were actually glad the other team was doing the same thing; they would thereby serve as a check for each other. But that doesn’t mean the wanted the other team to be first.

In 1998, Adam Reiss from the High Z Supernova Search Team published his team’s results; and shortly after that, the other team published as well.

Was the expansion of the universe slowing down rapidly, indicating that we’d end up in a Big Crunch someday (Ω>1)? Was it expanding in such a way that it’d never quite slow down to zero, indicating the amount of “stuff” in the universe was at the critical density (Ω=1)? Or did it have excess energy and would never slow down to zero (Ω<1)?

Scientists were fairly confident that Ω=1. Because we seem to be close to that value by every measurement ever made, and calculations indicated that we had to have been much, much closer to 1 in the distant past. At some point, if Ω really is 0.3 now, in the distant past it would have been Ω=0.99999999999. Why would it not just be at 1.0 in the first place?

Well, thanks to those two teams, we know the shape of the curve. And the answer is:

None Of The Above

Surprise!!!

(This is why we check theory against reality, folks!)

The expansion of the universe is accelerating. And has been for a few billion years. Before that, it was indeed slowing down, but now, some unknown factor was becoming more prominent and starting to give the universe a big push.

Here’s what’s actually going on, shown in red:

This was very, very surprising, to say the least.

(This is, by the way, the sort of moment a good scientist lives for: finding something totally unexpected that forces a re-evaluation.)

Something is pushing the universe apart, something that became dominant over gravity a few billion years ago.

What is that something?

We don’t know.

That doesn’t stop us from giving it a name, and that name is “Dark Energy.”

We know it’s some form of energy. And we believe that it’s absolutely, uniformly distributed throughout space.

And we know that when we add it all together, its total mass-equivalent is 0.70 Ω.

Which means Ω = 1.0 and space is flat…which is what we’ve been measuring. So even though the blue curve isn’t right…we have the Ω value it was supposed to match with.

So now we know, at a very high level, what the universe is made of. About 70% Dark Energy, 25% Dark Matter, and 5% ordinary matter and photons.

That means that we really don’t have even the most basic understanding of 95% of the stuff in the universe!

Science is far from done with this!

Notice something else too: With that history, the universe is slightly older than it would have been otherwise. That solves the nagging problem of those old globular clusters that turn out to be older than the universe was thought to be. And so now the best figure for the age of the universe is now: 13.787±0.020 billion years.

And there are a couple of other nagging problems that are neatly solved by this, which is why it’s pretty much accepted by astrophysicists and cosmologists today, even though it was a total “WTF!!” when it was first announced.

So what does the future hold? The universe will continue to expand. Eventually, many billions or even trillions of years from now, future astronomers will only be able to see the local group of galaxies. Those are gravitationally bound to each other and therefore don’t move apart as space expands.

Some speculate that the repulsion is going to grow stronger and stronger as the universe expands, so that the local group will get ripped apart, then the individual galaxies, then even stars and planets…and perhaps even molecules, atoms and nucleons, and that those last few phases will happen very quickly when they do get here. This is called the “big rip” but I hasten to remind any reading this, that it is speculative.

We’d sure like to know what Dark Energy actually is. Then we could at least speculate more intelligently.

Some think it might be “vacuum energy,” energy inherent in quantum fluctuations in even totally empty space. The only problem is when we try to calculate how much vacuum energy there ought to be, it’s something like 10¹¹² joules per cubic meter. Which is to say 10⁴⁶ times more energy than has been released by all the stars in all of the galaxies throughout the entire history of the universe so far (note: that’s from a quick back-of-the envelope calculation I did, but I shouldn’t be off by more than a factor of a billion–puny by comparison to these numbers). Whereas dark energy, whatever it is, would have to be about 10^-8 joules per cubic meter to fit what we are seeing.

That’s only an error of a factor of 10¹²⁰, which I will write out, The theory gives a value for vacuum energy

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

times as high as it “ought” to be, to fit dark energy. This seems to just about everyone to indicate that the theory of vacuum energy might need to be polished just a bit, since it is even more wrong than Critical Race Theory.

There’s an idea of something called “quintessence” which would be a sort of energy inherent in vacuum, though the amount of it per cubic meter is allowed to change over time. (It’s absolutely uniform at any given time, but that amount can change with time.)

And finally, there’s Einstein’s cosmological constant, which he called his greatest mistake ever. Maybe not!

Einstein used the Greek letter Λ (capital lambda–that’s not an A, and if it was, it’d be missing the crossbar) to represent this constant, and he used it as a “fudge factor” to prevent the universe from collapsing when he first tried to apply general relativity to the whole universe. That’s because everyone back in the late 1910s thought the universe was static. Hubble and Lemaitre had not yet discovered the universe was expanding under the impetus from the Big Bang.

Even if dark energy doesn’t turn out to be Einstein’s cosmological constant, it’s often symbolized by Λ anyway.

Since Λ is uniform per cubic meter of space, and space is growing, the total amount of Dark Energy is increasing as the universe expands. The total amount of matter remains the same (though it gets spread thinner and thinner), and the energy in photons is actually decreasing with time. So it stands to reason that at some point dark energy becomes dominant, and indeed it already has since it is already over half of the stuff in the universe.

So we have a universe which consists of dark energy and cold dark matter (cold because dark matter moves a lot slower than the speed of light). The ordinary matter we are made of is insignificant by comparison.

The model is called the ΛCDM (“Lambda Cee Dee Em”) model.

And now for my editorial comment: Λ will be uniformly spread throughout space. When we find out what it is, it probably won’t be very complicated. Cold dark matter will likely be more complicated, but not very complex in structure; after all it only reacts weakly. (That is a double meaning: it reacts weakly in the usual sense, and it also reacts with the weak nuclear force.) Regular old matter, on the other hand, has a vast variety of structures. That is, after all, what chemistry and more broadly, material science is all about, and of course you are made of it too. So the complexity will probably turn out to be almost entirely in that 5 percent of the universe that is “ordinary” matter.

Where To From Here?

I’ve brought us up to the present day. Yes, this is the last part of the “physics posts,” at least so far as the historical approach goes. If you’re still with me, go buy the “I survived SteveInCO’s Deplorable Physics Posts” bumper sticker. (If on the other hand, you just scrolled over them…you ain’t earned it! No stolen valor, please!)

Theoretical physicists are trying to figure out what dark matter and dark energy are. On the dark matter front, they’re trying to come up with coherent predictions of new particles, everything from string theory to supersymmetry and even membrane theory. All of this is entirely speculative; nothing has been detected, and many of the theories aren’t even refined enough to make a prediction that can be checked.

And dark energy, being much more recently noticed, is completely off the wall.

Which is not to say that absolutely nothing has happened since 1998. But it’s stuff I’ve already covered, like the top quark and the Higgs boson.

How about astrophysics? Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope and various very large telescopes on Earth (Palomar is still doing excellent work, despite being built in the mid 20th century–what a feat of engineering–but it has plenty of company now, much larger telescopes using adaptive optics to cancel out the turbulence of our own atmosphere), we can see things thirteen billion light years away–just barely. Why no further? Ideally we’d like to get back past those last six or seven hundred million years, maybe see back to shortly after the Cosmic Microwave Background, which was a mere 300-400 thousand years after the big bang.

Because further away than about ten billion light years, things become so red-shifted that we do not see any visible light at all; it has all been stretched to infrared wavelengths. If you have infrared sensors, this can be dealt with, but there are enormous practical problems that limit what can be done.

Visible light has wavelengths 380-800 nanometers (billionths of a meter). The short wavelength/high frequency light looks violet, the longer/low frequency light looks red. The cosmological red shift at extreme distances pushes all of the light from galaxies out past 800 nanometers.

Hubble’s sensors can’t see anything longer than about 2400 nanometers, and earth’s atmosphere blocks things at that wavelength, so we’re currently limited as to how far into the infrared we can see. If we want to see the very oldest galaxies, and better yet, the individual big stars that we think formed very shortly after the big bang, we’re going to need a bigger telescope, and one that can see deep into the infrared.

We don’t have one. Not yet. That will be a topic for next week.

One Loose End

One of the 1894 mysteries hasn’t come to complete closure even yet, but we know the outlines of the answer.

How was the solar system formed?

Well, we know what happens. The Hubble Space Telescope has looked into the Orion Nebula and can actually see stars and their planetary systems being formed, and it is indeed by accretion from nebulae.

The bulk of the mass ends up in the star, but there’s a large disk of gas and dust (and that “dust” is all stuff that formed in prior generations of stars) that eventually starts to clump up into small bodies, which collect into larger bodies called “planetesimals” which in turn combine into planets.

What we don’t understand is how some of those stages of growth actually happen. For instance, a B-B sized particle of stuff colliding with a 1 meter boulder will likely ricochet off of it, rather than sticking to it. Gravity just isn’t strong enough for objects of that size. So even though we can actually watch the process happen–which settles a lot of things–we still don’t understand it.

If just seeing it happen is good enough, check that one off; if you want a full understanding, then don’t.

What A Ride, And It’s Not Over

There’s so much we know that we didn’t know before Galileo did his first experiments rolling balls down inclined planes, a bit over four centuries ago…but there is also so much we don’t know. The hard sciences seem to have gone through a golden age already, but I suspect the best is yet to come.

We are humans, we use our minds as our primary means of survival. That comes with curiosity, a desire to learn what makes the universe ‘tick.’ And then inventiveness to put it to use. It’s our unique legacy, but it’s also our future. We press on!

NOT the end. The story is still being written.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

To conclude: My standard Public Service Announcement. We don’t want to forget this!!!

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Hey China!

Or rather, “Hey Chinese Communist Party and your entire array of servitors, ass-wipers, and fellators!”

You’re not even worth my time this week. When you decide to act like civilized people, maybe I’ll give you a lesson or two in how non-barbarians behave.

Hey BiteMe!
(Or, Whoever Has Their Hand Rammed Up That Putrefying Meat Puppet’s Ass)

[Language warning]

You and yours have caused a lot of injury. Literal injury with your war on people who don’t want to take an untested vaccine. When people die in an emergency room because a hospital won’t admit them because they haven’t had their clot shot, that’s a crime.

I’m going to address here the insult on top of the injury, because I am among the insulted. I still have my health but apparently you want me to live under the 8th Street Bridge (which actually isn’t on 8th Street, but whatever, that’s what the I-25 overpass over Cimarron is called), so maybe if you have your way that won’t be true for long. Dreadful time of year to become homeless.

No, you’re just trying to make me unemployed, because I won’t take your fucking shots.

Well, that threat is NOT going to work. I. Won’t. Take. Your. Fucking. Shots.

And neither will any of my coworkers who haven’t already had them…and those people who got the shots are a small minority. Most of those got the shots before we began to understand how nasty they truly are.

One of my coworkers was thinking he might have to knuckle under at least until he found another job…but don’t you even think (you do sometimes think, don’t you?) of finding that encouraging.

Don’t think that, because his resolve has hardened.

You’re LOSING.

You LOSER.

You Chinese-bought ratfucking traitor.

I would love to see you die an agonizing, humiliating death. (This isn’t a threat, because I am not threatening to cause that death. I am just announcing my intention to party if it happens.) It would be just recompense for the way you’re killing America…and millions of Americans.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, we haven’t heard much from the person who should have been declared the victor, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

(I’d like to add, I find it entirely plausible, even likely, that His Fraudulency is also His Figureheadedness. (Apparently that wasn’t a word; it got a red underline. Well it is now.) Where I differ with the hopium addicts is on the subject of who is really in charge. It ain’t anyone we like.)

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

Spot Prices.

Kitco Ask. Last week:

Gold $1786.70
Silver $23.18
Platinum $961.00
Palladium $1838
Rhodium $14,500

This week, markets closed as of 3PM MT.

Gold $1774.20
Silver $22.61
Platinum $940.00
Palladium $1900.00
Rhodium $14,850.00

A general decline except in the more obscure platinum group metals (palladium and rhodium). Was that big breakout just a flash in the pan?

XXIX Where did the Helium Come From?

A go-back:

You have actually seen the Cosmic Microwave Background.

About ten percent of TV static is actually the cosmic microwave background, being picked up by your TV set’s antenna.

OK, on to this week’s edumacation.

I dropped this into Part XXII on Powering Stars.

We know, now, that intergalactic gas consists of about three quarters hydrogen and one quarter helium. This gas is hot enough to radiate in X rays, but we can analyze the spectra.

There is only a trace of lithium in this gas, maybe a tiny bit of beryllium, and absolutely nothing else.

This is gas that was never part of a star. This is the original composition of the universe. [At least, as far as ordinary matter goes…but THAT is a future story.]

Part 22

…and it turns out this is a big clue.

I also mentioned, in part XXVII on the Cosmic Microwave Background, that Alpher and Gamow had predicted the cosmic microwave background on the basis of other work they were doing.

I’m now going to discuss that “other work.”

The best info I can find on the abundances of elements in the universe, before stars formed and started making heavier nuclei, is that, by weight, the universe is ~75% hydrogen 1 (one proton, zero neutrons), ~25% helium 4 (two protons, two neutrons), 0.01% each of hydrogen-2 (also known as deuterium, one proton, one neutron), 0.01 percent of helium-3 (two protons, one neutron), and 0.1 parts in a billion of lithium-7 (three protons, four neutrons). This is measured in nebulae consisting of gas that has never been a part of a star.

Alpher was a graduate student working on his PhD under Gamow in 1949; and he performed the first theoretical calculations on what sort of “stuff” ought to have come out of the Big Bang.

Gamow, before sending Alpher’s paper in for publication, added Hans Bethe (1906-2005) to the list of authors. Bethe was indeed a well-regarded astrophysicist (he did a lot of the work in figuring out how stars form elements, and would eventually win the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his work), but he had nothing whatsoever to do with this bit of research on the Big Bang. He had no idea his name was going onto this paper.

So why did Gamow put his name on the paper? So that the list of names would be Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow. Which looks a lot like “Alpha, Beta, Gamma” which, before they were Covid variants, were letters of the Greek alphabet, which, back then, every working physicist and astronomer knew (and that’s why so many of those weird baryons in the “particle zoo” ended up with Greek letter names). It sounds even more like it when you consider that the “th” in Bethe should be pronounced like a “t”, German having lost the th sound centuries ago.

What a prankster!

Alpher was not happy; his PhD dissertation now had him sharing credit with two prominent physicists and he feared that people would assume he had done very little of the actual work. Of course, this is now one of the most famous stories of how geeky scientific humor can be, so the truth of the matter is well known.

That first “Alphabet Paper” doesn’t hold up perfectly, because we now know a lot more than we did then, but it’s a major landmark in the history of cosmology. It got the Big Things right.

So what do we understand about this process now?

About one second after the Big Bang, the universe was a very hot, very dense mass of stuff. So hot and so dense even protons and neutrons couldn’t survive; they’d be blown apart into their constituent quarks with all the gluons (strong force carrying particles) being exchanged between the quarks (and the gluons themselves). It’s very hard to force a quark to separate from a proton or neutron; this universe was hot enough, with particles slamming into each other hard enough, that the neutrons and protons couldn’t even form and stay together in the first place. No sooner would a neutron or proton form than it would be smashed apart again.

It was at one second with the temperature about two billion degrees Kelvin and falling, that this began to change. Protons and neutrons could form without being immediately blown apart again. (This is analogous to the formation of atoms at about 300,000 years after the Big Bang; the temperature became cool enough to let electrons orbit nuclei unmolested.) This is called “proton neutron freezeout.” [Note: I am getting inconsistent search results as to exactly when protons and neutrons began to form.]

The ratio seems to have been about one neutron for every six protons. This is because the proton is a lower energy combination and would be formed preferentially.

Ten to twenty seconds later, temperatures dropped low enough that if a neutron got stuck to a proton, it would stay attached. Before this time, an extremely energetic photon was liable to come along and blow the thing apart. But now deuterium (1 proton, 1 neutron) could form.

There’s an important but subtle difference here versus hydrogen fusion in stars. It’s very difficult to form deuterium in a star because there aren’t any free neutrons there. Two protons have to overcome their mutual repulsion, and one of them has to undergo positive beta decay at the same time, to form a deuterium nucleus. This, on average, takes about nine billion years to happen inside of a star.

The reason there aren’t any free neutrons inside of stars is that free neutrons are unstable. They have a half life of roughly 880 seconds, which means in well under one day, they’re all gone. The reactions going on in stars, in fact, don’t release fresh neutrons either.

But right after the big bang, there are plenty of neutrons; they were just formed. And a neutron has no trouble sticking to a proton–there’s no mutual repulsion in this circumstance, it just has to be moving slow enough to stick rather than ricocheting off.

Over the next ten to twenty minutes, just about every neutron was consumed this way, and any that weren’t didn’t last long. In this time some of the neutrons did decay before they could find a proton; so the ratio was now one neutron for every seven protons.

Deuterium is stable–just barely. Nucleons would really rather be part of a a helium 4 nucleus, which can be formed by combining two deuterium nuclei. And indeed, almost all of the deuterium then combined with other deuterium to form helium 4 (two protons, two neutrons). Helium-4 is very stable indeed.

And at this point the universe was already too cool for carbon to form, as it does in older, heavier stars. And after about 20 minutes, it was too cool for deuterium and helium 4 to form; anything that hadn’t found a “mate” by this time, never would–at least not until stars formed.

So with one nucleon (or baryon) out of every eight being a neutron, starting with an original inventory of sixteen particles, there are two neutrons and fourteen protons. The two neutrons (and two of the 14 protons) end up in one helium 4 nucleus, and the twelve remaining protons become hydrogen. By mass, that’s 1/4 helium, 3/4 hydrogen, by counting atoms, on the other hand, it’s 12 hydrogen atoms to one helium atom.

Some helium 3 also formed, but it’s as rare as deuterium that didn’t happen to combine.

A very small amount of beryllium 7 and lithium 7 formed; the beryllium 7 decayed by positive beta decay into lithium 7.

An even smaller amount of lithium 6 is expected to have formed, but the amount is less than we could measure today.

As you might imagine, the original proportion of neutrons to protons matters greatly (if there were more neutrons, more deuterium and helium could form). Another parameter that matters is how many photons there are per baryon. That, in fact, matters a great deal. You can plug different photon/baryon numbers into the theory and get wildly different concentrations of the end products H-1, H-2, He-3, He-4 and Li-7.

This photon-to-baryon ratio is actually usually expressed the other way around; as baryons to photons, and the value that results in what we actually see today is about six baryons for every ten billion photons.

Here’s a chart showing the different densities (hydrogen-1 is not drawn, it’s 1 and everything else is relative to it) versus the photon/baryon ratios.

In this chart the actual values are shown as circles, and they all correspond to the same photon/baryon ratio at the time of nucleosynthesis.

Now most conceivable combinations simply can’t be gotten out of the theory. You can imagine, for instance, there being twenty times as much deuterium as hydrogen-1; but there’s no photon/baryon ratio in the theory that will let that happen. The mere fact that there is a match for four numbers at the same value tells us the theory is solid and hence we can be pretty confident how many photons there were at that time, versus baryons.

This number can be used to determine how much “normal” matter there was in the early universe…and it’s about 5 percent of the critical density. This is strong evidence that most of the total amount of matter we detect by its gravitational effects (about 30 percent of the critical density) is not normal matter, but rather “dark matter.”

Whatever the heck that is.

Back in part 27 I discussed what the universe looked like 300,000 or so years after the Big Bang. Now I’ve talked about 1 second to twenty minutes.

Dammit, Steve, go back one more second! What was going on at zero seconds!? Tell me!!!

Well, I can’t. Nobody can. At least not in any sort of detailed, physical way. To get past 10^-47 seconds with even a wild guess, we’d need a quantum theory of gravity…which we don’t have. And the situation isn’t much better for any time before about 10^-6 seconds.

The universe changed multiple times in that first second, and (going backwards toward zero) things were at higher and higher temperatures (energies). We have no real way of knowing what was going on at any energy higher than we can generate in particle colliders. (This is yet another reason cosmologists pay attention to particle physics–places like the Large Hadron Collider are the only labs that can reproduce conditions in the very, very early universe. They just can’t go back to zero.) Thus the closer you get to zero, the more and more speculative things get. (And yes, there’s a lot of speculation; but at least it’s educated speculation.)

I normally shy away from the speculative stuff, but I’m going to make an exception here.

Probably the most important speculation is that between 10^-36 seconds and 10^-32 seconds (in other words, about the amount of time it takes for a RINO to stab us in the back given the opportunity), the universe went through an epoch of really fast “inflation” where it increased in size by at least a factor of 10⁷⁸. I think that sets a new record for most gigantic number I’ve ever used in one of these posts (other than a passing reference to a centillion, which is 10³⁰³). Now this isn’t solid by any means, but such a thing would explain a few things we do see today, quite adequately. For instance, the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background. If inflation happened, then different parts of the universe that (otherwise) could never have interacted with each other did interact with each other, and the universe had time to become nearly uniform in temperature and density. So most cosmologists are pretty confident that this did happen, at least until a better idea comes along. And even if this is the correct explanation, of course the picture gets refined with each piece of new data. And no one really has any solid notion what could have caused “inflation” to happen.

The “Big Bang” term itself is a placeholder for something we’re pretty sure happened…but cannot describe in any kind of meaningful detail. Questions and (largely unbridled) speculation about it abound.

In the meantime, though, we at least have a good, solid notion where all the elements came from. The hydrogen and helium came about mere moments after the Big Bang, and everything else was made in stars or from dead stars. (Even though stars make helium, most of the helium “out there” is still original, Big-Bang helium. On the other hand, the helium here on Earth is not from either source, but rather from alpha decays since the earth formed.)

And we have one more line of evidence for “dark matter.” One that doesn’t depend on our understanding of gravity.

Next: A big surprise.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!

Okay you knuckledragging ChiComs trying to take us down…here’s a history lesson for you.

For millennia, you had to suffer from this:

Yep. Steppe Nomads. They laid waste to your country, burned, raped and pillaged (but not in that order–they’re smarter than you are) for century after century.

You know who figured out how to take them on and win? The Russians.

Not you, the Russians. And it took them less than two centuries. And Oh By The Way they were among the most backward cultures in Europe at the time.

You couldn’t invent an alphabet, you couldn’t take care of barbarians on horseback, and you think you can take this board down?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! We’re laughing at you, you knuckledragging dehumanized communists…worshipers of a mass-murderer who killed sixty million people!

I mean, you still think Communism is a good idea even after having lived through it!

By my reckoning that makes you orders of magnitude more stupid than AOC, and that takes serious effort.

His Fraudulency

Joe Biteme, properly styled His Fraudulency, continues to infest the White House, and hopium is still being dispensed even as our military appears to have joined the political establishment in knuckling under to the fraud.

All realistic hope lies in the audits, and perhaps the Lindell lawsuit (that will depend on how honestly the system responds to the suit).

One can hope that all is not as it seems.

I’d love to feast on that crow.

Justice Must Be Done.

The prior election must be acknowledged as fraudulent, and steps must be taken to prosecute the fraudsters and restore integrity to the system.

Nothing else matters at this point. Talking about trying again in 2022 or 2024 is hopeless otherwise. Which is not to say one must never talk about this, but rather that one must account for this in ones planning; if fixing the fraud is not part of the plan, you have no plan.

Political Science In Summation

It’s really just a matter of people who can’t be happy unless they control others…versus those who want to be left alone. The oldest conflict within mankind. Government is necessary, but government attracts the assholes (a highly technical term for the control freaks).

(A comment I wrote last week that garnered some praise.)

Lawyer Appeasement Section

OK now for the fine print.

This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines,  here, with an addendum on 20191110.

We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.

And remember Wheatie’s Rules:

1. No food fights
2. No running with scissors.
3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone.
4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns.
5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded.
5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty.
6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy.
7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.
8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.

(Hmm a few extras seem to have crept in.)

(Paper) Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1846.50
Silver $24.67
Platinum $1036.00
Palladium $2146.00
Rhodium $15,100.00

This week, 3PM Mountain Time, markets have closed for the weekend.

Gold $1786.70
Silver $23.18
Platinum $961.00
Palladium $1838
Rhodium $14,500

There’s no way to sugar coat it. This week was a blood bath. Anyone with palladium (and that does include me) lost $300 per ounce. Gold is heading right back to the levels it was at not so long ago.

XXVII The Cosmic Microwave Background

You’re going to get TWO parts this week. Thanksgiving Bonus!

The year is 1948. Ralph Alpher (1921-2007) and Robert Herman (194-1997) were doing work in close relation to work being done by Alpher’s PhD thesis adviser, George Gamow (1904-1968). At the time astronomers were still arguing about whether there had been a Big Bang, a definite ‘beginning’ to what we see around us, or whether we were in a ‘Steady State’ universe, and it had always looked pretty much as it does now. Always, as in always, back forever.

[Incidentally, the work this is related to is even more important than what I’m talking about here…but it makes more sense to cover it later. And no, it won’t be in the other part this week.]

Neither side denied that galaxies appeared to be rushing apart, and that the further apart they appeared to be the greater their speed away from each other.

The Steady State folks hypothesized that as the distance between two “neighbor” galaxies, A and B doubled, enough matter was spontaneously generated–out of nothing–to form a new galaxy in between A & B. By the time this new galaxy, call it C, had formed, it would be at about the same distance from A as B had been earlier, and it would be moving away from A at the same speed that B had originally been moving. Meanwhile the universe was now eight times bigger in volume (but twice as “wide”) than it had been previously, but it would also have eight times as much matter in it. This takes a certain amount of time, call it the “doubling time”

This would be going on everywhere, all the time. And if the universe was of infinite extent…well, run the tape backwards. A “doubling time” before the present, the universe was half as big as it was. All distances were half as great.

But half of infinity is still infinity. So you could go backward in time infinitely far, and you’d still see a universe with about the same density of galaxies you see today. It would look the same.

Contrast that with the Big Bang version, where, if you run the tape backward, you are compressing the same amount of matter into smaller and smaller amounts of space. It should heat up.

Run the tape back far enough, say to when the universe was about 1/1000th of its current size, and the universe ought to be so hot that all of the matter in it (not just the matter in stars) is plasma–the electrons have been knocked completely off their atoms.

Plasma is opaque. Photons can’t get very far before hitting and being absorbed by electrons; the electrons, of course are jumping around in energy levels every time the collide with each other, and emitting photons that get nowhere.

This is why we can’t see into the Sun. There’s a layer below which everything is plasma, and if you were there (without being vaporized), you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.

So imagine a time when the universe was at a temperature just above this point, and as it expands, the temperature drops.

Suddenly atoms form as electrons settle into orbitals and actually stay there, and the universe becomes transparent. There’s a crapload of high-temperature photons out there, and now they are free to run loose. And they ought to correspond to a temperature of roughly 3000 K.

And if this actually happened, they should still be running loose today. Can we detect them? If so, the Big Bang has a huge piece of evidence in its favor and Steady State is in big trouble.

That was the question Alpher and Herman asked. They did some calculations, and figured we should be able to see these photons today, but that they would now correspond to a temperature of 5 K. Which is microwaves, very much like what your microwave oven uses. Back then the technology to generate and detect them simply didn’t exist.

They then re-ran their calculations based on new values for the Hubble parameter a couple of years ago, and revised their estimate to 28 K. Then again back down to 5 K.

The Hubble parameter is notoriously difficult to measure.

This is the parameter that tells you, given how far away a galaxy is, how fast it appears to be receding. Modern values are close to 70 km/second, for every megaparsec of distance. But it wasn’t long ago that one group’s data said it was close to 50 and another group’s data indicated 100. Both groups insisted their data showed they had to be right, yet they couldn’t both be. As it turned out, neither was.

It’s called the Hubble parameter, by the way, because there’s no particular reason to suppose that it doesn’t change over time. In fact there’s a special symbol for its value today, H₀. And it’s a project of modern cosmology to plot the value of H versus time back in the past. This will be a topic for another day.

Where we left off talking about cosmology, people were pretty much estimating distances to distant galaxies–galaxies so far away we couldn’t see their Cepheid variables–by simply measuring their redshift, turning that into a speed, then dividing by H₀. Of course that assumes H always equals H₀.

It’s important to point out (again) that this is not the same sort of red shift you get from, say, Smokey’s radar gun.

A radar gun bounces a very precisely tuned frequency of radar waves off of your car, and then measures the frequency of what bounces back. If your car is stationary, the return frequency is the same. If your car is moving towards Smokey, the return pulses will be slightly closer together. If you’ve passed Smokey and are moving away from him, the pulses are further apart.

You can compute the “red shift” like this: Subtract the frequency of the return signal from the frequency of the emitted signal (i.e., subtract what the radar gun sees coming back from your no-doubt-bright-red car, from what the radar gun sent out). Then divide by what was measured coming back.

z = (f_emitted – f_returned) / f_returned

That number is invariably labeled z.

If you do some algebra, simply dividing the frequency of what the radar gun sent out, by the frequency of what came back, should equal 1+z.

The redshift of different galaxies turns out to have a very different cause. Now this is going to seem a bit freakish, but in fact galaxies are pretty much stationary.

The space between them is actually expanding.

That makes no damn sense if you think about space and time like Isaac Newton did, absolutely rigid and fixed, but according to Einstein’s General Theory, space and time can curve and stretch, and they do. It’s difficult to wrap our minds around, but that’s what’s going on.

A photon bopping along at about 300 million hertz, three hundred million cycles a second, will have a wavelength about a meter long–because it travels three hundred million meters in that second.

If, while it’s travelling along, the space between galaxies doubles in size, then the photon’s waves stretch to be two meters long. It can’t travel any faster to make this up, so now its frequency is only 150 million cycles per second. This means the photon actually loses energy as the space it travels through expands.

If the photon happens to be visible light it has a much, much shorter wavelength (half of a millionth of a meter, for instance), but as it stretches it looks redder and redder because red wavelengths are longer than blue ones.

So the redshift of these photons is directly related to how much space has stretched since the photon was emitted. In fact, you can write the following: 1 + z = a_now/a_then. The two as are “scale factors” but what really matters is the ratio between them. If z is 1 for some photon, 1+z = 2, and the scale factor today is twice as big as it was then. The universe has doubled in size; space has, everywhere stretched to double its old size, since the photon was emitted.

OK, returning to Alpher and Herman.

There was some discussion of their idea of there being a microwave remnant of the Big Bang until about 1955, but cosmology wasn’t considered a very serious area of study back then. And we simply didn’t have the technology to detect it if it were there. So the notion was largely forgotten.

Until about 1964. In the early 1960s Yakov Zeldovich (1914-1987) found their work, and Robert Dicke (1916-1997) reinvented that particular wheel about the same time. In 1964, David Todd Wilkinson (1935-2002) and Peter Roll at Princeton University in New Jersey decided to start building something called a Dicke Radiometer to look for microwave rays coming from the sky.

Meanwhile, Just Down The Road

This is New Jersey we’re discussing here. The damn state is so small everyone in it can get into the same freaking food fight. And if I lived there in that anti-gun tyrrany, if anything worse than Kalifornia’s, I’d probably need a food fight to relieve the stress.

And they can’t run an honest election as well as a bunch of southerners in Virginia, which should chap their look-down-on-Bubba asses. But since it won’t chap their asses enough to suit me, I am going to insult them and tell “small state” jokes about them. I may visit someday, but I doubt I could fit my truck into the state.

But seriously, just a few miles down the road from Princeton, at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias (born 1933) and Robert Woodrow Wilson (born 1936), a couple of electrical engineers were building a microwave antenna to test the feasibility of using microwaves to transmit signals. Their particular antenna had a Dicke Radiometer in it.

Something was wrong, though. There was noise in the system, noise they couldn’t get rid of.

They were pretty sure the noise was in their equipment, because no matter which way they pointed that antenna, the noise was there. If it had been someone testing out their prototype microwave oven somewhere else in the state, they’d only have picked it up while the antenna was pointing towards it. But this was always there no matter which way they pointed the antenna.

They even shotgunned the pigeons who were building nests in their antenna, so that when they cleaned out the poop, it would stay clean. But even that didn’t work. Noise in their system.

Finally in desperation they called Princeton University to see if they knew anything.

They ended up talking to Dicke himself, and Dicke knew what was going on. What was going on was that their team had been scooped.

Penzias and Wilson had found, quite by accident, what we now call the Cosmic Microwave Background.

The “Big Bang Theory” (a bit of a misnomer) not only had accounted for the galaxies (apparently) moving further apart, it had made an actual prediction of a previously unknown phenomenon, and it had panned out.

Steady State was dead. The universe, at least in its present form, has a beginning. (One can ask “what was there before the Big Bang” and it’s a plausible question, though most think that that is when space time itself began, and that therefore there can be no “before,” it’s like asking what is north of the north pole.)

Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics.

So this is what’s going on: Those 3000K photons now have been stretched by a factor of 1090. And their temperature is 2.725 K today.

NASA has launched two satellites to study this radiation in detail: COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) and WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. It was originally simply MAP, but after Wilkinson died of cancer, it was renamed in his honor). COBE, when it was launched, had been the second most elaborate satellite NASA had ever built–right after the Hubble Space Telescope.

Their charter was to measure the cosmic microwave background in every direction.

It turns out to be almost perfectly uniform–once you factor out the (regular) Doppler redshift/blueshift due to the Sun’s motion around the center of our galaxy, and the galaxy’s true motion towards the Hercules cluster. Uniform to 1 part in 100,000. This indicates that the universe, at the time it cooled and released all those photons to run free, was very, very smooth, much more so than it is today (the universe is now clumped into galaxies, which clump into clusters and superclusters). Back then a cubic light year of universe had some certain amount of matter and energy in it, and adjacent cubic light years might be different by 1/1000th of a percent.

If you’ve ever seen this picture:

…it’s the Cosmic Microwave Background…with very slight differences in temperature shown in different colors, with the contrast dialed way up. Every direction in the sky is represented somewhere in that ellipse.

Cosmologists have been able to learn a lot from this image. A lot of details of the big bang theory have yet to be worked out, however several possibilities have been decisively eliminated by this data. It has also been used to demonstrate that space is flat, or very nearly so.

It’s essentially blackbody radiation, so at any point, it should follow a very specific curve. Now usually when something like this is measured, it’s not quite a perfect blackbody, so the match to the curve isn’t precise. But COBE took some measurements, and when plotted against the curve, you see:

There’s no visible difference between the data in red, and the theory, in blue.

I understand that when this was presented at a scientific conference, there was a standing ovation because theory and data matched so perfectly.

Steady state was dead, face down in the Hudson River. Or the Delaware. Not sure which, doesn’t matter. It’s not as if those two rivers are more than 50 feet apart.

One thing that was learned had to do with the fact that the radiation is indeed so uniform.

It’s now thought that the universe was 380,000 years old when it became transparent, and that this is basically a picture of the universe at that moment. What is striking is that in the subsequent 13+ billion years, the microwaves from (say) the dead center of that ellipse are reaching us. 180 degrees away, near the left or right side of the diagram, those microwaves are now reaching us.

Those two locations still cannot see each other. They never could in the past, they don’t now. They have no way whatsoever of knowing each others’ state or affecting each other, not in the past and certainly not now.

So how is it that they’re the same temperature to one part in 100,000?

That is a question that has occupied astronomers for quite some time. There’s a likely (but not certain) answer to that question…but that’s for another day.

XXVIII Dark Matter

Not to be confused with “Dark Meat.”

Yes, I am writing this on Thanksgiving, so “white meat” and “dark meat” are on my mind. Having taken Steve’s Own Wonder Weight Loss Elixir early last week (somehow, no one is beating my door down trying to order some), I’m going to hang on to the conquered ground in my own personal Battle Of The Bulge. (Having gained that hill painfully, I don’t want to give it up.)

Newtonian gravitational theory is a marvel. I’d say that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it long preceded sliced-at-the-bakery bread and the sliced bread doesn’t come close to beating it.

But–even aside from General Relativity tweaking it–there’s only so much you can do with it.

If there are exactly two bodies in the universe, say a planet orbiting a star, and they’re both uniform spheres (no oblateness, though they are allowed to vary with density with distance from the center), you can specify the position and velocity of each body at a certain time, call it t, and then you can simply plug some other time into a few formulae and know, immediately where those bodies are at that time. It can be before t or after t. It can be a second later, it can be ten billion years earlier. Plug-and-chuck, on a calculator (though you want at least a scientific calculator, not a four-banger that just has +, -, *, and / on it). The same procedure gets you the answer, in the same amount of time, no matter how different the times are.

Add a third body…even a dust mote ten billion miles away…and everything changes. Now in fact, you can ignore the dust mote. You probably didn’t measure the mass of the star and planet that accurately! But in essence, as soon as there are three (or more) bodies involved, you can’t just plug and chuck into a few formulae to predict things at at arbitrarily chosen future date.

A lot of mathematical work during the 18th and 19th centuries went into working out some special cases of the three body problem. For instance, if there is a small body orbiting a large body in a perfect circle, you can put a third body either 60 degrees ahead or 60 degrees behind the second body, on the same circle, travelling at the same speed. So the three bodies are at the points of a perfect equilateral triangle. It turns out that that situation is stable. In fact, it’s stable enough that even if the third body is slightly out of place, it will tend to move into place. There are a few other places you can put that third body…e.g., at a precisely balanced point between the other two bodies…but those are metastable; if it’s slightly off in positioning…by a zillionth of a meter…it will drift away from that point. The mathematician who worked this out was named Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736-1813, he actually was born in what is now Italy as Giuseppe Luigi Lagrangia).

There are at least a million asteroids 60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter, for instance, known as the Trojan asteroids because the first ones discovered were named after characters in the Illiad, and they’re liable to stay there forever or at least until something else wanders in and jerks them around or hits them.

But for the most part, the general “three body” problem is not solveable in “closed form” which is mathematician-speak for having a nice tidy equation or set of equations.

Our solar system, of course has a sun, eight planets, a shitload of asteroids in the “asteroid belt” between Mars and Jupiter, more asteroids orbiting right outside of Neptune’s orbit (including Pluto), and likely even more stuff way out there, 50,000 AUs or more. You can’t do two body stuff far into the future on, say, the Sun/Earth pair and expect it to be accurate. Jupiter is the main body perturbing things, but by no means the only one. All of these bodies are pulling on all of the other bodies, and the effects do add up.

NASA, of course, sends space probes to other planets, and in figuring out where they’re going to go, they have to account for the Earth, the Sun, and the destination planet. And if they do a flyby for “slingshot,” they’ll want to include the planets being slungshot off of (is that a word? It is now) as well. The good news is they can do something called “patched conics” where they ignore the sun and the destination while near the earth, both Earth and the destination (but not the sun!) while in transit, then just the destination while there. That’s not perfectly accurate, but it’s accurate enough to see if the mission is feasible.

But in general, to work a problem like this, you need numerical integration. You start out with everything in an initial state: their locations, their velocities, and of course their masses. You compute all the forces between every pair of objects, and you step forward some very, very small amount of time. Of course now thanks to those forces the velocities are now different, and because everything is moving, none of the positions are exactly the same as they were before. So at the new time (one step after the initial time), you have to recompute everything again, then take the next step. And over and over again.

The shorter the step, the more accurate it is, and there are other tricks you can use to increase accuracy. In grad school I wrote a three body integrator that used a method called “Adams-Bashforth.” I tested it by running a known two body problem through it (satellite in a circular orbit); when I got to a step size small enough where the accumulated errors were less than a millionth of a meter after a month, I figured it was accurate enough, and that computer spent a solid day cranking the thirty or so scenarios in my thesis. (It would have been about a month, but I had just plugged a co-processor into the motherboard. A good thing. I didn’t have a month.)

Nowadays, they can model two galaxies colliding with each other, with a million representative stars in each, and take movies of what happens. For instance, this is what’s going to happen when M31 in Andromeda collides with our galaxy in about five billion years. Stars are far enough apart that the two galaxies will probably pass right through each other with no head on collisions, but every star is pulling on every other star throughout the entire collision.

Fortunately, it’s not always necessary to precisely know the fate of each individual body.

For centuries, astronomers have known about objects called “globular clusters.” These are compact groupings of stars, and they actually tend to be outside the galactic disk (but still be bound to the galaxy). There’s a swarm of these things accompanying the Milky Way, out in what is called the “galactic halo.”

Modeling something like this precisely would be a pain, but you can make general statistical inferences without doing that, thanks to the virial theorem. (Not “viral”, “virial.”)

The virial theorem relates the average total kinetic energy of the cluster, over time, with the total potential energy. (It’s not just used for star clusters; it gets used for other sorts of systems as well.) You can measure the speeds of the individual stars (easy to do with Doppler shifts off their spectra), their distances from each other, and get some notion of the total energy of the system, as well as its total mass.

Of course, you could estimate the total mass by counting the number of stars and multiplying by the average mass of a star, but this will fail if some of the mass of the cluster is not visible for some reason or another. For instance, imagine if there is a lot of interstellar gas. Or a black hole. Or neutron stars that have long since stopped rotating and pulsing.

So, time now for a jarring change in perspective.

It’s 1933, and Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974) is studying a galactic cluster, in particular the Coma cluster in the constellation Coma Berenices. It has over a thousand galaxies in it, and is about 100 megaparsecs away (over 300 million light years). The individual members aren’t just stars, they’re entire galaxies. [Zwicky coined the term ‘supernova’ and built some of the very first jet engines, too.]

He concluded that there is far more mass in that cluster than just the obvious masses of all the stars in the galaxies in the cluster. In fact, he figured that what we could see shining as stars was 1/400th of the mass of the cluster

Zwicky coined the term ‘dark matter’ (actually, he was Swiss German, so he said ‘dunkle Materie’) to describe the 399/400ths of the stuff in the frame of the picture that cannot be seen.

Of course, there are obvious possible explanations for this. Interstellar and even intergalactic gas wouldn’t have been visible to Zwicky; neither would things like planetary-sized bodies and so on. So this became a bit of a curiosity but not of real concern.

Now let’s consider a single galaxy. A star near the center of that galaxy isn’t going to be moving very fast in orbiting the galaxy, it’s surrounded by most of the mass of the galaxy, the gravitational pulls of everything outside its orbit are pretty much going to cancel out. Its orbital speed is really only going to depend on the mass inside its orbit. Further out, there’s more mass inside the orbit; a star out there is going to orbit faster. The further out you get, the faster the star will orbit (a situation exactly the opposite of what we have in the solar system) up to a point. Eventually you’re outside of the galaxy and the further out you get, the further away the galaxy is and the slower you orbit. So if you were to plot this against distance from the galactic center, it ought to start at near zero when you’re at the the center, rapidly climb to a peak, then drop off in an inverse-square fashion.

In 1939 Horace W. Babcock (1912-2003) took measurements of star velocities in the Andromeda galaxy to draw such a curve, and didn’t get this result. Speeds got high…and stayed high, much higher than expected, as he measured the velocities of stars further and further away from the center of a galaxy.

In the 1970s Vera Rubin (1928-2016) and many others repeated this work with many other galaxies, and the results were consistent. When you got beyond the visible edge of a galaxy, there was a lot of invisible mass. You couldn’t see it…until you measured its gravitational effect on lone stars way out there beyond the galaxy’s ‘suburbs.’

Was it gas that had somehow never been pulled fully into the galaxies? It turns out there is some such gas, and in fact the gas is a few times more massive more than the stars. We can detect the gas directly now; it turns out to be very hot, and glows in X rays. (We have to observe those in orbit; the earth’s atmosphere blocks them.)

One more piece of evidence.

Recall that General relativity explains gravity as space being warped by masses. Even light gets bent. This was first seen in 1919 by Arthur Eddington during a solar eclipse, a discovery which made the front page of the New York Times back when it wasn’t fake news, and made Einstein a celebrity.

It’s possible for a nearby galaxy to bend the light from a farther galaxy. It’s not only possible, it’s quite common. In the most extreme case, you can see a galaxy splitting a much more distant galaxy into four pieces, like this:

Another spectacular example of this is this “Einstein ring” photographed by Hubble. The distant galaxy is almost directly behind the near one. It gets distorted into a nearly-complete ring.

Now usually we don’t get something nearly this tidy. What we’ll see is a galaxy off to the side, stretched out into a long, thin arc.

And it doesn’t have to be just a galaxy. A galaxy cluster can do this. Consider the following, which is a picture of the galaxy cluster Abell 1689. [No, we don’t bother naming individual galaxies any more…there are hundreds of billions of them.]

Here if you look closely you can see all sorts of short, straight lines…and your mind’s eye can even connect them into concentric rings about the cluster.

The cluster as a whole is lensing dozens or even hundreds of further galaxies.

And it’s possible to work backwards, and determine where the mass is distributed.

After accounting for every sort of regular matter we know how to detect, we’re only at about 20% of the amount of matter we would need to have, to do this. Furthermore, most of this mysterious mass isn’t in the galaxies.

It’s as if there’s something massive out there, and a galaxy is simply a visible manifestation of the center of that mass. As if the “normal” matter condenses into galaxies, but the other “dark” matter condenses some, but not as much. It’s not uniformly distributed throughout all of space, but clumps up in galactic clusters. In a very real sense these invisible clumps are the galactic clusters, since they are most of the mass of the clusters–those bright blobs are just a side effect.

This should be enough to convince you the stuff is there. Especially when I remind you that there are thousands of such examples, not just the ones I cherrypicked for this essay. Strictly speaking, of course, I haven’t proved anything because I’ve showed you none of the math. But the people who have seen it are mostly pretty confident.

So what IS this stuff?

YOU tell ME. Then go collect your Nobel Prize.

Because the person who solves it WILL get a Nobel Prize.

This is a question that has been occupying astronomers for a couple of decades now. And for the most part they can tell you what it is NOT.

It’s not just interstellar or intergalactic gas. That sort of material can be seen now; it glows in X rays. Even though that gas is more massive than visible galaxies, it’s not that much more massive. We presently think the dark stuff is 5 or 6 times as massive as the galaxies and the gas.

It doesn’t seem to want to interact via electromagnetism at all–which is why we can’t see it with light at all. (That’s an electromagnetic interaction.)

We know it does interact with gravity, and it probably interacts with the weak force but not the strong force.

Such matter would have a tough time even interacting with other matter of the same type, and that even includes collisions. That would explain why it doesn’t condense with galaxies. Ordinary matter becomes galaxies because as it passes through the densest part of the cloud, it collides, slows down and loses mechanical energy. If dark matter doesn’t collide with things, or at least not as readily, that explains why it hasn’t condensed as much as the regular matter in galaxies has.

Which means it’s not baryonic matter–it’s not made out of baryons, i.e., protons and neutrons. In fact “baryonic matter” is now a synonym for “ordinary” matter.

The one thing in the standard model we saw two parts ago (last week) that seems like it could fit is neutrinos. Those interact only with gravity and the weak force.

The problem is neutrinos move too fast: At light speed (if they have no mass) or just below (if in fact they have a tiny mass). They wouldn’t, therefore, clump up even as much as dark matter has been shown to clump up.

So most astronomers and astrophysicists are pretty confident (but not sure), that whatever dark matter is, it’s not in the standard model of particle physics at all. Which means 4/5 or 5/6ths of all the matter out there doesn’t appear in the standard model!

That’s what I meant when I said we know it’s not complete.

There is a generic placeholder answer to the question: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. (WIMPs.) Massive because they must be slow compared to the speed of light. It’s some sort of particle we don’t know about yet. There’s quite a bit of speculation on what that might be, but nothing even remotely conclusive, and of course any coherent guess will be tried out in particle accelerators, or looked for in detectors.

Another possibility that some haven’t completely given up on is the Massive Compact Halo Object (MACHO) which would be things like black holes and rogue planets ant the like. (Of course the name was inspired by WIMP.)

A third possibility comes about from considering the nature of the evidence. There are multiple lines of evidence, but every single one of them ultimately depends on the assumption that we understand gravity properly.

What if gravity doesn’t drop off as an inverse square function after (say) ten thousand light years? This class of ideas is called MOND, for MOdified Newtonian Dynamics.

This last has fallen into disfavor (though there are die hard holdouts), because of the Bullet Cluster.

Here is the Bullet Cluster. It’s over a billion parsecs away.

There’s a large cluster on the left, and a smaller one on the right. It turns out they are both at the same distance from us, 1.141 Gpc or 3.7 billion light years. Which means this is what it looked like 3.7 billion years ago.

This is a visible light picture. When we photograph the intergalactic gas, which glows in X ray wavelengths, this is what we see:

The X rays come from gas clouds between the two clusters. (Unfortunately these two pictures aren’t to the same scale, but I will show you a picture with a super-imposition done on it, shortly.)

It’s apparent that the two clusters collided. Since the galaxies are far enough apart, no galaxies actually collided, so the galaxy clusters just went right through each other, like two shotgun blasts crossing in midair.

But the intergalactic gas fills space, and so the gas clouds accompanying the galaxies hit head on and slowed each other down. Thus the clusters left their intergalactic gas behind.

Finally, we can look for the dark matter by studying all gravitational lensing in the picture, and show it in blue:

The dark matter, responsible for most of the lensing, stayed with the galaxies. It’s not gas.

Putting them all together we have:

Now it becomes clear, the dark matter stayed with the galaxies–it didn’t collide meaningfully with the dark matter from the other cluster–but the hot gas did collide, and is now not moving along with the galaxies and dark matter.

There’s basically no way to account for this with a modified theory of gravity (though some astrophysicists still fight for it).

So we are back to asking: What is this stuff?

We know it’s there. We know how much of it there is. We’ll have another line of evidence that it’s not ordinary matter in an upcoming installment.

But we don’t know what it is. That’s a 2021 physics question.

And this is the sort of thing that occupies both the people who study the universe…and the people who study particles smaller than protons. One cannot imagine what ought to be two more different subjects, yet they are inextricably tied together.

Ordinary and dark matter put together account for about 30 percent of the mass/energy needed to make the universe “flat.” Suspiciously close to 100 percent, as I explained last week. But the fact of the matter is, everything we know about particle physics accounts for a fifth or a sixth of all the matter that exists. And why is the total amount (dark plus regular) off–but not by all that much–from the one number that is “special”–the critical density that would make spacetime “flat”?

That story is far from over.

Obligatory PSAs and Reminders

China is Lower than Whale Shit

Remember Hong Kong!!!

中国是个混蛋 !!!
Zhōngguò shì gè hùndàn !!!
China is asshoe !!!

China is in the White House

Since Wednesday, January 20 at Noon EST, the bought-and-paid for His Fraudulency Joseph Biden has been in the White House. It’s as good as having China in the Oval Office.

Joe Biden is Asshoe

China is in the White House, because Joe Biden is in the White House, and Joe Biden is identically equal to China. China is Asshoe. Therefore, Joe Biden is Asshoe.

But of course the much more important thing to realize:

Joe Biden Didn’t Win

乔*拜登没赢 !!!
Qiáo Bài dēng méi yíng !!!
Joe Biden didn’t win !!!