Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series)

by Neil deGrasse Tyson

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. —NDT

Amazing reference to the rational explanation of our existence!

These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes.

The gravitational waves of the first detection were generated by a collision of black holes in a galaxy 1.3 billion light-years away, and at a time when Earth was teeming with simple, single-celled organisms. While the ripple moved through space in all directions, Earth would, after another 800 million years, evolve complex life, including flowers and dinosaurs and flying creatures, as well as a branch of vertebrates called mammals. Among the mammals, a sub-branch would evolve frontal lobes and complex thought to accompany them. We call them primates. A single branch of these primates would develop a genetic mutation that allowed speech, and that branch—Homo sapiens—would invent agriculture and civilization and philosophy and art and science. All in the last ten thousand years. Ultimately, one of its twentieth-century scientists would invent relativity out of his head, and predict the existence of gravitational waves. A century later, technology capable of seeing these waves would finally catch up with the prediction, just days before that gravity wave, which had been traveling for 1.3 billion years, washed over Earth and was detected. Yes, Einstein was a badass.

I couldn’t put it any better; or could I 🤔.

Without a doubt, Einstein’s greatest blunder was having declared that lambda was his greatest blunder.

Amazing quirk and wildly unique inquiry.

Trivial questions sometimes require deep and expansive knowledge of the cosmos just to answer them. In middle school chemistry class, I asked my teacher where the elements on the Periodic Table come from. He replied, Earth’s crust. I’ll grant him that. It’s surely where the supply lab gets them.

So raw and so real, NDT is a legend when it comes to the dry humor but perfect banter of a science nerd. A true big bang OG!

I don’t know how Albert would have felt about this, but an unknown element was discovered in the debris of the first hydrogen bomb test in the Eniwetok atoll in the South Pacific, on November 1, 1952, and was named einsteinium in his honor. I might have named it armageddium instead.

Clever!

In short, where gravity is high, the high places tend to fall, filling in the low places—a phenomenon that sounds almost biblical, in preparing the way for the Lord: “Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain” (Isaiah 40:4). That’s a recipe for a sphere if there ever was one. For all these reasons, we expect pulsars to be the most perfectly shaped spheres in the universe.

Water may be fine for microwave cooking but it’s bad for astrophysicists, because the water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere

chews up pristine microwave signals from across the galaxy and beyond. These two phenomena are, of course, related: water is the most common ingredient in food, and microwave ovens primarily heat water. Taken together, you get the best indication that water absorbs microwave frequencies. So if you want clean observations of cosmic objects, you must minimize the amount of water vapor between your telescope and the universe, just as ALMA has done.

Interesting 🤔. Makes sense.

Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, Astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful. For, by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the Earth is discovered . . . ; but our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys, our minds exalted above [their] low contracted prejudices. JAMES FERGUSON, 1757

Well said; a true eternal testimant of the history in our exsistence.

Consider an adult who tends to the traumas of a child: spilled milk, a broken toy, a scraped knee. As adults we know that kids have no clue of what constitutes a genuine problem, because inexperience greatly limits their childhood perspective. Children do not yet know that the world doesn’t revolve around them. As grown-ups, dare we admit to ourselves that we, too, have a collective immaturity of view? Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us? Apparently not. Yet evidence abounds. Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers.

Subtle truth that words do not speak, but sbhoukd be the onky violence ever portrayed; heard words, and encouraged philosophies.

Allow me to suggest that it’s the professor, not I, who has misread nature. His ego was unjustifiably big to begin with, inflated by delusions of significance and fed by cultural assumptions that human beings are more important than everything else in the universe. In all fairness to the fellow, powerful forces in society leave most of us susceptible. As was I, until the day I learned in biology class that more bacteria live and work in one centimeter of my colon than the number of people who have ever existed in the world. That kind of information makes you think twice about who—or what—is actually in charge.

Mic drop!!

We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.