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Cisco Walker

Astronomy Detectives Reveal Origin of Monet's 'Impression' Painting - 3 views

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    By reconstructing the position of the sun, the condition of the tides and the view from Claude Monet's hotel room, researchers were able to determine the time and day Monet painted his dreamy piece "Impression, Sunrise" in Le Havre, France.Credit: Musée Marmottan Monet Astronomical clues could pinpoint the day Claude Monet painted "Impression, Soleil Levant (Impression, Sunrise)," the art piece that lent its name to the Impressionist art movement.
markfrankel18

Why Do People Persist in Believing Things That Just Aren't True? : The New Yorker - 2 views

  • One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief. But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief?
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Do People Persist in Believing Things That Just Aren't True? : The New Yorker - 1 views

  • Last month, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, published the results of a study that he and a team of pediatricians and political scientists had been working on for three years. They had followed a group of almost two thousand parents, all of whom had at least one child under the age of seventeen, to test a simple relationship: Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? Each household received one of four messages: a leaflet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that there had been no evidence linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine and autism; a leaflet from the Vaccine Information Statement on the dangers of the diseases that the M.M.R. vaccine prevents; photographs of children who had suffered from the diseases; and a dramatic story from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an infant who almost died of measles. A control group did not receive any information at all. The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds. The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked.
  • Until recently, attempts to correct false beliefs haven’t had much success. Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol whose research into misinformation began around the same time as Nyhan’s, conducted a review of misperception literature through 2012. He found much speculation, but, apart from his own work and the studies that Nyhan was conducting, there was little empirical research. In the past few years, Nyhan has tried to address this gap by using real-life scenarios and news in his studies: the controversy surrounding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the questioning of Obama’s birth certificate, and anti-G.M.O. activism. Traditional work in this area has focussed on fictional stories told in laboratory settings, but Nyhan believes that looking at real debates is the best way to learn how persistently incorrect views of the world can be corrected.
  • One thing he learned early on is that not all errors are created equal. Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. Take astronomy. If someone asked you to explain the relationship between the Earth and the sun, you might say something wrong: perhaps that the sun rotates around the Earth, rising in the east and setting in the west. A friend who understands astronomy may correct you. It’s no big deal; you simply change your belief. But imagine living in the time of Galileo, when understandings of the Earth-sun relationship were completely different, and when that view was tied closely to ideas of the nature of the world, the self, and religion. What would happen if Galileo tried to correct your belief? The process isn’t nearly as simple. The crucial difference between then and now, of course, is the importance of the misperception. When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something we’ve long held as important that problems occur.
Lawrence Hrubes

Ninth Planet May Exist in Solar System Beyond Pluto, New Evidence Suggests - The New Yo... - 1 views

  • What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet
  • Rather, in a paper published Wednesday in The Astronomical Journal, Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin lay out a detailed circumstantial argument for the planet’s existence in what astronomers have observed — a half-dozen small bodies in distant, highly elliptical orbits.
  • This would be the second time that Dr. Brown has upended the map of the solar system. In January 2005, he discovered a Pluto-size object, now known as Eris, in the ring of icy debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper belt.A year and a half later, the International Astronomical Union placed Pluto in a new category, “dwarf planet,” because it had not “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”In the view of the astronomical union, a full-fledged planet must be, in essence, the gravitational bully of its orbit, and Pluto was not.
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  • “The theorists didn’t really take it seriously,” he said. “They figured it was all some observational effect. The observers didn’t take it seriously, because they figured it was all some theoretical thing they couldn’t understand.”
Lawrence Hrubes

Ceres, Pluto, and the War Over Dwarf Planets - The New Yorker - 1 views

  • Whatever the probes find, it probably won’t help untangle the tortuous reasoning that led to Pluto and Ceres being labelled as dwarf planets in the first place. That happened in 2006, a few months after New Horizons launched and about a year before Dawn did, at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, the organization that is in charge of classifying and naming celestial objects. The I.A.U. defines a dwarf planet according to four criteria: it must orbit the sun, it must be spherical, it must not be a satellite of another planet, and it must not have “cleared the neighborhood” of other objects of comparable size. Ceres has a diameter of fewer than six hundred miles, Pluto of about fourteen hundred miles. By comparison, Mercury, now the smallest official planet in our solar system, is more than three thousand miles across. So it’s not unreasonable, Stern says, to call Pluto both a planet and a dwarf, provided that one doesn’t cancel out the other. “I’m the one who originally coined the term ‘dwarf planet,’ back in the nineteen-nineties,” he told me. “I’m fine with it. But saying a dwarf planet isn’t a planet is like saying a pygmy hippopotamus isn’t a hippopotamus. It’s scientifically indefensible.”
  • Why, then, did the I.A.U. demote Pluto? As David Spergel, the head of the astrophysics department at Princeton University, explained to me, once scientists discovered the Kuiper Belt, which includes several Pluto look-alikes, and once they discovered Eris, a dead ringer for Pluto, the organization became worried about a slippery slope. If Pluto was a planet, Eris would have to be, too, along with any number of Kuiper Belt objects. Things risked getting out of hand. Fifteen or twenty or fifty planets was too many—who would be able to remember them all? That last question may sound absurd, but in a debate held last year at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Gareth Williams, the astronomer representing the I.A.U.’s position, couldn’t come up with a better argument. “You’d need a mnemonic to remember the mnemonic,” he said. “We really want to keep the number of planets low.” He lost the debate on the merits, but the demotion had already been won.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Earth - Why does time always run forwards and never backwards? - 0 views

  • Newton's laws are astonishingly successful at describing the world. They explain why apples fall from trees and why the Earth orbits the Sun. But they have an odd feature: they work just as well backwards as forwards. If an egg can break, then Newton's laws say it can un-break.This is obviously wrong, but nearly every theory that physicists have discovered since Newton has the same problem. The laws of physics simply don't care whether time runs forwards or backwards, any more than they care about whether you're left-handed or right-handed.But we certainly do. In our experience, time has an arrow, always pointing into the future. "You might mix up east and west, but you would not mix up yesterday and tomorrow," says Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But the fundamental laws of physics don't distinguish between past and future."
Lawrence Hrubes

Why Pluto Is a Planet, and Eris Is Too - 0 views

  • The International Astronomical Union (IAU) got it wrong. Our solar system has 10 planets. As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft glides its way to the cold outer reaches of our solar system to take the first-ever up-close look at Pluto, the time is right to revise the International Astronomical Union (IAU)'s 2006 definition of a planet, which resulted in Pluto's "demotion" from planet to ambiguous dwarf-planet status.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Future - Languages: Why we must save dying tongues - 1 views

  • Just as ecosystems provide a wealth of services for humanity – some known, others unacknowledged or yet to be discovered – languages, too, are ripe with possibility. They contain an accumulated body of knowledge, including about geography, zoology, mathematics, navigation, astronomy, pharmacology, botany, meteorology and more. In the case of Cherokee, that language was born of thousands of years spent inhabiting the southern Appalachia Mountains. Cherokee words exist for every last berry, stem, frond and toadstool in the region, and those names also convey what kind of properties that object might have – whether it’s edible, poisonous or has some medicinal value. “No culture has a monopoly on human genius, and we never know where the next brilliant idea may come from,” Harrison says. “We lose ancient knowledge if we lose languages.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC World Service - The Forum, A Leap of Faith: Finding common ground between Science a... - 1 views

  • The Forum @ CERN: A Leap of Faith: Finding Common Ground Between Science and Theology. Promoting a dialogue between science and religion has long been a challenging task- the two communities of thought often seem far apart. The Forum explores the challenge in a discussion recorded at CERN in Switzerland and asks not only why this dialogue is important but how it is working and where it might lead. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research where physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universeWith Bridget Kendall to discuss common ground between science and religion are:Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, a German particle physicist and the Director General of the European Organization of Nuclear Research, or CERN, since 2009.Marcelo Gleiser, Professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College who specialises in cosmology, nonlinear physics and astrobiology. Dr. Kusum Jain, a renowned Indian scholar of Jain Philosophy and Director of the Centre of Advanced Study in Philosophy at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. She has published extensively on such topics as human rights, the roots of terrorism, and bio-ethics.Monsignor Tomasz Trafny, Head of Science and Faith, Vatican City State.And there is poetry, especially written for the programme, by British poet Murray Lachlan Young.
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    This is a 41-minute broadcast from 8 Dec 2015.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Earth - Black holes made simple with Stephen Hawking - 1 views

  • Fact can be stranger than fiction. This is especially true of black holes, as Prof Stephen Hawking explains.For instance as soon as you entered the black hole, reality would split in two. "In one, you would be instantly incinerated, and in the other you would plunge on into the black hole utterly unharmed," as we have previously explored.In the 2016 Reith lectures broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Prof Hawking further examines and challenges the latest scientific thinking about black holes.
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