Tag Archives: astronomy

Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating

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Got this book from the Jeffco Whale of a Used Book Sale a couple of years ago.

Brian Keating is an astrophysicist/cosmologist. He had dreams and desires of winning the Nobel Prize in physics, but there was an issue with the results of the BICEP2 project. But, he was prominent enough to be able to nominate candidates to the prize for a year or two.

He certainly does have some good ideas for ways to improve the award. Pages 272 to 274 give his main recommendations.

  1. Add prizes in new and emerging disciplines
  2. Award the physics prize to groups of any size
  3. Give retroactive awards
  4. Allow for posthumous awards
  5. Recognize that true discovery is serendipitous In other words, he would like to see more prizes given to people who make unexpected discoveries, not just confirmation of previous theories

Other things of note:

Pages 174-175. “There is a fierce competition that begins the day you declare yourself a physics major. First, among your fellow undergraduates, you spar for top ranking in your class. This leads to the next battle: becoming a graduate student at a top school. Then, you toil for six to eight years to earn a postdoc job at another top school. And finally, you hope, comes a coveted faculty job, which can become permanent if you are privileged enough to get tenure. Along the way, the number of peers in your group diminishes by a factor of ten at each stage, from hundreds of undergraduates to just one faculty job becoming available every few years in your field.” Brian Keating, Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor

Yeah? Um, no. I don’t think so. I was a physics major, and I had NO interest in sparing for top ranking in my class.

Page 228. He also had the idea that the nominated people or groups should also be publicized, just like how people know who is up for Academy Awards. It can be an honor just to have been nominated.

Page 244. He mentions Planck data as showing that what BICEP2 found, was simply polarized light from dust grains in the Milky Way, it was not primordial polarized light from the time of the Big Bang.

After reading that he likes to hang with the likes of Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Lex Fridman, and Jordan Peterson, my opinion of him drops waaaayyy down considerably.

He is turning into a physics YouTuber chasing clout. I am going to stay away from him.

The wild dark by Craig Childs

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The full title of the book is The wild dark: Finding the night sky in the age of light. Not sure where I heard of the book, but I checked it out from the JeffCo Libraries.

It is an interesting trip for the author and one of his friends to bike North out of Las Vegas, and they stop every night to view the night sky in a different Bortle zone. He also uses an SQM to determine how dark different places are on the journey. I know that the Bortle scale has its limitations, and it can change from night to night, but it is a good estimate when skies are clear.

The book started off with an editing error with two places saying “A little darker and you get hundreds of stars.” The first instance probably meant to say — a little darker and you get dozens of stars.

On page 19 – I learned that de Mairan figured out what circadian rhythm is.

On pages 59-60, he lends some credence to astrology so my scientific view of him goes down a notch.

Page 81 – There are indigenous peoples in Alaska and other parts of the Arctic that see a very large constellation called Yahdii.

Page 91-92 – The January 17, 1994 Northridge, CA earthquake. He noted how it took out power in the area. He said that power was disrupted in other states, too, and even up into Canada. Then, he said that people were calling emergency centers (and other news outlets) about a giant silvery cloud. He said that it was the first time people were seeing zodiacal light, but I would guess that the Milky Way would be the cause for alarm most likely.

Page 97 – Basin and Range Dark Sky Cooperative

Page 108 – The author talks about how he can eat most anything found in the wild, such as worms, insects, rackrabbit, little crabs (and other gelatinous creatures), and chuparosa flowers. That last plant had caused him to get sick. So, maybe you shouldn’t always eat found plants or whatnot.

Page 121 – He meets up with Mark Bailey.

Page 130 – Some people in the Hopi Native American tribe did not like the fact that people went to the Moon. Should people “be allowed to touch these sacred bodies in space?” I think yes, people should be allowed to explore space in an ethical way. We do not want to send bacteria to other water-filled moons such as Europa or Enceladus.

Page 150 – The Webb Space Telescope was used to find that there were 540 (or more) free floating planets in and around the Orion Nebula? The research was posted to the arXiv, but it isn’t in a journal yet.

Page 165 – He mentions that his county commissioner was Kris Holstrom, who was a commissioner in San Miguel County, Colorado. Looks like he lives in Norwood, CO.

Page 169 – The City art installation in Nevada.

The book finishes with Craig and his buddy meeting up with a bunch of friends in a supposedly Bortle 1 zone in the middle of Nevada. It would have been nice to see what path they took on the way there, and where exactly they all met at the end. But, since they found some indigenous artwork on the way there (pages 145-146), they might not want to reveal where they found it. Or, they could have told some native art experts where it was so that it could be protected and preserved.

This is another good overview of the book.

Unusual Telescopes by Peter L. Manly

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This book came out in 1991, and I bought a reprinted version that came out in 1999. The text is fine and all, but I found the reprinted images lacking. Below are some images that compares the book I bought with the hardback version (with the red cover) that I got from another library.

There were lots and lots of weird and interesting telescopes listed in there. I think they got most of the weird designs as of 1991.

Another negative is the gendered language used by the author. It was odd to see that still used even just 34 years ago. For example, he wrote this sentence on page 195. “This telescope design also supports the maxim that it is the mark of a good engineer to know where he can cut corners but it is the mark of an excellent engineer to know where he must not cut corners.” Are there no female engineers?

Otherwise, the book is ok. If you want to get a copy of the book for yourself, buy the original hardback if you can.

Standard Handbook for Telescope Making

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I was able to check out the revised 1984 edition of this book by Neale E. Howard. I did not realized that the original edition of the book was from 1959 and it shows. I had not heard of Neale Howard, and I wanted to see how this book compared to some others by Allyn J. Thompson, Jean Texereau, and Albert G. Ingalls.

While the revised edition does include information on some of the telescope companies and part suppliers that appeared between 1959 and 1984 (with addresses but no phone numbers), I found that some/much of the book had not really been updated.

They did include some pages that mentioned the new (at the time) Dobsonian mounts on pages 196-200, but they paid it short shrift. The book starts by assuming that the builder will make an equatorial mount for a 8 inch f/7 telescope so that it can easily track the stars with one motion.

I did not realize that the book came out in 1959 at first. It wasn’t until page 12 when I saw the text that said that the Yerkes Observatory was built sixty years ago. That did not make sense. It was not built in the mid 1920s, it was from the late 1800s. So, in looking at the copyright page, it said it was originally published in 1959. Ah, yeah, now this makes sense.

With images like the one below on page 173, it certainly looks like the book came out in 1959. (Sorry, kid, you gotta wear a tie for this photoshoot.)

Thus, some of the book was updated between 1959 and 1984, but not the whole thing.

I would also not recommend following the 18 supposedly simple steps for silvering a mirror as given on pages 333 to 335. That process is probably best left to mirror coating professionals.

However, the advice on how to grind a mirror, how make a pitch lap, and how to polish and figure a mirror had not really changed in the intervening years (and to the year 2025), so that section of the book still seems relevant.

Overall, if you want to grind, polish, and figure your own telescope mirror, then this book might provide some good advice for you.

The Unknown Universe by Stuart Clark

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I probably picked up this ex-library book from the JCPL at their whale of used book sale. The full title is The Unknown Universe: A New Exploration of Time, Space, and Modern Cosmology.

I found the writing to be comprehensible to people with a sciencey background, but one does not need a science background to understand much of the material. I was worried it was going to be a little boring — covering too much of the basics, but he added in new details and comments about people and concepts that I had not encountered before.

Page 31. This quote is interesting by Georg Busch. Comets are “‘formed by the ascension from Earth of human sins and wickedness, making a sort of gas which was then set on fire by the anger of God. This poisonous stuff’, he added, ‘falls down on people’s heads, and causes all kinds of unpleasant phenomena, such as diseases, sudden death, bad weather and Frenchmen.” (The translation in the book is slightly different from what came from that website.)

The second sticky note was page 159. Another thing caught my attention. Inertial mass and gravitational mass appear identical. He said that “this is the most mystifying thing in the whole universe.” I had not ever considered the fact that inertial mass might be different from gravitational mass. I just assumed they were the same, since they are defined to have the same value, thus considered to be equivalent.

Page 218-219. Georges Lemaitre beat Hubble in finding the expansion of the universe. He wrote in 1927 the following.

(PDF link) “Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extra-galactiques“. Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles. A (in French). 47: 49–59. 1927a. Four years later, it was translated as: “A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius Accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extra-galactic Nebulae”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 91 (5): 483–490. 1931. (These cites were grabbed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre.) When it was translated, they made it seem like this was confirming the Hubble data since they left out some information, but this 1927 article should have been found and read by others before Hubble got famous for his research of 1929.

Page 221. Einstein was supposed to have said for the first time “God does not play with dice” (or something like that) at the Solvay conference of 1927. The author noted that Neils Bohr replied with “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

Page 223. In 1924, a Swedish astronomer named Knut Lundmark had estimated the expansion rate of the universe, and this was three years before Lemaitre, and five years before Hubble. It is now about 1% off of the mark. He was much more accurate than both Hubble and Lemaitre, but he has not gotten the accolades for it.

Page 244. The half-life of a proton is something like 1.29 x 10^34 years. It might be now 1.67 x 10^34 years. No citation was given, but the Wikipedia page seems to cover it good enough.

Page 258. Thomas Buchert has a theory of inhomogeneous cosmology that does not need dark energy to explain the supposed acceleration of the expansion of the universe. In 2016, he said that dark energy will be gone by 2026, but I am not sure that will be the case. Instead of treating the whole universe as having an average density, voids and strands of galaxies (and clusters) are considered to have different average densities. This changes the calculations for supernovae distances.

Page 259. David Wiltshire. Universe as a timescape. From that same Wikipedia article on inhomogeneous cosmology, “David Wiltshire proposed a model (timescape cosmology) in which backreactions caused time to run more slowly or, in voids, more quickly, thus leading supernovae observed in 1998 to be thought to be further away than they were.[8][9]” Does time run differently in he voids between the galaxies?

Page 292-293. Here are a bunch of the books that he recommends for further reading. Of course, he recommends 5 of his other books. I might try to read his “The Day without Yesterday” since that was a good chapter in this book. I assume he will go into more detail about the Big Bang.

Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder

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The full title is Existential physics: a scientists guide to life’s biggest questions. This one came out in 2022.

I read this one right after reading Sabine’s previous book entitled Lost in Math. This was a good followup. As an amateur astronomer and a physics major from college a LONG time ago, I often have my head in the clouds and I ask myself some of the same deep questions that are posed in her new book. Some of those questions are:

“Does the past still exist? Do particles think? Was the universe made for us? Has physics ruled out free will? Will we ever have a theory of everything?” and — Does the universe think? Are humans predictable? What’s the purpose of anything anyway?

I did not mark as many pages to comment on as I did with the Lost in Math book, but I found this one just as enjoyable.

Starting on page 95, she interviewed David Deutsch. It was noted that he wrote some books, The Fabric of Reality and the Beginning of Infinity. They sound interesting.

Chapter 6 (page 125-) – Has physics ruled out free will? This depends on what you mean by free will. In short, she thinks that the answer to that is no. She wrote:

“The major problem with discussions about free will is that philosophers have put forward a heap of definitions that have nothing to do with what nonphilosophers think free will means. I am tempted to write “normal people” as opposed to ‘philosophers,’ but maybe that’s a little uncharitable. And I don’t want to be uncharitable. Certainly not.” More of this chapter was transcribed at this blog post.

I liked this line on page 134 — “If you tell someone you think free will is real because the renormalization group equations might run into an essential singularity, you might as well paint GEEK on your forehead.”

Brief answer on this question (page 141) — “According to the currently established laws of nature, the future is determined by the past, except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence. Whether you take that to mean that free will does not exist depends on your definition of free will.” Not sure I agree with her on this.

Page 191 – Zeeya Merali wrote a book — Big Bang in a little room: the Quest to Create New Universes.

On page 217, she starts an epilogue. She noted that physicists who propose unobservable parallel universe, they are not using science. “It’s religion masquerading as science under the guise of mathematics.”

However, on page 219, she says she agrees with Stephen Jay Gould on how religion and science are two “nonoverlapping magisteria.” I do not agree with her on that point. I think that religions overlap (or try to overlap) into science all the time. It was a mystery how thunder and lightning worked, and it was a mystery how alcohol was made as literal spirits. Over time, science has shown how weather works, and how alcohol can be made. Science continues to explain things that religions do not, but religions never explain things (yet) that science could not. But I do agree that there are some questions that are asked by both religious and scientific people all the same, and we do not have good answers yet, or some questions may not be answerable — ever. Both groups want to make sense of the world, and to make sense of how people and groups of people behave.

She concludes with “So, yes, we are bags of atoms crawling around on a pale blue dot in the outer spiral arm of a remarkably unremarkable galaxy. And yet we are so much more than this.”

Sorry, but I prefer to think of myself as a meat robot with a skeleton and a brain, but anyway, yes, we are more than just those things.

Read — Cheap Land Colorado

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This was an eye opening book by Ted Conover in 2022 about how cheap land plots were sold in the 1970s, and how they are still sold and used today.

There are plenty of other good book reviews, so I don’t need to rehash them here.

While I had considered getting some of that cheap land to use for astronomy viewing, I might reconsider after reading this book.

He does cover some of the advantages of viewing the night sky in the San Luis Valley a couple of places in the book. On page 177, Zahra Dilley arrived in Colorado, and she had never seen so many stars in her life. She was from the Chicago area, and she was used to seeing maybe one or two stars in the sky, not thousands. “I’ve been looking at the same star all my life. All my life. And I had no idea that Earth could look so freaking beautiful.”

On page 256, a friend of his (Lance) has a telescope and they looked at the Hercules Cluster and the Andromeda Galaxy. I am guessing that he looked at M13 which is one of the best globular clusters in Hercules.

Anyway, it is a great book. If one is thinking of buying cheap land in Colorado, read this before you buy.

PS. Thanks to Vladimir for making the recommendation.

Finally read – Starlight Nights: The Adventures of a Star-Gazer

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Why did I wait so long to read this book. Had I read this 35 years ago, it might have turned me into a variable star observer and comet hunter. (Leslie found at least 10 comets during his lifetime. Some say he found 12.) I am not sure how I could add to the plethora of 5 star reviews at Amazon.

In any case, I write these book reviews just so that I can remember that I read it, and what I particularly liked about it or found interesting. So, here we go.

Even though he was not able to graduate from high school (because he had to work on the farm while a brother was off in Europe for WWI) He seems to respect and encourage the academic pursuits of his wife Dottie, who had graduated from college during the mid-1920s.

The discussion of Native Americans was usually somewhat respectful, but there was a mention in the book about him being glad that he did not get scalped by an Indian for trespassing on their land. (Page 161.)

In the chapter where he and his wife went looking for native pots and fragments of evidence of life in a cave, I found this sentence odd. “Had we found the cave untouched we would have left it intact, for we well knew that many times important evidence has been destroyed by amateur explorers and souvenir hunters.” So, after seeing that much had already been dug into, they figured that most of the cave had already been dug up, so they could dig up some more to see what else they could find as “amateur explorers”? (Page 152.)

I am not sure that just because the cave was previously touched, that they should have felt confident in trying to find their own treasure, but the 1930s was a different time in the west.

It was interesting that Robert (Bob) Ingersoll was invoked on page 158. Maybe Leslie had an agnostic bent.

In chapter 20 on Mt. Locke, he took great pains to describe the steak that they purchased and cooked up for a guest of honor, Dr. Van Biesbroek. I was not surprised to learn that Van B was vegetarian, and he did not touch the steak. They could have asked him what he wanted for dinner. They just assumed that he would like what they wanted for dinner.

This is a great book, even though it is now 59 years old. I also like the inventiveness and ingenuity of his mind. The merry-go-round observatory should be a thing that is commercially made.

Some Astronomy Hacks

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Read the book Astronomy Hacks: Tips and Tools for Observing the Night Sky

Even though this came out 19 years ago, it was still interesting to see what kind of tips and tricks I might be able to glean from the 65 hacks that they provide. The book is from O’ Reilly, and while they typically have computer based books, they delved into other technology topics, since they know that they have geeky readers.

Some of the hacks that I found most interesting were:

#9 on choosing the best telescope was quite lengthy. It was about 29 pages. Most of the other hacks are a lot shorter. They do a good job of covering the basics, but they steer people away from apo refractors.

#11 covers eyesight and vision. I don’t think I’ve previously learned about the chemistry of the rods and cones in the eyeball. I did not know that there are L, M, and S cones. I thought all cones were the same.

I learned of the book because the DAS linked to hack #45 on dark adapting your vehicle. Other parts of the book are also online, such as this segment on barlows.

The section on eyepieces at #49 was just ok, and they seemed focused on Tele Vue and Pentax eyepieces to consider. Celestron and Meade were mentioned as well as some other makers, such as Orion, University Optics, and Vixen. They skipped other makers such as Baader, Brandon, RKE, and others. I guess Explore Scientific was not around yet – the company formed in 2008.

The review of 1x finders was good at #53. I will have to see if I can find a Rigel QuikFinder.

I did not like that he only called the Moon — Luna. I’m sure that was done to not confuse Earth’s Moon with other moons of the solar system. Still, it was a little jarring. It was also a little weird to have the authors use the term binocular for a single instrument instead of binoculars or let alone the phrase — a pair of binoculars. Really? We all know that a pair of pants is a single garment that one wears. It is not a pant. One wears pants, or a pair of pants.

End rant. The book is still a useful read 19 years after first publication.

The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, etc., etc., etc.

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Ok, the whole book title is The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. This book documented the process of how two different teams of scientists discovered that the expansion of the universe is accelerating back in 1998. If you are interested in the sociology of how different scientific disciplines do their work, this would be of interest. The author explained how the astronomers did group-based work quite differently from the physicists.

For example, on page 229, one can read this. “The core of White’s argument was that astronomy and particle physics constituted two different cultures. Astronomers, White said, were ‘generalists,’ exploring the complexities of the universe on a case-by-case basis. Particle physicists were ‘fundamentalists,’ wringing the complexities of the universe in the hope of squeezing out an ‘ultimate foundation’—a ‘Truth.’ ‘Dark Energy,’ he wrote, ‘is a unique link between them, reflecting deep aspects of the Fundamental Theory, yet apparently accessible only through astronomical observation.'” (From https://millstonenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/panek4PercentUniverse.pdf)

The book covered dozens and dozens of scientists, and I got lost trying to keep track of them all in my head. I probably should have taken notes. Pictures of the scientists involved might have helped me keep track of them all.

Overall, if you are interested in learning more about dark energy, and how different scientific teams work together (or not), then this book would be a worthwhile read.