We live in an accelerating expanding universe.  What does this mean? On the biggest of scales, scientists observe that all observable galaxies are moving away from each other, the expanding part.  But the rate at which they are expanding away from each other is accelerating at the same time, and the rate of acceleration itself is increasing.  If there is any intelligent life in our Milky Way galaxy some billions of years from now, these sentient beings will never know that they live in a Universe populated with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each populated with a hundred billion stars.  They will only see their own galaxy because, at the moment they look up into the sky,  all other galaxies in our vast universe will have moved away from ours so fast that even the light from their stars will never reach them.  This idea of the accelerating, expanding Universe is a quite new idea, in fact only being revealed in the last 20 years.  But how do we know this?  How can you, if you sat in front of the world’s most powerful telescopes, determine even how far away a given star or galaxy is, let alone say with any bit of confidence how far away it is?  The answer is in something called standard candles.  Imagine, if you will, a typical light bulb.    Florescent or incandescent doesn’t matter in this case.  What does matter is how bright of a light bulb it is, and in your case pretend you have a 100-watt light bulb.  This brightness is what is known as it’s intrinsic luminosity.  Now place your light bulb on one end of a long room, move to the other end of the room, and take a measurement of the brightness of the light that is hitting your detector at that end of the room.  Since you know the energy level of the emitting body (the intrinsic luminosity), by plugging your numbers into some basic physics equations, you can determine exactly how far away your light bulb is.  This same basic technique is used to determine distances to far away stars by building up what is called the cosmic distance ladder.  First, using the principle of parallax, the distance to the closest star, our sun, was determined.  Just as distance can be measured if luminosity is known, so can the opposite be determined.  By measuring the distance to the sun and using the apparent brightness, the sun’s intrinsic luminosity is revealed.  The next step is to look further out into the cosmos and find other stars that are very similar to our own sun (and hence have the same intrinsic luminosity).  Once a sun-like star is found, cosmologists look for other, different types of stars that are about the same distance away as the sun-like star.  Since this distance is now known, the intrinsic luminosity for these new types of stars is measured.  The first rung in the cosmic distance ladder is in place.  Armed with the intrinsic luminosity of this new type of star, cosmologists look even further out in the universe for this same type of star and repeat the process.  A star whose intrinsic luminosity is known is found, the distance is measured.  Nearby stars at the same distance are found, and their intrinsic luminosity is measured.  The next rung in the cosmic distance ladder is found. Repeating this process allows for the measuring of more and more distant objects.

Now you can determine the distance to a variety of distant objects in the Universe, but how can you determine if these objects are moving relative to you?  The answer lies within measuring a star’s red shift, which is accomplished using something known as emission lines.  As electrons flow around the nucleus of an atom, they are always found in discrete energy levels (discrete here meaning that an electron can be in either one energy state or another, there is no “in between” energy states).  When an electron of, say, Hydrogen, moves from a higher energy state to a lower energy state, it emits a photon of a specific energy.

(Hydrogen Emission Line)

As different types of stars are different sizes and different temperatures, they also emit more strongly in some elements than others.  Depending on the type of star, different emission lines can be examined.  But examined how?  Look at the Hydrogen emission line above.  There are 5 distinct emissions at 5 different wavelengths.  Take a star whose distance is known and observe these emission lines.  If the star was stationary compared to your location, the emission lines would be the exact same wavelength.  But if the star was moving relative to you, the wavelength of the emission lines will have changed.  If the star is moving towards you, it is said to be blue shifted, and the wavelength becomes shorter.  In the example above, if the star was moving closer, then the last emission line at 656.3 would be smaller.  Conversely, objects that are moving away are said to be red shifted, and result in longer wavelengths, taking the 656.3 to a higher number.  Anyone who has heard an ambulance zoom by and noticed the change in tone of the siren has witnessed this effect.  It is known as the Doppler Effect, and this same principle applies directly to measure the movement of distant stars and galaxies.  And it is this that answers the first part of the expanding universe puzzle.  It was in the early years of the 20^th century that Edwin Hubble, by measuring the red shift of many different stars of known distance, discovered that the heavens were not static.  Objects in our universe were moving away from us, and, even more intriguing, the further away the object, the faster it was moving away.  This applies to every object that we can measure out in distant space.  Star, galaxy, black hole, it does not matter.  They are all speeding away from us.  Perhaps most intriguing of all, some very distant galaxies are zooming away from the Milky Way faster than the speed of light.  But how is this possible, you might ponder, isn’t the speed of light the universal speed limit?  For all matter, yes, nothing can break this speed.  As it turns out, however, it is not the galaxies themselves which are moving away from us, it is space itself that is expanding, and space can expand as fast as it likes.

The expansion of space may seem impossible, but it is this expansion which seems to be causing the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.  To understand this mystery force, we must first discuss a more intuitive and familiar force: gravity.  Recall that early on in the 20^th century, Edwin Hubble showed that the universe was expanding.  Shortly after this discovery scientists were not sure if the universe would continue to expand or if it would level off or perhaps even begin to accelerate back in upon itself.  The universe was expanding due to the big bang, the initial burst of energy in the universe.  That energy was still acting upon these heavenly bodies, but keep in mind that while this initial push was still in play gravity was pulling on these objects as well.  Since there was only so much energy supplied by the big bang, these earlier cosmologist thought that once the initial bang energy was depleted, gravity could take over, pulling everything back together in the opposite scenario than what we know see today.  Distant stars and galaxies would produce a blue shift due to an accelerating, compacting motion from the pull of gravity. As we have already established, this is not the case, but to understand why this is and how it was discovered, we must go back to standard candles.   Objects which are standard candles are stars whose intrinsic luminosity is known, thereby giving us the distance to these stars.  Brighter standard candles are needed in order to determine distances further and further out into the universe.  The further out a star, the further back in time cosmologists are seeing.  Saying a star is 50 million light years distant means that the light is 50 million years old[add footnote here].  The person studying that star is looking 50 million years in the past.  With this data cosmologist can not only determine that rate at which distant objects flee our little corner of the galaxy, but can also plot the rate of expansion over time.  But, as was just mentioned, these standard candles can only be seen out to a certain distance because individual stars are too dim to observe too far away.  Or they were until the 1990’s, when a new type of standard candle was discovered.  This new type of standard candle, called a super nova 1A, is a white dwarf binary pair.  Without going into too much detail, just understand that what happens is that the smaller star, the white dwarf, pulls in extraordinary amounts of matter into itself from a larger, nearby star.  It can only take in so much of this star before physics dictate that it can take no more, causing the white dwarf to explode.  This explosion is of such fantastic force that the resulting light can outshine an entire galaxy of stars.  Cosmologists were able to determine it’s intrinsic brightness, and, since these objects allowed them to see further and further out (and further and further back in time), they were able to plot a more complete graph of the expansion of the universe.  What they discovered was that the further back in time they went, the slower the expansion of the universe.

(Expansion of the Universe over time)

If you look towards the beginning of the graph you notice that the acceleration slowed down for a while before picking up again.  This slowing down is what cosmologists had originally thought they would see.  The energy from the big bang is running out and gravity may or may not take over at this point.  But, obviously, it didn’t. What is driving this expansion?   The energy in empty space.

Within empty space there is energy.  Stop for a moment and try to take that in.  Imagine traveling in a (faster than light) spaceship to someplace far away from any galaxy or planet or star or alien.  For thousands of light years all around you there is absolutely nothing but space, empty space.   Yet within this seemingly empty nothingness, there is a mysterious form of energy, dubbed by scientists dark energy.  What is dark energy?  Scientists have no idea. No one has ever seen it, detected it, or even devised a way that it might be detected.  It is, at this point, purely hypothetical.  Why, then, do scientists claim that this hypothetical energy is driving the acceleration of the expansion of the universe?  Look again at the chart above.  The expansion of the universe was actually slowing down a few billion years after the big bang.  Gravity was exerting it’s pull on everything within, slowing the expansion.  But before gravity could pull everything back together, some other force took over and the expansion began again, this time accelerating with time.  Even though the expansion was slowing down, everything was still moving apart.  Gravity was tugging at everything, but the further apart everything moved, the weaker the force of gravity pulling on everything.  Dark energy, our mystery force, was also present during this slower expansion, but it was not strong enough of a force to push everything away due to the force of gravity pulling everything together.  It was not until everything within the universe became just far enough apart that suddenly the pushing force of dark energy was too strong for the pulling force of gravity.  Once this point was reached, there was no going back.  Gravity was too weak due to the distance between objects, and the further dark energy pushed things apart, the weaker the force of gravity.  Hence the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

What does this tell us about the future of our universe?   If this dark energy continues to behave as it is, then we are heading for the heat death of the universe.  If this happens, galaxies will continue to expand and expand, and everything within those galaxies will also eventually continue to expand.  Eventually, after trillions upon trillions of years, every last thing, down to the last atom, the last proton, will decay, leaving the universe in a state with no thermodynamic free energy.  In other words, the universe has now reached maximum entropy, a state that can support no life or motion.  Will the Universe stay in this state forever?  The truth is that science cannot predict that, even if the Universe does end up in this state, that it will stay in this state forever.  Some familiar with the laws of quantum physics suggest that another big bang could be triggered from this pool of nothingness, this eternal stretching of empty space.  Perhaps our universe came from such a state, which came from another such state, ad infinitum?  This is all out of the realm of evidence and no answer has more merit than any other, but theorists have developed many varied, fascinating answers to the fate of our universe.

Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

This quote inspired David Schneider (a professor at Rice University) and Daniel Wegner to conduct a research experiment to test just that:  Subjects were instructed to sit in a room, alone, and think of anything but a white bear.  When they thought of the bear, they were to ring a bell.  And the results?  Schneider said:

The original white bear paper documented the fact that people can, but only for brief periods of time, suppress thoughts of white bears. But on removal of suppression instructions, people are typically flooded with the thoughts they were supposed to suppress.

Later in the study, the some subjects were told to think of the bear for five minutes before trying not to think of them and did better than the subjects who were never told to suppress white bear thoughts.  From the paper:

These observations suggest that attempted thought suppression has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy, perhaps even producing the very obsession or preoccupation that it is directed against

Just some food for thought.

Source

After finishing these 6 credit hours, I now needed only 2 more natural science credits.  I decided to continue on my current path and take 1 more 3 hour astronomy class and signed up for another 100 level class earlier this summer.  I wasn’t all to happy with having to take a 3 credit hour class to cover 2 credit hours, but, as I do want to graduate, this was the path of least resistance.  But it turns out I didn’t last more than 1 lecture in this meets 2 days a week for 3 hours each time class.  The 2nd day after the first class, my old astronomy prof came to eat at my restaurant, and I began explaining my credit hour situation.  He immediately said, why don’t you drop that class and take a reading class or two with me?  Sign up for a 1 one credit class, we can do it easily this summer, and then continue it for your last 1 hour either this fall or next spring.  I dropped the class the next day and signed up for a 1 hour reading class with him for the 2nd summer session.

Despite the fact that this is a science class, the 1 hour we meet each week to discuss the book I’m reading (Brian Greene’s newest book, The Hidden Reality) is the most fun, interesting, engaging, and fruitful class I have yet to take.  Perhaps it is my learning style, or that I get along well with the prof, or the material is intriguing, but whatever the case, I love studying this book and discussing in detail what I’ve learned/read.  I know it isn’t possible for everyone to go one on one with a prof in this manner for science credits, but I find it immensely more satisfying than any other science course I’ve had.  Instead of worrying about which facts to memorize for the next quiz/exam or what formulas to apply to which problem, I’m concentrating on learning the material.  And since I know I’ll look the fool if I don’t prepare, I am more motivated to learn on my own than most any other class.  It is very reminiscent of private saxophone lessons both as an undergraduate and graduate.  Perhaps it isn’t the same for others, but for me, the pressure of having to perform every week for a prof  is a great motivator.  It doesn’t always work, of course (there were many times as an undergraduate I went into lessons woefully unprepared although this was probably due more to my younger self’s laziness than anything else), but it is far better than what I experienced with the “real” class.  Plus, its just plain fun to be able to pick an experimental astrophysicist’s brain for an hour each week.

Here’s to finishing school!

So here it is, a brand new post for December right after the first snow of the year.  I could lose the cold weather but I still love the snow.

I love maps, especially really huge maps that you see in public places like a metro station or museum.  I wanted one for my place and after some work, printed out a giant map of Tokyo that covers the entirety of one of my walls.  Luckily I have access to the laser printers at IU (and a large enough print quota to print this with plenty left over) since this was 17 pages wide and 10 1/2 pages tall.  This is the view of the entire wall:

It didn’t work out exactly as I wanted.  Tokyo proper is actually on the bottom 1/3 of the wall, where I wanted it to be center in my planning.  But after printing, cutting and taping the first 2/3 on the wall I figured I’d just live with it vs. starting all over.  My method was a bit of a pain to piece together and there very well may be a much better way to do it (if you know, let me know please!).  So how did I do it? 

First, what area did I want to print?  I thought of a few major metropolitan areas like NYC, but as my wife is from the Tokyo area and I’ve been there several times it seemed the most fun.  Then I had to decide between a street map or a satellite image.  I actually had an even bigger satellite map of Saitama when I was living in Miami and found that having the more traditional map was more fun to look at.  You could always do a hybrid if you wanted the best of both worlds as we’ll see in a minute.

Now I needed a way to view a really large portion of a Google map at a time.  I suppose you could take a screen grab of tiny little squares and piece those together in Photoshop (after all, I had to chop the big image up into smaller ones in the end anyways) but there is an easy way to view a REALLY large chunk of Google maps at a time.  I went to Google maps, went to Tokyo, then clicked on the Link option on the top right corner of the map.  Inside here is some Embed code for directly embedding the Google map into any website. 

Next I opened up notepad and created an html file with the embed code in it.  Since it reads the information directly from Google I didn’t have to put it up on my website, although I certainly could have.  I just loaded it from my hard drive and it worked.  When you first do this, the map is still very small, and that is because within the embed code there are settings for how big the window into Google maps is.  It’s at the very beginning of the code and it’s very self explanatory:  width=”425” height=”350”.  This allows you to tell Google how big of a window, in pixels, you want to display of Google maps on your site.  I wanted about an 8ft x 10ft image so I went into Photoshop and, at least according to Photoshop, I wanted a frame 6912 pixels tall and 8640 pixels wide.  So my new HTML file looked like this:

<html>
<body>

<iframe width="8640" height="6912" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;source=s_q&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp;q=tokyo+japan&amp;sll=42.044143,-87.686904&amp;sspn=0.007872,0.019805&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;hq=&amp;hnear=T%C5%8Dky%C5%8D+Metropolis,+Japan&amp;ll=35.689488,139.691706&amp;spn=0.017219,0.039611&amp;z=15&amp;output=embed"></iframe><br /><small><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&amp;source=embed&amp;hl=en&amp;geocode=&amp;q=tokyo+japan&amp;sll=42.044143,-87.686904&amp;sspn=0.007872,0.019805&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;hq=&amp;hnear=T%C5%8Dky%C5%8D+Metropolis,+Japan&amp;ll=35.689488,139.691706&amp;spn=0.017219,0.039611&amp;z=15" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map</a></small>
</body>

</html>

At this point if you don’t have a decently fast computer and especially one with plenty of memory, things are going to get really really slow or crash.  Google will happily comply and send you the image data for all the tiles you are requesting and your browser will then display all of those on screen so if your computer is low on memory you can probably forget about it.  Things slowed down on my computer but they didn’t crash, so next I had to adjust the zoom and placement of the image, which works just like the smaller version of Google maps, except that it has to refresh the ENTIRE page if you move the screen even one pixel.  Once I decided on what looked like a good placement and zoom I wanted to save the entire thing.  You can save the entire page if you go to File –> Save Page, but it will save an HTML file with all the little image tiles Google sent your way.  You could, if you were wanting to print hundreds and hundreds of pages, print all these little tiles, cut out the little squares, and piece everything together on your wall.  I wanted full page images both to save paper and my sanity and so I turned to a Firefox addon:

There very well may be other screengrab plugins, but my googling found this one first and it worked fine for me.  Once I had the entire image where I wanted it and the screengrab plugin was installed I clicked on the Screengrab icon on the lower right corner of Firefox and selected to Save the entire frame as an image.  Once again, if you are short on memory at this step, Firefox will crash.  The ram usage for Firefox while the plugin was saving the entire frame as an image shot up to well over a gigabyte.  The bigger the image you want, the more ram it requires. 

At this point I went searching for programs that would auto splice and print this giant file.  I first thought I had a match with a program called the Rasterbator.  But it doesn’t allow really fine detail like my map had.  It is better for taking a smaller image and blowing it up the size of your wall, where you don’t need really fine details.  I found another program called Posterizer, but it crashed every time I tried to use it.  So I had to use Photoshop to splice it into all the little pieces.  Luckily Photoshop, being the powerful program it is, has a way to automate this using the Slice Select Tool (btw, I have to add I love that IU has a volume license agreement with Adobe and I get the entire CS4 creative suite free). 

Finally I had 200 separate images (I created an image bigger than I thought I would need, just in case), each sized to fit my paper nicely.  I headed over to campus and printed out all 200 pages and then spent another 30 minutes at the paper cutter slicing the extra borders off the images. 

The final step was to put the giant puzzle together and paste it on the wall.  This was the longest step and actually harder than I thought.  It was surprisingly difficult to make sure everything lined up correctly as I taped all the pieces together.  Get a little off in one direction and then the next layer down you might find that the bottom of the one doesn’t match the top of the next.  I tried taping together larger sections on the floor and then taping those to the wall to be a bit easier although I was still off in a few places. 

Overall, though, I’m really happy with it.  I just wish Tokyo proper was centered like I wanted.  Shibuya is down by my wall socket

Tokyo station and the Imperial palace is also near the bottom of the wall

Oh well.  Next time I’ll get it just right

But you know what I really want?  I want the entire wall to display a live version of Google maps.  One that I can grab and zoom in/out, drag around, switch from satellite to map to street view.  A giant wall sized multi-touch screen in other words.   Now THAT would be really cool. 

Comcast technicians cut the television signal yesterday and I removed the tv from the living room this morning.  I love it.  I wish we would have done this sooner.  On the rare occasions I sat in front of the tv it seemed I would either be flipping through dozens of channels not finding anything of value or watching commercials waiting for something halfway decent to appear.  Shows downloaded or even on Hulu or so much better as you watch on your time and avoid (at least on downloaded versions) commercials which saves you time.  And money in this case since we no longer pay for cable.  Even with digital cable and “on-demand”, it was terrible compared to what I can already get on my computer and the internet.  In fact, Comcast’s on-demand was all in all worthless.  There was always a small smattering of free movies or shows (although always older releases and usually not worth watching) and their premium movies were crazy expensive.  We already pay for a Netflix subscription and their Watch-It-Now selection is far superior to Comcast and if there is a premium movie we want it goes in the queue and comes to our door in a few days.  And since we don’t watch live sports, there really isn’t anything cable offers us that we can’t already get from our Netflix and Internet subscriptions.

Wife and I are on a vacation to Mexico.  We meet another couple we know.  We say hello, pleasantries and all that, then go different ways.  The city we are in has a very carnival atmosphere, only a Mexican carnival (whatever that means).  We meet the same couple again, decide to hang out together.  It starts getting late we try to find a hotel.  We find a place, but when we ask for rooms, we are told there is only one big room with lots of beds.  The manager shows us around.  All the beds are king sized beds, put next to each other, but separated by curtains.  He pulls back all the curtains one by one to introduce us to the people staying in the beds.  Somehow this seems important to him.  But we decide to go elsewhere.

Fast forward.   We find some person’s house to stay.   We spend the night.  But the next morning the owner of the house comes and says that one of us tried to hit on his teenage daughter and so he will punish us.  Flash forward and wife and I and the other couple are tied to a giant slingshot, where the crazy man is going to shoot us far into the sky to kill us.

The Beatles Hey Jude starts playing.  I wake up, realizing that wife is really playing the song downstairs while eating breakfast.  Hey Jude keeps going through my head all morning.

Hi Ben,

It looks like you clocked out early (but within the last minute of shift) 3 times in the last pay period.  Please be sure to use the PIE time as reference when clocking out, and be sure it has clicked over to the top of the hour before doing so.  The professional development issue below has been entered into your performance record as a friendly reminder.  Just let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Ms. Manager

Ben checked out of three shifts early this past pay period. All of these checkouts were in the last minute of shift and he was never pointed for an early checkout. This is a friendly reminder that consultants are expected to observe PIE time and check out after their shift has ended. The shifts were:

· 12:00-16:00 on 9\8 in Ashton; checked out at 15:59:14

·  12:00-16:00 on 9\15 in Ashton; checked out at 15:59:58

·  12:00-16:00 on 9\19 in IC2; checked out at 15:59:58

Yes, that’s right ladies and gentlemen.  My manager decided it was prudent to spend the time emailing me and assigning me a "personal development issue" for clocking out 2 seconds early twice and 46 seconds another time.  2 seconds early.  Good grief.