Frederik Pohl
Albert Einstein, 1920.
Science published this extract from an article called “Counterexamples to Relativity” from Conservapedia, which calls itself “an encyclopedia written from a conservative viewpoint”:
“The theory of relativity … is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativitism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world. . . . Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible.”
Here are the answers to yesterday’s science quiz:
Albert Einstein, 1920.
You know that light travels at a speed of 1 light-year per year, don’t you? You also know that the universe is 13.5 billion years old? Okay, if you’re so smart, how far away is the farthest object we can see in our telescopes?
45 billion light years. (13.5 billion years ago it was closer, but then the universe started to expand.)
When Gregor Mendel started experimenting with how organisms inherited characteristics he started with mice. What made him switch from mammals to peas?
His bishop said (rough translation), “Mice? You want to breed mice and have them copulating all over my monastery? Not a chance! Stick to plants, Gregor!”
In what way did the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 save Albert Einstein’s reputation and clear the way for acceptance of his relativity theories later on?
Einstein’s theories were scheduled to be put to the test in August 1914, when a crucial total solar eclipse could be observed in the Crimea. The outbreak of war made those observations impossible.
Then Einstein, regretfully looking over the calculations of the displacement of stars close to the sun that were now useless, realized with horror that he had made a mathematical mistake. His results were all wrong. If the observations had been performed his paper would have predicted false positions for both the stars and his professional credibility.
He redid the calculations in time for the actual observations, and then the results were just as he had said they would be.
You know that light travels at a speed of 1 light-year per year, don’t you? You also know that the universe is 13.5 billion years old? Okay, if you’re so smart, how far away is the farthest object we can see in our telescopes?
When Gregor Mendel started experimenting with how organisms inherited characteristics he started with mice. What made him switch from mammals to peas?
In what way did the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914 save Albert Einstein’s reputation and clear the way for acceptance of his relativity theories later on?
Give me your answers in the comments, and I’ll give you mine next time!
The viewable path of the next total solar eclipse, predicted for 11 July 2010.
Remember Omni? It was a wonderful, slick-paper magazine published and edited by Bob Guccione and his gorgeous wife, Kathy Keeton, and I just this minute realized that one of the reasons I liked it so much was that its basic editorial policy was pretty much identical with that of this blog: Its primary interests were science fiction and science, with excursions into anything else that attracted the attention of its editor — in Omni’s case Guccione, in this blog’s case me. We knew that we had interests in common, too, and that’s why I did a lot of writing for Bob’s magazine throughout its all-too-short history.
Pretty much the whole editorial staff of Omni suffered from the same streaks of curiosity as Bob and Kathy and I did, which included not only the policy-makers but the ones that made it happen day by day — that is, Ben Bova, Bob Sheckley and maybe one or two others. And when, in the spring of 1991, we all became aware that one of those splendid sky shows that are called total eclipses of the sun was going to happen later that year it seemed to all of us that someone (preferably me) should cover the event for the magazine.
At the same time, I’ve been looking over some pieces I wrote on various subjects for various periodicals long ago, and wondering how many of you guys would like to see some of them reprinted here. So let’s find out. And to do that, here’s the eclipse of ’91 report, just as Omni published it nearly twenty years ago.
7:27 a.m., July 7, 1991. We’re ninety-six hours from the eclipse, but some of the dedicated eclipse fans are already out on the starboard railings of the S.S. Independence, squinting anxiously at the sun. It’s good and bright, right this minute. That’s pretty much the way you’d expect the sun to be here in these sunny Hawaiian waters, and the good news is that if the moon were going to slide in front of it today instead of four days from now you’d surely say that it was being eclipsed, all right. The bad news is that you wouldn’t be able to make out some of the fainter outer corona because there’s a thin, high fan of cirrus that starts at the horizon and spreads out over the eastern sky. It won’t keep you from getting a sunburn, but it’s just enough to fuzz out the fainter patches of coronal light. Maybe our luck will be better on July 11.
Maybe it won’t, too. Pacific skies are cloudy. I’ve flown over this ocean twice in the last few weeks, fourteen and a half hours from San Francisco to Hong Kong, and there was never a minute when I could look out my window and see no clouds in the sky at all. This morning there are fluffy little clumps of cumulus all over the eastern horizon. Twenty minutes later, while we’re eating our breakfast papaya and omelets on the fantail, a couple of clumps slide right over the sun, and that’s the kind of thing that can really spoil an eclipse for you.
Of course, on the Independence we’ll be a moving target. We should be able to dodge a few cumulus shadows. We’d better do it, too. There are 800 passengers who have booked passage on the Independence for the sole and simple reason that they want to see the sun go out. If they don’t see it with their own eyes some of them are going to be thirsting for blood.
