Category: Science

Ecliptic vertigo

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I looked up one evening recently and saw the crescent Moon, Venus, and Jupiter forming a line across the deepening twilight sky. Suddenly, it seemed as though I could actually feel the Earth’s axial tilt — the moon and the planets showed me what was truly “horizontal” in relation to the much bigger solar system of which the Earth is just a minuscule part.

Luna Venere e Giove su Palermo

Photo by Carlo Columba

At that moment, waiting for my bus, the universe opened beneath my feet. I looked across the ecliptic to Jupiter and felt as though I were standing on the slope of a steep mountain at the edge of the sea, a lighthouse beaming across the darkness from the far shore. Below the line formed by Jupiter and Venus, I stared down into the depths of space.

To keep from feeling as if I were about to slip off the face of the Earth, I grabbed hold of the bus stop sign.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity explained by 1923 film

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In 1923, Max and Dave Fleischer created a silent animated film titled “The Einstein Theory of Relativity,” which illustrated the key concepts of this early 20th-Century scientific breakthrough. It’s fascinating to see how differently Einstein’s theory was explained nearly a hundred years ago. The marvels of modern technology chosen by the filmmakers include steam engines, steam shovels, and biplanes. A flight to the moon is illustrated by a man with a gas mask hopping into a massive artillery piece a la Georges Méliès’s interpretation of Jules Verne in the 1902 silent film “A Trip to the Moon.” (Goddard’s newfangled rockets had not yet made an impression, apparently.)

The Einstein Theory of Relativity 1923 from ricordidimenticati on Vimeo.

Historical amusement aside, it’s an entertaining and often beautiful way to learn about Albert Einstein’s famous theory.

Via Boing Boing.

The alien past

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There are shared themes between the science fiction and archaeology books I’ve been reading lately. There’s a sense of otherness, of alien intelligences glimpsed across a void.

Göbekli Tepe

Photo by Vince Musi from National Geographic

As little as we know about the builders of Newgrange in Ireland, we know even less about the builders of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. What we do know about these monuments is that the first were built about 11,000 years ago, during the earliest years of the Eurasian Neolithic. In other words, Göbekli Tepe predates our current understanding of when agriculture began. (And yes, it also predates Stonehenge — by six or seven thousand years.) It’s hard to imagine what motivated tribes of hunter-gatherers to create such monumental architecture, full of animal sculptures and mysterious standing stones. It’s also hard to conceive of why each succeeding structure grew smaller and less sophisticated over time.

So this is where archaeology, science fiction, and poetry all converge. As a poet, archaeology enables me to explore that alien otherness while remaining grounded in the scientific reality of human experience.

More about Göbekli Tepe:

Acheulean tools geologically dated to 1.76 million years ago

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A study being published later this week in Nature reports that geologists have dated the Kenyan sediments where a collection of Acheulean tools were discovered, such as the hand ax below, to 1.76 million years ago — at least 160,000 years older than previous dates for technology created by Homo erectus.

Acheulean hand ax

Although the New York Times article summarizing the study focuses on the newsworthiness of these tools as the oldest, it makes a few other interesting points.

The story of human progress is unavoidably a story of technological innovation, Paleolithic designs fading into oblivion as Neolithic tools take their place. Right? Not necessarily.

In reality, it’s not always as simplistic as one technology giving way to the “next,” as these recently dated discoveries show. Older Oldowan tools were discovered alongside the more advanced Acheulean tools, indicating that “the two technologies are not mutually exclusive.”

Other highlights (or, things Andrew didn’t know):

  • The first humans to leave Africa didn’t take the Acheulean technology with them.
  • Acheulean technology wasn’t widely adopted for another several hundred thousand years.

Full NYTimes.com article via Boing Boing.