Cognitive Labs

On August 25, 1609 Galileo demonstrated an optick tube to a group of Italian merchants. In the process, one invention - ground glass lenses created by a Dutchman - was mashed into another invention, the telescope which can be considered a meta-invention.



As the story goes, children playing with lenses in Hans Lipershey's shop may have accidentally invented the telescope (Oops!) without even trying, and began the process which has culminated in the Hubble Space telescope today.



By aiming the new invention at the sky, Galileo fomented innovation in the realm of celestial mechanics and astronomy, like ripples in a pool into which one has tossed a marble, and provided key support for other period iconoclasts like Copernicus and Kepler. Because of Galileo's troubling observations, it now appeared that heliocentricism was as unlikely to be correct as geocentricism.

The speed of these interlinked discoveries was highly uncomfortable to authorities since it threatened cosmology and humanity's hypothetical position in the universe along with their established referent power.



If fundamental beliefs were found to be lacking a solid foundation, what else would inquisitors and congregations question? They might as well go back to the belief that the Earth was being carried on the backs of turtles. Chaos might result.

As a result, the church silenced Galileo by forbidding him from making new discoveries, writing about his findings, and placing him under house arrest for years.

However, knowledge eventually triumphed.

Labels: 400, copernicus, galileo, hubble, kepler

The new Kepler Space Telescope has just revealed a planet unlike any other.



Termed HAT-P-7b, the planet has a disparity of 1300 degrees F between its coolest and warmest spots, a greater range than anything in the solar system.

The atmosphere according to instrument analysis appears to contain a different mix than the Hydrogen dominant atmosphere of Jupiter; in this case Titanium Oxide. On Earth, this substance is the leading ingredient in white paint and industrial coatings and in crystalline form, the component of the minerals rutile and anatase, amethyst-like octahedron structures that occur naturally in gem-bearing areas. So, we might conclude that this planet is like a giant, superheated paintball.

The parent star, GSC03547-01402, has an apparent magnitude of 10.5 and is 1000 light years away (I earlier reported it at 320, using an older source) in the constellation Cygnus. It would be visible in a scope of 3 or 4 inch aperture, at minimum.

Labels: cygnus, HAT-P-7B, kepler, oxide, titanium

Gravity, that fundamental force explained by Isaac Newton so well, may not be so constant afterall.

Recent probes hurtling across Earth's terminator have not behaved as expected, missing the tightly calculated predicted trajectory by a small margin. The incidence has been measured at least five times in cases around the Earth and also on the outbound slingshot characterizing the departure of Pioneer X and XI from the solar system, billions of miles -- and several light-minutes away.

This troubling occurrence has suggested to some scientists that the law of gravity is somehow incorrect and needs to be modified - if something is mostly true, but not always, than by definition it cannot be a law in the physical sciences, at least as presently conceived. Or, on the other hand, a new principle of physics exists that we have not accounted for up to now.

Attempting to force observation into a law and creating a 'fudge factor' was previously the case with the Ptolemaic system, which defined and expanded the concept of epicycles or tangent circles to account for perturbations in planetary orbits, in particular the planet Mars - until it was realized (by Kepler) that orbits were ellipses. Previously, it was believed that orbits must be circular (perfect).




more at space.com

Labels: epicycles, kepler, ptolemaic