Copia

At least not yet

CMS Black Hole The Compact Muon Solenoid seen under construction in late 2008. Wikimedia Commons

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider report that after a series of tests, they have not seen any mini black holes, to the chagrin of string theorists and the relief of disaster theorists.

[Ars Technica]

It seems a bit cynical to label people (such as myself) who are concerned about the consequences of theoretical physicists trying to mess with powerful forces they don't understand as 'disaster theorists'. It is one of the hallmarks of western science to seek to confuse the line between productive scientific discovery and hubris (in the Greek tragedy sense). I often wonder what the difference between religion and theoretical physics is (no offense to either) given how much each relies on faith and very minimal experiential evidence to so vehemently demonstrate the answer to the Jeopardy question 42.

But seriously, this LHC business reminds me of the words of the character Victor Frankenstein:

You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.

By Rebecca Boyle Posted 10.20.2010 at 3:47 pm 35 Comments

This Mars miner will probably never go home again. NASA

If NASA ever gets a clear directive for interplanetary exploration, a new Hundred-Year Starship could be their version of the Mayflower. And like the first pilgrims, Martian explorers might set sail with the knowledge they would never return home.

NASA and DARPA have joined forces to build something called a Hundred-Year Starship, according to the director of NASA’s Ames Research Center. Simon “Pete” Worden said NASA contributed $100,000 to the project and DARPA kicked in $1 million.

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden said, according to a Singularity University blog that covered the event. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” (Worden added that he was fired by President George W. Bush.)

Beyond that, there are no details. But the prospect of a DARPA-NASA spaceship collaboration for Star Trek-esque exploration sounds thrilling — even if by definition, a 100-year ship means leaving Earth and never coming back.

Incidentally, that’s exactly the proposal in a new paper in press in the Journal of Cosmology, a relatively new, peer-reviewed open access journal. Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies suggest sending astronauts to Mars with the intention of staying for the rest of their lives, as trailblazers for a permanent Mars colony.

[Kurzweil AI, ScienceDaily]

Reminds me of the movie Sunshine.

Backyard astronomers, take note: Jupiter and Earth are approaching their near-yearly rendezvous, and this time the two planets will be closer together than they have been since 1963. The giant planet's proximity should make for good viewing, weather permitting—Jupiter will appear especially bright in the sky for several nights around its closest approach on September 20.

The planet should be highly visible to the naked eye; with Jupiter's apparent magnitude of –2.94, only the moon will be brighter after Venus sets relatively early in the evening. Apparent magnitude is a measure of an object's luminosity as viewed from Earth; faint objects have large positive magnitudes, whereas bright objects have large negative magnitudes. When Jupiter and Earth draw near, the nearly full moon will shine with an apparent magnitude of –11.87.

Jupiter will be visible in the direction of the constellation Pisces, appearing to the east and low in the sky at sunset, before moving toward the south as the night progresses. With a decent set of binoculars, stargazers may be able to identify Jupiter's four largest satellites, the Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Sky & Telescope has a handy Web application that shows where to find the moons in relation to Jupiter at any given time.

Jupiter takes nearly 12 times as long to complete one orbit around the sun as our planet does, so Earth laps its much larger planetary counterpart every 399 days. Because both Earth and Jupiter follow slightly elongated elliptical orbits, the distance between the two planets varies with each rendezvous.

Jupiter is currently drawing closer to the inner solar system, including Earth, as it nears perihelion, its closest approach to the sun, in March 2011. On September 20 of this year, Jupiter and Earth will be separated by a mere 591,499,329 kilometers, about 11 million kilometers closer than in 2009, according to orbital data from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's HORIZONS system. The last time that Jupiter was so close to Earth was October 1963, and it will not exceed the close proximity of this year's passage until September 2022.

Photo of Jupiter, with Europa visible at upper left: Joshua Bury/Flickr

Read More About: amateur astronomy, Jupiter, astronomy

I have access to a telescope.