Sciency Words: Time’s Arrow

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Hello, friends, and welcome back to Sciency Words!  Each week, we take a closer look at the definition and etymology of a science or science-related term.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

TIME’S ARROW

Which way is time going?  Prior to the 1890’s, no one would have asked such a silly question.  Time is time.  Everything about time is self-evident.  Why would anyone question it?

But then in 1895, H.G. Wells introduced the concept of time travel to the readers of adventure fiction.  And then in 1915, Albert Einstein started treating time as a variable, rather than a constant, as part of his general theory of relativity.  In his book Time Travel: A History, science historian James Gleick explains:

Millennia had gone by without scientists needing special shorthand like “time’s arrow” to state the obvious—the great thing about time is that it goes on.  Now, however, it was no longer obvious.  Physicists were writing laws of nature in a way that made time directionless, a mere change of sign separating +t from –t.

British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington gets credit for introducing the “arrow of time” as a conceptual metaphor.  Eddington’s arrow points from the past toward the future.  Unless it doesn’t.  Depending on what sort of physics problem you’re trying to solve (or what sort of Sci-Fi story you’re trying to tell), it may be more convenient to imagine time’s arrow pointing from the future toward the past.

In 1927, in a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh, and then later in a book titled The Nature of the Physical World, Eddington made three key points about time’s arrow, which I’ll paraphrase as:

  1. Gosh, time’s arrow sure does seem real to us humans.
  2. And common sense reasoning insists that time’s arrow must always point in the same direction.
  3. But when you do the math, you’ll find that none of the laws of physics actually require time’s arrow to exist, except one.

That one exception is the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that the entropy of a closed thermodynamic system will inevitably increase with the passage of time.  So time’s arrow must always point in the direction of increasing entropy.

Of course a lot of people remain skeptical about time travel.  The Time Machine by H.G. Wells is a fine piece of fiction.  As for general relativity, treating time as a variable (rather than a constant) might help make the math work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean variable time is a real phenomenon.

Still, thanks in larger part to Arthur Eddington and his arrow metaphors, the question “which way is time going?” no longer sounds like total nonsense.

Next time on Planet Pailly: have we discovered a second planet orbiting Proxima Centauri?

Orbiting the Blogosphere: Aliens, NASA Missions, and Flat Earthers

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

Hello, friends!

Today, I thought we’d take a quick look around the blogosphere and see what other space/science enthusiasts have been writing about.

First up, why is science fiction so obsessed with alien life?  Steven Lyle Jordan explores that question in an article for Medium.  Click here to check out that article, or click here to visit Steven’s blog.

Next, NASA has announced the finalists for the next Discovery-class mission, and one of those finalists involves a return to Neptune (frickin’ finally, am I right?).  Specifically, this would be a mission to explore Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.  Jay Cole from Digestible Space can tell you more.  Click here!

Meanwhile, NASA’s InSight mission has been gathering a surprising amount of data about earthquakes on Mars (a.k.a. marsquakes).  Maybe Mars isn’t as geologically dead as we thought?  Blaine Henry from Gimme Space can tell you more.  Click here for that!

And lastly, but not leastly, Fran from My Hubble Abode pays tribute to a prominent Flat Earther who recently passed away.  Fran has done many great posts debunking Flat Earth nonsense and other conspiracy theories.  But still, everyone deserves some compassion and respect.  Fran has set a wonderful example of how to disagree with someone without being disrespectful.  Click here.

That’s all for now.  If you read and enjoyed any of these posts, please be sure to let the author know with a comment.  It’s important that we all keep sharing and spreading our love for space and for science!

Next time on Planet Pailly: this might sound like an odd question, but which way is time going?

My Apologies to the Brevard Astronomical Society and to the Planet Orbitar

~ J.S. Pailly ~ Leave a comment

Hello, friends!

I’ve been blogging for almost ten years now.  In that time, I’ve written and illustrated a lot of posts that I’m really proud of.  But I’ve also made some stupid mistakes, and I’ve posted things that I thought were funny at the time but, in retrospect, I’m not so proud of.

In 2016, I wrote this post about an exoplanet named Orbitar.  Today, I have to issue a retraction.  In that 2016 post, I attributed a quote to the Brevard Astronomical Society, the group that won the I.A.U.’s naming contest for the planet now known as Orbitar.  The quote was about the possibility that Orbitar might have moons and that those moons could possibly support life.

Well, somebody from the Brevard Astronomical Society got in touch to inform me that no one from their organization had made such a statement.  Turns out I did a sloppy job citing my sources for that 2016 post, so I can’t figure out where I got the quote from.  Hence, the need for this retraction.

Given that Orbitar orbits a red giant star at a distance of approximately 1.19 AU, it seems highly unlikely that any Orbitarian moons could support life.  It would be pretty outlandish and unscientific to claim otherwise.  I can understand why an astronomical society would not want to be associated with such a claim.

And another thing: in that 2016 post, I made fun of the name Orbitar.  I thought it was a doofy thing to name a planet.  But I have since gotten used to the name, and I’ve come to like it.  It’s unique.  It’s a name with a lot of personality.  I’m sure lots of planets wish they had such a cool name.

So I’d like to apologize to the planet Orbitar.  Even more so, I’d like to apologize to the Brevard Astronomical Society.  This isn’t the first time I’ve made a mistake on my blog, and it surely won’t be the last.  But using that quote without clearly citing my source was an especially stupid mistake, and I’m very sorry for doing it.

Next time on Planet Pailly, we’ll check out some of the cool stuff other space and science bloggers have been up to lately!

Sciency Words: Somaforming

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 11 Comments

Hello, friends, and welcome once again to Sciency Words.  Each week, we take a closer look at some new and interesting scientific term so we can expand our scientific vocabularies together.  This week’s Sciency Word is:

SOMAFORMING

I’d like to begin this post with a quote.  This comes from the 2019 Sci-Fi novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers.  As the protagonist of that book explains, we humans are a remarkably versatile species, able to adapt to pretty much any environment—or at least any environment Earth has to offer.

But take us away from our home planet, and our adaptability vanishes.  Extended spaceflight is hell on the human body.  No longer challenged by gravity, bones and muscles quickly begin to stop spending resources on maintaining mass.  The heart gets lazy in pumping blood.  The eyeball changes shape, causing vision problems and headaches.  Unpleasant as these ailments are, they pale in comparison to the onslaught of radiation that fills the seeming void.

I have rarely seen the dangers of human spaceflight so artfully or so succinctly explained as in this book.

Even before Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, scientists knew space would be rough on the human body.  They did not know specifically what might go wrong, but they knew there would be trouble.  The obvious solution is to create an environment that is safe and comfortable for human beings.

But as early as 1960, some scientists were considering an alternative solution.  Rather than creating space environments that are suitable for human life, why not modify human life to be suitable for the environment of space?  This was the idea proposed by American research scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in their 1960 paper “Cyborgs and Space.”

Clynes and Kline proposed some rather drastic surgical changes to the human body.  They make it sound quite easy.  Just rip out a bunch of internal organs.  Replace those organs with synthetic parts.  Pump the patient/astronaut full of drugs and use hypnosis to suppress any psychological issues that might come up during or after the process.  And now you have a human being who’s ready to go to space!  Or you have a human being who’s dead on the operating room table.  One, or the other!

Clynes and Kline introduced the word “cyborg” to describe the half-human/half-machine person they proposed to create.  What Becky Chambers describes in To Be Taught, If Fortunate sounds a little bit safer and a lot less dehumanizing.  And Chambers introduces a new term to describe the transformation her characters undergo: somaforming.  The word is created by analogy with the word terraforming, with the Greek root word “terra” (Earth) being replaced with the Greek root word “soma” (body).

As the protagonist of To Be Taught, If Fortunate explains it, human space explorers come as guests, not conquerers.  The age of colonialism is long behind us. And being good guests, we don’t want to demand too much of our hosts or cause our hosts too much trouble.  To quote Chambers’ book once more: “I have no interest in changing other worlds to suit me.  I choose the lighter touch: changing myself to suit them.”

And I think that is a wonderful sentiment!

As far as I can tell, the word somaforming has not yet been picked up by the scientific community.  But plenty of words from science fiction have been adopted by scientists.  I have a suspicion that this is going to be one of those words.

Next time on Planet Pailly: Oh no!  I made a mistake in an old blog post, and I need to issue a retraction!

Dreaming About Pailly Crater

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 12 Comments

Hello, friends!

So this is kind of a weird time in my life.  A few weeks ago, I handed my manuscript over to my editor.  Now my editor has handed that manuscript back to me.  There’s surprisingly little that needs to be fixed, so I guess I’ll be moving forward with my self-publishing plan soon.

And that’s weird to me.  I’ve been writing for a really long time now.  I’ve come close to being published before, but this time is different.  My writing dreams have never felt so real to me, and yet at the same time nothing about what’s happening feels real to me at all.  I don’t know how to explain it any better than that.

I know a lot of writers fantasize about getting their book on a bestseller list or winning some sort of award.  I honestly don’t care about that.  So long as I make a living writing full time, I’ll be happy.  However, I will confess there is one prestigious honor that I do find myself daydreaming about, from time to time.  Is it premature for me to talk about this?  Yes.  Yes, it is.  Indulge me.

The International Astronomy Union has a longstanding tradition of naming craters on Mercury after artists, writers, and musicians.  To quote from this website, Mercury’s craters are to be named after:

Artists, musicians, painters, and authors who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field and have been recognized as art historically significant figures for more than 50 years.

The most recent Mercury crater naming announcement came in September of 2019.  Among others, poet Maya Angelou and comic book artist Jack Kirby now have craters named in their honor.  Previously, craters have been named after H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Walt Disney (this is not Disney crater, which seems like a missed opportunity to me).  Click here to see a full list of Mercury’s crater names.

Mercury is the most heavily cratered object in the Solar System, so it seems to me there should be room on the I.A.U.’s list for a Pailly crater.  Maybe someday.  A writer can dream, right?

Next time on Planet Pailly, if you can’t make the planet fit for human life, maybe you should make human life fit for the planet.

Sciency Words: The Yarkovsky Effect

~ J.S. Pailly ~ Leave a comment

Hello, friends!  Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about those weird and wonderful words scientists use.  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

THE YARKOVSKY EFFECT

Have you ever tried to count all the stars in the night sky?  Well, that might be an easier job than finding and tracking all the asteroids that keep whizzing by our planet.  Part of the problem is due to something called the Yarkovsky Effect.

Ivan Yarkovsky was a Polish engineer working in Russia.  He was also a huge science enthusiast.  If Yarkovsky were alive today, I imagine he’d be writing a blog about all the cool sciency research he was doing in his free time.

But it was the late 19th/early 20th Century.  Blogging wasn’t an option, so instead Yarkovsky wrote pamphlets about science, which he circulated among his science enthusiast friends. And almost fifty years after Yarkovsky’s death, an Estonian astronomer by the name of Ernst Öpik would remember reading one of those pamphlets.

Imagine an asteroid orbiting the Sun.  Sunlight causes this asteroid’s surface to get hot.  Then, as the asteroid rotates, that heat energy radiates off into space.  Would this radiating heat produce any thrust?  Would there be enough thrust to push an asteroid off its orbital trajectory?

Öpik thought so, and in 1951 he wrote this paper introducing the idea to the broader scientific community.  Today’s Sciency Words post would probably have been about the “Öpik Effect,” except Ernst Öpik was kind enough to give credit to the obscure blogger pamphlet writer who originally came up with the concept.  Thus we have the Yarkovsky Effect.

And in 2003, radar observations of the asteroid 6489 Golevka confirmed that the Yarkovsky Effect is real!  The asteroid had wandered 15 km away from its original course!

Around the same time, a copy of Ivan Yarkovsky’s original pamphlet was found in Poland.  As described in this article, it seems Yarkovsky was working on the basis of some faulty premises and a few rather unscientific assumptions.  He more or less stumbled upon the right idea by accident (but let’s not dwell on that part of the story).

Next time on Planet Pailly, no one’s going to name a scientific theory after me, but maybe there’s another sciency honor I can aspire to.

How Proxima b Lost Its Ozone Layer

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Hello, friends!

Today we’re visiting Proxima Centauri, one of three stars in the Alpha Centauri system, the star system right next door to our own.  And it turns out Proxima has at least one planet.  Not only that: Proxima’s planet is orbiting within the habitable zone.  That planet may have liquid water on its surface, and perhaps even life!

Proxima’s planet, known officially as Proxima b, orbits about 0.05 AU away from its star.  That puts Proxima b closer to its star than Mercury is to our Sun.  But that’s okay.  Proxima Centauri is much smaller, dimmer, and colder than our own Sun, so everything balances out.

But I have bad news.  The temperature might be right for life, but the radiation environment is all wrong.  Proxima Centauri is a very angry little star.  It’s much angrier than our Sun.  Solar flares, solar wind, and solar radiation are a whole lot worse than anything Earth would normally have to worry about.

In March of 2016, Earth-based astronomers observed a “superflare” on Proxima Centauri.  As you can see in the highly technical diagram below, that superflare would have done serious damage to Proxima b’s ozone layer (assuming Proxima b had an ozone layer in the first place).

According to this 2018 paper on ozone loss, if superflares like that are normal for Proxima Centauri, we should expect Proxima b to lose 90% of its ozone layer in just five years (again, assuming Proxima b had an ozone layer in the first place).  Without an ozone layer, incoming ultraviolet radiation would thoroughly sterilize Proxima b’s surface (much like it does on Mars).

And it gets worse.  Earth’s magnetic field deflects a lot of harmful solar and cosmic radiation away.  But according to this 2016 paper on space weather, Proxima b’s magnetic field (assuming Proxima b has a magnetic field) is taking a real beating.  The magnetic field would be badly weakened and compressed.  As a result, Proxima b’s atmosphere would start eroding away, due to the solar wind, and if those UV rays haven’t already killed everything on the surface, all that solar and cosmic radiation would have a chance to finish the job.

Even the most extreme of extremophiles here on Earth would have a tough time surviving on Proxima b.  But the situation is not hopeless.  That 2016 paper on space weather and that 2018 paper on ozone loss both acknowledge that there are still plausible scenarios where life could evolve and thrive on Proxima b.  But in order to do it, the Proxima b-ians must have done one of two things:

  • Life on Proxima b must be very specifically adapted to that radiation environment, or…
  • Life on Proxima b must have found a good hiding place, perhaps deep underwater or underground, where the radiation can’t reach it.

Next time on Planet Pailly, it’s a bird!  It’s a plane!  It’s… oh no, it’s a killer asteroid!!!

Sciency Words: Solar Wind

~ J.S. Pailly ~ Leave a comment

Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of Sciency Words.  Each week, we take a closer look at some science or science-related term so we can expand our scientific vocabularies together!  Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:

THE SOLAR WIND

The stars twinkle in our sky because Earth’s atmosphere scatters starlight.  The Sun has an atmosphere too, so it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that when astronomers observe stars that happen to be near the Sun (as viewed from Earth), they can see that the Sun’s atmosphere also scatters starlight.

What might surprise you—and what did surprise astronomers in the 1950’s—is that this scattering effect can extend very, very far into the space around the Sun.  The Sun’s atmosphere must be huge!  As reported in this 1959 article from Scientific American, the Sun’s atmosphere might be so big that it encompasses Earth!

Pursuing this and other lines of evidence (such as the apparent correlation between flare activity on the Sun and aurorae here on Earth, as well as apparent 11 year fluctuations in cosmic radiation levels), American astrophysicist Eugene Parker wrote this paper in 1958, introducing a concept now known as the solar wind.

As you might imagine, the Sun’s atmosphere is hot.  Absurdly hot.  Remember that temperature is really just a measure of the average velocity of atoms, and you’ll soon realize (as Parker did) that atoms in the Sun’s atmosphere must have enough velocity to escape the Sun’s gravity.  And since those atoms would also be ionized, these streams of ionized particles coming from the Sun would serve as extensions of the Sun’s magnetic field.

The term solar wind doesn’t appear in that 1958 paper.  Parker first introduces that term in this 1959 paper, in which he defends his idea and responds to critiques from other astrophysicists.  As Parker explains:

In view of the simple hydrodynamic origin of the expansion, it seems appropriate to term the stream a solar wind.

Also in 1959, the Soviet Union’s Luna 1 space probe gathered the first empirical evidence that the solar wind really does exist, leading to confirmation that Eugene Parker’s solar wind hypothesis was correct.

And today, a NASA spacecraft named in Parker’s honor is spiraling closer and closer to the Sun, gathering more data about the solar wind and other mysterious phenomena associated with the Sun.

Next time on Planet Pailly, now that we’ve talked about the solar wind in our own Solar System, we’ll check out the space weather forecast for the solar system next door.

#IWSG: The Writing Lesson I Never Learned

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 34 Comments

Hello, friends!  Welcome to another episode of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group!  If you’re a writer, and if you feel in any way insecure about your writing, click here to learn more about this wonderful group!

This month, my muse and I have reason to celebrate.  I mean, any time writing gets done, my muse and I have reason to celebrate.  But this month in particular, we have an especially good reason to celebrate.  My manuscript is done, and it is now in the hands of my editor.

At some point, obviously, my editor will hand that manuscript back to me along with a big old list of things that need to be fixed.  But in the meantime, I don’t have to worry about it, and that’s a nice feeling.

Except turning my manuscript over to my editor did not feel like the triumphant moment I thought it would.  Why not?  Because my manuscript was late.  Very late.  I’m taking the self-publishing route with this book, so it’s not like I’m in breech of contract or anything like that.  The only deadline I missed was a deadline I imposed on myself.

But still, I’m really shocked by how long it actually took me to finish that manuscript.  And since I have other self-imposed deadlines looming on the horizon, I’m a little concerned.  Am I going to stay on schedule?  Are those self-imposed deadlines not as realistic as they seem?

Which brings me to one of the very first lessons I (supposedly) learned on my writing journey.  This comes from author/blogger Jon Gibbs.  I attended one of his writing seminars back in 2006 or 2007, and he told me—told a whole group of us young, naive writers—that however much time you think you need to write something, double it.  That’s how you set a deadline.

More often than not, that lesson has proven to be true.  Just about everything takes twice as long as I think it should.

So when I set my deadline for my manuscript, did I follow Jon Gibbs’ advice?  No.  And the two deadlines I have coming up in March and May?  Did I follow Gibbs’s advice for those?  Nope.  So my muse and I are going to have to cut the celebration short and get back right back to work.

Next time on Planet Pailly, have you noticed how windy it is in outer space?

Orbiting the Blogosphere: The Betelgeuse Supernova and Other Spacey Stuff

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 9 Comments

Hello, friends!

Last week ended up being kind of a research poor week for me.  So today I thought we’d take a look at what some other spacey and sciency bloggers have been up to.

First up, Matthew Wright has a post about Betelgeuse, a red giant star in the constellation Orion.  Betelgeuse is about to go supernova!  Or maybe not.  Probably not, actually.  Click here for more!

And speaking of Betelgeuse, if it were to go supernova, what would the resulting Betelgeuse nebula look like?  How visible would it be to us here on Earth?  Starman over at Starman’s Meanderings has done some math for us.  Click here!

Meanwhile, SpaceX has been launching a whole lot of shiny new satellites for their Starlink Internet service.  But those shiny new satellites are too shiny, it turns out, and they’re already causing problems for astronomers.  Steve Hurley over at Explaining Science explains that science.  Click here!

And lastly, but not leastly, Fran from My Hubble Abode pays tribute to the Spitzer Space Telescope, recently decommissioned by NASA.  Click here for that.

And if you’ve seen any cool space or science blogs recently, be sure to share in the comments below.  The more we can share our love for space and for science, the better!

Next time on Planet Pailly, there’s one super important lesson about writing that I really should have learned by now.  We’ll talk about that in this month’s posting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.