The Milky Way is Not a Spiral? 594
ETEQ writes "Space.com reports that new data from the Spitzer Space Telescope showing that the Milky Way is in fact a barred spiral! Looks like all our old astronomy textbooks will have to be thrown away..."
It looks that way for now. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yay for more evidence! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Known for decades (Score:3, Interesting)
Saw it on the tribune earlier:
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1556/5564676.h
Old news if you follow space stuff (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not Exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Chucking Books... (Score:4, Interesting)
* Hundreds of treatments involving mercury and various acids
* Discussion of the debate on whether what causes rabies is an organism or a toxin
* Amusing description of the disease "Hysteria", a catch-all disease for women.
* Recipes for feeding sick people - includes about a dozen types of gruel.
* Discussion of STDs couched in terms of Christian morality
* A detailed discussion of the Japanese medical system around the turn of the century.
* A plant identification guide, in the section for how to prepare your own medicines
Re:It looks that way for now. (Score:5, Interesting)
Other interesting aspects of the spirals is that they do not actually contain much more mass, 5% more iirc, than the space between the spirals. There is a larger number of new stars being formed in the spirals, thus the bright but shortlived stars make them visible.
These star births are caused by the compression of cold molecular clouds. Thus when another smaller galaxy collides it may cause shockwaves to travel through the galaxy compressing the molecular clouds.
Re:Science is not wright all the time. Blasaphmy!! (Score:3, Interesting)
If, on the other hand, you mean a more nebulous intelligent designer that leant a helping hand, then while I disagree with you (being an atheist), it isn't anti-scientific (though not a scientific concept) and I have no quarrel with you at all. Many researchers are essentially theistic evolutionists or simply believe that God "helps" out, if even just in the starting conditions of the Universe.
So it all really depends o what you mean by Intelligent Design.
Re:Science is not wright all the time. Blasaphmy!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I should have seen that predictable response coming
At the end of your life of Earth, evolution, the Big Bang and other theories are interesting academic exercises but they don't do anything if you are more than worm food and there is a Creator. Not believing may or may not get you "in". Being a jerk about it and those who believe probably won't score brownie points
Re:Science is not wright all the time. Blasaphmy!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I subscribe to ID Version 5.3.Goody-pre-1
I don't abhor the teaching of Evolution or other scientific theories, but I do deplore the pravailing attitude on Slashdot that religion is a joke or that all ID and Creationism is bunk. I may not have math formulas to back me up, but I have Faith, a good book to live by, events that are recorded to have happened, and the testimony of others.
And anyways, my theory and version of ID ties it all together, so I'm right and you're all wrong !!!
Re:Not Exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
If the submitter had actually read the article....no, I guess that's too much to ask.
Quote FTA "The bar is made of relatively old and red stars, the survey shows. It is about 27,000 light-years long, or roughly 7,000 light-years longer than previously thought." (emphasis mine)
In other words, the news isn't that they just discovered the Milky War is a bared spiral galaxy, the news is that the Milky Way's bar is 7,000 light-years longer than scientists thought.
Re:Maybe the sky isn't blue, either (Score:3, Interesting)
We might point out that there's a critical difference between "The sky is blue" and "The sky appears blue". The first isn't quite correct, because "blue" isn't actually an accurate description of the sky's spectrum. The second is correct, because it acknowledges that the color depends on the observer's optical equipment.
It would be even better to say "The sky appears blue to the human eye". It has different colors to other animals. Thus, birds have four visual pigments. Three are like ours; the fourth has peak sensitivity around the violet end of human vision. To birds, the sky would stimulate the blue and violet pigments about equally, and the sky would appear a complex blue/violet/UV blend. An avian interior decorator would have words for those colors. Something similar would happen with a lot of insects, who typically have a V/UV-sensitive pigment but often no red-sensitive pigment.
To get even pickier, we might note that in mammals, birds and insects, there is significant variation in the actual frequency response of the visual pigments. There is also intra-species variation in many species. Humans are one such. When I was in high school back in the 60's, a physics teacher did a lab demo of this. He set up a prism to give a solar spectrum, and it was good enough that he could use a couple of absorbtion lines to calibrate it and label the frequencies. Then he had us go up to the paper and put marks at where we saw the ends of the rainbow-colored bar. The marks were approximately normally-distributed around the 400-nm and 700-nm points. The students were duly impressed by this demo of the variations in their color vision.
He went on to explain that any of us into photography should appreciate this. Different people have different opinions about how good various films and printers reproduce colors. This is partly because their pigments can't match the visual pigments for all of us exactly. How good a picture's colors look is partly determined by how closely the pigments match your visual pigments. Because human eyes vary so much, no printing system using only a few pigments can be accurate for all of us. (In my case, the red ended somewhat past the average for the class, but my violet mark was right at the average.)
But imagine how our pictures (and computer screens) must look to birds. The violets and ultraviolets are missing. It would be like us looking at a picture that has all its blues zeroed out.
A lot of birds and insects have ultraviolet markings, as do the flowers that they pollinate and the fruit that they eat. These markings are invisible to human eyes. Biologists have only recently learned to appreciate this, and a lot of mysterious behavior has become clearer as a result.
In particular, it turns out that a lot of avian navigation can only be understood if you realize that they see ultraviolet and they see polarization. There are situations in which birds are using polarized ultraviolet/violet sky light. If you can't see this yourself, you have difficulty explaining their behavior, because the sky just looks plain "blue" to you.
Info on the topic is easily available online. For avian color vision, google for "avian color vision". Use some photographic or printers' terms to find discussions in those subject areas. What you see through your eyes is only the start of undstanding what color the sky is.
(And I can hear the shouts of "Too much information!"
Re:Throw 'em Away (Score:1, Interesting)
The only true religion has to accept all truth, so they must accept science, but they can still believe that science does not understand some things and that it will eventually prove them right.
Re:Chucking Books... (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I suspect that one day we will realize that those tiny bits are not there, either. Solid matter is merely a type of energy, and energy is merely the will of the Cosmos. C.S. Lewis had no idea how right he was when he said that the world around us was nothing but mere "shadowlands," and that reality, if it exists, is something that we have not experiened yet.
Now don't bogart that reefer, dude. Pass it over!
Laugh if you will, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Science is not right all the time. Blasphemy!! (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, yes. But an important side effect is generating and testing explanations of those facts. With an emphasis on testing, which usually means you have to go out and collect more facts (usually called observations, or just data). So as a scientist, most of your life will always be collecting the facts that you need.
One of the more pointed explanations that Stephen Jay Gould made about evolution was to point out that Darwin didn't show that evolution had happened. By the time Darwin was born, this was an accepted fact among scientists. All these fossils had been dug up, and they showed a clear set of changes with time. Geologists got involved, and concurred with the whole thing. Nobody who actually studied the fossil data questioned this. But the observed evolution was very non-random, and a good explanation was lacking.
What Darwin did was to present a theory that explained why the fossil record showed certain kinds of evolutionary change and not others. And, most important, his theory was testable. Incidentally, it offended religious people, because it didn't need an intelligent guiding hand. Scientists immediately jumped all over it, of course, and managed to collect a great deal more data that kept coming up consistent with Darwin's theory. Religious people also jumped all over it, but they didn't understand scientific testing methods, so they couldn't disprove anything, or even understand why they were expected to do so.
And, of course, lots of philosopher types have pointed out that none of this ever dealt with proof or truth. Rather, people had simply failed to find data that disproved Darwin's theory. This sort of double negative is standard scientific method, and is where the term valid comes in. That just means a theory that can successfully explain all the observed data despite many attempts to shoot it down. It doesn't mean truth, because we might have several valid theories competing at once, and new facts might pop up at any time that would shoot down any of them. A valid theory is only tentativily accepted, because it has passed a number of tests and hasn't (yet) failed any. See Karl Popper for lots more words on this topic.
Similarly, Einstein made some rather outrageous predictions about the universe's behavior just a century ago. This was in an attempt to find a theory that explained some rather outrageous observations (i.e., facts) by other scientists in previous decades. Since then, physicists have repeatedly found new ways to collect data that could disprove some of Einstein's equations. They have repeatedly failed; his equations always predict results that are within the error bars of the observations. Maybe next month someone will find an exception, but for now, we have to accept Einstein's theories as valid descriptions of our universe.
Now, scientists often carelessly use true for valid, when true should really only be used for facts. A fact can be true or false; i.e. it does or doesn't describe an actual observation; a theory can only be valid or invalid. It's true that evolution has happened on our planet, but Darwin's theory isn't true; it's valid (so far).
Of course, all of this is above the mental capacity of most of the media or the political system (or the religious communities). So we have an ongoing bogus "debate" on such topics.
(Hmmm
Re:Chucking Books... (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't agree. Science isn't just about making predictions, it's also about providing explanations. But putting that aside, one of the reasons why some theories can provide accurate predictions is that they actually are correct - ie, the world really is the way they say it is.
I mean, there really are things like electrons, bacteria, anti-matter, and so on; things which were unknown to science a couple of centuries ago, but which are now known about and let us make predictions in physics, medicine, etc.
Lots of science is really unlikely to ever be shown to be false.
Predictions for the world of 2105 (Score:5, Interesting)
Psychiatric drug therapy of today will be seen in the same light as trying to fix jet engines using nothing but fuel additives. Most current forms of morality and immorality will be demonstrated to be correctable mental defects.
All sex laws and taboos will be seen as medieval.
More than 99.9% of people in the solar system will be able to outscore 99.9% of today's people on today's mental tests, but we would regard most of them as cheating. They will regard their enhancements as part of themselves or as corrective devices, like eyeglasses are today.
The concept of privacy, even for thoughts, will be as antique and nominal as the divine right of kings is today; nevertheless, people will be more free in the sense of usable personal power than they ever were in the past.
Global cooling will be a concern, but manageable.
Only a few fundamentalists will keep traditional 100% human bodies, or for that matter just one body. Some will have as many bodies as todays people have shirts.
Most "persons" in existence will not have been born at all. Greater than 90% of the population will have predominantly non-biological substrates, but some of these will have been born, while many of the mostly bio-based people will not have been. The sentient population will exceed 1 trillion by most measures, but will be difficult to decide how to count the self-aware corporations, partials and copies, distributed intellects, acorporeal persons and so forth. Most people will be very young by today's standards, but this will have little correlation with experience and knowledge, which will not necessarily be linked with personal histories.
Lamarck will be seen as not all that far off the mark. Epigenetic and protein-reaction-web engineering will be a basic ability like computer programming is today. The supposed decoding of the human genome at the end of the 20th century will be regarded as about as complete as Columbus' understanding of world geography. Virtually everything important will be in the introns, methylation etc. and in protein regulation of the genetic molecules.
Genetics (and other substrate codes) will be seen as easier to correct than personal environmental history , but not by much.
The expression "willful ignorance" will be seen as self-evidently redundant.
The theory of relativity will have undergone significant modifications.
Archaelology and paleontology will be essentially competed sciences, and today's theories will be seen as wrong in virtually every respect.
Teleportation will be commonplace, but will be based on information rather than matter per se traversing distances.
Eric Drexler's predictions in Engines of Creation and Nanosystems will be seen as being as over-conservative as Ben Franklin's speculations about the use of electricity.
Consciousness will be more fully understood than quantum mechanics is today. Indeed, they will turn out to be related, but only in a very vaguely similar manner to most of the 20th century speculations in that vein.
There will have been at least one more war which killed over 1,000,000 people, but none in at least 30 years.
Strong AI will show up late in the game, and won't take off instantly, but will have far surpassed human levels in every way in the late decades of the 21st century.
Re:Chucking Books... (Score:3, Interesting)
40 years ago geologists were swearing up and down that continental drift was a crackpot theory. Today they atill claim that geologic hydrocarbons are all the result of fossil life, despite all the methane and other HCs in the gas giants and their moons and despite oil being found in solid primordial granite.
Biologists still get huffy and irrational when you point out that they still don't have a clue how the first cells formed.
Archaeologists still believe in the Clovis theory, no matter how much pre-Clovis stuff turns up, a pattern of willful ignorance that is repeated over and over throughout the world.
Re:Throw 'em Away (Score:3, Interesting)
"What's this?" I asked.
"A revision, of course."
So simple, so effective, yet so few do it anymore.
One of the few places that I've seen still do it is a roleplaying company, of all things - Kenzer & Company [kenzerco.com], makers of Hackmaster. They published in their comics a series of errata, perfectly sized to cover the amended section, in the same font et al, so you could update your rulebooks without having to buy brand new ones.