Quanta
For the record
Seen and heard
To boldly go where no-one has gone
before does not require coming
home again
Lawrence Krauss, director of the Origins
Initiative at Arizona State University, quoted in the
New York Times
Krauss was proposing the idea of a one-way ticket
to Mars without the need to bring astronauts back
to Earth.
My expectation was that researchers
would propose risky ideas that were
completely new. Disappointingly, we
got rather little of that
Wood you believe it?
“With the compliments of the
Ambassador of the United States Of
America, J. William Middendorf II, to
commemorate the visit to the Netherlands
of the Apollo 11 astronauts.” So reads a
plaque below one of the Rijksmuseum’s
most prized possessions – a small sample
of Moon rock that was acquired by the
Amsterdam-based museum in 1988 after
the death of former Dutch prime minister
Willem Drees. The brown-coloured rock
was a gift to Dress from Middendorf, who
apparently received it via the US State
Department. Yet tests carried out recently
on behalf of the museum have revealed
that the “rock” is in fact nothing more than
a piece of petrified wood. Geologist
Frank Beunk from Vriije University in
Amsterdam took a slice of the object with
permission of the museum and, using a
scanning electron microscope, found that
it was entirely composed of quartz, which
is abundant on Earth but not present on
the Moon. “It may have originated from
the Petrified Forest National Park in
Arizona,” Beunk told Physics World.
Despite the mundane origin of the “rock”,
which was last shown to the public in 2006
at the museum’s “Fly Me to the Moon”
exhibition, the museum is still planning
to keep the piece. But if you see it, don’t
be fooled.
Rijksmuseum
bubble would burst, Sornette went on to
make the bold prediction that the index
would crash between 17–27 July. So did
traders flock to take money out of the
exchange? Well, on 28 July the index stood
at 3438 points before climbing slightly to
3471 on 4 August. But by 31 August it had
tumbled to 2667 points – a fall of more
than 20%. As Physics World went to press,
the index had recovered somewhat and
was nearing 3000. Green shoots of
recovery, perhaps?
Outgoing president of the International
Astronomical Union Catherine Cesarsky quoted
in Science
Cesarsky, who was director-general of the
European Southern Observatory from 1999 to
2007, says that she tried to encourage innovative
projects under the director’s discretionary
time-allocation programme, but most of the
resources were instead used to get quick results
and publications.
The first thing a freshman should
know is that college is never what
one expects
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg quoted in the
New York Times
Weinberg was talking about his time at Cornell
University, where he graduated in 1954. Although
he says he found it difficult at first, he was left with
memories of inspiring professors and a love of
music and Shakespeare.
Bolt out of the blue
Few would doubt that Jamaican sprinter
Usain Bolt is now the fastest man on the
planet after yet again breaking the world
record for the 100 m sprint at the World
Athletics Championships held in Berlin in
August. But, of course, we all knew that he
could run that fast. After his previous
record-setting time of 9.69 s at the Beijing
Olympics last year, astrophysicists at the
University of Oslo in Norway worked out
that Bolt could have run even faster if he
had gone flat out rather than slowing down
in the last 20 m of the race to celebrate his
Olympic win. And they got it pretty much
spot on. The physicists calculated that Bolt
could have covered the 100 m in 9. 55 s
(±0.04 s) if he had maintained his
pre-celebration acceleration. The time he
clocked in Berlin? 9. 58 s exactly. “The
agreement could almost not have been
better,” says Hans Kristian Kamfjord
Eriksen from the University of Oslo.
While my body was sleeping, I think
my spirit flew on a triangular-shaped
UFO to Venus. It was an extremely
beautiful place and was very green
Miyuki Hatoyama, actress and wife of Japan’s
newly elected prime minister Yukio Hatoyama
Hatoyama wrote about her surreal space trip in a
book published last year entitled Most Bizarre
Things I’ve Encountered.
Perhaps astrophysics stories should
come with a health warning
Journalist Charlie Brooker quoted in the Guardian
Brooker was commenting on a BBC story last
month about the discovery that Andromeda is
expanding by digesting stars from other galaxies.
He says the human brain is not equipped to deal
with thoughts of this “humbling enormity”.
Bubble trouble
You do not usually get stock-market
commentators predicting exactly to the
day when a stock or index will crash or
depreciate heavily in value. In early July,
however, Didier Sornette of the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zurich and colleagues predicted that
China’s Shanghai Composite Index on the
Shanghai stock exchange would collapse as
it was showing “bubble-like” behaviour by
growing faster than an exponential rate
(arXiv:0907.1827). But rather than just
saying that at some point in the future the
Space, not-so-rockin
“To my ear all these songs
are universally awful”
was the response of
astronomer Sir Patrick
Moore in an interview
with TheQuietus.com – a
rock music and pop-culture website – when
forced to listen to 10 songs with either a
cosmic or scientific theme. So what did he
think of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”?
“I wonder if any of these people could sing,
even if someone showed them how to do
it.” And what of Muse’s “Supermassive
Black Hole”? “Dreadful.” As for the rather
more mainstream “No Matter What Sign
You Are” by Diana Ross & the Supremes, it
did not impress Moore either. “All these
songs are nasty noises.” Maybe the
interviewer should have got the hint with
the first song played to Moore – “Out of
Space” by hardcore rave outfit The Prodigy.
“I must be quite honest with you, this isn’t
my type of music,” he complained.
