August 7, 2022
"We Earthlings lug around a very long and daunting list of Things We Don’t Know. The new telescope can chip away at them..."
"The fact that there are so many unknowns should not be confused with the silly notion that we don’t know anything at all. [That] is not an intellectual argument so much as a moral one, a kind of chastisement for arrogating to ourselves the belief that we can understand our physical reality.
Hogwash. If you lived a few centuries ago and asked an astronomer how many light-years distant is the Andromeda Galaxy, the answer might be 'What’s a light-year?' (and also 'What’s a galaxy?')... Maybe one reason it is so hard to understand some of the fundamental features of the universe is that it’s outrageous on its face. It is packed with untold trillions of stars and galaxies and planets and moons.... If the universe were much simpler — just a lot of hydrogen and helium floating around — it wouldn’t be as inscrutable. It would be just a big, boring gasbag.... Maybe someday we’ll figure out gravity, cosmic destiny and life on other worlds, but for now let’s just remember that we’re making progress on the great unknowns...."
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54 comments:
What was before the Big Bang?
"it’s capturing some of the first light emitted after the big bang"
At what price per photon? What is the interest on the additional debt incurred to do this now?
what are these "wonders"?
if they're So Wonderful; why do they pretend that the photoshopped sausages they show us are "astronomy"?
The new telescope compounds what we know, don't know, cannot know, and infer from a liberal pool of assumptions, assertions, and axiomatic beliefs that are consistent with signals of unknown fidelity and origin recorded from outside of of a limited frame of reference that is considered in scientific philosophy and practice.
<>The new telescope can chip away at them...<>
Chip away?? It's easier to slice chorizo.
The more interesting things aren't on a list of unknowns, they are the unknown unknowns.
"We Earthlings lug around a very long and daunting list of Things We Don’t Know. The new telescope can chip away at them..."
Sounds like hint for the WaPo staffers to churn out a "What You Need To Know About The Universe" article.
1) It's big ...
One does not "lug around" unknowns. Once you have a body of knowledge, that can be lugged around--even if half, or more, turns out to be untrue, it's still heavy. Man.
The "big bang" theory bears a litany of missing past, present, and progressive links to known states and processes. WaPoo!
BS.
Yo, Sebastian—the computer you type your snark on is the result of the spending on the original Moon shots. The FitBit you wear on your wrist would never have existed as soon as it did without the scientific achievements necessary to produce wonders like the Webb telescope. You live in an age of ease and information directly due to the efforts and yes, the expenditure of billions, on scientists who do more for you than you'll ever know or appreciate.
Idiot.
The Vault Dweller said...
The more interesting things aren't on a list of unknowns, they are the unknown unknowns.
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How can anyone be interested in unknowns we don't even know of?
"Ignorance is bliss"---but is it interesting?
First figure out a unified field theory, then I'll listen...
n.n said...
The new telescope compounds what we know, don't know, cannot know, and infer from a liberal pool of assumptions, assertions, and axiomatic beliefs that are consistent with signals of unknown fidelity and origin recorded from outside of of a limited frame of reference that is considered in scientific philosophy and practice.
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Can you point us to any UNlimited frames of reference?
What is a signal's "fidelity"? What makes a signal's fidelity "unknown" if we can measure its strength and wavelength, observe the structures it comes from, and and compare them with "signals" we can produce here on Earth, such as emission/absorption spectra?
Should we just stop trying to do science? After all, according to you we are merely compounding our ignorance.
Are you arguing we should have stopped compounding our ignorance before it yielded up computers, the Internet and telecommunications satellites?
We could have built a dozen walls around the entire USA for the money that was spended on the Webb Hubble telescope.
Blogger Jupiter said...
"BS."
What part is BS?
"At what price per photon?"
Pretty damn low. See, when you divide almost any number by a really, really large number you get, well, … the rest is left as an exercise.
Who says we can know nothing? Throw some strawmans around and claim someone else isn't making an intellectual argument.
Science was more engaging when people of faith practiced it.
Howard, we could have built those same dozen walls with the money we're spending on virtually useless wind turbines and solar panels. Priorities.
Is not a classic philosophical thing, duality? I think there’s a misunderstanding here.
The images we see from this telescope are artificially colored, because it collects mostly infrared light that humans can't see. Unfortunately it won't last long as it has zero protection from objects in space.
it expands our understanding, and makes the notion, that we are anything but a speck in the universe, so much clearer
Richard said...
What was before the Big Bang?
oh i Know! I KNOW!!
in the beginning, all was without form, and void.. Which sounds kinda scary; but ALSO!
in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So, there's That!
'We could have built a dozen walls around the entire USA for the money that was spended on the Webb Hubble telescope.'
It doesn't matter, moron.
We could just print the money.
Budgets mean nothing.
I agree...but two dozen walls would be preferable...
Blogger Stan Smith said...
the computer you type your snark on is the result of the spending on the original Moon shots.
That's Sure What THEY SAY.. And WHO AM I to question them..
BUT which (REALLY) had more to do with computer development?
The Apollo Program? Or the Minuteman Program?
Hints. Program bought more IC's? For WHICH program were IC's even created?
Are all the children in America fed? All housed? All have fine schooling?
Then we can't afford fancy cameras for our Outer Space Instagram Page.
If Jeff Bezos and the rest of the Davos billionaires can afford to buy spaceships, they can fund NASA's Instagram page.
Buckwheathikes said...
"Are all the children in America fed? All housed? All have fine schooling?"
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They are not fucking CAMERAS, you yahoo.
Your impossible criteria for doing science would never be met by any freakin' country in history.
Jebus. You're denser than a black hole.
Stan: "the scientific achievements necessary to produce wonders like the Webb telescope"
I greatly appreciate the achievements necessary to produce the telescope. My question was about the benefit of the building and use of the telescope itself, relative to the cost. If the achievements involved that actually enhance human well-being were produced only thanks to the investments in the Webb project, let's hear more about the causal connection: Webb did this, Webb did that. I doubt FitBit fits.
But since we are talking science, what is the scientific value of "capturing some of the first light emitted after the big bang"? What specific hypotheses does it confirm or refute? Not meant as snark.
I am old enough to remember the rationalizations for the moon landing. I liked getting there, but the rationalizations about the supposed payoffs were always BS. Same thing with the space station: what did we get for the tens of billions spent?
The Webb telescope is a wonder. My question is about its relative value--relative to cost, relative to other things we could be doing with the money. It's interesting that just the question triggers immediate indignation.
"Are all the children in America fed? All housed? All have fine schooling?"
Yeah, cuz all those problems would be solved if we just threw more money at them.
We had computers and transistor radios in the 50's. Once transistors were implemented in silicon, the rest was, so to speak, an exercise for the reader. The problem of building integrated circuits is partly the problem of drawing fine lines on a substrate. The density of elements increases as the square of the thickness of fine features that make them up. The cost of integrated circuits is directly related to the cost of drawing the fine lines; whereas the benefit improves as the square of the cost.
So as long as the effort between succeeding generations of lithography is more or less linear wrt scale, there's more dependency on geometry and less dependence on the largesse of the gov't toward the space race wrt the development of the electronics industry than is generally credited.
Now Tang. There's something we probably would have had to live without.
B said...
The images we see from this telescope are artificially colored, because it collects mostly infrared light that humans can't see. Unfortunately it won't last long as it has zero protection from objects in space.
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Not so. NO satellite, no Space State, NO shuttle has any protection from objects in space.
The Webb has already been hit by one micro-meteor, a rare event, and it's still working fine. It has a great deal of redundancy built in.
The Hubble's been up there for twenty years, also "unprotected". It's still going strong. Ditto the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Ditto the ISS.
Visible-spectrum images from Hubble are also colorized to illuminate the different ionized elements and compounds creating the photos detected on the images. H2,He, O2, CO2, N2, etc.
Again, the images are not just snapshots.
Infiniti isn't a possibility apparently, only a finite start such as a Big Bang.
you have 2 programs.. One is Classified Top Secret; the other is on the front page of Time Mag
Which one gets the credit for advancing science? The only one that can be talked about.
"What was before the Big Bang?"
Not known, but many theorize a previous universe existed, itself the result of a previous Big Bang, (one of countless Big Bangs over an eternity of time). Each universe is born, expands, stops expanding, begins to contract, and, in the fullness of time, collapses back into an infinite point of nothingness, from which a new Big Bang occurs.
Sometimes I just go with the Professor’s summary for my knowledge base expansion on her chosen topic. Other times I’ll click through and read. This time was a bit of a hybrid. I clicked over and read as much as I could before the author sort of lost me.
The subject matter is extremely dear to me as an amateur astronomer (14” tracking Newtonian, 8” manual Alt/Az Newtownian and a “grab and go” 130mm refractor). I’ve seen every significant object in our solar system that the limits of my telescope allow; all the major planets as well as several dwarf’s including Pluto and Ceres (Pluto is a planet, damn it!).
I don’t fully get what the author is trying to convey here, tho. Maybe a bit of fanboy sentiment for the JWST? Channeling Donald Rumsfeld’s “we don’f know what we don’t know” perhaps? Anything that draws attention and support for JWST is welcome in my book but the click over from was sort of a waste of time.
I hope it solves mysteries closer to home, like what is sausage made of...
"I’ve seen every significant object in our solar system that the limits of my telescope allow; all the major planets as well as several dwarf’s including Pluto…"
You've observed Pluto? That's an accomplishment. I haven't attempted it yet. My largest aperture is 15", so it should be doable.
It would never make it past the climate cult but comparative studies of exoplanet atmospheres in greater detail than Hubble or earthbound observatories would put to bed the idea that humans have an outsized impact on the Earth’s weather. Ditto with comparisons of solar cycles on main sequence stars that fall in similar classed to our son.
All life contributes something to global patterns with weather and other systems. You don’t have to accept the “Earth as a living organism” theory to recognize the interrelation of all living and non living systems on Earth and that the microsystems, like humanity, pale when compared to the macrosystems like oscillations or ocean currents or plate techtonics.
James Webb is limited by *some* heat at LaGrange 2 and also has the challenge of zodiacal light to try to tunnel through so we still can’t get the detail to identify these things directly in distance systems, stars and exoplanets, but it’s instrumentation can intuit these indirectly.
So yeah, I’d say that there is some very meaningful science that can have nearly immediate impact on major policies in the US and globally but only if the data is allowed to be studied honestly and transparently
"like what is sausage made of . . ."
You do NOT want to know.
"What specific hypotheses does it confirm or refute? Not meant as snark."
Here are the accepted proposals for the first observing year.
You doubt that there is a boat load of science we're going to get? You really do think it was done for pretty pictures?
A God who made all that by speaking a word is a powerful friend to have.
"Infiniti isn't a possibility apparently, only a finite start such as a Big Bang."
Infinity certainly is possible. Most, perhaps all, cosmologists view the Big Bang as something we can't see beyond to an earlier time (at least not currently). They do not view it as a boundary beyond which there can't be anything earlier.
"Each universe is born, expands, stops expanding"
Nope. The universe doesn't have enough gravity to stop the rate of expansion and contract on itself. It began and it will die.
What was before the Big Bang?
It's a nonsensical question. What was before the beginning? There is no before. There cannot be a before.
Furthermore, inasmuch as the Big Bang was the beginning of physical space and linear time (e.g. "before") is a measurement of changes in space (t = distance divided by rate of velocity), without space, there is no time. Hence, there is no "before"; it does not exist.
The universe began ex nihilo, ab intio temporis.
Original Mike: Thanks.
"You doubt that there is a boat load of science we're going to get? You really do think it was done for pretty pictures?"
But WTF. I asked a question. No news reports I've seen reported any real science. I made no assumptions about pretty pictures, but do get irritated when that's what we get. I assume Webb is Big Science with lots of Big Scientists involved. I admire them, truly. But as a citizen I have no clue about the relative value of the investment, nor do my representatives.
Why are you so certain there was nothing before the Big Bang, Mark? No cosmologists would make such statements.
Sebastian said...
Original Mike: Thanks.
"You doubt that there is a boat load of science we're going to get? You really do think it was done for pretty pictures?"
But WTF. I asked a question. No news reports I've seen reported any real science. I made no assumptions about pretty pictures, but do get irritated when that's what we get. I assume Webb is Big Science with lots of Big Scientists involved. I admire them, truly. But as a citizen I have no clue about the relative value of the investment, nor do my representatives.
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Why do you assume someone has to spoon-feed that information to you?
Try YouTube. You'll find hundreds, nay thousands, of science videos that can educate you on the whats, hows and whys.
If I and everyone else have to do that when we want to understand the world of politics, law, economics and the like, that's where we go.
If your "representatives" voted to fund Big Science, but can't tell you why, that's failure. Perhaps you should stop voting for such people.
Sebastian, I think your gripe is with the media. I share it.
It's also very early in the program.
"At what price per photon? What is the interest on the additional debt incurred to do this now?"
The price? Knowledge. To know. This might not make any sense to you. Some of us attempt things, no matter how grand or mundane in order to know , to understand. Is the risk worth the reward? Sometimes. But the knowledge is priceless. So, yeah. The telescope is cool. It is a time machine. We get to see history.
"At what price per photon? What is the interest on the additional debt incurred to do this now?"
The price? Knowledge. To know. This might not make any sense to you. Some of us attempt things, no matter how grand or mundane in order to know , to understand. Is the risk worth the reward? Sometimes. But the knowledge is priceless. So, yeah. The telescope is cool. It is a time machine. We get to see history.
Humans are innately curious. You kill that off and we might as well be living in caves. Hell, we would be living in caves.
If you lived a few centuries ago and asked an astronomer how many light-years distant is the Andromeda Galaxy, the answer might be 'What’s a light-year?'
Get back to me in another millennium or so when we've actually gotten there.
Original Mike said...
"Humans are innately curious."
Some of us are. Others make up for their lack of curiosity by making cheap political comments.
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