spider!

i was looking to write something about the surface geography of pluto and came across this article about a cool geographic feature on the surface of pluto! since the flyby, we’ve had a lot of new information to sift through about the distant icy planet, and now we’ve found a new set of tendrils on the surface of pluto in a pattern that’s like “nothing else we’ve seen in the outer solar system.” the newly released pictures show us 6 cracks which radiate out from a central point, unlike typical cracks we’ve seen in the past which typically run parallel to each other due to the expanding icy crust. they are also red! what would that mean? what caused them? and why are they colored? only time will tell for our distant icy friend!

what other features is pluto’s surface waiting to reveal??

love is forever!

neutron stars are extremely dense stars – perhaps the densest stars in the known universe! – so dense in fact, that a marble-sized serving of neutron star would weigh about the same as 5 trillion tons of earth rock! they can form as a result of the collapse of a giant star in a supernova event. because they are so compact, thanks to the conservation of angular momentum, they spin really quickly – more than 700 revolutions a second! – which we can detect from earth. based on our estimate of how many supernovae events there have been in the universe, we estimate that there are as many as 100 million neutron stars out there. that’s a lot! as one of my favorite bands muse sing, love is forever, and hearts will combine like a neutron star collision!

love is forever!

enough energy to power the world forever

for years people have been advocating for countless alternative ways to generate energy to power our ever-industrializing world (hint: fossil fuels are unsustainable!!)

whereas nuclear fission generates massive amounts of electricity by splitting atoms apart but also generating radioactive waste, fusion is incredibly pristine and produces no waste byproducts! it is, after all, the process which powers our Sun, and the ability to harness that kind of power would mean an absolute reshaping and rethinking of how we power our lives on earth – and the potential that offers for humanity. earlier this year, a team in germany successfully produced and sustained hydrogen plasma for the first time on earth. it lasted only a quarter of a second, but it was enough to prove that it could be done on earth!

the possibilities for clean, limitless energy are endless. what would you want your world to be like where everyone had access to clean energy forever?

hawking radiation

on my flight back from amsterdam at the end of spring break, i finally had the opportunity and wherewithal to watch the theory of everything, the stephen hawking biopic from a couple of years ago. it got me thinking about a lot of things from my physics education in high school and more recently my pursuit of an undergraduate physics degree. i remembered in 10th grade my physics teacher talking about uniting all the forces in the universe in one “beautiful, elegant” equation which would provide a grand unifying framework for all of physics in the universe. pretty lofty stuff.

what goes in and what comes out?

in the movie we learn (albeit very minimally) about hawking radiation, the theoretical model of which hawking developed in 1976. so what is it? essentially it is when the fluctuation in energy in the black hole engenders a particle-antiparticle pair of imaginary particles near the event horizon. one slips into the black hole before they have a chance to completely annihilate each other, so it appears to an observer that a particle was emitted from the black hole! the particle that gets absorbed then has a negative energy!

this is fascinating stuff – enough to warrant eddie redmayne’s best actor oscar!

love is in the spacetime

gravity has found itself grounded in a great deal of pop culture recently. from depictions in cinematic blockbusters to the recent historic breakthrough at LIGO, gravity has become somewhat of a household/cocktail party topic of conversation.

being a physics major, over the years i’ve come to think of cosmological things in visuals, or colors, or little mind models i have for myself. quantum mechanics is grey, and there is always a potential well in the image i conjure up. classical mechanics is a pulley, and it’s green. not the pulley, just the thought. e&m i don’t think of very often because i hate it, but when i do i imagine a gaussian cylinder. it’s always the same one.

so what are we thinking of when we think of gravity?

is it fun bouncy times with color like in the new ok go video?

is it a destructive thing of despair like in the clooney/bullock blockbuster?

is it a higher dimension hitherto inaccessible to us humans in our current plane of existence but manifests as the power of love in a tesseract?

our intrepid hero unlocks the secret of love and gravity in the tesseract (interstellar)

is it a product of the curvature of space? if i stand still i am moving in one direction (forward in time !!) – similarly if i am right above earth i am moving downward – falling. time and space are part of the same fabric.

is it the love force of sara bareilles and john mayer? why do we romanticize it this way? why does it make us feel this way?

is it a force mediated by the imaginary graviton? if we find it will it help us unite quantum mechanics with general relativity?

so many questions, so much time and space. as one professor puts it, this is a matter of serious gravity.

“ask me”

my little brother wants to be an astronaut and swim in the shadows of titan and calypso in the silk sheen shadow of saturn but sometimes we face-off across the little coffee table with the etch marks i made when i was ten and the ones he made when he was ten.

“i have so many questions,” he says.

“i know. i want to talk to you about gravity waves. but you have to learn about the nitrogen cycle now.”

his science book is splayed open hopelessly on the table between us. plants and animals need nitrogen to live. it helps plants make chlorophyll, which lets them make food and energy.

“read that again,” i urge.

“i don’t get it…” he’s eleven.

“do they just want you to memorize it?”

“i think so… it’s so hard.”

he huffs, crossing his arms. i decide to try something different.

“ok…” i venture. “what do you wanna learn about?”

instantly his eyes alight. “black holes… and dark matter… and why haven’t we found aliens yet?”

“whoa there buddy… one at a time. let’s see… let’s start with something simple. do you know how the seasons work?”

“yeah! i read about it in encyclopedia brittanica. it’s because earth is kinda tilty so one side is closer to the sun in the summer and the other side is far away from the sun in the winter.”

i chuckle. “you know, it isn’t really about how close it is. it’s all about how much direct sunlight it’s getting.”

“ahhh….” he leans back heavy in his chair, he is chubby. “that makes sense ok. now gravity waves i saw it on your facebook.”

i spend the night telling him all i know about “gravity waves”. how they were theorized by einstein 100 years ago and how we can finally hear them. how two black holes got married more than 1 billion years ago and this is the whispering of their love. i tell him he should read more brittanica. i am frustrated. why isn’t he allowed to talk about how cool science is at school? instead of memorizing the nitrogen cycle without understanding the science behind it, why don’t they invest in the inherent human curiosity that these kids clearly have? instead of squashing it out like an ant or a cockroach? here in my hometown of beirut, there is a painfully apparent lag in scientific literacy among all age groups. people don’t understand global warming. they don’t think evolution is “real” to “provable”. they don’t understand the scientific method. they want to stay in their bubble and ingest blindly the politics of their religious leaders. they don’t want to look up at the sky and wonder. in the pedagogy seminar we talk a lot about the importance of instilling a love for scientific curiosity and inquisitiveness at a very young age. if we can’t satiate kids’ curiosities, at the very least we ought not to siphon them dry by wrongful and misguided attempts at teaching science.

a most galilean affair

Let’s talk about Galileo [February 15^th, 1564 – January 8^th, 1642]. Not only was he a champion of the Copernican heliocentric view of the cosmos; he also discovered four of Jupiter’s moons with his telescope – giving less and less credence to a critics of the heliocentric model because it showed that small objects could orbit a moving object. He also demonstrated the phases of Venus – a phenomenon that could only be possible if it orbited the Sun instead of Earth. For that he is considered by many, among many other things, the father of modern science, the father of physics, and the father of observational astronomy.

stunner

Galileo’s lifetime was a formative period in Europe. One important thing that strikes me is the publication of the first novel in the form as we understand it in 1605, Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, arguably one of the most influential literary works and the formative work for modern Western literature. Another major event that happens is the establishment of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, which is the first permanent English settlement in America, marking the beginnings of the British Empire.

Let’s put this further in context. William Shakespeare [birth date unknown | baptized April 26^th, 1564 – April 23^rd, 1616] considered by many to be the greatest figure and dramatist in English literature, was his contemporary. His works continue to have a marked influence on the way we study and interact with literature.

do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

It’s always very enlightening to ground our knowledge in a historical basis. I feel like – especially in a liberal arts college environment – we are inundated with knowledge about many different fields, but it can rarely ever occur to us how this knowledge came about in history. It’s especially interesting to see what kinds of historical figures were contemporaries of each other – and hence, what kind of intellectual epoch humanity was in at a particular time in history. It’s fascinating that hallmark events in astronomy and literature (here specifically) were happening within a person’s lifetime.

goddess of love

Venus is many things. I don’t know much about it besides the fact that it is hot, orange, it’s the second planet in the solar system, and is the goddess of love in Roman mythology.

On June 5th, 2012, a couple of days after I graduated from high school, my dad and I woke up at 5 am and drove to a large parking lot in downtown Beirut. There were local news station vans and minor celebrity figures. The transit of Venus across the face of the sun was the biggest headline that day. My physics teacher was there, too, and he introduced me to Majdi Saadi, an astrophysics professor at the American University of Beirut and scientific personality who I have now grown to liken to a sort of Lebanese Neil deGrasse Tyson – charismatic, cynical, and very passionate about science literacy.

I took off my glasses and pressed my eye into the telescope. The goddess of love looked largely unglamorous, a black dot on the face of the massive sun. But really it represented something – this was a couple of months before I was scheduled to fly out to America for the first time. I was in awe of its insignificance, really. This massive, massive celestial body, a speck in an eyepiece. It was quite lovely, rather akin to Tyson’s cosmic perspective. Bigness and smallness conflating.

“You are the future of science for this country,” Saadi told me as he vigorously shook my hand. “Make us proud.”

I have wanted to be a scientist ever since.

goddess of love in transit

magic

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C Clarke’s third law.

I stumbled on a little thing I had posted some time ago, early in September when friendships were still tentative and the air was still crisp. -We spent the weekend in a cabin four dirt trails off the everyday. At night we cracked open beers and harmonized to loud electronic dance music and jazz. At one point my gaze drifted a little upward and I realized we were completely outside the belly of Nashville light pollution. The sky danced with playful glitter. In a moment of personal triumph I was reminded why I loved the night sky so much I had pledged to study the science that governs it. Amidst the thumping music in a moment of serenity I found a sliver of purpose again. The night sky in Nashville is purple smeared, bruised, unglamorous. I forget there is magic out there still-

I love looking up at the sky. Back home in Beirut, the sky was full of possibilities. But mostly smog, dark clouds, light pollution. One month, in 2006, drones. Then the sky became a place of fear, and anguish, and loss, and grief. It stopped giving sunlight, rain, wispy cloud, but only bombs. Where was the human endeavor? Where was the space race, national pride, stretching onto the rubber band of impossibility? Space travel, exploration, discovery?

Then it stopped. I was on a plane that shot up into the sky. Opportunity. The atmosphere was still my ceiling. I was still under all this evil. But now I was in the land of opportunity, and the sky opened up for me once more.

The sky gives many things.

Hello!

This is me. This blog works. I love science, writing, singing, and enjoying the time I have to spend with my family (because I’m an international student from Lebanon, I don’t have a lot of it!)

fam ❤