Coffee House Musing

My phone is a Samsung, so in a pinch I can use it as an immersion heater to make instant coffee.

My dance teacher friend (our relationship is mainly that I assisted her for about 14 years) has an iPhone. As a retired software engineer, Apple software just drives me crazy in how it keeps me from performing the most basic programmer tasks. Even the "Genius Bar" geniuses have told me that the most basic functionality that I need, being able to transfer individual files between my phone and computer (ie, PDFs or photos), was impossible with an iPhone. In addition, photos and videos of my grandsons (all the way across the country in Florida) are unnessecerily complicated because of incompatibilites between Apple and non-Apple devices. A classic example was when I had an AVI file from my camera of a dance routine we had done the week before and tried to display it for the class on a brand-new Mac. That brand-new Mac could not recognize that decade-old AVI file. "Not manufactured here." Well fuck you very much, Apple!In our two European trips, my friend and I traded our photos afterwards. This second and last time (she died last year on Veterans' Day) she couldn't share her photos because her new iPhone had a proprietary photo format that was incompatible with everybody else. Well fuck you very much, Apple!My dance teacher friend keeps castigating me for not switching to Apple, but who would ever want to drink that Kool-Aid?

Fortunately the Budgie desktop can be made to look like an Apple desktop but you can still actually do stuff.I've been known to build computers for some kids that can't afford them and they seem to like the Apple look so often I install the Ubuntu Budgie desktop. It has tools that will even handle most of the Appleized formats but that are also real world compatible.

Apple was smart in their marketing, but it screwed a lot of kids up.Apple donated a lot of Apple computers to schools. Generations of kids and teachers grew up with Apple computers. Every time we see anyone on TV using a computer, it's most likely an Apple computer or iPhone (in European productions, I saw a lot more Windows computer and phones in use). Then those kids went out into the real world economy and had to work with Windows computers because that's the route that business had taken.So just who the frak would ever want to make their device appear to be a fracking severely impaired Apple device?How do you edit a text file? How do you do a hex dump of a file? How do you do anything at all meaningful on an Apple device? You can't even right-click on a screen object. Absolutely useless!

I had a TNG tricorder app on my Palm Pilot. One of its built-in scanner settings was for heating up a microwave burrito. Unfortunately, my Palm Pilot didn't have the required hardware upgrades so I was never able to properly test that feature.For my coffee, I stay old-school and still use my Bialetti Moka Express.

Today there were several articles in my SciTechDaily news feed about clever, innovative astronomical studies to refine the measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe, plus, is it uniform in every direction? And using gravity waves, specifically created by merging neutron stars, to tell us about all about these stars including the orientation of of the rotating pair. Gravitational-Wave Scientists Brilliant New Method to Refine the Hubble Constant – The Expansion and Age of the Universe

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A team of international scientists, led by the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics (IGFAE) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), has proposed a simple and novel method to bring the accuracy of the Hubble constant measurements down to 2%, using a single observation of a pair of merging neutron stars.

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I think this was a pretty good article about this study with a lot of good background into the questions we are trying to ask about dark energy that might clues to which questions might increase our understanding of what is observable and how to do that. Dark Energy Experiment 16 Years in the Making Could Illuminate Origin, Evolution, Fate of Universe

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A map of stars and sound
“HETDEX is very ambitious,” Ciardullo said. “It’s going to observe a million galaxies to map out the structure of the universe going over two-thirds of the way back to the beginning of time. We’re the only ones going out that far to see the dark energy component of the universe and how it’s evolving.”

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Both these articles are fairly well written. Occasional articles in their list I would say the best part was the title. Some had whole paragraphs repeated in the same article, but every day I find good articles about studies and findings in the branches of science and technology that interest me. One thing I like about SciTechDaily is a nice list of references for every article.It's interesting reading while my imaging computer is processing thousands of images every day.A question just occurred to me, Do gravity waves have an effect like the electromagnetic red-shift from cosmic expansion?Another question, why is the speed of gravity the speed of light? Is it coincidence or is there an obvious link between gravity and light that I am overlooking?

Apparently, yes. Not to be confused with "gravitational redshift" where a photon expends energy to leave the gravity well.https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.1862v2.pdf The tie in to Maxwell from Special Relativity shows the "speed of causality" in the equations. GR gives the same constraints on gravity wave propagation as does Maxwell show for EM.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

SN15 went up, down and is sound.

That's one in a row.

Thanks, good answers!I'm anticipating the development of the field of gravitational wave astronomy that will open new views of the Universe the same ways that light, radio, X-ray, and Gamma-ray astronomy have. I can imagine the gravity data being used to create visible images of the Universe similar to the images created using various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. I am disappointed that I will not live long enough to see it developed into a mature branch of astronomy.

One of the positive features of science, that is often unrealized by non-scientists, is the tradition and responsibility to train the next generations of aspiring scientists. This is not just giving students a sampling of the accumulated knowledge previously acquired by scientists in a specific field, but how to engage in science and apply the scientific method to understand observations.

Today I read an interesting article on SciTechDaily and learned about a major global astronomy collaboration. Mapping the Universe’s Earliest Structures and Dark Matter Distribution With COSMOS-Webb

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When NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope begins science operations in 2022, one of its first tasks will be an ambitious program to map the earliest structures in the universe. Called COSMOS-Webb, this wide and deep survey of half-a-million galaxies is the largest project Webb will undertake during its first year.

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With more than 200 hours of observing time, COSMOS-Webb will survey a large patch of the sky—0.6 square degrees—with the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). That’s the size of three full moons. It will simultaneously map a smaller area with the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI).

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I love that they describe it as a large patch of sky, but to us it seems like an awfully small patch of sky.

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It’s a large chunk of sky, which is pretty unique to the COSMOS-Webb program. Most Webb programs are drilling very deep, like pencil-beam surveys that are studying tiny patches of sky,” explained Caitlin Casey, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-leader of the COSMOS-Webb program. “Because we’re covering such a large area, we can look at large-scale structures at the dawn of galaxy formation. We will also look for some of the rarest galaxies that existed early on, as well as map the large-scale dark matter distribution of galaxies out to very early times.”

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(Dark matter does not absorb, reflect, or emit light, so it cannot be seen directly. We know that dark matter exists because of the effect it has on objects that we can observe.)

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COSMOS-Webb will study half-a-million galaxies with multi-band, high-resolution, near-infrared imaging, and an unprecedented 32,000 galaxies in the mid-infrared. With its rapid public release of the data, this survey will be a primary legacy dataset from Webb for scientists worldwide studying galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

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This is so cool!!! They are looking at this patch of sky over the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

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The COSMOS survey began in 2002 as a Hubble program to image a much larger patch of sky, about the area of 10 full moons. From there, the collaboration snowballed to include most of the world’s major telescopes on Earth and in space. Now COSMOS is a multi-wavelength survey that covers the entire spectrum from the X-ray through the radio.

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Because of its location on the sky, the COSMOS field is accessible to observatories around the world. Located on the celestial equator, it can be studied from both the northern and southern hemispheres, resulting in a rich and diverse treasury of data.

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“COSMOS has become the survey that a lot of extragalactic scientists go to in order to conduct their analyses because the data products are so widely available, and because it covers such a wide area of the sky,” said Rochester Institute of Technology’s Jeyhan Kartaltepe, assistant professor of physics and co-leader of the COSMOS-Webb program. “COSMOS-Webb is the next installment of that, where we’re using Webb to extend our coverage in the near- and mid-infrared part of the spectrum, and therefore pushing out our horizon, how far away we’re able to see.”

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They have some ingenious methods of mapping dark matter halos around galaxies.Some humans can achieve amazing things working together. A question occurs to me that maybe Son Goku can answer or give us the leading hypothesis.

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Why doesn't dark matter clump together like regular matter does, in denser and denser clumps? I usually see dark matter described as more amorphous halos around galaxies. Is the repulsive force of dark energy acting more strongly on dark matter than normal matter?

Before the big brains get here let me tackle these just to see if I’m generally right. The major issue with dark matter is it appears to not respond to any electromagnetic force. EM is the force that causes matter to clump. No EM no clump.Since dark matter does not, as far as we can tell, respond to EM that means it cannot be seen, at any wavelength. Matter with no heat signature. No absorption or emission. Photons, apparently, just pass by or thru without any notice responding only to dark matter's gravitational field. Have you seen the Bullet Cluster - Wikipedia?We see two big lobes of gravity separated from their colliding galaxies. We know it’s there because of the gravitational lensing of objects in the background. Milky Way is hypothesized to be wrapped in a dark matter fog out to twice+ our visible stellar population. Doesn’t appear so. Dark energy affects all of space equally. It’s progressive that way. Definitely not republican.Dark matter adds to the gravitational field overcoming the minor dark energy expansion in local space like galaxies and galaxy clusters but I haven’t heard of dark matter being affected by, or exhibiting, any properties or forces other than gravity.That's the rub. We can see "Dark Matter: The Gravity" but that's it. What it is? Right now we got nothing.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

It does not add any (or very much) space between near galaxies. An example is the space between Andromeda and our own Milky Way.It adds a massive amount of space when there is just about nothing but matterless space.The question about Dark Matter ( not to be confused with Dark Energy, which I was just talking about) having the same weight against Dark Energy as Baryonic (regular) Matter reminded me of the total reboot that our textbooks underwent after the discovery of Dark Energy (1998). The assumption that the expansion of space was slowing down ( with all sorts of mathematical equations and formulas) was the subject of a big debate about whether Dark Matter + regular matter were slightly more or less mass/energy than a 100% "flat" universe.The unknown cause of the Big Bang and the equally unknown driver of the (ever ongoing) creation of space was truly an interesting "Dark" period, in science, that got a brightening new day when Dark Energy brought a new dawn. The old textbooks are fascinating to read but I am in awe of the true darkness that existed in science before the discovery of Dark Energy.Edited by LamarkNewAge, : No reason given.

Of course it does and locally, like I said, the expansion is minor on galactic scales.You mentioned Andromedea. 2.5 Million LY of space between us. If I have my sums right the space between us and Andromedea is expanding at about 58 km/sec. Yet even with this increased distance the radial velocity of Andromeda's approach due to gravity is over 110 km/sec.Dark Energy is expanding all of space everywhere even within and between galaxies. But the local gravity field is enough to counter those tensions. You want a mind blower? Even the space within an atom is expanding due to dark energy. What are you talking about? What darkness in science?That darkness started lifting 300 years ago and these last 100 years of science has been the brightest intellectual period of our species' history.Are you complaining that cosmologists didn't discover dark matter and dark energy before there was any evidence for them?Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.