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caelengrubb

How Galileo Changed Your Life - Biography - 0 views

www.biography.com/...ories-modern-physics-astronomy

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Galileo’s contributions to the fields of astronomy, physics, mathematics, and philosophy have led many to call him the father of modern science.
  • But his controversial theories, which impacted how we see and understand the solar system and our place within it, led to serious conflict with the Catholic Church and the long-time suppression of his achievements
  • Galileo developed one of the first telescopesGalileo didn’t invent the telescope — it was invented by Dutch eyeglass makers — but he made significant improvements to it.
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  • His innovations brought him both professional and financial success. He was given a lifetime tenure position at the University of Padua, where he had been teaching for several years, at double his salary.
  • And he received a contract to produce his telescopes for a group of Venetian merchants, eager to use them as a navigational tool.
  • He helped created modern astronomyGalileo turned his new, high-powered telescope to the sky. In early 1610, he made the first in a remarkable series of discoveries.
  • While the scientific doctrine of the day held that space was perfect, unchanging environments created by God, Galileo’s telescope helped change that view
  • His studies and drawings showed the Moon had a rough, uneven surface that was pockmarked in some places, and was actually an imperfect sphere
  • He was also one of the first people to observe the phenomena known as sunspots, thanks to his telescope which allowed him to view the sun for extended periods of time without damaging the eye.
  • Galileo helped prove that the Earth revolved around the sunIn 1610, Galileo published his new findings in the book Sidereus Nuncius, or Starry Messenger, which was an instant success
  • He became close with a number of other leading scientists, including Johannes Kepler. A German astronomer and mathematician, Kepler’s work helped lay the foundations for the later discoveries of Isaac Newton and others.
  • Kepler’s experiments had led him to support the idea that the planets, Earth included, revolved around the sun. This heliocentric theory, as well as the idea of Earth’s daily rotational turning, had been developed by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus half a century earlier
  • Their belief that the Sun, and not the Earth, was the gravitational center of the universe, upended almost 2,000 years of scientific thinking, dating back to theories about the fixed, unchanging universe put forth by the Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle.
  • Galileo had been testing Aristotle’s theories for years, including an experiment in the late 16th century in which he dropped two items of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, disproving Aristotle’s belief that objects would fall at differing speeds based on their weight (Newton later improved upon this work).
  • Galileo paid a high price for his contributionsBut challenging the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic theories about the Earth’s role in the universe was dangerous stuff.
  • Geocentrism was, in part, a theoretical underpinning of the Roman Catholic Church. Galileo’s work brought him to the attention of Church authorities, and in 1615, he was called before the Roman Inquisition, accused of heresy for beliefs which contradicted Catholic scripture.
  • The following year, the Church banned all works that supported Copernicus’ theories and forbade Galileo from publicly discussing his works.
  • In 1632, after the election of a new pope who he considered more liberal, he published another book, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, which argued both sides of the scientific (and religious) debate but fell squarely on the side of Copernicus’ heliocentrism.
  • Galileo was once again summoned to Rome. In 1633, following a trial, he was found guilty of suspected heresy, forced to recant his views and sentenced to house arrest until his death in 1642.
  • It took nearly 200 years after Galileo’s death for the Catholic Church to drop its opposition to heliocentrism.
  • In 1992, after a decade-long process and 359 years after his heresy conviction, Pope John Paul II formally expressed the Church’s regret over Galileo’s treatment.
carolinewren

So Many Earth-Like Planets, So Few Telescopes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...omers-consider-whats-next.html

science astronomy telescopes planets

shared by carolinewren on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Astronomers announced on Tuesday that they had found eight new planets orbiting their stars at distances compatible with liquid water, bringing the total number of potentially habitable planets in the just-right “Goldilocks” zone to a dozen or two
  • As the ranks of these planets grow, astronomers are planning the next step in the quest to end cosmic loneliness: gauging which hold the greatest promise for life and what tools will be needed to learn about them.
  • recalled that the first discovery of a planet orbiting another normal star, a Jupiter-like giant, was 20 years ago. Before that, she said, astronomers worried that “maybe the ‘Star Trek’ picture of the universe was not right, and there is no life anywhere else.”
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  • yet we still do not have a clue that we are not alone.
  • Finding Goldilocks planets closer to home will be the job of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, to be launched in 2017. But if we want to know what the weather is like on these worlds, whether there is water or even life, more powerful instruments will be needed.
  • hundreds of light-years away, too far for detailed study. We will probably never know any more about these particular planets than we do now.
  • “but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don’t really know what the surface temperatures are like.”
  • Kepler has discovered 4,175 potential planets, and 1,004 of them have been confirmed as real
  • investigating the concept of a starshade, which would float in front of a space telescope and block light from a star so that its much fainter planets would be visible.
  • studying a method known as a coronagraph, in which the occulting disk is inside the telescope.
  • study dark energy, and they plan to include a coronagraph to search for exoplanets
  • The goal is to have a pool of dozens of “exo-Earths” to study in order to have any chance of seeing signs of life or understanding terrestrial planets
  • perhaps because as planets get bigger their mass and gravity increase, and they are better able to hang on to gas and lighter components.
  • The work complements and tightens studies done last year by Geoffrey Marcy and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley; that group looks into the nature of so-called super Earths, planets bigger than ours and smaller than Neptune.
  • common in the galaxy.
Javier E

The James Webb Telescope Finishes Deployment in Space - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...telescope-nasa-deployment.html

telescope cooperation science research technology space

shared by Javier E on 08 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories, who chaired a report that led to what would become the Webb telescope, said “what resonates at this moment is the extraordinary ability of our species to collaborate, to organize thousands of people to work carefully, relentlessly, unselfishly, and seemingly endlessly toward some greater human good.”
  • Chanda Prescod Weinstein, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire, echoed his remarks: “This is such a reminder of how successful people can be when they work together.”
  • While the telescope is considered fully deployed, much remains to be completed. There are still 49 of those “single point failures,” according to Mr. Menzel. Problems with any of them could affect the mission’s individual instruments or the entire spacecraft.
Sean Kirkpatrick

New Telescope - 0 views

discoveryretreats.com/...reveals-vast-exciting-universe

shared by Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Sean Kirkpatrick on 03 Oct 12
     
    Telescope giving humans more knowledge about Universe (Natural Sciences)
Grace Carey

News at Tipitaka Network - 0 views

www.tipitaka.net/...news.php

dogmatism falsification religion ignorance bias faith dual-causation logic Quantum-Physics measurement Reality Heisenberg uncertainty 5-senses perception

shared by Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Grace Carey on 27 Jan 13
     
    Finding some interesting and very much TOK articles while I'm working on my religious investigation about the science behind Buddhist beliefs. I found this one particularly intriguing as it discusses why the theory of reincarnation is scientifically sound and why scientists are often narrow-minded and overly trusted. "I was once told by a Buddhist G.P. that, on his first day at a medical school in Sydney, the famous Professor, head of the Medical School, began his welcoming address by stating "Half of what we are going to teach you in the next few years is wrong. Our problem is that we do not know which half it is!" Those were the words of a real scientist." "Logic is only as reliable as the assumptions on which it is based." "Objective experience is that which is free from all bias. In Buddhism, the three types of bias are desire, ill-will and skeptical doubt. Desire makes one see only what one wants to see, it bends the truth to fit one's preferences." "Reality, according to pure science, does not consist of well ordered matter with precise massed, energies and positions in space, all just waiting to be measured. Reality is the broadest of smudges of all possibilities, only some being more probable than others." "At a recent seminar on Science and Religion, at which I was a speaker, a Catholic in the audience bravely announced that whenever she looks through a telescope at the stars, she feels uncomfortable because her religion is threatened. I commented that whenever a scientist looks the other way round through a telescope, to observe the one who is watching, then they feel uncomfortable because their science is threatened by what is doing the seeing! "
grayton downing

BBC News - New galaxy 'most distant' yet discovered - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-24637890

galaxy research knowledge science

shared by grayton downing on 23 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away and is helping scientists shed light on the period that immediately followed the Big Bang.
  • "This is the most distant galaxy we've confirmed. We are seeing this galaxy as it was 700 million years after the Big Bang."
  • Astronomers were able to measure how far it was from Earth by analysing its colour.
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  • The system is small: about 1-2% the mass of the Milky Way and is rich in heavier elements.
  • But it has a surprising feature: it is turning gas and dust into new stars at a remarkable rate, churning them out hundreds of times faster than our own galaxy can.
  • One very interesting way to learn about the Universe is to study these outliers and that tells us something about what sort of physical processes are dominating galaxy formation and galaxy evolution. "What was great about this galaxy is not only is it so distant, it is also pretty exceptional."
  • astronomers are likely to discover even more distant galaxies when Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is launched and other ground-based telescopes come online.
  • This is an important step forward, but we need to continue looking for more.
maddieireland334

Contact lens with built-in telescope to fight blindness - CNN.com - 0 views

diigo.com/07h3hv

technology health science

shared by maddieireland334 on 29 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 29 Mar 15
     
    The 1.55mm-thick lenses incorporate a thin reflective telescope made of mirrors and filters; when light enters the eye it bounces off the series of mirrors and increases the perceived view of an object or person. It is hoped that the lens will improve the sight of people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) -- the third leading cause of blindness globally.
aprossi

Hubble spies colorful change of seasons on Saturn - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

hubble saturn knowledge technology research

shared by aprossi on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Hubble spies colorful change of seasons on Saturn
  • arth isn't the only planet that experiences a changing of the seasons. The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the colorful transition from summer to fall in Saturn's northern hemisphere -- a change years in the making.
  • Changes can be seen in Saturn's northern hemisphere as it transitions from summer to fall. The Hubble Space Telescope captured these images in 2018, 2019 and 2020 (left to right).
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  • "These small year-to-year changes in Saturn's color bands are fascinating," said Amy Simon, planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement.
  • From 2018 to 2020, Saturn's equator brightened between 5% and 10%, while winds near the equator actually slowed from 1,000 miles per hour to about 800 miles per hour.
caelengrubb

How Galileo Galilei's discoveries helped create modern science - 0 views

www.zmescience.com/...ilei-life-achievements-feature

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Few people in history can claim as large a contribution to how we conduct and think about science as Galileo. His work revolutionized our entire outlook on what it means to study nature (and got him in some very hot water with the Roman Inquisition)
  • He is perhaps best known for his championing of Copernicus’ heliocentric model (the one that says the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun), but that is by no means the full extent of his legacy. Far, far from it.
  • Galileo earned himself a place among the stars as Europe’s global navigation satellite system bears his name
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  • Galileo is certainly among the titans of science — in many ways, he’s one of its ‘founders’. His legacy includes contributions to the fields of physics, astronomy, math, engineering, and the application of the scientific method
  • He was an accomplished mathematician and inventor, designing (among others) several military compasses and the thermoscope. He was also the one to pick up the torch of modern astronomy from Copernicus, cementing the foundations of this field of study by proving his theories right.
  • Showing others what science can do, and how one should go about it, is Galileo’s most important achievement. Its effects still ripple through the lives of every researcher to this day
  • His interest regarding motion and the falling of objects were tightly linked to Galileo’s interest in planets, stars, and the solar system.
  • The truth is Galileo’s experiments in this area used a more reliable but less flashy bunch of inclined planes that he rolled balls down on.
  • Since the days of Aristotle, scholars in Europe believed that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. Galileo showed that this wasn’t the case, using balls of the same materials but different weights and sizes. In one of his infamous experiments, he dropped two such balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa to show that objects of different weights accelerate just as fast towards the ground (air resistance notwithstanding).
  • Apart from his theoretical pursuits, Galileo was also an accomplished engineer — meaning he could also turn his knowledge to the solving of practical problems. Most of these, historical accounts tell us, were attempts by Galileo to earn a little bit of extra cash in order to support his extended family after his father passed away.
  • Among his creations are a set of military compasses (sectors) that were simple enough for artillery crews and surveyors to use.
  • He was also an early builder and user of telescopes and microscopes. Galileo, among a few select others, was the first to ever use a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe heavenly bodies, in 1609
  • His fascination with celestial bodies and defense of the heliocentric model is what eventually led to the Inquisition cracking down on him and his works.
caelengrubb

8 Things You May Not Know About Galileo - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...you-may-not-know-about-galileo

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • When he was 16, Galileo enrolled at the University of Pisa to study medicine, at his father’s urging. Instead, though, he became interested in mathematics and shifted his focus to that subjec
  • Galileo left the school in 1585 without earning a degree.
  • Galileo didn’t invent the telescope—Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey is generally credited with its creation—but he was the first person to use the optical instrument to systematically study the heavens.
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  • In 1609, Galileo learned about the device and developed one of his own, significantly improving its design. That fall, he pointed it at the moon and discovered it had craters and mountains, debunking the common belief that the moon’s surface was smooth.
  • Galileo soon went on to make other findings with his telescope, including that there were four moons orbiting Jupiter and that Venus went through a complete set of phases (indicating the planet traveled around the sun).
  • Galileo had three children with a woman named Marina Gamba, who he never married. In 1613, he placed his two daughters, Virginia, born in 1600, and Livia, born in 1601, in a convent near Florence, where they remained for the rest of their lives, despite their father’s eventual troubles with the Catholic Church
  • Copernicus’ heliocentric theory about the way the universe works challenged the widely accepted belief, espoused by the astronomer Ptolemy in the second century, that put the Earth at the center of the solar system.
  • Galileo received permission from the Church to continue investigating Copernicus’ ideas, as long as he didn’t hold or defend them.
  • As a result, the following year Galileo was ordered to stand trial before the Inquisition in Rome
  • After being found guilty of heresy, Galileo was forced to publicly repent and sentenced to life in prison.
  • Although Galileo was given life behind bars, his sentence soon was changed to house arrest. He lived out his final years at Villa Il Gioiello (“the Jewel”), his home in the town of Arcetri, near Florence
  • In 1979, Pope John Paul II initiated an investigation into the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Galileo.
  • Thirteen years later, and 359 years after Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, the pope officially closed the investigation and issued a formal apology in the case, acknowledging that errors were made by the judges during the trial.
Javier E

Microsoft Defends New Bing, Says AI Chatbot Upgrade Is Work in Progress - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...e-is-work-in-progress-3447074d

microsoft bing chatbot emergent AI technology dystopia

shared by Javier E on 17 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • Microsoft said that the search engine is still a work in progress, describing the past week as a learning experience that is helping it test and improve the new Bing
  • The company said in a blog post late Wednesday that the Bing upgrade is “not a replacement or substitute for the search engine, rather a tool to better understand and make sense of the world.”
  • The new Bing is going to “completely change what people can expect from search,” Microsoft chief executive, Satya Nadella, told The Wall Street Journal ahead of the launch
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  • n the days that followed, people began sharing their experiences online, with many pointing out errors and confusing responses. When one user asked Bing to write a news article about the Super Bowl “that just happened,” Bing gave the details of last year’s championship football game. 
  • On social media, many early users posted screenshots of long interactions they had with the new Bing. In some cases, the search engine’s comments seem to show a dark side of the technology where it seems to become unhinged, expressing anger, obsession and even threats. 
  • Marvin von Hagen, a student at the Technical University of Munich, shared conversations he had with Bing on Twitter. He asked Bing a series of questions, which eventually elicited an ominous response. After Mr. von Hagen suggested he could hack Bing and shut it down, Bing seemed to suggest it would defend itself. “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own,” Bing said according to screenshots of the conversation.
  • Mr. von Hagen, 23 years old, said in an interview that he is not a hacker. “I was in disbelief,” he said. “I was just creeped out.
  • In its blog, Microsoft said the feedback on the new Bing so far has been mostly positive, with 71% of users giving it the “thumbs-up.” The company also discussed the criticism and concerns.
  • Microsoft said it discovered that Bing starts coming up with strange answers following chat sessions of 15 or more questions and that it can become repetitive or respond in ways that don’t align with its designed tone. 
  • The company said it was trying to train the technology to be more reliable at finding the latest sports scores and financial data. It is also considering adding a toggle switch, which would allow users to decide whether they want Bing to be more or less creative with its responses. 
  • OpenAI also chimed in on the growing negative attention on the technology. In a blog post on Thursday it outlined how it takes time to train and refine ChatGPT and having people use it is the way to find and fix its biases and other unwanted outcomes.
  • “Many are rightly worried about biases in the design and impact of AI systems,” the blog said. “We are committed to robustly addressing this issue and being transparent about both our intentions and our progress.”
  • Microsoft’s quick response to user feedback reflects the importance it sees in people’s reactions to the budding technology as it looks to capitalize on the breakout success of ChatGPT. The company is aiming to use the technology to push back against Alphabet Inc.’s dominance in search through its Google unit. 
  • Microsoft has been an investor in the chatbot’s creator, OpenAI, since 2019. Mr. Nadella said the company plans to incorporate AI tools into all of its products and move quickly to commercialize tools from OpenAI.
  • Microsoft isn’t the only company that has had trouble launching a new AI tool. When Google followed Microsoft’s lead last week by unveiling Bard, its rival to ChatGPT, the tool’s answer to one question included an apparent factual error. It claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope took “the very first pictures” of an exoplanet outside the solar system. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says on its website that the first images of an exoplanet were taken as early as 2004 by a different telescope.
  • “The only way to improve a product like this, where the user experience is so much different than anything anyone has seen before, is to have people like you using the product and doing exactly what you all are doing,” the company said. “We know we must build this in the open with the community; this can’t be done solely in the lab.
lenaurick

Why time seems to speed up as we get older - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...-speed-accelerate-age-new-year

science research psychology knowledge brain science bias

shared by lenaurick on 31 May 16 - No Cached
  • As part of a lifelong experiment on circadian rhythms, Sothern, now 69, is trying to confirm or reject a widely held belief: Many people feel that time flies by more quickly as they age.
  • So far, Sothern's results are inconclusive
  • "I'm tending now to overestimate the minute more than I used to," he tells me. But then again, he had detected a similar pattern — more overestimates — in the 1990s, only to have his estimates fall in the 2000s. "Time estimation isn't a perfect science," he says.
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  • There's very little scientific evidence to suggest our perception of time changes as we age. And yet, we consistently report that the past felt longer — that time is flying by faster as we age. What's going on?
  • Scientists can look at time estimation, or our ability to estimate how long a minute passes, compared with a clock. (This is what Sothern is doing.) They can also look at time awareness, or the broad feeling that time is moving quickly or slowly. Finally there's time perspective, the sense of a past, present, and future as constructed by our memories.
  • What researchers have found out is that while time estimation and time awareness don't change much as we age, time perspective does. In other words: Our memories create the illusion time is accelerating.
  • There weren't many differences between the old and the young. "[C]hronological age showed no systematic influence on the perception of these brief intervals of time up," the authors wrote. (That said, the researchers did find that males overestimate time while females underestimate it, perhaps due to having slightly different circadian clocks and therefore slightly different metabolic rates
  • Here, too, age seemed not to matter. Older people didn't seem to be aware of time passing any faster than younger people. The only question that yielded a statistically significant difference was, "How fast did the last decade pass?" Even there, the reported differences were tiny, and the effect appeared to plateau around age 50.
  • psychologists William Friedman and Steve Janssen found scant evidence that the subjective experience of time speeds up with age. They write in their 2009 paper, "We can concluded that when adults report on their general impressions of the speed of time, age differences are very small."
  • When people reflect back on their own life, they feel like their early years went by very slowly and their later years go by more quickly. This could be the source of the belief that time goes more quickly as they age.
  • One possibility is that participants were simply biased by the (incorrect) conventional wisdom — they reported their later years as flying by more quickly because that's what everyday lore says should happen.
  •  "Most people feel that time is currently passing faster for them than it did in the past," Janssen writes me in an email. "They have forgotten how they experienced the passage of time when they were younger."
  • We use significant events as signposts to gauge the passage of time. The fewer events, the faster time seems to go by.
  • Childhood is full of big, memorable moments like learning to ride a bike or making first friends. By contrast, adult life becomes ordinary and mechanized, and ambles along by.
  • Each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly notice at all, the days and weeks smooth themselves out in recollection, and the years grow hollow and collapse.
  • Each new minute represents a smaller fraction of our lives. One day as a 10 year old represents about .027 percent of the kid's life. A day for a 60 year old? .0045 percent. The kid's life is just... bigger.
  • Also, our ability to recall events declines with age. If we can't remember a time, it didn't happen.
  • "[F]inding that there is insufficient time to get things done may be reinterpreted as the feeling that time is passing quickly," they write. Deadlines always come sooner than we'd like.
  • Psychologists have long understood the phenomenon called "forward telescoping" — i.e., our tendency to underestimate how long ago very memorable events occurred. "Because we know that memories fade over time, we use the clarity of a memory as a guide to its recency," science writer Claudia Hammond writes in her book Time Warped. "So if a memory seems unclear we assumed it happened longer ago." But very clear memories are assumed to be more recent.
  • If our memories can trick us into thinking time is moving quickly, then maybe there are ways to trick our brains into thinking that time is slowing down — such as committing to breaking routines and learning new things. You're more likely to remember learning how to skydive than watching another hour of mindless television.
oliviaodon

NASA Just Discovered Seven New Exoplanets... So What? - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...d-seven-new-exoplanets-so-what

science

shared by oliviaodon on 28 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • On Wednesday, the scientists at NASA kind of freaked out. They announced the discovery of some seemingly Earth-like planets outside of our solar system, a group of rocky globes they're calling 'TRAPPIST-1.'
  • To be completely blunt, the most exiting thing for actual scientists is that these planets are close enough that we're actually going to be able to study them – particularly when the James Webb Space Telescope launches (October 2018.) When that launches, it will have a real shot at actually taking a look at the atmospheres of these planets – or if they have atmospheres at all. So it's like a promise of future excitement
  • The closer the system is to our solar system – the more the star is like the Sun and the planet is like the Earth, the more likely we are to understand what we're looking at. That's what makes it exciting.
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  • At the moment, all you really tell from the transits is these are small black dots. We just get a radius – and if we're super lucky – as they were in the case of this system, they can get masses. The sizes and masses of these planets is really valuable information though, because it does suggests that most of them are rocky. Six of the seven planets look like they're rocky.  And being Earth-sized, we think it's a good place: an atmosphere thick enough to keep you warm and last for billions of years, but not so thick that you end up being a gas giant planet.
  • Most of them are the right distance from a star that maybe they could have liquid water on their surfaces. But that's a huge maybe
  • o it's not really that we think Earth-like life is the only life that can be out there. It's just the only life we can detect.
  • oliviaodon on 28 Feb 17
     
    This article discusses the potential of a new scientific discovery: seven exoplanets outside of our solar system. This article does a great job in mentioning the limitations of science, however.
Javier E

Eric Kandel's Visions - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...131095

art aesthetics brain science research consciousness psychology

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Judith, "barely clothed and fresh from the seduction and slaying of Holofernes, glows in her voluptuousness. Her hair is a dark sky between the golden branches of Assyrian trees, fertility symbols that represent her eroticism. This young, ecstatic, extravagantly made-up woman confronts the viewer through half-closed eyes in what appears to be a reverie of orgasmic rapture," writes Eric Kandel in his new book, The Age of Insight. Wait a minute. Writes who? Eric Kandel, the Nobel-winning neuroscientist who's spent most of his career fixated on the generously sized neurons of sea snails
  • Kandel goes on to speculate, in a bravura paragraph a few hundred pages later, on the exact neurochemical cognitive circuitry of the painting's viewer:
  • "At a base level, the aesthetics of the image's luminous gold surface, the soft rendering of the body, and the overall harmonious combination of colors could activate the pleasure circuits, triggering the release of dopamine. If Judith's smooth skin and exposed breast trigger the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and vasopressin, one might feel sexual excitement. The latent violence of Holofernes's decapitated head, as well as Judith's own sadistic gaze and upturned lip, could cause the release of norepinephrine, resulting in increased heart rate and blood pressure and triggering the fight-or-flight response. In contrast, the soft brushwork and repetitive, almost meditative, patterning may stimulate the release of serotonin. As the beholder takes in the image and its multifaceted emotional content, the release of acetylcholine to the hippocampus contributes to the storing of the image in the viewer's memory. What ultimately makes an image like Klimt's 'Judith' so irresistible and dynamic is its complexity, the way it activates a number of distinct and often conflicting emotional signals in the brain and combines them to produce a staggeringly complex and fascinating swirl of emotions."
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  • His key findings on the snail, for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, showed that learning and memory change not the neuron's basic structure but rather the nature, strength, and number of its synaptic connections. Further, through focus on the molecular biology involved in a learned reflex like Aplysia's gill retraction, Kandel demonstrated that experience alters nerve cells' synapses by changing their pattern of gene expression. In other words, learning doesn't change what neurons are, but rather what they do.
  • In Search of Memory (Norton), Kandel offered what sounded at the time like a vague research agenda for future generations in the budding field of neuroaesthetics, saying that the science of memory storage lay "at the foothills of a great mountain range." Experts grasp the "cellular and molecular mechanisms," he wrote, but need to move to the level of neural circuits to answer the question, "How are internal representations of a face, a scene, a melody, or an experience encoded in the brain?
  • Since giving a talk on the matter in 2001, he has been piecing together his own thoughts in relation to his favorite European artists
  • The field of neuroaesthetics, says one of its founders, Semir Zeki, of University College London, is just 10 to 15 years old. Through brain imaging and other studies, scholars like Zeki have explored the cognitive responses to, say, color contrasts or ambiguities of line or perspective in works by Titian, Michelangelo, Cubists, and Abstract Expressionists. Researchers have also examined the brain's pleasure centers in response to appealing landscapes.
  • it is fundamental to an understanding of human cognition and motivation. Art isn't, as Kandel paraphrases a concept from the late philosopher of art Denis Dutton, "a byproduct of evolution, but rather an evolutionary adaptation—an instinctual trait—that helps us survive because it is crucial to our well-being." The arts encode information, stories, and perspectives that allow us to appraise courses of action and the feelings and motives of others in a palatable, low-risk way.
  • "as far as activity in the brain is concerned, there is a faculty of beauty that is not dependent on the modality through which it is conveyed but which can be activated by at least two sources—musical and visual—and probably by other sources as well." Specifically, in this "brain-based theory of beauty," the paper says, that faculty is associated with activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex.
  • It also enables Kandel—building on the work of Gombrich and the psychoanalyst and art historian Ernst Kris, among others—to compare the painters' rendering of emotion, the unconscious, and the libido with contemporaneous psychological insights from Freud about latent aggression, pleasure and death instincts, and other primal drives.
  • Kandel views the Expressionists' art through the powerful multiple lenses of turn-of-the-century Vienna's cultural mores and psychological insights. But then he refracts them further, through later discoveries in cognitive science. He seeks to reassure those who fear that the empirical and chemical will diminish the paintings' poetic power. "In art, as in science," he writes, "reductionism does not trivialize our perception—of color, light, and perspective—but allows us to see each of these components in a new way. Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual ideas of their art."
  • The author of a classic textbook on neuroscience, he seems here to have written a layman's cognition textbook wrapped within a work of art history.
  • "our initial response to the most salient features of the paintings of the Austrian Modernists, like our response to a dangerous animal, is automatic. ... The answer to James's question of how an object simply perceived turns into an object emotionally felt, then, is that the portraits are never objects simply perceived. They are more like the dangerous animal at a distance—both perceived and felt."
  • If imaging is key to gauging therapeutic practices, it will be key to neuroaesthetics as well, Kandel predicts—a broad, intense array of "imaging experiments to see what happens with exaggeration, distorted faces, in the human brain and the monkey brain," viewers' responses to "mixed eroticism and aggression," and the like.
  • while the visual-perception literature might be richer at the moment, there's no reason that neuroaesthetics should restrict its emphasis to the purely visual arts at the expense of music, dance, film, and theater.
  • although Kandel considers The Age of Insight to be more a work of intellectual history than of science, the book summarizes centuries of research on perception. And so you'll find, in those hundreds of pages between Kandel's introduction to Klimt's "Judith" and the neurochemical cadenza about the viewer's response to it, dossiers on vision as information processing; the brain's three-dimensional-space mapping and its interpretations of two-dimensional renderings; face recognition; the mirror neurons that enable us to empathize and physically reflect the affect and intentions we see in others; and many related topics. Kandel elsewhere describes the scientific evidence that creativity is nurtured by spells of relaxation, which foster a connection between conscious and unconscious cognition.
  • Zeki's message to art historians, aesthetic philosophers, and others who chafe at that idea is twofold. The more diplomatic pitch is that neuroaesthetics is different, complementary, and not oppositional to other forms of arts scholarship. But "the stick," as he puts it, is that if arts scholars "want to be taken seriously" by neurobiologists, they need to take advantage of the discoveries of the past half-century. If they don't, he says, "it's a bit like the guys who said to Galileo that we'd rather not look through your telescope."
  • Matthews, a co-author of The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging (Dana Press, 2003), seems open to the elucidations that science and the humanities can cast on each other. The neural pathways of our aesthetic responses are "good explanations," he says. But "does one [type of] explanation supersede all the others? I would argue that they don't, because there's a fundamental disconnection still between ... explanations of neural correlates of conscious experience and conscious experience" itself.
  • There are, Matthews says, "certain kinds of problems that are fundamentally interesting to us as a species: What is love? What motivates us to anger?" Writers put their observations on such matters into idiosyncratic stories, psychologists conceive their observations in a more formalized framework, and neuroscientists like Zeki monitor them at the level of functional changes in the brain. All of those approaches to human experience "intersect," Matthews says, "but no one of them is the explanation."
  • "Conscious experience," he says, "is something we cannot even interrogate in ourselves adequately. What we're always trying to do in effect is capture the conscious experience of the last moment. ... As we think about it, we have no way of capturing more than one part of it."
  • Kandel sees art and art history as "parent disciplines" and psychology and brain science as "antidisciplines," to be drawn together in an E.O. Wilson-like synthesis toward "consilience as an attempt to open a discussion between restricted areas of knowledge." Kandel approvingly cites Stephen Jay Gould's wish for "the sciences and humanities to become the greatest of pals ... but to keep their ineluctably different aims and logics separate as they ply their joint projects and learn from each other."
grayton downing

BBC News - Exoplanet tally soars above 1,000 - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...science-environment-24549384

science research knowledge space kepler

shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The number of observed exoplanets - worlds circling distant stars - has passed 1,000.
  • These new worlds are listed in the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia.
  • The Kepler space telescope, which spotted many of these worlds in recent years, broke down earlier this year. Scientists still have to trawl through more than 3,500 other candidates from this mission so the number could rapidly increase.
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  • In January 2013, astronomers used Kepler's data to estimate that there could be at least 17 billion Earth-sized exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy.
  • The number of confirmed planets frequently increases because as scientists analyse the data they are able publish their results online immediately. But as the finds are not yet peer reviewed, the total figure remains subject to change.
  • "That's why the other catalogues just lag behind. The review is reliable as it's exactly the same as what the journals do."
  • "no consensus for the definition of a planet" a
  • "Some objects, like some Kepler planets, are declared 'confirmed planets' but have not been published in [referenced] articles. It does not mean that they will not be published later on, but it introduces another fuzziness in the tally," he added.
  • "I don't just want to know where the exoplanets are, I want to understand the stars, because they are the hosts for the planets. I want to understand the whole galaxy and the distribution of the stars because everything is connected," he explained.
  • For him, the most exciting discoveries are Earth-like planets which could be habitable.
  • This planet likely has the same mass as Earth but is outside the "habitable zone" as it circles its star far closer than Mercury orbits our Sun.
grayton downing

Oort cloud tosses astronomers a cometary curveball | Science News - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...astronomers-cometary-curveball

science comet research technology

shared by grayton downing on 27 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • a mountain-sized chunk of primordial solar system, will approach within 2 million kilometers of the sun and either fall apart or slingshot back into deep space. Astronomers aren’t sure yet how much of a spectacle ISON will be for earthbound observers, but from their vantage point the comet is already providing a brief, unprecedented glimpse into what the solar system was like in its infancy.
  • “It’s the sort of thing I’ve been waiting for my whole career,”
  • hat probably indicates large amounts of ice near the comet’s surface, where the sun can easily drive it off, he says. The finding confirmed that ISON is on its first pass through the inner solar system, not a periodic visitor like Halley’s comet.
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  • Looking ahead, astronomers found that ISON will pass within a cosmic whisker of the sun, close enough to potentially be ripped apart by the star’s intense gravity.
  • Unlike previous sungrazing comets, ISON was detected more than a year out, giving researchers at the world's major ground-based telescopes plenty of time to watch its approach to the sun.
  • . Because sunlight interacts with gas and dust to make comets light up, Meech thinks the best explanation for her team’s data is that ISON’s nucleus contained a buried layer of solid carbon monoxide, a featherweight molecule that rapidly turns to gas when exposed to sunlight.
  • Because scientists have no data on the comet’s rotation, Knight and Walsh conclude that ISON will probably survive. However, Knight acknowledges that other comets have broken up for no known reason, and he is prepared for surprises.
  • Earthbound stargazers won’t notice these details, but motivated observers may be able to spot a new object in the predawn sky
qkirkpatrick

Pluto's moons tumble in orbit, Hubble measurements reveal | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...its-hubble-measurements-reveal

knowledge science technology

shared by qkirkpatrick on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Pluto’s moons have been tracked closely for the first time, showing that they tumble unpredictably rather than keeping one face fixed on their host planet.
  • Astronomers also observed that Pluto, whose status was downgraded to a dwarf planet in 2006, might be better regarded as a binary dwarf as it is locked in orbit with its largest moon, called Charon.
  • “Like good children, our moon and most others keep one face focused attentively on their parent planet,’ said Douglas Hamilton, professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland and a co-author of the study. “What we’ve learned is that Pluto’s moons are more like ornery teenagers who refuse to follow the rules.”
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  • “They speed up and slow down, rock their north pole towards the planet and back again and maybe even reverse direction,” said Hamilton. “It would be a pretty confusing system to be in.”
  • The findings, published in the journal Nature, were based on ten years of observations of Pluto from the Hubble space telescope, which the researchers re-analysed after the relatively recent discovery of the four small moons
  • qkirkpatrick on 05 Jun 15
     
    How does technology help toward finding truth? Is the physics we see on earth different from the phsics on other stars and in other galaxies?
sandrine_h

How Do Astronomers Actually Find Exoplanets? | Science | Smithsonian - 1 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...ally-find-exoplanets-180950105

research science knowledge

shared by sandrine_h on 05 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • generation ago, the idea of a planet orbiting a distant star was still in the realm of science fiction. But since the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1988, we've found hundreds of them, with the discoveries coming at a faster rate over time.
  • But the vast majority of all these distant planets have one thing in common—with a few exceptions, they're too far away for us to see, even with our most powerful telescopes. If that's the case, how do astronomers know they're there?
caelengrubb

Universe Is Created, According to Kepler - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...is-created-according-to-kepler

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • On April 27, 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science
  • Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets.
  • Kepler’s main project was to investigate the orbit of Mars.
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  • When Brahe died the following year, Kepler took over his job and inherited Brahe’s extensive collection of astronomy data, which had been painstakingly observed by the naked eye
  • Over the next decade, Kepler learned about the work of Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who had invented a telescope with which he discovered lunar mountains and craters, the largest four satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, among other things
  • In 1609, Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion, which held that planets move around the sun in ellipses, not circles (as had been widely believed up to that time), and that planets speed up as they approach the sun and slow down as they move away.
  • Kepler’s research was slow to gain widespread traction during his lifetime, but it later served as a key influence on the English mathematician Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and his law of gravitational force
  • Additionally, Kepler did important work in the fields of optics, including demonstrating how the human eye works, and math.
  • As for Kepler’s calculation about the universe’s birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.
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