By: RachelM,
on 2/6/2016
How is human freedom really possible in the natural world as correctly described by modern physics, chemistry, biology, and cognitive neuroscience? Or, given the truth of modern science, are you really free? By 'real freedom,' I mean 'real free will and real rational agency'.
The post Are you really free? Yes: a new argument for freedom appeared first on OUPblog.
Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth: All About Rocks, Minerals, Fossils, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, & Even DIRT!
Written by Steve Tomecek
Illustrated by Fred Harper
National Geographic Society 6/09/2015
978-1-4263-1903-7
128 pages Age 8—12
“Geologist Steve Tomecek, aka The Dirtmeister, and his sidekick Digger unearth all kinds of amazing information in this comprehensive book about geology. Clear explanations of geologic processes will teach future geoscientists the fascinating topics while fun facts and simple experiments reinforce the concepts. So grab your shovel and get ready to play IN THE DIRT.” [back cover]
Review
Divided into ten relatively short, but in-depth, color-coded chapters, (such as “The Dynamics of Soil,” “How it (Earth) All Began,” and “Digging Old Dead Things”), Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth will teach kids a lot about geology and how it helps answer many questions. While very educational—teachers will love it—the kid-friendly book is equally entertaining. Kids are at the center of Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth. In fact, each chapter begins with a question put forth by a middle-grade-aged kid:
“Is that you down there, Dirtmeister?
I thought I recognized your dirtmobile.
My name is Richie and I have a quick
question . . . How did the Grand Canyon
get to be, you know, so grand?”
(Richie, in chapter 6, “What Goes Up Must Come Down”)
Other kids ask questions about such things as volcanoes, earthquakes, the shape of the continents, if can rocks make other rocks, and if dinosaurs are really extinct. The questions are interesting and the answers fascinating and fun. The Dirtmeister adds “cool” facts he calls “Dirtmeister’s Nuggets,” short biographies of important people, and simple experiments that let kids see geology at work. The illustrations are cartoonish and the images of Dirtmeister and his sidekick Digger are quite expressive. The art, especially the first spread of each chapter and its graphic novel layout, help draw in the reader and make the book feel personal, as if Dirtmeister is talking directly to the you. The remaining of the book is filled with photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and text that answers each question and then digs a bit deeper.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth from cover-to-cover. Being a National Geographic Kids publication I should have realized, even before turning to page 1, that I was in for a humorous, engaging, and educational read with incredible illustrations by Fred Harper. Geology, heck science of any kind, was never this easy to understand or could grab me from start to finish. I was amazed at geology’s reach. Topics included not just how to find Earth’s age, but how she came into existence.
The variety of subjects, tied into the Earth’s soil and its importance to humans, makes Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth ideal as an adjunct middle grade science text. I think elementary teachers could also find ways to utilize this book in their science classrooms. The entire book is kid-friendly and larger words are defined (in context). Home-schoolers should not miss a page of Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Earth. The author has correlated each chapter with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)* and STEM** Science Standards, both for grades 3 to 8. These follow the final chapter. There is also an extensive Index.
From volcanoes spewing hot lava and earthquakes splitting open Mother Earth, plus experiments such as designing rocks, building sediments, and simulating the Big Chill, Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth is probably the dirtiest middle grade book ever written—parents and teachers will approve. Oh, yeah, so will kids!
*NGSS was developed by the National Research Council and are based on the Framework for K—12 Science Education. Website: http://nextgenscience.org/
**STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. Teachers can find relevant information on STEM at the National Education Association (NEA), PBS, and at Teach.com.
DIRTMEISTER’S NITTY GRITTY PLANET EARTH: ALL ABOUT ROCKS, MINERALS, FOSSILS, EARTHQUAKES, VOLCANOES, & EVEN DIRT! Text copyright (C) 2015 by Steve Tomecek. Illustrations copyright (C) 2015 by Fred Harper. Photographs copyrights vary and are listed in the book. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, National Geographic Society, Washington, DC.
You can buy Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth at Amazon
Learn more about Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth HERE.
Information for Teachers and Librarians HERE and HERE.
National Geographic + Common Core is HERE.
More for Kids from National Geographic Kids HERE.
Meet the author, Steve Tomecek, at his website: http://www.dirtmeister.com/
Meet the illustrator, Fred Harper, at his website: http://www.fredharper.com/
Find more books at the National Geographic Kids website: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/
ALSO BY STEVE TOMECEK
Dirt (Jump Into Science®)
Moon (Jump Into Science®)
Sun (Jump Into Science®)
Rocks and Minerals (Jump Into Science®)
Stars (Jump Into Science®)
Rocks and Minerals (National Geographic Kids Everything)
Copyright © 2015 by Sue Morris/Kid Lit Reviews. All Rights Reserved
Full Disclosure: Dirtmeister’s Nitty Gritty Planet Earth: All About Rocks, Minerals, Fossils, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Even DIRT! by Steve Tomecek & Fred Harper, and received from National Geographic Society, is in exchange NOT for a positive review, but for an HONEST review. The opinions expressed are my own and no one else’s. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
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By: Alex Guyver,
on 1/19/2015
Modern science has introduced us to many strange ideas on the universe, but one of the strangest is the ultimate fate of massive stars in the Universe that reached the end of their life cycles. Having exhausted the fuel that sustained it for millions of years of shining life in the skies, the star is no longer able to hold itself up under its own weight, and it then shrinks and collapses catastrophically unders its own gravity. Modest stars like the Sun also collapse at the end of their life, but they stabilize at a smaller size. But if a star is massive enough, with tens of times the mass of the Sun, its gravity overwhelms all the forces in nature that might possibly halt the collapse. From a size of millions of kilometers across, the star then crumples to a pinprick size, smaller than even the dot on an “i”.
What would be the final fate of such massive collapsing stars? This is one of the most exciting questions in astrophysics and modern cosmology today. An amazing inter-play of the key forces of nature takes place here, including gravity and quantum forces. This phenomenon may hold the secrets to man’s search for a unified understanding of all forces of nature, with exciting implications for astronomy and high energy astrophysics. Surely, this is an outstanding unresolved mystery that excites physicists and the lay person alike.
The story of massive collapsing stars began some eight decades ago when Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar probed the question of final fate of stars such as the Sun. He showed that such a star, on exhausting its internal nuclear fuel, would stabilize as a “White Dwarf”, about a thousand kilometers in size. Eminent scientists of the time, in particular Arthur Eddington, refused to accept this, saying how a star can ever become so small. Finally Chandrasekhar left Cambridge to settle in the United States. After many years, the prediction was verified. Later, it also became known that stars which are three to five times the Sun’s mass give rise to what are called Neutron stars, just about ten kilometers in size, after causing a supernova explosion.
But when the star has a mass more than these limits, the force of gravity is supreme and overwhelming. It overtakes all other forces that could resist the implosion, to shrink the star in a continual gravitational collapse. No stable configuration is then possible, and the star which lived millions of years would then catastrophically collapse within seconds. The outcome of this collapse, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, is a space-time singularity: an infinitely dense and extreme physical state of matter, ordinarily not encountered in any of our usual experiences of physical world.
As the star collapses, an ‘event horizon’ of gravity can possibly develop. This is essentially ‘a one way membrane’ that allows entry, but no exits permitted. If the star entered the horizon before it collapsed to singularity, the result is a ‘Black Hole’ that hides the final singularity. It is the permanent graveyard for the collapsing star.
As per our current understanding of physics, it was one such singularity, the ‘Big Bang’, that created our expanding universe we see today. Such singularities will be again produced when massive stars die and collapse. This is the amazing place at boundary of Cosmos, a region of arbitrarily large densities billions of times the Sun’s density.
An enormous creation and destruction of particles takes place in the vicinity of singularity. One could imagine this as ‘cosmic inter-play’ of basic forces of nature coming together in a unified manner. The energies and all physical quantities reach their extreme values, and quantum gravity effects dominate this regime. Thus, the collapsing star may hold secrets vital for man’s search for a unified understanding of forces of nature.
The question then arises: Are such super-ultra-dense regions of collapse visible to faraway observers, or would they always be hidden in a black hole? A visible singularity is sometimes called a ‘Naked Singularity’ or a ‘Quantum Star’. The visibility or otherwise of such super-ultra-dense fireball the star has turned into, is one of the most exciting and important questions in astrophysics and cosmology today, because when visible, the unification of fundamental forces taking place here becomes observable in principle.
A crucial point is, while gravitation theory implies that singularities must form in collapse, we have no proof the horizon must necessarily develop. Therefore, an assumption was made that an event horizon always does form, hiding all singularities of collapse. This is called ‘Cosmic Censorship’ conjecture, which is the foundation of current theory of black holes and their modern astrophysical applications. But if the horizon did not form before the singularity, we then observe the super-dense regions that form in collapsing massive stars, and the quantum gravity effects near the naked singularity would become observable.
“It turns out that the collapse of a massive star will give rise to either a black hole or naked singularity”
In recent years, a series of collapse models have been developed where it was discovered that the horizon failed to form in collapse of a massive star. The mathematical models of collapsing stars and numerical simulations show that such horizons do not always form as the star collapsed. This is an exciting scenario because the singularity being visible to external observers, they can actually see the extreme physics near such ultimate super-dense regions.
It turns out that the collapse of a massive star will give rise to either a black hole or naked singularity, depending on the internal conditions within the star, such as its densities and pressure profiles, and velocities of the collapsing shells.
When a naked singularity happens, small inhomogeneities in matter densities close to singularity could spread out and magnify enormously to create highly energetic shock waves. This, in turn, have connections to extreme high energy astrophysical phenomena, such as cosmic Gamma rays bursts, which we do not understand today.
Also, clues to constructing quantum gravity–a unified theory of forces, may emerge through observing such ultra-high density regions. In fact, the recent science fiction movie Interstellar refers to naked singularities in an exciting manner, and suggests that if they did not exist in the Universe, it would be too difficult then to construct a quantum theory of gravity, as we will have no access to experimental data on the same!
Shall we be able to see this ‘Cosmic Dance’ drama of collapsing stars in the theater of skies? Or will the ‘Black Hole’ curtain always hide and close it forever, even before the cosmic play could barely begin? Only the future observations of massive collapsing stars in the universe would tell!
The post Of black holes, naked singularities, and quantum gravity appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Choper Nawers!,
on 8/5/2009
Some illustrations i have been doing for Big bang Magazine down in México. I have been really busy so i will try to keep in pase on SFG....:D!
By: Kirsty,
on 5/19/2009
Frank Close, OBE is Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College. He was formerly vice president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (now the British Science Association), Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. His most recent book examines one of the oddest discoveries in physics - antimatter.
In the post below, Frank Close reveals the fallacies concerning antimatter in the Dan Brown novel (and now major cinema release) Angels and Demons. He has previously written for OUPblog on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.
Many people have never heard of CERN. Of those that have, most know it as the birthplace of the World Wide Web; fewer knew its main purpose, which is as the European Centre for experiments in particle physics. However, with the appearance of Angels and Demons CERN is about to become famous as a laboratory in Geneva that makes antimatter. These two statements about CERN are correct; much else in Dan Brown’s novel, which inspired the movie and has led to much of the popular received wisdom about antimatter, is not.
The movie is of course fiction, but the book on which it is based teases readers with a preface headlined “FACT”. This includes “Antimatter creates no pollution or radiation… is highly unstable and ignites when it comes in contact with absolutely anything… a single gram of antimatter contains the energy of a 20 kiloton nuclear bomb”. CERN is credited as having created “the first particles of antimatter” and the curtain metaphorically rises to the question whether this “highly volatile substance will save the world, or… be used to create the most deadly weapon ever made”.
These “facts” are at best misleading and even wrong, but many, including some in the US military, believe them to be true.
Antiparticles have been made for 80 years; a few atoms of antihydrogen have been made at CERN during the last decade; antimatter, in the sense of anti-atoms organised into amounts large enough to see, let alone contain, is still in the realms of fantasy and likely to remain so.
In Angels and Demons the experimental production of antimatter being equated with The Creation is so central to the plot that a scientist tells the Pope the “good news”, even though it is decades old. Whatever led to our universe, it was not akin to the creation of matter at CERN, in either the fictional or the real world. It is not “something from nothing… practically proof that Genesis is a scientific possibility”. This is at best cod theology and non-science.
The Big Bang is the creation of all energy, all matter, and all of the known universe, together with its space and time. We cannot recreate that singular event, but we can examine what happened afterwards, within what became our present universe.
Energy, lots of it, is what turned into matter and antimatter. Energy is not nothing; it is measurable and when you use some the power company will charge you for it. When you create antimatter together with its matter counterpart, you have to put in the same amount of energy as would be released were they to annihilate one another; you do not get matter from nothing. Now reverse the process, such that antimatter meets matter and is turned back into radiant energy. That certainly is not nothing, as Angels and Demons recognises since the resulting blast is what is going to destroy the Vatican.
It is at this point that some in the US military seem to have adopted this fictional work as its practical guide to antimatter, and to have ignored its many contradictions. The preface of Angels and Demons described antimatter as the ideal source of energy which “creates no pollution or radiation and a droplet could power New York for a day”. Antimatter may not emit radiation so long as it stays away from matter, but in that case it offers nothing to bomb makers or power companies. In order to exploit this “volatile” substance, you need to annihilate it with matter, at which it releases its trapped energy as radiation such as gamma rays.
The statement that there are “No byproducts, no radiation, no pollution” is ironic given that it occurs within a few paragraphs of a warning to beware of the gamma rays. The US Air Force were enthused so much that in promoting their interest in antimatter for weapons they announced “No Nuclear Residue”. The media trumpeted that “a positron bomb could be a step toward one of the military’s dreams from the early Cold War: a so-called `clean’ superbomb” San Francisco Chronicle 4 October 2004, uncanny examples of fiction, written in 2000, presented as if fact in 2004.
As a major milestone in antimatter science CERN is indeed marvellous, but trifling compared with what would be needed to make antimatter in industrial quantities. Even were it possible, the belief that antimatter technology could “save the planet” is specious. As we first have to make the antimatter ourselves, we would waste more energy in making it than we could ever get back, so antimatter is not a panacea for “saving the planet”. Thankfully, neither will it become “the most deadly weapon”.
By: Rebecca,
on 9/18/2008
Frank Close, OBE, is Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College. He was formerly vice president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Head of the Theoretical Physics Division at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. He received the Institute of Physics’ Kelvin Medal in 1996, awarded for outstanding contributions to the public understanding of physics. He is the author of The Void, Very Short Introduction to Particle Physics, The Particle Odyssey and many more. Also, look for Antimatter in January, Close’s newest book.
We asked Close to explain the importance of the Large Hadron Collider to us. He kindly sent us the post below and the following analogy, comparing the journey for answers about the origin of the universe to sewing a tapestry: “The quest is like sewing a tapestry, but one where the picture is only revealed as you do so. First you have to make a needle, then feed it with thread and then finally start sewing. It took 20 years to design and build the needle. Last Wednesday we started to put thread through the needle’s eye. It will take some time before we have enough thread, tightly enough wrapped and in sufficient colors to start sewing. That will be later this year or next spring. If we are lucky there may be some parts of the picture where the image quickly comes clear; other parts of the picture may take a lot of time and careful work before the images can be discerned.”
Keep reading to find out the answers this tapestry may hold.
Only nature knows what happened in the long-ago dawn of the Big Bang; but soon humans will too. The visions of the new world will hopefully be tomorrow’s stories. If you want a machine to show how the universe was in the moments of creation, you don’t find it in the scientific instrument catalogs: you have to build it yourself. And so scientists and engineers around the world pooled their knowledge to build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Immediately there were problems. Beyond the ability of a single continent, this became a truly global endeavor; unparalleled in ambition, in political and financial challenges. At its conception, the state of the art in cryogenics, magnets, information technology, and a whole range of technologies was far short of what would be required for the LHC to work. The whole enterprise relied on the belief that bright ideas would emerge to solve problems, any one of which could have proved a show-stopper. There were many who feared that particle physics had bitten off more than it could chew; that the LHC was over-ambitious; that this would be the end of physics.
Now we are almost there. Wednesday, Sept 10 when the current was turned on, and for the first time a beam of protons circulated through the vacuum tubes colder than outer space, was just the start. The next step will be to send two beams, in opposite directions – well, that’s been done but not yet intensely enough to smash into one another and produce data. That is still for the future. At first, and for some months, they are likely to be too diffuse and low energy to produce anything of great use to science. Only later when high energy intense beams collide, and the debris from those mini-bangs pour through the gargantuan detectors, which in turn speed signals to the waiting computers, will the moment we’ve waited for have arrived. A year or two accumulating data and the first answers to the big questions will begin to emerge.
The seeds of matter were created in the aftermath of the Big Bang: quarks, which clustered together making protons and neutrons as the newborn universe cooled, and the electron, which today is found in the outer reaches of atoms. We and everything hereabouts are made of atoms. In the sun and stars intense heat rips atoms apart into their constituents, electrons, protons and neutrons.
By colliding beams of particles, such as electrons or protons, head-on, it is possible to simulate the high-energy hot conditions of the stars and the early universe. At CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research) in the 1980s a machine called LEP (Large Electron Positron collider) collided electrons and their antimatter analogues, positrons, fast enough that they mutually annihilated and created for brief moments in a region smaller than an atom, the conditions that occurred within a billionth of a second of the Big Bang. Trying to reach time zero is like finding the end of the rainbow, and the LHC will take us ten to a hundred times further than ever before. At the LHC the beams of protons will pack a bigger punch and their collisions will show how the universe was at its infancy and perhaps give us some insight to how the universe evolved.
Within a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the material particles from which we are made, and the disparate forces that act on them, had become encoded into the fabric of the universe. However, the events that led our universe to win the lottery of life were decided earlier than this. Some of them we believe occurred in the epoch that is now within our reach. That is what the LHC promises to reveal.
As the 21st century begins, physics can explain almost all of the fundamental phenomena revealed in the search for our origins, yet there are niggling loose ends. We see hints of a unified theory vaguely in the shadows, but what it is and how the structures that led to the particles and forces that molded us are still perceived only vaguely.
Why are there three spatial dimensions; could there be more? Cosmology suggests that “normal matter” is but one percent of the whole, and that we are but flotsam on a sea of “dark matter”. What that dark sea consists of, how it was formed, why there is any matter at all rather than a hellish ferment of radiation, are unknown.
Why is there structure and solidity to matter when our theories would be happier if everything flitted around at the speed of light? Theorists believe that all structure and ultimately the solidity of matter are the result of a field of force that today permeates the universe known as the Higgs field. This can be made to reveal itself if the conditions are right. For example, as an electromagnetic field can be stimulated to send out electromagnetic waves, so can the Higgs field create waves. However to create these waves requires huge energy. The LHC has been designed to achieve these conditions. As an electromagnetic wave comes in quantum bundles, particles known as photons, so the Higgs waves will come in the form of particles known as Higgs bosons.
There is also the question: why there is anything at all? In the beginning there was nothing: “there was darkness on the face of the void”. Then came a burst of energy: “let there be light and there was light”, though from where it came no-one knows. What we do know is what happened next: this energy coagulated into matter and its mysterious opposite, antimatter, in perfect balance. Anti-matter destroys anything it touches in a pyrotechnic flash. So how did the early universe manage to survive self-annihilation between the newly born matter and antimatter? Something as yet unknown must have occurred in those first moments to upset the balance. For several years we have glimpsed a subtle asymmetry between arcane forms of matter and antimatter made from “strange” and “bottom” quarks and antiquarks. One of the goals of the LHC will be to produce large numbers of particles of bottom matter and their antimatter counterparts in the hope of finding the source of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter.
Ultimately however, this is a voyage of discovery into a world that once existed but was lost in the sands of time, 13.6 billion years ago. Like some astonishing Jurassic Park, the LHC will show once more what that epoch was like. We have ideas of what is to be found, and there are certainly questions, such as those above, whose answers we crave. But in focusing on them like this we are getting ahead of ourselves. We are at the stage of witnessing remarkable engineering, and it is those we should be applauding; as for discoveries in fundamental science – watch this space.
By: Cassie,
on 6/25/2008
Richard Dawkins is the bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. He’s also a pre-eminent scientist, the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and is a fellow of New College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Oxford Guide to Modern Science Writing, a collection of the best science writing in the last century.
This is the fourth in our series of podcasts. Dawkins has talked about a wide range of scientists before, and now he introduces us to Fred Hoyle, one of the astronomers who originally proposed the steady state theory of the universe. The steady state theory may have been disproved, but Hoyle’s contributions to science–and science fiction–still remain.
Transcript after the jump.
DORIAN DEVINS: Outside of the realm of biology, you have a lot of physicists and mathematicians as well, and it struck me that you have Fred Hoyle in here—a lot of people may not be familiar with Fred Hoyle.
RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes, Fred Hoyle was an English astronomer, astrophysicist. He was one of the three physicists who proposed the steady state theory of the universe, which is now out of fashion. Indeed, it’s almost certainly wrong, disproved by the evidence. But it was a very, very interesting theory. According to the steady state theory, there never was a beginning to the universe. The universe has always been in existence; and the expanding universe, the galaxies pulling apart, that is true, but the gaps between the galaxies get filled with spontaneously created new matter, so there are new galaxies being created in the gaps that are left as the other, older galaxies pull apart. Now, that theory is wrong, but it was never obviously silly. You might think “Well how on Earth can matter just spontaneously be created?” And Hoyle’s point was well that’s no more odd than the idea that it should be spontaneously created in the first place, at the time of the Big Bang. So it was an interesting theory; its now been disproved. He had another great claim to fame, which was that he worked out how the elements, the chemical elements, are formed in the interior of stars. We now know that in this case, Hoyle was absolutely right, that all the elements apart for hydrogen and helium I think, are made in the interior of stars. And we’re all made of star stuff, that was the poetic phrase that Carl Sagan used to quote. I think maybe he got it from Joni Mitchell or the other way around. But anyway, that all comes from Fred Hoyle. He was also a science fiction writer. His first science fiction book, The Black Cloud, is a wonderful story. I mean it’s just a feast, it’s just a riveting science fiction story marred by the fact that its hero is such a deeply unpleasant character. And all the heroes of Fred Hoyle’s science fiction books are the same deeply unpleasant character, you can’t help wondering where that unpleasant character came from.
By: dibujandoarte,
on 5/21/2008
i saw this at Casey's blog and thought it was in some way an interesting experiment... so why not give it a try...
Will the force produced inside earth due to this experiment will change the orbit of rotation of earth?
is there any effect to nature like about radiations emmited by the protons energy, since that will be 100,000 times more than suns energy
Frank Close has the Kelvin Medal (1996), but does he want to relive Lord Kelvin’s “Nineteenth-Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light” (1900)? “As the 21st century begins, physics can explain almost all of the fundamental phenomena revealed in the search for our origins, yet there are niggling loose ends”. Lord Kelvin’s choice of Clouds was prophetic, but the 20th Century, unhappily for Classical Physics, didn’t refine his worldview, it turned it upside down.
The picture of the tapestry is fine, but a tapestry has two sides. One side an image the other an incomprehensible mass of stitches.
I think we are on a long journey, with many, many more questions.