Category: Astrophysics

The First Person to Weigh the Atmosphere

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Italian Jesuit Evangelista Torricelli was able to definitively prove that the atmosphere has a specific weight by designing an experiment in which a tube is filled with mercury and then placed into a dish of mercury. Torricelli disovered that when performing this experiment, half of the mercury runs down into the dish and the other half stays within the tubing. Until this point, it was believed impossible to create a negative or empty space as the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle once stated, “nature abhors a vacuum” believing that nature would forever fight against the creation of true and pure nothingness. This is the same reason that an object (e.g. plastic straw or an oil drum barrel etc.) crumbles when all of the air within is extracted. Torricelli was able to overcome this phenomena by using the exteme weight of mercury within a ridged glass tube. The level of mercury left within the tube was a measurement of the weight of the atmosphere, a balancing act between the weight of the mercury and the weight of air pressing down upon this mercury, balancing each other out like scales. Torricelli famously stated, “noi viviamo sommersi nel fondo d’un pelago d’aria” which means “we live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air” in Italian, and his findings made scientists realize that air was a substance for the first time. Torricelli became the first person to invent the barometer because of his understanding of atmospheric pressure. Despite Aristotle being believed to be correct for millennia, Torricelli definitively proved that air does have weight

The Reason Scientists Can Calculate the Distance and Velocity of Galaxies and Stars

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Scientists understand the immense distance between galaxies and stars because of American astronomer Edwin Hubble’s theory of the expanding universe, as it is now understood that galaxies drift from the observer proportional to their distance, meaning the further a star is, the faster it continues to move away from the observer. This phenomenon is referred to as “Hubble–Lemaître’s Law”. Astronomers can calculate how fast a star is moving away from the Earth by observing the Doppler shift of the light it projects, as yellow light becomes red light as a star moves away and yellow light becomes blue light as it approaches closer. A formulae is then used to calculate the distance from the source point. Redshift is observed throughout the universe which confirms that the universe is indeed expanding at a phenomenal rate of speed

The Reason the Summer Solstice and Winter Equinox Were Important Within the Ancient World

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The sun rises and sets at different points of the horizon throughout the year, which is what causes days to become longer or shorter. This process slows down during mid-summer and mid-winter, and for a few short days, the sun appears to rise and set at the same points of the horizon, causing most people during antiquity to believe that the laws of nature had been suspended for a short period of time. It was commonly believed that during this short window, human beings and the supernatural could interact with one another

The “Soulmate” Quality of Quantum Non-Locality and Photons

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When a photon, a particle with no mass which is effectively a quantum packet of light, divides due to some external force, its energy is split and it emerges as 2 photons. These new photons are forever intrinsically tied together, able to communicate instantaneously despite their great distances as the universe expands. This should not be possible as light cannot travel faster than 299,792,458 kilometers per second. Regardless of how far apart these particles travel, their profound bond is unbreakable as they will always remain connected regardless of circumstance. This can be thought of as the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s understanding of love, with a single being split into 2 beings with the new beings become soulmates who search for eachother eternally. For as long as the soulmates, or photons, exist, they will be intrinsically tied to each other as the one and only soulmate, or particle, which has the capability to do this with its pair. This long distance relationship between all elementary particles has been on going since the beginning of the universe, a fidelity which lasts for as long as the universe exists. The simple act of observant measurement is all that is required to sever this tremendous commitment between particles. If the spin of one particle is measured, a seemingly innocuous act by a third party observer, the bond between each particle is forever severed, never to return to its previous state. It’s unclear how these particles communicate which includes the break up message sent between them when the integer spin of one of the pair is observed

The Rationale as to Why Scientific Fact is Often Referred to as “Scientific Theory”

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The term “theory” placed behind suffixes of large theories like gravity, evolution, and special relativity (e.g. the Theory of Gravity, the Theory of Evolution, the Theory of Special Relativity etc.), doesn’t mean “theory” in the traditional sense. During the 20th century, Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion began to break down within the theories own borderlines as physics progressed further and further to answer continually larger and more complex questions. As a direct result of this, a grander, more encapsulating law was required to explain certain phenomena (e.g. the reason the sun has a corona of light bend around it during a total solar eclipse) which is why Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is so immensely important, as it explains such phenomena after which Newton’s laws begin to break down (e.g. Newton’s ability to predict planetary orbit but not explain why such a function occurs in nature etc.). Eventually the international scientific community unanimously agreed that laws should not be named as such because they may not remain laws in the long term, as there may be concepts outside of them which help explain both the supposed law itself as well broader phenomena outside of the suppositional law. The term “theory” was utilized to replace the term “law” because something scientific which can change over time, is not or was not truly a law to begin with. The term “theory” is used in the connotation of an idea which accurately describes a phenomena and empowers an observer to accurately predict what they have yet to observe. An idea isn’t genuinely a “theory” until it’s supported by empirical evidence, before which time it remains as a “hypothesis”

The Reason the True Age of the Universe Can Be Definitively Proven

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This discovery of the speed of light provided a satisfactory explanation as to why the world becomes dark at night. This is immensely important as the further a star is from an observer, the longer it will take for light to arrive from that point, to the observer themself. If the universe was infinite in its age, all of the light ever created would have had time to reach the Earth which would cause the night sky to be ablaze with starlight, photons emitted from every single possible part of the universe. This clearly is not the case so it is abundantly evident that the universe must have had an origin point. Scientists use the term “observable universe” as it’s entirely possible and likely that matter exists outside of what can be observed predicated upon the theory that as the universe expanded, light from this matter would have to travel increasingly larger distances to reach an observer. Because of constant expansion, this light has not yet had the chance to reach the Earth and perhaps never will, causing it to be outside of an observers field of vision and therefore unable to be proven in its existence using current methods and technologies

 

The Cosmic Web

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The Cosmic Web is a scientific approximation of what the universe may look like at the largest scales, with massive clusters of galaxies linked together through vast filaments, with each containing trillions of stars. It would take light nearly 10,000,000,000 (10 billion) years to cross the distance of the Cosmic Web image

 

The Ability of Quantum Theory to Explain the Existence of All Matter

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The theory of quantum mechanics is the most accurate and powerful description of the natural world which scientists have at their disposal. Quantum fluctuations are written into the stars as modern day theories explain that as the universe sprang from a vacuum, it expanded very rapidly, which means that the rules of the quantum world, should have contributed to the large scale structure of the entire universe. The universe is shaped by quantum reality, essentially the quantum world inflated many, many times in that nothingness has shaped everything, with this concept now being definitively proven as fact. Quantum physics provides a natural mechanism through quantum fluctuations to see into the early universe with small irregularities that would later grow to create galaxies. The idea that a cluster of gas and dust like the Milky Way Galaxy, a collection of billions of stars, could begin life simply because of small quantum fluctuations, is absolutely mind boggling, as these tiny fluctuations within the vacuum of space were only present upon a submicroscopic scale, yet had the ability to grow into some of the largest objects in the universe. This is possible because the Big Bang produced equal amounts of matter and anti-matter but as the universe cooled down, matter and anti-matter annihilated almost perfectly, but not quite, as every 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) annihilations will lead to 1 particle of matter being left behind and this is what has built the matter of the physical world, everything from stars to the Earth to the smallest life forms and inanimate objects. Everything within the universe which is physical to the touch is simply debris of an enormous collision between matter and anti-matter at the beginning of time

Ancient Roman Emperor Julius Caesar’s Contribution to Time Keeping

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The month of July is a derivation of the name, “Julius Caesar”. The ancient Romans opted to rename “Quintilis”, the original name for July which means “fifth month” in Latin, to “July” after Caesars death because this was the same month that he was born. The Julian calendar, a western calendar used until 1582 when the Gregorian calendar supplanted it, is also attributed to Caesar as the Roman year had only 355 days and required an extra month be added, every 3 years. The ancient Romans repeatedly made the same calculation errors and continually found seasons out of synchronization with the actual calendar date observed. With the help of a few Roman scientists, Caesar removed the pre-Etruscan 10 month solar calendar in favor of the 365 day year calendar named after himself. The Roman calendar started on March 25, but was moved to January 1 with the advent of the Gregorian calendar

The Invention of Star Luminosity Mapping to Measure Immense Distances in Space

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Henrietta Leavitt, a brilliant scientist who worked at the Harvard Observatory discovered the true size of the universe because of her ability to objectively measure the true brightness of stars. Leavitt became enamored and fascinated by a type of star referred to as a “cepheid variable” which means a “star which pulses within the night sky”. Leavitt’s revolutionary breakthrough occurred when she realized that the intensity of brightness is precisely linked to how quick or slow at which the star blinks. If 2 points of light blink at the same rate but with different intensities, it would stand to reason that the brighter star is closer to the observer than the dimmer one. This allowed Leavitts to measure the distance to stars which lay far beyond the reaches of parallax distance