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 !!!

SPECIAL SECTION: Message For Our “Friends” In The Middle Kingdom

You knuckle-dragging barbarians are still trying to muck with this site, so I’ll just repeat what I said last time.

Up your shit-kicking barbarian asses. Yes, barbarian! It took a bunch of sailors in Western Asia to invent a real alphabet instead of badly drawn cartoons to write with. So much for your “civilization.”

Yeah, the WORLD noticed you had to borrow the Latin alphabet to make Pinyin. Like with every other idea you had to steal from us “Foreign Devils” since you rammed your heads up your asses five centuries ago, you sure managed to bastardize it badly in the process.

Have you stopped eating bats yet? Are you shit-kickers still sleeping with farm animals?

Or maybe even just had the slightest inkling of treating lives as something you don’t just casually dispose of?

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

And here’s my response to barbarian “asshoes” like you:

OK, with that rant out of my system…

So Just this Once Justice Has Been Done

Kyle Rittenhouse goes free. Not guilty on all counts!

He shot some real dirtbags, though he didn’t know at the time just how dirtbag they were, so that can’t justify it. What justified it was the dirtbags were coming after him. He did miss one, and merely wound another (Grosskreutz, who should now be prosecuted for attacking Rittenhouse. Though maybe we owe him thanks because he blew up the persecution’s case with his testimony.)

A lot of real shitbags need to pay for this. Not just the rioters, but the persecution, the media, the political “leadership” in this country that came down against him when enough was out to acquit him almost immediately, on and on. Sure there will be defamation suits but that’s not enough. These people will probably launch gofundmes to pay their awards for them anyway; there are enough Leftist mushbrains to make that happen.

But in the meantime, we celebrate what we did get.

Loop it if you like; I will wait.

https://youtu.be/SkcLUkuQpPQ?t=760

Richly deserved.

And justice, after all, is seeing that people get what they deserve, not just with criminal acts, but even in our personal lives.

Justice can be done. So…

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.

The Audit

The Audit is definitely heating up. Let’s see if the Opposition manages to squelch it and its consequences. I’ll be honest; I expect it to be ignored by anyone capable of ordering Biden/Harris to step down.

Nevertheless, anything that can be done to make Biden look less legitimate is a worthy thing!

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 (i.e., paper) Prices

Last week:

Gold $1866.10
Silver $25.42
Platinum $1091.00
Palladium $2195.00
Rhodium $15,100.00

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

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

I looked earlier today and things were a bit higher, but right now it does look like gold is trying to drift downward…or is being pushed downward. I was about to say it looked solidly established in the 1850s-1860s but…nooope.

Physics — The “Standard Model”

I’m finally feeling well enough to try to take this on.

Last week I told the story of how all sorts of unexpected medium (~200 electron masses) and heavy weight particles (1800 electron masses and up) began turning up in particle physicists’ cloud chambers, leading to a ridiculous-seeming ‘zoo’ of particles that all seemed fundamental (though all except the previously-known proton are unstable).

And of Murray Gell-Mann and Zweig brought order to the confusion by postulating that there were in fact three types (called “flavors”) of quarks (and three matching types of anti-quarks) that made up all of these these particles…including the proton and neutron. A quark and anti-quark pair (usually of a different flavor) made up a meson (medium weight particle), and three quarks made up a baryon (heavy weight particle).

The three flavors are “up” (+2/3 electric charge), “down” (-1/3 electric charge) and “strange (-1/3 electric charge).

And then the idea that there was a new fundamental kind of charge, different from electric charge, called the color charge. Where the electric charge comes in positive and negative forms, the color charge has three forms, none of them quite the opposite of any of the others, but all three of them adding up to “neutral.” This reminded someone of the primary colors red, green, and blue [primary when dealing with light emitting sources, not paints, where it’s the red, blue and yellow you’re probably thinking of] and so the three charges were named red, green and blue.

It turns out that this is the real “strong force” and the “strong nuclear force” noted in the past, that holds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus is just a side effect of it. No, the real strong force holds the protons and neutrons themselves together!

Strong interactions within a proton or neutron generate a pion (a meson), which will decay almost instantly unless it runs into another proton or neutron immediately, in which case it interacts with that particle; that interaction is the “strong nuclear force.” That other proton or neutron has to be practically touching the first one for this to work at all, so that’s why the strong nuclear force had such a short range.

And these are particles a trillionth of a millimeter across, roughly, so when I say “short range” I mean “short range.”

The real strong force operating by quarks exchanging “gluons,” much like the electromagnetic force operates by charged particles exchanging photons. But it is much, much more complicated than that. A photon, once emitted, has no electric charge and no mass, so even though it carries the electromagnetic force, it’s not affected by it. It won’t be bent by electric or magnetic fields. It won’t be affected by other photons. But a gluon itself has a color charge and a mass! That means it can interact with quarks and other gluons, by exchanging yet more gluons…which can exchange yet more gluons. This was a seemingly-intractable mess that, frankly, I don’t understand the resolution to. But they did resolve it. (Richard Feynman had a lot to do with that.)

So there was this totally new and much deeper understanding of the strong force (no longer the strong “nuclear” force). The whole topic is now called “quantum chromodynamics” to match with “quantum electrodynamics” (the completely up-to-date marriage of quantum physics and Maxwell’s and Einstein’s work).

[As an aside, every experiment made to test quantum electrodynamics has been a perfect match, down to ten parts in a billion of precision. Nothing else in physics is this solid.]

Later on, physicists discovered three more quarks, the charm quark (+2/3 charge), bottom quark (-1/3 charge), and top quark (+2/3 charge) and they got grouped into three “generations: Generation 1 is the up and down quarks, and those make up protons and neutrons and thus the overwhelming majority of everything you see around you by mass (the rest of the mass is electrons; and of course you see photons; in fact you see with photons). Generation 2 is the charmed and strange quarks, while Generation 3 are the top and bottom quarks.

But what about the weak force?

The weak force, it turns out is the only force that can change a quark’s flavor, from say, down to up.

Consider a neutron, out all by its lonesome. It contains an up quark (+2/3 electric charge) and two down quarks (-1/3 each electric charge). Each of those quarks is a different color charge, but it actually doesn’t matter which one is which.

The weak force operates here by changing one of the down quarks to an up quark. That raises the charge of that quark an entire unit, from -1/3 to +2/3, which means that some particle with a negative charge unit has to be generated to make up for it (electric charge is (still) always conserved). Well, now, an electron fills the bill nicely. But if you generate an electron, you’ve created a lepton, and an anti-lepton must be generated to make up for that. (The total number of leptons can never change, but anti-leptons count as –1 lepton.) And an anti-neutrino fills that bill, since neutrinos are leptons and anti-neutrinos are therefore anti-leptons.

I’ve just described negative beta decay.

(If you get the feeling, after watching all that book-balancing going on, that physics is a lot like accounting, well, yes, yes it is! Except you’re keeping books in six different currencies at once, between conserving quark number, lepton number, electric charge, angular momentum, linear momentum and occasionally mass-energy.)

And indeed the result is a proton, and electron, and an anti-neutrino.

Logically, there should be particles that mediate this force too, and indeed predictions were made in 1968. This had come about because, fresh off the success of quantum electrodynamics, physicists had turned to trying to “crack” the weak force, and Sheldon Glashow (1932 and still alive), Stephen Weinberg (1933-July 23 2021), and Abdus Salam (1926-1996) put forward a prediction that not only related the weak force to electromagnetism, but suggested three new particles. The first two were the W⁺ and W^– “bosons” (bosons are particles with integer spin, force carrying particles are all bosons), named W for the weak force, and they have + and – 1 unit of electric charge, respectively. The third particle is the Z boson, which has no charge at all (and Z for Zero).

These particles were found in 1973.

Beta Decay, the Modern Understanding

So what really happens in a beta decay? One of the down quarks in a neutron emits a W- boson. That alone turns the down quark to an up quark, and that quark’s involvement is over. About 10^-25 seconds later (enough time for the W particle to move about 3 percent of the width of the neutron it’s inside), the W particle breaks down into the electron (which carries off all the charge) and antineutrino. That avoids having three things happen at once.

Below is a Feynman Diagram of the interaction. Starting at the lower left, the neutron, consisting of one up and two down quarks is moving (in space) slightly to the right, but is climbing along the time axis. Then one of the down quarks spits out the W^– particles, and the neutron turns into a proton, which recoils…exactly like a rifle firing a bullet. Exit shiny new proton, stage upper left. The W boson moves off then becomes an anti-neutrino (with that Greek “nu” ν that looks like a v to us for a symbol, the bar over it denotes it’s an antiparticle, as does the arrow pointing backwards in time), and an electron.

Feynman diagrams are actually enormously powerful visualization tools (and helped solve the mess with gluon-gluon interactions) and I really should have found some excuse to introduce them sooner. Actually, I’m being charitable: I feel like an idiot for not using them sooner.

I just dropped a tiny spoiler (soon to be resolved) in that diagram; notice the antineutrino is subscripted with an e, ν_e.

Muon Decay

Another place where the weak force comes into play is the decays of muons and tauons. Recall that these are basically bigger “cousins” of the electron, and indeed these particles decay, ultimately, into electrons. These are all leptons.

Let’s look at the muon decay, in another Feynman diagram.

Here the muon (μ^–), in many ways just a bloated electron, enters at stage lower left, decides it’s bored with being a muon, and decides to become a neutrino (with zero charge). So it upchucks a W^– to get rid of the charge. [Sorry about the imagery, but recent events in my life suggested it to me.] Everything is kosher to the guys with the green eyeshades, because there’s one lepton going in and one going out (neutrinos are leptons). But that W^– lives only about ten times as long as a politician’s promise not to violate your rights, and breaks down into an antineutrino and an electron. The electron bears the charge of the W^– particle, the anti-neutrino balances the lepton number of the electron.

So what’s the deal here? That neutrino that the muon turned into has a cute little μ subscript (ν_μ) and the antineutrino from the W^– breakdown has an e subscript (ν_e, though unfortunately I can’t draw the bar over it in this text editor).

As it turns out the charged leptons come in three generations, electron, muon, and tauon…and so do the neutrinos!

As if the dang neutrino isn’t a slippery enough little bugger, now there’s three kinds of them?

In fact there seem to be three generations of everything: leptons, quarks, and subdividing, three generations of neutrinos, “electron-ish” leptons, -1/3 quarks and +2/3 quarks.

The Sun is Safe, and You Still Have To Do Your Taxes (Dammit).

And this helped to solve a mystery that was beginning to bother people. Really bother them.

Nuclear fusion should generate neutrinos. We can check this because there is a big fusion reactor less than a hundred million miles away: the Sun. Based on the energy output of the sun, and the amount of energy each fusion reaction generates (measured in a laboratory), we can know how many reactions are taking place each second; we can use simple geometry to figure out how many neutrinos should pass through detectors here on Earth. And we can do further calculations to figure out the tiny number of neutrinos that should actually react with the detector and therefore be detected rather than just cruising on through to go on, probably, forever.

The problem was, we only detected a third as many neutrinos as we thought. Either we just didn’t understand something…or the Sun was shutting down for some reason. Which would be bad. We’d only find out ten thousand years or so after it happened, because it takes that long for the heat and light generated by the fusion to work its way out (the neutrinos zip out instantly since all the matter of the sun is nothing to them). When, suddenly, no more light and heat…we’re up shit creek.

It turns out that neutrinos can change generation. This suggestion was made clear back in 1957 by Bruno Pontecorvo (1913-1993) and eventually was confirmed by experiments done at neutrino detectors. It takes some time for neutrinos to do this, which is why the effect was visible in solar neutrinos (which are 8 minutes, 20 seconds old) but not in neutrinos generated by nuclear reactors here on earth (which are less than a millionth of a second old). One implication of this is that neutrinos do have a mass, albeit one we still can’t measure (much, much less than an electron, which is the lightest thing we know of that isn’t zero mass). The details are still being worked out.

The last bit of fallout from the work done in 1968 was the Higgs boson. It turns out to be the particle representing a field that gives particles mass. So electrons, muons, tauons and quarks interact with it (as do the W, Z, and gluon), but photons do not. [At least one theory of neutrino mass claims it gets its mass from something other than the Higgs field.]

That particle was finally found in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider. And if you’ve wondered why on earth it’s the Large Hadron Collider, recall that a hadron is any particle made of quarks including both mesons and baryons.

[And yes, it must be told. Richard Dawkins (yes, that Richard Dawkins) mentioned the LHC in a book he wrote before the Higgs was finally discovered, and he got the proofs back from the publisher. And sure enough someone had flubbed and in print was “Large Hardon Collider.” He has quite a good sense of humor, actually, and he begged the publisher to leave the misprint in, but they removed it. (There is, or at least was, on his website a troll named “Rawhard Dickins” that he tolerated.) It was only a couple of years later that “the typo we’ve all been waiting for” finally appeared on a website.]

The Standard Model…Ta Da!!

So that completes what is actually named “the standard model” of particle physics. It pretty much sums up everything we’ve every seen in a collider.

Here’s a graphic. This one includes the anti-particles in columns 4-6. (Most such diagrams do not; it’s assumed you know they’re there.)

[Sorry, Zoe, I don’t know a quick way to describe this one, and listing what’s in each cell in a 8×4 grid would be tedious.]

One thing sometimes included in the diagram, but not this diagram, is the “graviton,” the force carrying particle for the gravitational force. But, we really can’t even hazard much of a guess as to what such a particle would be like, because we’d need a quantum theory of gravity.

We don’t have one. Personally I’m not even sure there can be one, but really, I am WAY beyond my pay grade here.

There are a couple of other details that still need to be worked out (neutrino mass would result in a tweak to the theory, not its breakage), but again, it seems like everything we’ve ever seen in a particle collider or a lab of any type fits into this, with the nagging exception of gravity–we just have to figure out how to bolt that onto the schema.

So is physics done?

Nope.

Not even close.

Because we have excellent reason to believe that this diagram only categorizes one sixth of the matter in the universe.

Wait, since this explains everything we do see…that would mean we only see one sixth of the matter in the universe!

And if we can’t see it, how do we even know it exists?

What’s up with that?

Back to the astronomers…

Fuck Joe Biden

No expansion on this thought necessary.

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 !!!

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?

Election Cheating

Republicans won…in Virginia, and maybe in New Jersey, and in a lot of local races nationwide (including school boards–very critical in the long term).

If we can’t possibly win without an honest system, and we know the system has not been fixed…uh, what’s up? Seems like a bit of a contradiction.

So I will modify my stance somewhat, in the light of new information: Apparently the automated cheating that’s rather subtle could be overcome. And indeed it was overcome in 2020 as well.

That’s when the Left/Establishment went to good old fashioned blatant ballot-box stuffing, putting up cardboard to block the view into election centers and running ballot after ballot through the machines. To say nothing of the six figure dumps of votes entirely for China Joe and Skanky Hoe.

This time, for whatever reason, they didn’t go that far.

Perhaps it’s just so they can claim “See, Republicans can win elections, so we’re not cheating and Trump was just a Loser.” In which case, I’ll go back to my original stance and say that we cannot win until the election process is fixed. But then I’ll go on to add: unless they decide for tactical reasons to let us win a couple.

So for now, I’ll stick with:

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.)

Spot Prices

Last week:

Gold $1785.10
Silver $23.99
Platinum $1028.00
Palladium $2087.00
Rhodium $15,250.00

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

Gold $1819.00
Silver $24.25
Platinum $1042.00
Palladium $2117.00
Rhodium $15,500.00

Everything is UP. Gold has busted $1800. Silver has busted $24. I suspect they’re going to continue upward, for now.

The Distance Ladder

A couple of go-backs

A couple of things I failed to mention last time.

Schwarzschild (the name is German for “black shield,” ironically enough) did his theoretical work in 1915, immediately after Einstein published the theory of general relativity. His solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity was the first one, in fact. Astrophysicists are still careful to distinguish “Schwarzschild black holes” from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild was killed in action on the Eastern Front in World War I.

There probably is no such thing as an actual non-rotating black hole. Such would have to be formed from a non-rotating massive star (or a nebula with absolutely no rotation, in the case of the supermassive black holes). Remember that even the tiniest rotation will be magnified, and magnified a lot, as the object shrinks down from light years (or tens of trillions of kilometers) across, to star-sized (hundreds of thousands of kilometers) to just a few kilometers in radius, just as the figure skater spins much faster when she pulls her arms in.

Black holes are generally safe…as long as you’re far enough away. If the sun were magically to be replaced by an equal-mass black hole, the Earth would continue in its orbit and not be sucked in. It’s only when you get to within about 3 Schwarzschild radii that you can’t have a stable orbit. (And the Schwarzschild radius is the radius at which the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light.) For the sun the Schwarzschild radius is 2,950 meters (not kilometers, meters). Earth could be made into a black hole too–if you could manage to compress it until its radius is 8.87 millimeters.

Measuring Distances

Astronomers can easily measure the direction of a star. This was being done with surprisingly high precision even before the invention of the telescope. As seen from earth, the sky forms a “celestial sphere” and every star’s position on that sphere can be measured and plotted in star charts. The celestial sphere appears to rotate on an axis (really it’s the earth that rotates on that axis, in the opposite direction), so that defines north and south “poles” on the celestial sphere; and halfway between them is the celestial equator. So you can get something like “latitude” on the celestial sphere, only it’s called “declination” or “Dec.” Longitude is trickier because there’s no objective zero point, but can be handled too. The sun, of course, moves along the celestial sphere following the “zodiac” which is a circle tilted at a 23.5 degree angle to the celestial equator (and again, it’s not the sun that’s really moving, it’s the earth orbiting the sun making the sun appear to move). The place where the zodiac crosses the celestial equator, when the sun is moving from the southern celestial hemisphere into the northern celestial hemisphere, is called “the first point of Aries” and is also the zero “longitude” point by convention. When you see a statement like “Spring will start at 4:46 PM on March 21″ that’s really the time the sun will (appear to) cross through the first point of Aries”. But here’s a wrinkle with regard to celestial longitude: It’s measured not in degrees but in hours. 24 hours makes up the full circle, then those are divided into minutes and seconds just like degrees are. And it’s called “Right Ascension” or “R.A.,” not longitude.

If you remember last week I posted a rather colorful plot of the orbits of some stars at the center of the Milky Way around the supermassive black hole there, plotted on a grid. The grid is marked off in seconds of arc (i.e., the kind of second that is 1/3600th of a degree, not the kind of second that is 1/3600th of an hour of right ascension), with respect to the declination and right ascension of that black hole. That is what those scales mean.

In any case it’s easy to measure this sort of thing; one of the two most manifestly obvious things about a star is what direction it’s in. (The other is how bright it is.)

But that alone will not tell us where the star is. In three dimensional space, you need three coordinates. In a Cartesian (square/cubic) grid, you need x, y, and z. In this case, you’re dealing with spherical coordinates, and you still need three of them (that’s why it’s “three dimensional” space): Right ascension, declination, and distance.

And unlike right ascension and declination, distance to a star is a cast-iron bitch to measure accurately.

I’ve told, here and especially elsewhere, the story of how we first determined the distance from Earth to the Sun (and hence all of the other distances within the solar system, since we already knew the ratios of the distances to each other). This was in the 1760s and it required observations of Venus transiting the Sun (i.e., crossing directly between Earth and the Sun so as to appear as a black dot crossing the fact of the sun, rather than crossing north/”above” or south/”below” the sun as it laps us in its orbit). This distance is called an “Astronomical Unit” (AU), and is currently defined to be 149,597,870,700 meters (in other words if we ever measure it in the future and it turns out the actual distance isn’t quite this, we’ll keep this number for the astronomical unit anyway). (And [Oh By The Way] knowing the average distance from the earth to the sun to the nearest 100 meters is, in and of itself, quite a triumph of measurement.)

With extremely painstaking measurements, best done on photographic plates, it became possible to measure distances to some stars once we knew this. It took until the mid 1800s. What happens is, as the earth revolves around the sun, its position changes by roughly 300 million kilometers, and that will cause nearer stars to appear to shift back and forth in relation to farther stars, just like you can shift your head back and forth and, say, a nearby light pole in a parking lot will appear to move back and forth with respect to the mountains in the background. (Folks in Kansas and especially Florida and Louisiana will have to adjust that example a bit.) This is known as parallax.

If you know how far you are moving your head, and can measure how many degrees along the horizon the pole appears to shift, it’s straightforward trigonometry to determine the distance to the light pole.

Even with the earth moving back-and-forth 300 million kilometers, the parallax of even the nearest star is less than one second of arc. (But note, this is quoted, for historical reasons, with respect to half of the earth’s orbital diameter, i.e., its orbital radius, which is to say, versus a 1 AU baseline, not a 2 AU baseline.) An arcsecond is about the width of a quarter at eighteen thousand feet (over three miles).

It’s possible to compute how far away something has to be to have a (half) parallax of one arc second as seen from a body orbiting with a radius of 1AU. Again, straightforward trigonometry. And, to the nearest meter (it has to be rounded because the formula has pi in it), it’s 30,856,775,814,913,673 meters. Or about 31 quadrillion meters or 31 trillion kilometers. This is called a “parsec” (short for “parallax-second”), and it’s roughly equal to 206,000 AU. (If you consider that Neptune’s orbit is roughly 30 AUs in radius, you can see how truly vast this distance is even compared to our solar system, which is measured in billions of miles. And this is closer than the nearest star.)

Astronomers–and I mean people who do astronomy for a living–think in and use parsecs. You’ve heard of light years, I am sure. That’s the distance light travels in a year. A parsec is actually about 3.26 light years, or alternatively, it takes 3.26 years for light to travel one parsec.

Astronomers talking to the public basically have to multiply everything by 3.26 so they can express it in light years. Why work in parsecs, then? Well, when they measure a parallax, they just have to divide it into 1 arc second to get the distance in parsecs. A 0.5 second parallax, means a two parsec distance, and so on.

The first successful parallax-based distance measurement was of the star Vega (visible low in the west shortly after sunset this time of year; it’s part of the Summer Triangle asterism); its parallax is almost exactly 1/8th of an arc second, so its distance was roughly 8 parsecs.

This was conceptually easy, but parallaxes were so small that by 1900 only 60 stars had had their distances measured. The process sped up in the early 20th century, to be sure…but since even with a small telescope hundreds of thousands of stars are visible, we weren’t going to finish off the list any time soon. Plus, of course, the fact that most of these stars are so distant they couldn’t be measured by the instruments of the time–they were in fact used as the backdrop for the nearer stars to move against. (Even today, with satellites doing the work, we really can’t get past about 1600 light years with this method.)

Clearly, if we were going to measure lots of stellar distances, we’d need another method.

But now for a wrenching change of subject.

The Shape of the Universe

William Herschel (1738-1822) is best known as the discoverer of the planet George. At least, that’s what he wanted to name it, after the King of England, George III.

(I’ll pause now and give you all a chance to quit vomiting at the prospect of naming a planet after that particular asshole.)

This name was not accepted by most astronomers, so instead they named it after every asshole: Uranus. And of course, that probably leads to even more bad jokes than naming it “George” would have. Astronomers school themselves to say “YER in us” instead of “your Anus” when they name that planet, but even that sounds too much like “urinous” (full or redolent of urine). Perhaps they should have gone with “OO rahn us,” probably closer to how the Greeks pronounced that name (father of the Titans) in any case. (And no, I didn’t mean to usurp Wheatie’s word of the day, but if you can find a good use for “urinous” with respect to current events–shouldn’t be that challenging–go right on ahead.)

Anyhow, Herschel did a lot of other things, perhaps the most important of which was discovery of infrared light. But for our purposes today, he was also the first to suggest that the stars, if their three-dimensional positions could be plotted, would form a disc with a central bulge, sort of like some renderings of flying saucers; and that the Sun would not be at the center of this shape.

How did he conclude this? If you get away from city lights (and that was easy to do in his day; nothing was as brightly lit back then as it is now), you will see a faintly glowing cloudy band stretching across the night sky. In fact, this cloudy band runs clear around the celestial sphere, including through the part we cannot see from the United States because it’s too far south. It’s most prominent where it runs through the constellation Sagittarius, but it also runs through Cassiopeia (the “W” in the northern sky) and the northern cross (part of Cygnus), in fact it runs along the long member of the cross. (This part of it should be readily visible shortly after dark…again, if you get the heck away from city lights.)

The ancient Greeks, of course, had spotted this band, and had named it γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxias kyklos) or “milky circle” since the pale faint color suggested milk to them; they even had conjured up a myth that it was actual milk from the breast of Hera, queen of the gods. The Romans called it via lactea which translates directly to “Milky Way.”

When Galileo turned his telescope on the Milky Way, it turned out to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of stars that were individually too faint to be seen by the unaided eye, but together turned into this “milky way” stretching across the sky.

What Herschel had done was to catalogue thousands of stars and other deep sky objects, like nebulae, and to note that more of them were in the general direction of Sagittarius than any other direction, and of course most were in the plane of the Milky Way than other directions (such as 90 degrees away from it, where almost no stars are). And exactly opposite of Sagittarius, the Milky Way was thinnest.

That’s what we’d see if all the stars were spread out evenly in a fairly flat disc, and we were inside the disk but off center. We’d see the most stars looking through the center, lots of stars looking any other direction through the disc (the least when looking away from the center, because the distance to the edge of the disc is shortest in this direction) and much less looking perpendicularly to the disc.

The Milky Way is not just brighter in the direction of Sagittarius, but broader, which is why Herschel believed (correctly) there was a central bulge in that direction.

Note that Herschel was working before we could measure the distance to stars (and well before spectroscopy and stellar classification), so he was going entirely off their brightness, assuming that dimmer stars were further away. However, he was still essentially right about the shape of this conglomeration of stars.

It was believed that everything–the entire universe–was within this structure. That included not just stars, but also nebulae, in essence either dark, opaque clouds of gas and dust, or in some cases such clouds brightly lit by nearby stars.

One fairly obvious and prominent nebula is in the sword of Orion; it looks a bit fuzzy to the unaided eye (instead of being a crisp point of light like other things “up there”) but in binoculars it is obviously a glowing cloud of gas lit by stars embedded within it.

In fact, this is a place where stars and planetary systems are forming–right now. This is abundantly clear from observations, including from Hubble Space Telescope images.

Other nebulae had distinctly spiral shapes, like, for instance, this one:

And this is pretty much where things sat, clear into the early part of the 20th century. The universe was believed to consist of the Milky Way, surrounded by empty space.

But there were proponents of a different idea, that these spiral nebulae were actually separate galaxies. On April 26, 1920, in fact, there was a debate held at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History; today it is known as the “Great Debate.” Harlow Shapley argued the spiral nebulae were on the outskirts of this galaxy, while Heber Curtis argued that they were in fact, distinct galaxies and therefore very far away, outside of this galaxy.

Note that this was just over a century ago. The issue wouldn’t be settled until 1924.

We have only known about other galaxies definitively for less than a century. Think about that.

How could the people who thought that “spiral nebulae” were in fact separate galaxies outside our own actually prove it? Or alternatively, be made to shut up? Well, the most straightforward way to do that would be to show that they were far, far away–or not.

Which brings me back to pointing out that in astronomy, measuring distances is a cast-iron bitch.

Even with today’s satellite technology, we can barely get parallaxes over 1% of the distance across this galaxy; certainly in 1920 using stone knives and bearskins we’d never be able to prove something was outside the galaxy with parallaxes.

A Standard Candle

But we already had a solution to this.

We go to HAH-vuhd, 1908-1912, and yet another woman, Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921).

I point out the fact that she was, indeed, a “she” because in those days it was very unusual for women to be involved with the “hard” sciences. How, then, did so many of them end up clustered at Harvard?

As it happens the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering (1848-1919) had developed a method of taking the spectra of multiple stars all at once by putting a prism in front of a photographic plate. He had,over decades, assembled a team of women to go through the data for 220,000 stars. This was primarily because they were cheap labor, but also because even back then women were appreciated for work that required attention to detail. [For instance, the US Mint preferred women for work as adjusters, who’d file excess precious metal off of unstruck planchets.] Annie Jump Cannon, whom we’ve met previously, emerged as their natural leader. The group became known as “Pickering’s Computers” (this was well before the invention of the electricity powered computer) and are now known as the Harvard Computers. They didn’t have doctorates (not by any means) but their contributions to astronomy today are well-regarded.

There were so many photographic plates involved–and back then these were sheets of glass coated with emulsion–that Pickering’s research was said to weigh 120 tons.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin (whom I discussed previously; she discovered the stars were mostly made of hydrogen) was not one of the computers; she actually was a graduate student who worked closely with them.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt, on the other hand, was one of the computers and she established the first “standard candle.”

Clear back in September of 1784, Edward Pigott noticed that the star Eta Aquilae was variable; it would regularly dim, then brighten suddenly, then dim again. It would do so with the same period; every pulsation took the same amount of time, known as the period. (We now know that stars like this actually pulsate in size, like a yo-yo dieter only much more rapidly.) Just a few months later a different astronomer noticed the same for Delta Cephei. The periods range from a few days to a few months.[A digression about these names. There are thousands of stars in the sky visible to the naked eye; countless more visible with a telescope. They can’t all be given unique names (though hundreds have been, everything from Betelgeuse [famous] to Zubenelschamali [not so famous]). So in 1603, just before the invention of the telescope, Johann Bayer came up with a system of labeling the brightest star in a constellation as “alpha” (such as Alpha Orionis–Betelgeuse). Beta would go to the second brightest star and so on. This would be followed by the Latin genitive of the constellation name. So Betelgeuse was “Alpha of Orion,” strictly translated. This is called the Bayer designation, and has been extended since then. Continuing to look at Orion, alpha through kappa, the brightest ten stars: Eight of them have “real” names, one (theta) is actually the Orion nebula, and eta is (as far as Wikipoo knows) nameless. The three belt stars are among the named stars, the four stars of the not-quite-a-rectangle also all have names. Returning to Cepheids, Delta Cephei was designated the fourth brightest star in Cepheus by Bayer.]

There turned out to be an entire class of these variable stars and they became known as Cepheid variables in honor of Delta Cephei. Several dozen had been discovered by the end of the 19th century. Today we know that they are typically stars four to twenty times as massive as the sun, and therefore very bright, up to 100,000 times as bright–but this was not apparent before Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied them.

In 1908 Henrietta Swan Leavitt began measuring the apparent brightness and periods of numerous Cepheids in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. Apparently there are thousands of Cepheids in these clouds, though they appear quite faint compared to the ones previously discovered.

The SMC and LMC are patches of milkiness that are quite apparent to the naked eye, provided you are far enough south; they are deep in the southern celestial hemisphere, and the further south an object is, the further south you have to be for it to be above the horizon. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds were noted by Antonio Pigafetta, who was with Ferdinand Magellan on his voyage (yes, that Magellan, famous for being the first to circumnavigate the Earth in the early 1500s). Of course many had noticed them before, anyone from Australian aborigines to Arabic astronomers and some other early European explorers, but for some reason this guy was able to tell the European scientific community about them and have it “stick.”

Leavitt noticed that the Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds had an interesting correlation: the brighter they appeared, the longer their periods.

It was logical to suppose that Cepheids in one of the clouds are all at about the same distance from us. Which would mean the brighter ones really were intrinsically brighter than their dimmer cousins. And if the brighter ones had the longer periods…well then!

So what we had was a “standard candle” (Leavitt coined the term), in other words something of known intrinsic brightness. If you could measure the period of a Cepheid, and it had a long period, you knew it was the same intrinsic brightness as one with the same period in the Large Magellanic Cloud. If it looked dimmer, then it was actually further away. If it looked brighter, it was closer. So you could tell the (relative) distance of a Cepheid by measuring its period.

Leavitt published in 1912.

All we needed now was to measure the distance to one Cepheid variable by some other means and we’d know the distance to all of them. Eijnar Hertzsprung (as in “Hertzsprung Russell Diagram”, 1873-1967) measured the distance to several Cepheids by parallax in 1913.

We had our standard candle and were off to the races now.

In 1924, Edwin Hubble (after whom the space telescope is named, 1889-1953) working at the Mt. Wilson observatory in southern California, was able to detect very faint Cepheids in many of the “spiral nebulae,” measure their periods, determine that they were well outside the bounds of “the” “one and only” galaxy, and could therefore establish, once and for all, that the spiral nebulae they were in were actually separate galaxies.

The universe had just gotten bigger. A lot bigger. Some of the galaxies Hubble was able to measure were sixty or so million light years away; which is to say six hundred million trillion kilometers away (which is to say six hundred quintillion kilometers). That’s a lot more than the 100,000 light year diameter of this galaxy, which hitherto had been thought to be the entire universe.

A bunch of those galaxies about fifty or sixty million light years away are in the constellation Virgo, and that group is now known as the “Virgo cluster.”

And there were many, many dimmer “spiral nebulae” in which no Cepheids could be detected at all–presumably because those nebulae were so far away the Cepheids in them were too faint to see. So how big, precisely, is this universe of ours? Certainly at least hundreds of millions of light years!

At the other end of the scale, and most famously, there is a “spiral nebula” in Andromeda. You can see it with your own unaided eye, far away from city lights. (I personally find it hard to see; I have to look away from it slightly to see it. But it certainly shows up in binoculars!) It’s now called the Andromeda Galaxy, thanks to Hubble. It’s about 2 million light years away. The LMC and SMC are much closer, they’re now considered satellite smaller galaxies in orbit about our own galaxy. There are a few other very close galaxies, such as M-33; together with the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies they make up the imaginatively-named “Local Group.” Twenty quadrillion kilometers may not seem terribly “local” to you, but for galaxies, that’s Standing Room Only and get your elbow out of my eye!

That telescope on Mt. Wilson? It was a monster in its day, with a 100 inch mirror. It still exists today; you can see it on tours during the daytime. It is not, however, used by professional astronomers any more as it’s simply not powerful enough. However, for several thousand dollars a night, you can rent the telescope–though as far as I know that opportunity is only extended to astronomy clubs.

But in terms of its historical impact on our view of the universe, it is probably second only to Galileo’s telescopes. Hubble himself is considered a Giant of astronomy; those astronomy clubs can actually use the same telescope he used.

But Hubble was not done in 1924. If anything, what he went on to do after this was even more important.

Redshifts

Vesto Melvin Slipher (1875-1969), had, back in the 1910s, looked at “spiral neblulae” through a spectroscope and had been able to measure their velocity towards or away from us (the “radial” velocity) by noting the Doppler shift of the spectral lines.

Almost all of them were moving away from us, as indicated by a shift towards longer wavelengths (lower frequencies). This is the famous “red shift” because the lines in the visible spectrum were shifted towards red, the longer wavelengths of visible light. Very few were shifted towards violet (which, for some reason is called a blue shift, not a violet shift). This was peculiar; after all a bunch of objects “out there” should have a pretty random assortment of radial velocities…yet almost all of these spirals were moving away from us, and rather rapidly, too.

For example, M-87 in the Virgo Cluster (this is the one with the really big black hole at its center–but Slipher had no idea about that) is moving away from us at 1284 kilometers per second. Which is pretty doggone fast.

Hubble took this data, combined it with his distance measurements, and made a plot.

And got the surprise of his life.

It turns out that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is receding, The main exceptions turned out to be within the Local Group; some of those galaxies actually are headed towards us (like Andromeda, which will collide with this galaxy in about five billion years).

M-87 is 16.4 megaparsecs (million parsecs) away from us which puts it at about 53.5 million light years off.

What is it about the Milky Way galaxy that is repelling almost all of the other galaxies?

Nothing, actually. It turns out that a hypothetical observer in any galaxy will see all of the other galaxies rushing away from him, the further away, the faster.

Hubble was able to determine that for every megaparsec of distance, a galaxy is going to be moving 500 kilometers per second. As it turns out, there were significant problems with using Cepheid variables–it turns out there are two distinct classes of them that behave differently. I’ve ignored that fact up til now. But now, this recession rate is known to be 74 km/second…for each megaparsec of distance. This is known as the Hubble parameter, now. And the fact that further galaxies recede faster is now known as Hubble’s Law.

Bang!

But, run the movie backwards! What happens? Since galaxies twice as far away move twice as fast, if you run the movie backwards, all galaxies come together simultaneously at some point. Which means (if you halt the reverse at this point and start looking at it in forward motion) everything was in one place, then there was a big explosion (or something like that) and all of the pieces got blown away from from the other pieces at some point in the distant past, eventually leading to what we see today.

Time for Einstein and Company to step in.

One thing that was instantly apparent to Albert Einstein when he formulated General Relativity was that it could be applied to the universe as a whole. Einstein believed (as most did in 1915) that the universe was essentially static and unchanging on a large scale. What we see now was pretty much what had been there…back forever.

However, both General Relativity and Newtonian gravity said that if the universe consisted of a bunch of stationary objects, they’d simply attract each other and start to move closer to each other, in exactly the same way that a stationary apple a meter above the floor will, without support, fall.

So Einstein, believing that this wasn’t what was happening (he really didn’t have evidence of that; this was before Hubble), put a fudge factor into his equation, a cosmological constant repulsion that counteracted what would otherwise be the natural inclination of the universe to contract.

Hubble’s discovery was an attitude adjuster for Einstein. The universe was not static and unchanging, it had not always existed. It had instead had a beginning, and from that beginning everything rushed apart. Clearly, ever since then, the galaxies had been slowing down due to their mutual attraction, but also, clearly, they hadn’t come to a halt. With the residual motion evident even today, there was no need for the cosmological constant fudge factor in his equations.

Einstein later considered it the biggest mistake of his life and he was probably right because he didn’t vote for Joe Biden.

[I say that, but perhaps a check of the voter rolls for Princeton, NJ is in order.]

In 1922, Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann (1888-1925) worked with Einstein’s General Relativity equation, and derived a relationship between the average density of the universe (in kilograms per cubic meter, for instance–and by the way this number is very, very small!), its current expansion velocity, and its acceleration; this equation could be used to determine the future state of the universe (or any past state). You could essentially get the Hubble parameter out of it with the right inputs; and the equation can be rearranged to use the Hubble parameter as one of its coefficients.

The equation makes it clear that the Hubble parameter is not a constant, it can change. And indeed it’s expected to start out at a high value when everything was bunched together, then drop as things slow down over time as galaxies attract each other–exactly the way an apple thrown up into the air slows down and stops.

Another part of the equation is an expression for how fast the Hubble parameter is changing with time.

The big unknown, actually, is the average density of the universe. There is a certain value of it, which will cause the universe to expand forever, but as the time goes to infinity the speeds drop to zero…as if everything were currently moving exactly at escape velocity. This is the critical density, and the actual density could conceivably be one billionth (or a centillionth) of that value, or a billion times as much.

Determining the ratio of the actual density to the critical density has occupied a large part of the efforts of cosmologists over the last century. I had originally written a bunch more on that here…but this article has gotten long enough, and I don’t want to get too historically askew. Suffice it to say that early estimates were less than 1, but more than 0.01, meaning that there didn’t appear to be enough matter in the universe to cause its expansion to slow down and have it recollapse. But these numbers are suspiciously close to 1 when you consider the range of conceivable values is literally infinite.

It appeared at the time as though it was one third of the value, which is close enough to 1 (compared to all of the other possible ratios) to make scientists suspect it really is 1 and we’re just not measuring it right.

But this is general relativity we are dealing with here, not Newtonian mechanics, so the Friedman equation is actually an equation about how much space time is warped. That makes it more than just an equation about escape velocity. And so there are some things about it that are distinctly counter-intuitive.

First off, the galaxies that rushed away from the original point location are not moving through space. Instead, space itself is expanding. Originally, space itself was small; as it expanded all the matter in the universe stretched out with it, and eventually coalesced to form galaxies. (If the galaxies started moving in some different direction after the Big Bang, because they were near some giant cluster and are attracted to it, that’s actual motion. (And today we believe the Milky Way is moving towards the Virgo cluster.)

One consequence of space expanding is that the red shifts that we see are actually due, not to a Doppler effect but rather, to the fact that while the photon was travelling from the distant galaxy to our eyes the space stretched, which stretched the photon into a longer wavelength. One rather odd consequence of this is that a photon, once emitted, will lose energy as it travels through intergalactic space because its frequency is dropping.

Second, space-time across the expanse of the universe has a shape. And it turns out that a value of density lower than the critical density would imply that space has negative curvature, and a value that is higher would imply that space has positive curvature.

Now what the heck does that mean? How can space be curved? Well, we already know it can be warped and that’s what gravity actually is. But this deserves some elaboration.

You were taught in geometry class that the sum of the three interior angles of a triangle is always 180 degrees. That’s a fundamental property of flat space.

But really, this is only true if the triangle is drawn on a flat plane.

If you were to travel from the equator directly to the north pole, make a right-angle (90 degree) left turn, then head back to the equator (traveling south), then, on reaching the equator, make another right-angle left turn (now traveling east), you’d end up back where you started, eventually. You could then turn left 90 degrees and be facing north, like you were in the beginning.

You’ve drawn three straight lines, and are back where you started; that’s a triangle. But every interior angle is 90 degrees so the total of the three is 270 degrees.

This “breaks” that 180 degree rule I just reminded you of, but the earth is not flat, it’s (roughly) spherical. It exhibits positive curvature.

Now imagine a surface like a saddle or a Pringles chip, extended to infinity. (The bell of a tuba also works.) Drawing a triangle on that kind of surface gives you a sum of interior angles less than 180 degrees.

If the universe has too high a density, its expansion will eventually cease (at a time short of infinity) and it will collapse back in on itself again. This would render space-time the four dimensional equivalent of a sphere.

If it’s below the critical density, then even at infinity there’s velocity left to the expansion, and space time is shaped somewhat like that saddle.

If it’s exactly at the critical density, then space time is, on the whole, flat.

How can we tell? Try measuring the interior angles of a really big triangle. Preferably one billions of light years in size. (And believe it or not, today’s scientists think they’ve actually done something like that, and they believe the universe to be flat. But I am WAY ahead of the story here.)

If this makes your head hurt, you’re not alone, believe me.

Anyhow, to return to our narrative, a lot of astronomers did not want to accept that the universe didn’t have a definite beginning. Fred Hoyle, famously, refused to accept it, and died in 2002 still refusing to believe it.

It’s not that he didn’t believe that the galaxies were rushing away from each other, but rather, he imagined that as galaxies grew further apart, new matter in the form of hydrogen atoms was being spontaneously created, which would then coalesce to form new galaxies. This would result in the universe of the distant past, or the distant future, looking about the same as it does today, rather than the galaxies being closer together, or further apart, respectively. This is known as the steady state theory, and from what I can see, virtually no scientist accepts it today. Certainly, we’ve never detected any sign of hydrogen spontaneously being created throughout space, as it would have to be if Steady State were true.

Hoyle, trying to characterize the theory he disagreed with so vehemently, came up with the moniker “Big Bang.” He claims he wasn’t trying to be derisive, but many took it as such. The proponents proudly adopted the term to describe that instant–roughly 11 to 13 billion years ago–when everything in the universe was jammed close together.

(It’s not as if people haven’t, at other times, proudly adopted what was supposed to be a derisive label. Right, oh fellow Deplorables?)

The Big Bang theory was simultaneously worked out by Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), who was not only an astronomer, but also a Catholic priest. He certainly had no problem with the universe having a beginning! In fact Hubble’s Law is often called the Hubble-Lemaitre’s Law.

There was one minor issue though.

Running the tape backwards, the Big Bang appeared to be ten or eleven billion years old. This was based on extrapolating the current expansion rate backwards, and accounting for how the expansion rate was undoubtedly faster in the past. Yet we also had good reason to believe that globular clusters–groupings of thousands to millions of stars that mostly exist above and below the plane of this galaxy–are at least 13 billion years old. Clearly it’s absurd that globular clusters could be older than the universe that they are part of, so this was a nagging issue for quite some time.

The Next Rung Of The Ladder

With Hubble-Lemaitre’s Law established, we had a new way to measure distance. If we couldn’t see Cepheid variables in some galaxy because it was too far away from us, we could instead measure its red shift, turn a mathematical crank, and get a distance out, one likely to be over a hundred million light years.

In fact, when quasars were first discovered, their red shifts were measured and they were instantly some of the most distant objects ever detected. Some were even billions of light years away. But there is a complication here. The farther away a galaxy is, the further back in time we are looking. If we look at M-87, we are seeing it as it was 53 million years ago, because the light has traveled 53 million light years to get to us, and for the light to be getting to us now, it has to have left M-87 53 million years ago.

Similarly for more distant galaxies. As our telescopes became more and more sensitive, we were looking at galaxies further and further into the past. Quasars, it turns out, all happened well in the past, and now we know they are a “young galaxy” thing as the black holes at the galactic centers devour interstellar gas. In older galaxies, that interstellar gas is as gone as last Thanksgiving’s dinner.

But, if the universe has been slowing down its expansion rate, 53 million years ago, or a billion years ago, the Hubble parameter must have been higher. If we compute a distance to a galaxy using a constant Hubble parameter, we’re introducing an error.

Of course this relies on what is ultimately an assumption: That the Hubble parameter is indeed decreasing. It’s an assumption that seems to make sense, because after all everything in the universe is being attracted to everything else. On the other hand, if you’re a galaxy surrounded by other galaxies, their pulls should all cancel out, and that same is true of all of those other galaxies too–they’re all surrounded by other galaxies.

So scientists wanted to check that assumption–and the data gathered would help nail down the average density of the universe a bit better.

So we needed some other way to measure the distance to a galaxy, and compare it to the distance inferred from its red shift. If the first distance was further, that would imply that the Hubble parameter used to be bigger than it is today (as expected) and we could even, if we did this with enough galaxies with different red shifts, be able to plot how much the Hubble parameter was at any given time in the past.

But to do that, we needed another “Standard Candle,” one a lot brighter than Cepheid variables.

And we eventually found one.

But here, I think, is where I need to pause.

I’m going to shift gears next time. But not really. Because as you investigate the very earliest stages of the universe (I am talking about, say, 1 second after the Big Bang) you find yourself needing to know about particle physics.

So switching from talking about the entire universe, to talking about stuff much smaller than atoms, isn’t as jarring as it might seem at first.

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 !!!