Scientific Copenhagen

Do you have that strange feeling when you are about to visit new city abroad and little afraid of what you would stumble to when it come to simple things? Like how to use metro line or how to buy a bus ticket or how to identify your next destination? Or how to book your flight back to your home? Or how to handle a simple dilemma of should you exchange the money to the local currency or is it wise to put your card in every ATM or any other 'slot' machine on your way?

Hello™ at Microsoft Campus Days, 2014

Ericsson, a Swedish multinational provider of communications technology and services, has the answer for you. And me too. Last week, I took my entire family to the trip to Copenhagen for both, business and pleasure hours in the Danish capital. During my previous visits I didn't have much time for tourism and any off work activity for that matter. So I took a little research this time and Ericsson's "Networked Society City Index" helped a lot. Within the well-developed ICT infrastructure, economy and social development as well as environmental progress, Copenhagen is located in the top five within the NSC index, among 31 well developed worldwide cities. After our visit we left Denmark with a feeling that everything, or most of it, went perfectly smooth and applied IT were extremely helpful, simple and useful. Unified communications (UC), integrated into people's business life from within smart gadgets and laptop computers were also big part of it and I can proudly say that, in a way, I took a part in active development of Rackpeople's* Hello™ for Microsoft® Lync® - UC software that integrates with Microsoft's Lync and Exchange and presents video conferencing within a single click on wide variety of screens and devices. The business part of last week Copenhagen's trip was to visit Microsoft Campus Days where Hello™ had a big feature presentation and successfully presented what it can do in current edition. From developer's point of view I have a good feeling that this project will have long life with plenty of room for more versions in the future especially if Skype and Lync integrate and create space for non-business users as well.

However, Copenhagen, beside business side of the medal has plenty more to offer. History, arts, sport and music events, amusement parks, museums, royal and naval sites, shopping streets and malls, restaurants, walks along the canals, sightseeing from the sea and many more, but this time we chose to glimpse the city's unique scientific side. With seven years old boy in our small family, along with me, being a big fan of science and skeptical society, our stay was really special. If you add a last week's Black Friday hysteria, which brought enormous smile on my wife's face all-day-long, I can safely say that we spent one of those memorable times you never forget.

The Rundetårn, a 17th-century astronomical observatory**

The very first day we went to see Rundetårn, almost 400 years old observatory, built by king Christian IV, after first major success of naked-eye astronomical observation of planetary motion, performed by famous astronomer Tycho Brahe. His incredibly accurate measurement of 6 planets motion at the time, was used by Johannes Kepler after Tycho's death in 1601 and for the first time in astronomy, three laws of planetary motion were established, including the one that all planets in Solar system move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at a focus. Even though, there are still suspicious thoughts about honest relations between Brahe and Kepler and even uncleared circumstances related to Tycho's death (traces of mercury in hairs from his beard was found in 1901 autopsy), these two colorful characters of the early 17th century made crucial contributions to our understanding of the universe, including discovery of the Newton's law of gravity which was direct outcome from Kepler's laws.

Anyway, the Round Tower in the heart of Copenhagen is still active and one of the oldest functioning astronomy observatory. The dome is 6.75 meters high and 6 meters in diameter and contains a refracting telescope with 80–450x magnification with equatorial mount. Without elevator and stairs, walking up and down its unique 209 meters long spiral ramp that spins 7.5 times is something special I never saw before. Not to mention we had opportunity to look through the 'scope with two very friendly astronomers who warmly welcomed us and patiently answered all the questions we had.

Apollo 17's moon rock

Next stop in our astronomy tour was Tycho Brahe Planetarium. It is located not too far away from the observatory and hosts 'The Space Theater' with 1000 square meters dome-shaped screen and seeing a giant 3D Earth rotating in front of you or 30+ meters high mammoths in "Titans of the Ice Age" is the experience you don't want to miss. They also hosted a "A Journey through Space" program and permanent exhibition with meteor specimens and one of the largest moon rocks from Apollo 17 mission (in the above image).

Science is not science if you don't experiment in the lab and to have at least a feeling of what scientists do on daily bases, you have to visit Experimentarium City. Main exhibition, last week was "The Brain", with tons of posts waiting to be explored and played with. Needless to say, my favorite was the game with cool name "Mindball" - in which you have to push the ball only by using brain wave sensors. The more you are relaxed and focused, the more it will get into your control and move in desired direction.

Mindball - moving the ball with brain activity

If you like to have your brain scanned and to see which part is activated when you move fingers or if you want to see really cool optical illusions or to learn more about scientific facts and how stuff works or to play memory games or ... simply to experience a great family time, visiting Experimentarium City is mandatory.

Finally, no trip to Copenhagen would be aloud to have 'scientific' adjective in title without visiting national aquarium and the zoo. Opened last year, Den Blå Planet, National Aquarium Denmark, located near to Copenhagen's airport in Kastrup is something you would need to see to believe. Especially if you came from the continental country like Serbia. Equally interesting was the zoo, who went viral earlier this year when they decided to euthanize Marius, the young giraffe, because of a duty to avoid inbreeding, approved by European Breeding Programme for Giraffes. Right or wrong, it is not mine to say, but we humans are responsible for the health of the animal life and at least it is a good thing that there are scientific organizations that are taking breeding of animal species seriously. Anyway, perhaps the best impression in both wild animals and fish exhibitions, to me were their climate controlled environments - in the zoo their "Tropical section" with jungle climate conditions and in case of the aquarium it's "Amazonian region" with tropical plant life, strange looking fish and lots of piranhas.

The Little Mermaid

Finally, I want to thank all my coworkers at Rackpeople for having a good time on and off the office, especially Lasse who invited us for a visit and opportunity to spend my yearly bonus in Copenhagen. Trips like this are also one great opportunity to learn more about the country and region you are visiting and I mean not just about the sites, history, monuments and other attractions, but also about people, hospitality and friendship. Sometimes, the result is more than you hope for.. Sometimes less. Perhaps the best advice when you are visiting abroad, no matter if you are doing it as a pure tourist or within a business agenda, or both, is to leave high expectations at home. Nevertheless, Copenhagen is one great corner of the world, more than worthwhile to visit and this scientific side I wanted to show in this post is something not many cities in the world can offer.

Image references:
Scientific Copenhagen, 2014

References:
* http://www.rackpeople.com/
http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2013/ns-city-index-report-2013.pdf
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundetårn
http://www.rundetaarn.dk/en/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/17/was-tycho-brahe-poisoned

Are We Holograms?

Most of the famous movies and novels that are dealing with remarkable and bold scientific ideas in existence, like plotting the script behind the most intriguing property in the latest string theory called the "holographic principle", lack one main attraction I am always looking for in science fiction. The plausibility of the story. To get to the wider audience, science behind is somehow always pushed below the main layer, and the result is either too philosophical, ridiculous, or unnecessary complex (like planting humans for energy in 'Matrix' by AIs) or simple love story, like in case of "The Thirteenth Floor", or other simple and proven Good-vs-Bad chases in virtual realities, like those portrayed in Caprica.

The Thirteenth Floor*

But, if I had to choose one of those Hollywood fictions, maybe you would be surprised if I preferred "The Thirteenth Floor" over all the others I had a chance to watch or read. For one simple reason. Like with the holographic principle in string theories, producers identified one very true prediction in such realities and embedded it in the film and its poster ad as well—the boundary that represents the very end of the world. In the movie, both virtual characters learn about their worlds not being the real deal by discovering their own artificial horizons where all the roads inevitably and ultimately end. Almost like in the Middle Ages when the Earth was considered to be flat and there was a point where it eventually ended or in the myth with Earth carried by four elephants standing on a turtle floating in a never-ending ocean. Like many times before, the science fiction behind this might not be too far from the truth at all, and if you think that centuries after the flat Earth myth, we finally learned that Earth is spherical and doesn't have an end along with our endless and ever-expanding universe, well, think again. With new findings and several published papers within ongoing string theory research, especially within holographic principle research of black hole event horizons, a new and exciting (or disturbing, looking at it from our own perspective) plausible reality might be considered the accurate one. And yes, with the new theory, our own universe now has an end in the form of one tiny two-dimensional bubble where we all might actually be located in our true form, and the universe, as we perceive it, is just a figment of our imagination or, to be precise, a hologram made out of some other reality residing in the outer bubble we simply know as the cosmological horizon.

Plausible?

Like with the end of the road in the movie, theoretical physicists hit the wall sometimes when they try to describe some astronomical processes. Exactly this was the case when Stephen Hawking discovered black hole radiation. Hawking radiation is made out of a pair of virtual particles emerging from a vacuum where the positive particle manages to escape the event horizon while the negative one gets absorbed by the black hole, resulting in the black hole losing energy and eventually evaporating. In other words, radiation from a black hole seems to not originate from the inside of the black hole at all. If this is true, then all the information of the matter swallowed by the black hole is lost forever, and that in fact contradicts quantum mechanics, which dictates that nothing, including information, can ever be lost. At the time, this problem, called the black hole information paradox, divided leading scientists to the point of a simple bet, where nobody was absolutely sure what was going on in the mysterious holes. There was even a book, published six years ago, conveniently named “The Black Hole War” by Leonard Susskind, committed to this paradox in physics.

Holographic Principle to Multiverse Reality**

Of course, paradoxes are only there to indicate that something is wrong, either with fundamentals or with the theories. In this case it's either something wrong with quantum mechanics and its math, and information can be lost in black holes, or this is impossible and some new (or one of the existing) theory is still waiting to be proven and accepted by mainstream science. You can find many of proposed solutions in below links, from the one where information still, by some unknown process, find the way to leak along with radiation of virtual particles through the one, that I preferred in the past, where black hole in the other end forms a baby universe with all the information transferred to the newly created cosmos to the most hypothetical one in which something happens at the very last moments of black hole evaporation, similar to the supernovae explosion with all the information finally burst out or ... in the more exotic realm ... and what is the newest approach and recently backed with new evidence, that all the information actually got copied in the tiny two-dimensional film of the event horizon and maybe never entered the black hole in the first place by some black hole quantum mechanism. If we use the life metaphor, the content of a black hole holds only corpses, while information, like a soul, left the body in the moment of death, or in this case, when it irretrievably fell into singularity. Actually, this approach is now widely accepted among string theorists, and it is appropriately named the "holographic principle", which all new string theories now include.

The scientific explanation for this principle is "the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a boundary to the region". String theory proposed by Juan Martín Maldacena, Gerard ’t Hooft, and Leonard Susskind with the holographic principle included suggests that not only with black holes but everywhere in the universe, all the information needed to describe a closed system or volume of space with any physical process inside can be fully encoded within the two-dimensional surface surrounding it. If this is correct, then we can go further and conclude that all the physical processes in the monitoring system are actually happening on the surface instead of in its three-dimensional representation, and our familiar space-time continuum might be just a (holographic) projection of the two-dimensional entities and events. On the larger scale, this theory allows that the entire universe can be understood as the reality of a two-dimensional information structure encoded within the cosmological horizon, while the three spatial dimensions we live in are only its representation at macroscopic scales and at low energies described by cosmological holography.

In other words, it might mean that there is a two-dimensional me (and you) at the end of the universe, more than 13 billion light-years away, encoded somewhere in the cosmological horizon, that is a full description of myself and controlling all my actions (and reactions) over here. Strangely enough, recently more evidence has been suggested in scientific research by Yoshifumi Hyakutake of Ibaraki University in Japan and his team. What they did was to perform a mathematical calculation of the internal energy of a black hole based on the predictions of string theory. By using the proposed holographic principle, they compared the results with the calculated internal energy of the corresponding lower-dimensional cosmos with no gravity and found the amazing fact that they match completely. They, of course, used a model of a hypothetical universe, which is not a representation of our own, but still, this is the most valuable "proof" in favor of holographic theory. And not just that, if these calculations are right, this practically means that one complex universe with gravity included (that still fails to be understood fully) can be explained and compared by the flat universe with no gravity force whatsoever.

The holographic universe is, of course, highly hypothetical and hard to comprehend, but the main principle is solid; calculations are there, math exists, and it brings both a solution to the information paradox in black hole physics and a way to simplify our future modeling of astronomical systems. With a possibility to exclude gravity out of the equation, the holographic principle is already nicknamed the "21st-century Rosetta Stone" in the world of mathematics, and if proven accurate, we could be a bit closer to the final understanding of how nature really works. But, like any other new breakthrough discovery, it could open many more questions on the way, and the obvious one is if the main reality is in the information surface, how does it work? How does life fit in? Is it also located on the surface and projected like everything else, or perhaps living creatures are something else that works independently?

Images and article refs:
* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/
** https://community.emc.com/people/ble/blog/2011/11/06/holographic-principle
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2013/12/do-black-holes-destroy-information/

Refs:
http://www.nature.com/news/simulations-back-up-theory-that-universe-is-a-hologram-1.14328
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox
http://rt.com/news/space-evidence-universe-hologram-195/
http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jun/03-our-universe-may-be-a-giant-hologram
http://astroengine.com/2009/01/20/is-the-universe-a-holographic-projection/
http://www.universetoday.com/107172/why-our-universe-is-not-a-hologram/
http://physics.about.com/od/astronomy/f/hawkrad.htm
http://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/relativity

Aliens & UFOs

Not so long ago I mentioned the great city of Alexandria in the post Constantine & Naissus when I described the horrible misfortune and death of Hypatia, one of the greatest philosophers and astronomers of the 4th century AD, who lived at the very end of the classical Greek era of prosperity. Within the same city walls, a couple of centuries before, one of the greatest and most famous scientists of all time, Claudius Ptolemy, was living, exploring, teaching, and dedicating his life to various disciplines, including astronomy and, of course, the unavoidable astrology, which was considered to be "connected science" for centuries, especially in the old ages.

Rachel Weisz as Hypatia of Alexandria in Agora (2009)

Among other things, Ptolemy will be remembered as one of the first scholars who described and identified 48 constellations of clear and unpolluted nightly skies above Alexandria so many centuries ago. One of the biggest constellations in his list was the great constellation of Gemini. This zodiac member* (one of 13 constellations that appears in the background of the Sun during one year of Earth's orbit) is made out of 80 stars. Perhaps the most interesting stars in Gemini are two "twins", Castor and Pollux (twin brothers from Greek mythology), who are among the brightest star systems of the heavens, the first being a system made out of 6 stars gravitationally bonded while the other is an old and evolved giant star. These two stars are the pillars of the whole constellation and certainly the most important stars in Gemini, but from the point of view related to this post's title, maybe the more interesting star in the constellation is its 37th member. A star without a name with astronomical designation HD50692 and simply called 37 Geminorum or "37 Gem". It came to focus during the year of 2003 when astronomers Jill Tarter and Margaret Turnbull, under Project Phoenix (a part of SETI), published the article Target Selection for SETI. I. A Catalog of Nearby Habitable Stellar Systems. The goal was to, by thorough examination of various star features (like star age, composition, similarity to the Sun, capability to harbor a stable habitable zone where liquid water can exist, etc.), narrow down 118,218 stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue database to the relatively small number of potential SETI targets. The result of the research is the Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems (HabCat), with a selection of 17,129 candidates with potentially habitable exoplanets capable of complex life similar to Earth.

After this initial research was done in 2003, according to one of the paper writers, astrobiologist Maggie Turnbull, "37 Gem" was most likely the best candidate to harbor an Earth twin planet within its Goldilocks zone. The star is stable and non-variant, middle-aged, and just a bit hotter and brighter than our Sun. It is located 56.3 light-years from our solar system, and it is one billion years older than our sun. Now, if this system is rich with elements originated from old supernova explosions in the distant past, like in our planetary front yard, and if major cosmic collisions and natural doomsday scenarios didn't interfere much with the evolution of lifeforms, then this star and its potential planetary system is more than promising. However, so far no planets are detected in this system, and no radio messages are caught from this direction, but if some Earth-like planet is there and, in one potential scenario, if some sort of intelligent life emerged and evolved, the fact is that they had one billion years ahead of us. In simple words, if alien humanoids, or whatever they look like, exist, they could be far more advanced than we are, and they may not communicate with radio waves anymore. Furthermore, if interstellar travels are possible with some sort of 'warp speed' spaceship technology, it is likely that they already developed it by now. Not to mention that this kind of advanced civilization would be fully aware of all star systems in their neighborhood of, say, 100 light-years in all directions. In other words, if they exist, they already know about us.

Astronomy, of course, is the science dealing with extremely large numbers, and thanks to many new techniques in interstellar observation, we now know a great deal about the star "37 Gem". Even though the two stars are similar in many aspects, it is actually not the exact Sun twin. Like in the case of the identical twins of the mythological story of Castor and Pollux, the two stars are different. Slightly, but they are. Way back in the year of 2004, I read one interesting hypothetical question within a popular Serbian Astronomy Magazine. Miroslav Filipović, one of the astronomers who worked at the time at the Australian Parkes Observatory, asked a very interesting question. He wondered what would happen if we took the almighty hand and in one millisecond replaced our sun with "37 Gem"? It was actually an interactive quiz question (here is the Serbian link), and I couldn't resist posting my thoughts on the subject. Basically I said that this scenario would be catastrophic for our solar system. All orbits would start changing immediately, and our Goldilocks zone would suffer the most as the asteroid belt would go into a chaotic stage, and in the process of adjusting to the new boss, until all orbits stabilize, Earth would probably lose all habitable properties due to asteroid bombardments similar to the early stage of the solar system, and life as we know it would most definitely cease to exist. The biggest unknown to me was what would happen to Jupiter? This giant planet and its orbit act as a gravitational balance between the main star and all other planets, and with its enormous gravity, it attracts all killer objects toward itself and keeps the asteroid belt in line. The moral of the story is that even the slightest difference between two stars can be the major difference in their system geometry and behavior. Not to mention that if we use our solar system analogy, in order for life to survive billions of years of evolution, there must exist one giant planet in the right position in order to protect the planets in the habitable zone from serious attacks from large asteroids and comets. If we put this story into consideration, it seems now that finding Sun's twin doesn't guarantee the existence of a habitable Earth-like planet capable of the evolution of intelligent life.

With the latest update of this post, I tried to simulate this hypothetical scenario in Universe Sandbox. 37 Gem, actually, is not part of the app's default library, so, to test it out, I just enhanced the Sun's mass to match 37 Gem's, which is estimated to be 1.1 solar masses. In the simulation result, within hours and days, the Earth's orbit changed and the Goldilocks zone expanded, causing the average temperature to jump from a cozy fifteen degrees to more than fifty. I am not sure that there is a physics process in existence to create something like this, but this fragileness gave me another stomach twitching nevertheless.

But to get back to the title, and in light of so many reported UFO sightings all over the world and with lots of stories involving alien autopsies, abducted humans, and (ancient) alien astronauts, we believers can ask ourselves, is there an ultimate connection between aliens & UFOs?

Well, the ultimate fact is that we still have no single proof that aliens exist at all, and sometimes, the lack of proof means that it doesn't exist at all, and in this case, this might be true for our small interstellar neighborhood. So, for now, the answer to the famous question "Are there aliens in UFOs?" will stay "No". UFO will still be what the acronym means in the first place: "Unidentified Flying Object". To be honest, on several occasions I saw UFOs in the sky. One of them was pretty memorable—a decade or so ago there was one bright light flying very fast above the beach resort in Greece, and its magnitude was probably about -5 or even brighter, which was probably the brightness of three or four full Venus magnitudes, and believe me or not, what first popped to my mind wasn't aliens driving some fancy saucer, and instead the first thing I thought was that this might be related to the jet military planes from the nearby air force base located a couple of hundred kilometers near Thessaloniki, the second largest city in the country. It's not that I am one of those conspiracy theorists out there; it was the simple fact that we were regularly seeing these jets during daylight, with some of them repeatedly breaking the sound barrier above the Aegean Sea. However, what I didn't hear that night was the sound of a jet. It was flying completely quietly. That fact is still buzzing in my mind. But not enough to immediately imagine little grays in shiny alien aircraft in search of abductees.

UFOs Explained***

In favor of the fact that there is no proof of aliens visiting our planet or any significant proof of their communications detected in past decades speaks the 50+ years of radio silence since SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been using scientific research to detect at least one confirmed artificial electromagnetic signal from above. That is if we exclude the WOW!** signal from August of 1977. Jerry R. Ehman, an American astronomer, detected the strong narrow-band radio signal that appeared to originate from Chi Sagittarii, a shared three-star system in the constellation Sagittarius. However, even though the signal never repeated again, it remained the best candidate for the proof of one alien world 220 light-years away from Earth. The signal was 30 times louder than normal deep space noise, and the fact that its frequency was 1420 MHz, the same frequency the most common element, hydrogen, resonates at, no doubt points toward the valid conclusion that it indeed was artificial in origin. Too bad it has stayed unconfirmed ever since. But if it was really a message from the alien race living in one of the star systems of the Sagittarius constellation, I could say that I fully understand why it was not repeated (or detected) again. The simple reason is the same as why we here don't send messages to outer space on purpose. Or, to be precise, why broadcasts sent from Earth to chosen star systems are not continuous messages and are instead just some isolated, shy, and timid dispatches.

Ever since SETI started its research in only listening to the heavens, there has been a loud debate over whether or not it is wise to send pointed messages to the unknown aliens. There is a simple fear that some of them can be violent and eager to enslave us the moment they receive this kind of invitation. If you ask me, I stand by the point that sending these messages is too early. We are still a young civilization, and it is wise to wait for a couplemore decades until we, at least, evolve from residents of one planet into residents of one solar system. We simply need to understand more than just Earth before we start actively searching for the contact of the third kind. Of course this doesn't stop people behind Active SETI or METI (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence), who have been trying to send messages ever since the first message to ET was sent in the form of Pioneer plaques, placed on board the 1972 Pioneer 10 spacecraft, illustrating a hydrogen atom, a naked man and woman, and the solar system's main objects. A couple of years later, the first radio message was sent from the Arecibo radio telescope toward the 25,000-light-year-distant star cluster M13. The Arecibo message was created by Dr. Frank Drake with the help of Carl Sagan and contained simple physics along with mathematical and graphical data, and it served more educational purposes than as a real attempt to contact extraterrestrials.

'Aliens form Orion'****

On the other end, there are pointed messages to the desired star systems with more complex data included. Scientists and politicians are not really united when it comes to possibly messaging extraterrestrials, not to mention that there is no valid protocol for what we should do if some ET pays us a surprise visit, and so far there are no united efforts to perform active SETI on a global scale. Instead, some not very bright individual messages are sent from time to time, like the one sent last year toward the source of the WOW! signal with, believe it or not, 10,000 Twitter messages. I wonder what aliens would conclude after reading tweets, but I am sure nothing good. Equally problematic, to say the least, a message called "Teen Age Message" is sent from a radio telescope in Ukraine in 2001. The message's content and target stars were selected by a group of teens from four Russian cities. You probably guessed, teens, among other data, have chosen to send an audio file, and in this case a concert named "First Theremin Concert for Extraterrestrials". Among other stars, this message is sent toward "37 Gem" as well, and it will arrive in December 2057. Then we will know for sure if aliens there like music and art.

In conclusion let me say the obvious. Space is a cruel place, and distances between two star systems are tremendously huge. Technology to build a spaceshipfor interstellar travel is definitely extraordinary and not just within the realm of solving the cruising speed to be faster than light. I am more than positive that first contact with alien technology will be with some robotic probe instead of live contact with cute and friendly aliens in a flash. If traveling through the space was easy and solvable, we would probably have significant proof by now that aliens exist, and we wouldn't be buzzing our minds with the Fermi paradox and the obvious question of why the nightly sky is not filled with alien spacecraft, deep space stations, and beautiful green girls from Orion.

Original post date: November 2013; Updates: December 2016, December 2015

Image ref:
https://philipstanfield.com/tag/mysticism-2/

*What is the Zodiac?
http://earthsky.org/space/what-is-the-zodiac
http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/starfinder2/en/

**Wow! signal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal

***UFOs Explained –– and Unsolved
http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a3995/4304207/
http://ufodigest.com/news/0809/ufos-solved.php

****The Green Sisters
http://www.startrekmemorabilia.com/non-human-hotties/slave-sisters-from-bound

More resources:
http://static.astronomija.co.rs/razno/zabava/igre/pobednik2.htm
http://static.astronomija.co.rs/dubokisvemir/galaksija/explanete/37gem/odgovor.htm
http://www.astrobio.net/exclusive/627/habitability-betting-on-37-gem
http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/031008190106.4hcm1yfo.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_twin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_to_Extra-Terrestrial_Intelligence
http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/newworlds/HabStars.html

Celestia, Campfire and Astronomy

I remember every little detail from that weekend trip. From the very first moment when we stepped into the bus that took us to the mountain base, throughout the rest of the first day when we climbed down into a small cave with narrow hallways toward the small chamber at its end. I vividly remember the glorious, endless, and hard-to-find second cave we stepped in the very next day, followed by an overwhelming feeling and little fear when we passed through cave chambers, cutting the darkness with handy tools and small flashlights. I will always hate myself for not having a camera to capture the surrounding scenery when we traveled by train later that afternoon, which looked like it came right out of the 19th century with wooden benches rolling the railways slower than Usain Bolt. All those rock formations and abandoned train stations were slowly losing their battles with nature and were looking exactly like a background from Sergio Leone's spaghetti western movies.

Viktor at Rundetårn observatory, Copenhagen

But what I will remember the most is the first camping night between the caves. It was an extraordinary experience only a campfire can provide.

It was the hot middle of the summer, and the forest was mysterious and kind at the same time. I don't remember the exact year, though, but it surely was during my late teenage years, most likely in July or August of 1987. Along with a couple of my peer friends, I was lying down in the middle of a forest clearing on top of my brand-new sleeping bag, hypnotically staring toward the nightly sky. I glimpsed the watch and saw that midnight passed just an hour ago. The campfire was vividly glowing around the small glade surrounded by dark trees. It was the perfect time, and soon it was about to begin. As planned, the first one came on schedule, leaving a straight line in the sky for a millisecond or two. Shortly after, another one fractured the nightly sky, then another one and another and another...and then it was a shower. The Perseids. The icy fragments entering the Earth's atmosphere every summer are body parts of the comet Swift–Tuttle, which travels in this neighborhood every 130 years, providing lots of meteors for our camping TV. That particular year we planned our adventure by the moon's motion, or, to be precise, we wanted to go on the trip when there was no moon in the sky most of the night during its crescent phase. Without light pollution from the Earth and the Moon, the sight was amazing—perseids, thousands of stars, nebulas, galaxies and planets, the Milky Way in the center of our view, planes, and artificial satellites passing by throughout constellations with their leader of the time—the Russian space station "Mir", which was probably one of those brightest moving dots we saw that night. If you didn't see such a sight, you would be surprised how the night sky is actually dynamic. If you add to the scene strange sounds coming from the surrounding forest made by sleepless birds and wild animals, you get perfect entertainment for the big portion of the night. It was our first camping trip, and the fear of the unknown a little spoiled the event, but in our defense, without any experienced guides or team members, I can assure you that every suspicious sound that came from the forest sounded like the ultimate wild predator hungry for young humans. Anyway, little because of the fear and much because of active heavens, we finally fell asleep a little before dawn and successfully slept for an hour and a half, ready for the next day.

Space station Mir (1986-2001)

That really was one great summer, and this trip would stay on top of my adventurous history, from many perspectives. But it wasn't the one that triggered my interest in science and astronomy. I couldn't say what it was for sure, and probably, among many things, at the very beginning, it was one scientific toy my parents bought for me when I was really young. It was one toolkit box**—an optical set of plastic parts and various lenses allowing you to build different gadgets such as a microscope, binoculars, a spyglass, a kaleidoscope, a diapositive magnifier, prism tools, etc. It was my favorite toy for many years. The other equally important trigger is my failure to comprehend the word "infinite" and my everlasting desire to understand its meaning. It was bugging my mind ever since I started to look up at night. Even today, after dozens of courses of various mathematics I had to pass during my high school and university education, infinity is staying the biggest unknown, lying right there, far beyond my scope. There were years in my youth when I was convinced that infinity actually doesn't exist at all. I loved the idea that the cosmos is curved to 360° in all directions. I desperately wanted to believe that if you go with your spaceship straight up, eventually you will reach the same spot only from the opposite direction, just like the surface of Earth and its two-dimensional fully closed curve. Of course, today within the mainstream scientific thought there is much evidence that the expansion of our universe is real, but still it doesn't solve the infinity of it. At least in my mind. Even though the probable fact that our universe is just a part of a multiverse neighborhood where our cosmos is expanding into something bigger, to me it is only stretching the infinity out, only this time far beyond our borders. Maybe one day we will find the definite answer.

From the other perspective, if we are looking at the 'infinite' trouble only from our rational mind, we have to admit that the human race is extremely young, evolutionarily speaking. The real handicap is that we are living in a 'finite' world. Everything that surrounds us has its beginning and the end. At least it seems so, and even though we today learned a great deal about our position within the celestial realm, we only scratched the surface of it. We only managed to set a foot or two (or 12 to be exact) on the Moon, and we only started to explore our own solar system. Due to our own limitations in the form of our unwillingness and hesitations to deal with the unknown and/or our own animosities for each other in the form of militant behavior throughout our history, this is still a very slow process, but inevitably, one day, in the not-so-far future, the time will come when, lackingenough energy to sustain humanity as we know it, we all will have to start looking up, not for searching for the divine but for our own pure survival. Then our own evolution will speed up and skip some gears toward answers to many inconceivable questions.

Night Sky and Perseids by Brad Goldpaint (Goldpaint Photography)*

Anyway, astronomy is one of few scientific playgrounds simply because it contains many unanswered questions. There are plenty of proposed theories that will surely stay in their theoretical phases for many years until we finally get ultimate proof. It is entirely based on studying electromagnetic radiation we are picking up on the surface of Earth and several instruments in orbit. All possible frequencies within electromagnetic radiation are telling us many stories from its origin point and the path it is traveling through. Of course, studying full spectrum requires big and even large instruments in both size and money needed for their manufacturing. Especially if they require being lifted into orbit in order to avoid atmospheric disturbances. Secondly, it is amazing what must be done in order to look up one particular spot in the heavens simply because everything in the cosmos is in motion. We need to solve the rotation and revolution of the planet and, if posted in orbit, compensate for the extremely fast speed of the spacecraft carrying the instruments. As the monitoring object is farther away, the less amount of radiation is picked up by the sensors, so astronomy is one of those indirect or asynchronous sciences where we need to collect the data for some time, which could be years or even more time, and then for an equally considerable time analyze the data, compare the resulting images, and conclude science out. For example, take the Kepler orbital space laboratory. It orbits the Sun following the Earth in order to get a clear view toward the monitoring stars, and it is simply continuously taking images of 'nearby' stars (about 145,000 stars) and sending the data to the Kepler team for analysis. Over time, the team and their sophisticated software measure slight brightness changes during possible orbits of potential planets, and only by these small changes in brightness of the main star is it possible to roughly determine the size and orbit of the planet causing the dimming of the light from the star. However, in order to get all those facts out of the data, Kepler must take lots of images and cover the planet's full orbit. That means in order to confirm the planet, Kepler must take at least two images separated by time in order to confirm the revolution time of the planet. It's a slow process, and considering lots, and I mean LOTS, of received data, I am sure we will hear about more and more planets found by this technique.

Among all possible wavelengths within the full electromagnetic spectrum, the coolest one is the one situated between infrared and ultraviolet waves. The greatest visible light. The one we can see. Even though it is just a tiny portion of the full spectrum, this is the one we can enjoy with our own eyes. This is the one we see every night we look up toward the amazing heavens. Thanks to relatively cheap optical instruments, we are able to enhance the view and zoom it in and see further. Some time after I enjoyed my optical set toy I mentioned earlier, I got my own first refracting telescope. It was small without any tripods and fully mobile, but looking at the moon for the first time was something I will always remember. Discovering the fact with my own eyes that Venus, like the Moon, also has phases and seeing it in its crescent shape was the next best thing I experienced. I still have it, and every time I grab this small piece of optics, I can't help myself and instantly remember the times when I was fixing it on the ladder positioned on the top of our garage and spending hours looking toward the stars.

Transit of Mercury over Sun by Sky-Watcher 150/750

Today I have in my possession an educational reflecting telescope with a respectable mirror size and focal distance mounted on an equatorial tripod along with a motion tracking system capable of fixing the spot on the sky for hours. Unfortunately, amateur astronomy requires lots of free time, which I regretfully don't have enough of. In addition to a lack of free time, watching the heavens requires an unpolluted environment, and life in big cities is beneficial for everything but astronomical observation. Sometimes I feel like that character from the Michael Keaton movie—I don't remember the title now, but in the movie he found a way to clone himself in order to get finished various tasks in his life... Similarly, I would like to have one me for work, one for astronomy and science, one for family and writing... Simply, the day is too short, and to support the family and life, the work is always number one. But it is a good thing to have spare moments and spend them in the most enjoyable way. Even today, from time to time, I point the scope up and peek a little. Sometimes I take photos out, like this one of Mercury transiting the Sun disc.

To conclude with some short 'observations', if you want to do some amateur astronomy, you will need star maps. Before they were black and white and printed in the form of atlas books. Today all that changed with the speed of the internet and graphic tools on the average personal computer. They are all online, and you can access them with many apps. I recommend 'Celestia' and 'Stellarium'. Even without a real telescope, they provide endless fun.

Image refs:
https://amsmeteors.org/2017/08/viewing-the-perseids-in-2017/
* https://goldpaintphotography.com/

Kepler project:
http://kepler.nasa.gov/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54fnbJ1hZik

** Toolkit box (~1978):


Refs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
http://www.stellarium.org/