God and Science

God and Science

One of the Sanskrit words for « victorious » is abhijit. That’s what Vega was called in ancient India: Abhijit. It was under the influence of Vega that the Hindu divinities and heroes conquered the asuras, the gods of evil. Now, it’s a curious thing. In Persia there are asuras also, but in Persia asuras were the gods of good.

Eventually religions sprang up in which the chief god, the god of light, the Sun god, was called Ahura-Mazda. The Zoroastrians, for example, and the Mithraists. Ahura, Asura, it’s the same name. There are Zoroastrians today, and the Mithraists gave the early Christians a good fright, But in this same story, those Hindu divinities – they were mainly female, by the way – were called Devis. In India, the Devis are gods of good. In Persia, the Devis become gods of evil. Some scholars thing this is where the English word “devil” ultimately comes from. The symmetry is complete. All this is probably some vaguely remembered account of the Aryan invasion that pushed the Dravidians to the south. So, depending on which side of the Kirthar Rande one lives on, the star Vega supports either God or the Devil.

Egyptian Gods. Photo by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness (George Santayana, scepticism and Animal Faith, IX).

The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, no a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals (William James, the Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902).

The real God be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, no a retail business. Image: Goddess by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Orion Starship

Orion Starship

Among Leonardo’s many interests and accomplishments – in painting, sculpture, anatomy, geology, natural history, military and civil engineering – he had a great passion: to devise and fabricate a machine that could fly. He drew pictures, constructed models, built full-size prototypes – and not one of them worked. No sufficiently powerful and lightweight engine then existed. The designs, however, were brilliant and encouraged the engineers of future times. Leonardo himself was depressed by these failures. But it was hardly his fault. He was trapped in the fifteenth century.

A similar case occurred in 1939 when a group of engineers calling themselves the British Interplanetary Society designed a ship to take people to the Moon – using 1939 technology. It was by no means identical to the design of the Apollo spacecraft which accomplished exactly this mission three decades later, but it suggested that a mission to the Moon might one day be a practical engineering possibility.

The star which is the closest to Earth. Photo: Elena

Today we have preliminary designs for ships to take people to the stars. None of these spacecraft is imagined to leave the Earth directly. Rather, they are constructed in Earth orbit from where they are launched on their long interstellar journeys. One of them was called Project Orion after the constellation, a reminder that the ship’s ultimate objective was the stars. Orion was designed to utilize explosions of hydrogen bombs, nuclear weapons, against an inertial plate, each explosion providing a kind of “putt-putt”, a vast nuclear motorboat in space. Orion seems entirely practical from an engineering point of view. By its very nature it would have produced vast quantities or radioactive debris, but for conscientious mission profiles only in the emptiness of interplanetary or interstellar space. Orion was under serious development in the United States until the signing of the international treaty that forbids the detonation of nuclear weapons in space. This seems to me a great pity.

The Orion star-ship is the best use of nuclear weapons I can think of. Image: © Elena

Project Daedalus

Project Daedalus

Project Daedalus is a recent design of the British Interplanetary Society. It assumes the existence of a nuclear fusion reactor – something much safer as well as more efficient than existing fission plants. We do not have fusion reactors yet, but they are confidently expected in the new few decades. Orion and Daedalus might travel at 10 percent the speed of light. A trip to Alpha Centauri, 4,3 light-years away, would then take forty-three years, less than a human lifetime. Such ships could not travel close enough to the speed of light for special relativistic time dilation to become important. Even with optimistic projections on the development of our technology, it does not seem likely that Orion, Daedals of their ilk will be built before the middle of the twenty-first century, although if we wished we could build Orion now.

For voyages beyond the nearest stars, something else must be done. Perhaps Orion and Daedalus could be used as multigeneration ships, so those arriving at a planet of another star would be the remote descendants of those who had set out some centuries before. Or perhaps a safe means of hibernation for humans will be found, so that the space travelers could be frozen and then reawakened centuries later. These nonrelativistic sharships, enormously expensive as they would be, look relatively easy to design and build and use compared to starships that travel close to the speed of light. Other star systems are accessible to the human species, but only after great effort.

Something must be done for voyages beyond the nearest stars (quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: Elf Ears Flower Pixie © Elena

Fast interstellar spaceflight – with the ship velocity approaching the speed of light – is an objective not for a hundred years but for a thousand or ten thousand. But it is in principle possible. A kind of interstellar ramjet has been proposed by R. W. Bussard which scoops up the diffuse matter, mostly hydrogen atoms, that floats between the stars, accelerates it into a fusion engine and ejects it out the back. The hydrogen would be used both as fuel and as reaction mass. But in deep space there is only about one atom in every ten cubic centimeters, a volume the size of a grape. For the ramjet to work, it needs a frontal scoop hundreds of kilometers across. When the ship reaches relativistic velocities, the hydrogen atoms will be moving with respect to the spaceship at close to the speed of light. If adequate precautions are not taken, the spaceship and its passengers will be fried by these induced cosmic rays. One proposed solution uses a laser to strip the electrons off the interstellar atoms and make them electrically charged while they are still some distance away, and an extremely strong magnetic field to deflect the charged atoms into the scoop and away from the rest of the spacecraft. That is engineering on a scale so far unprecedented on Earth. We are talking of engines the size of small worlds.

Project Daedalus. Photo by Elena

Kepler’s Laws of Nature

Kepler’s Laws of Nature

In an elliptical orbit the Sun is not at the center but is offset, at the focus of the ellipse. When a given planet is at its nearest to the Sun, it speeds up. When it is at its farthest, it slows down. Such motion is why we describe the planets as forever falling toward, but never reaching, the Sun. Johannes Kepler’s first law of planetary motion is simply this: A planet moves in an ellipse with the Sun at one focus.

In uniform circular motion, an equal angle of fraction of the arc of a circle is covered in equal times. So, for example, it takes twice as long to go two-thirds of the way around a circle as it does to go one-third of the way around. Kepler found something different for elliptical orbits: As the planet moves along its orbit, it sweeps out a little wedge-shaped area within the ellipse. When it is close to the Sun, in a given period of time it traces out a large arc in its orbit, but the area represented by that arc is not very large because the planet is then near the Sun. When the planet is far from the Sun, it covers a much smaller arc in the same period of time, but that arc corresponds to a bigger area because the Sun is now more distant. Kepler found that these two areas were precisely the same no matter how elliptical the orbit: the long skinny area, corresponding to the planet far from the Sun, and the shorter, squatter area, when the planet is close to the Sun, are exactly equal. This was Kepler’s second law of planetary motion: Planets sweep out equal areas in equal times.

Green Sea. Photo by Elena

Many years later, Kepler came upon his third and last law of planetary motion, a law that relates the motion of various planets to one another, that lays out correctly the clockwork of the solar system. He described it in a book called The Harmonies of the World.

Kepler’s first two laws may seem a little remote and abstract: planets move in ellipses, and sweep out equal areas in equal times. Well, so what? Circular motion is easier to grasp. We might have a tendency to dismiss these laws as mere mathematical tinkering, something removed from everyday life. But these are the laws our planet obeys as we ourselves, glued by gravity to the surface of the Earth, hurtle through interplanetary space. We move in accord with laws of nature that Kepler first discovered. When we send spacecraft to the planets, when we observe double stars, when we examine the motion of distant galaxies, we find that throughout the Universe Kepler’s laws are obeyed.

Not given to quiet understatement, Kepler assessed his discoveries in these words: With this symphony of voices man can play through the eternity of time in less than an hour, and can taste in small measure the delight of God, the Supreme Artist… I yield freely to the sacred frenzy… the die is cast, and I am writing a book – to be read either now or by posterity, it matters not. It can wait a century for a reader, as God Himself has waited 6,000 years for a witness.

With this symphony of voices man can play through the eternity. Image: Animated Moving Flashing Colors by © Elena

Bizarre Species

Bizarre Species

An extraterrestrial visitor visiting the Earth and looking at the differences among human beings and their societies would find those difference trivial compared to the similarities between them. However, we, the Earthlings, have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed.

Think for instance of the negative connotations of words like Alien or Outlandish. And yet the cultures of each of our civilisations merely represent different ways of being human.

Think than of Cosmos which is populated with many intelligent beings. Everyone of them is very different, because the Darwinian lesson is very clear: there will be no humans elsewhere.

Only here, on the Earth. Only on this small planet there are Humans. In fact, we are as rare as well as an endangered species.

Bizarre Species. Photo by Elena

We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. The Sun warms us and feeds us and permits us to see. It fecundated the Earth. It is powerful beyond human experience.

Think of the Sun’s heat on your upturned face on a cloudless summer’s day; think how dangerous it is to gaze at the Sun directly. From 150 million kilometers away, we recognize its power. What would we feel on its seething self-luminous surface, or immersed in its heart of nuclear fire?

Birds greet the sunrise with an audible ecstasy. Even some one-celled organisms know to swim to the light. Our ancestors worshiped the Sun, and they were far from foolish. The early Sumerian pictograph for god was an asterisk, the symbol of the stars. The Aztec word for god was Teotl, and its glyph was a representation of the Sun. The heavens were called the Teoatl, the godsea, the cosmic ocean.

And yet the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars? Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernel of awe.

Glamour. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies you will not find such a specimen. Image: © Elena