Another Geological Myth Refuted

Geological science fiction refuted: A ‘cool’ new picture of early Earth.

The first 700 million years of Earth’s 4.5-billion-year existence are known as the Hadean period, after Hades, or, to shed the ancient Greek name,
Hell.

That name seemed to fit with the common perception that the young Earth was a hot, dry, desolate landscape interspersed with seas of magma and inhospitable for life. Even if some organism had somehow popped into existence, the old story went, surely it would soon have been extinguished in the firestorm of one of the giant meteorites that slammed into the Earth when the young solar system was still crowded with debris.

Over the last decade, the mineralogical analysis of small hardy crystals known as zircons embedded in old Australian rocks has painted a picture of the Hadean period “completely inconsistent with this myth we made up,” said T Mark Harrison, a professor of geochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Those same zircon crystals also show that the modern oceans didn't exist in the Triassic and the Earth was half it's present diameter. Maybe now people can start to realize the mantle is also cold and therefore mantle convection is a myth.

What Time Is It?

Louis, as in Louis Hissink, made a very keen Kantian observation the other day in the comments section.

"What we have thrown out is purely mathematical science with no connection to physical reality, and why we throw out Einstein's relativity theory - his initial error was to make time a physical entity - it isn't. Knock that assumption off its perch and the rest falls down." -- Louis Hissink, Nov 2008

Which got me thinking (yet again) about the unparalleled genius of my favorite scientist and philosopher of all time, Immanuel Kant, a.k.a. "The Great Chinaman of Königsberg" (Nietzsche, 1886).

"Ah-so, Grasshopper, your shaolin metaphysical training with respect to transcendental idealism in accordance with empirical realism is now complete," Kant must've been saying with folded legs and squinting eyes in Nietszche's imagination.



As you may or may not know, it was Immanuel Kant who discovered in 1754 that the Aristotelian/Newtonian concept of "absolute, true, and mathematical time" (Newton, 1687) does not exist in material reality but can only be thought of as ideal.

In order for time to be known in any absolute sense, it must be in the form of units, and in order for it to be in the form of units, it must be measured. So what units is time measured in? Days of course.

What Kant discovered in 1754 that changed the world forever is that the rotation of the Earth is being retarded due to tidal forces not to mention the radial increase of the Earth, thus the lengthening of the day.

"Kant pointed out in the middle of last [18th] century, what had not previously been discovered by mathematicians or physical astronomers, that the frictional resistance against tidal currents on the earth's surface must cause a diminution of the earth's rotational speed. This really great discovery in Natural Philosophy seems to have attracted little attention,--indeed to have passed quite unnoticed,--among mathematicians, and astronomers, and naturalists, until about 1840, when the doctrine of energy began to be taken to heart." -- Lord Kelvin, physicist, 1897

Time, according to Kant (1781), is the a priori form of our intuition and therefore not a thing in itself or a so-called "fabric" as claimed by 20th century dogmatism.

"If we...consequently take objects as they are in themselves, then time is nothing." -- Immanuel Kant, philosopher, 1781

"...As our intuition is always sensuous, no object can ever be presented to us in experience, which does not come under the condition of time. On the other hand, we deny to time all claim to absolute reality; that is, we deny that it, without having regard to the form of our sensuous intuition, absolutely inheres in things as a condition or property. Such properties as belong to objects as things in themselves never can be presented to us through the medium of the senses. Herein consists, therefore the transcendental ideality of time, according to which, if we abstract the subjective conditions of sensuous intuition, it is nothing, and cannot be reckoned as subsisting or inhereing in objects as things in themselves, independently of our intuition." -- Immanuel Kant, philosopher, 1781

If I had known about the essay contest "On The Nature of Time" and the $10,000 cash prize being offered by the Foundational Sciences Institute earlier [in time?], I would've addressed this issue in detail.

Physicist Brian Cox and others, interviewed on the BBC, agree as well.



And thus the house of cards that Einsteinian relativity is built upon comes tumbling down.

The speed of light is not a constant "c" as there is no such material thing as empty space, a vacuum, or void (the universe is filled with plasma) and the speed of light has been experimentally slowed to less than 38 miles per hour (Hau et al., 1999, 2001) in a frozen sodium ion chamber. The records continue to be broken. Therefore special relativity has been empirically falsified.

Newton, I., Principles of Math Treating Time As Absolute, 1687

Kant, I., Kant's Cosmogony: As In His Essay On The Retardation Of The Rotation Of The Earth And His Natural History And Theory Of The Heavens, 1754

Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, 1781

Kant, I., Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 1786

Nietzsche, F.W., Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

Bostick's Plasmoids: Plasma Vortices and Spiral Galaxies

Ian Tresman of Plasma Universe: Bostick’s Plasmoids.

On December 12, 1956, the front page of the New York Times announced: "Physicist 'Creates' Universe in a Test Tube; Atom Gun Produces Galaxies and Gives Clues to Creation".

Just over 50 years ago, plasma physicist Winston H. Bostick made the kind of news headlines that many a scientist dreams. In his laboratory experiment Bostick created a simple "plasma gun" consisting of a 4-inch diameter glass jar around which he wound a wire carrying an electric current that created a small magnetic field. Most of the air was removed from the jar and two titanium wires were connected to a high-voltage, high-current electric power source.

On flicking the power switch, a 10,000 ampere electric current passed through the titanium wires, instantly vaporizing them and creating a puff of ionized gas (a plasma) travelling at 450,000 miles per hour. Bostick noted that the puffs of plasma formed distinctive shapes that resembled galaxies at various stages of aging and formation. Bostick called his laboratory produced plasma entities, "plasmoids".

Over the next thirty years, Bostick, a Professor of Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, investigated plasmoids further and found that "not only the morphology [shape] but the controlling dynamic elements, electric and magnetic fields, are the same in the laboratory as in the galactic phenomena".

Bostick's theory describes galaxies as analogous to series-wound homopolar generators (a kind of motor) that convert gravitational energy of rotation into increasing magnetic energy that causes galaxies to expand away from each other. Furthermore, Bostick suggested that such a model could produce a concentration of current perpendicular to the galactic disk that would be a cosmic-sized "plasma focus" – a device that produces high energy, relativistic (near the speed of light) particle beams, or jets.

Winston H. Bostick was born in 1916, and died January 19, 1991, at age 74.


Left: Two plasmoids in a magnetic field producing similarities to the shape of barred spiral galaxies.
Right: Winston H. Bostick makes the news headlines in 1956.

Further reading: Winston H. Bostick and Plasmoids.

Magnetic Reconnection On Mars

Solar Wind Rips Up Martian Atmosphere.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2008) — Researchers have found new evidence that the atmosphere of Mars is being stripped away by solar wind. It's not a gently continuous erosion, but rather a ripping process in which chunks of Martian air detach themselves from the planet and tumble into deep space. This surprising mechanism could help solve a longstanding mystery about the Red Planet.

"It helps explain why Mars has so little air," says David Brain of UC Berkeley, who presented the findings at the 2008 Huntsville Plasma Workshop on October 27th.

Billions of years ago, Mars had a lot more air than it does today. (Note: Martian "air" is primarily carbon dioxide, not the nitrogen-oxygen mix we breathe on Earth.) Ancient martian lake-beds and river channels tell the tale of a planet covered by abundant water and wrapped in an atmosphere thick enough to prevent that water from evaporating into space.

Some researchers believe the atmosphere of Mars was once as thick as Earth's. Today, however, all those lakes and rivers are dry and the atmospheric pressure on Mars is only 1% that of Earth at sea-level. A cup of water placed almost anywhere on the Martian surface would quickly and violently boil away—a result of the super-low air pressure.

So where did the air go? Researchers entertain several possibilities: An asteroid hitting Mars long ago might have blown away a portion of the planet's atmosphere in a single violent upheaval. Or the loss might have been slow and gradual, the result of billions of years of relentless "sand-blasting" by solar wind particles. Or both mechanisms could be at work.

Brain has uncovered a new possibility--a daily ripping process intermediate between the great cataclysm and slow erosion models. The evidence comes from NASA's now-retired Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft.

In 1998, MGS discovered that Mars has a very strange magnetic field. Instead of a global bubble, like Earth's, the Martian field is in the form of magnetic umbrellas that sprout out of the ground and reach beyond the top of Mars' atmosphere. These umbrellas number in the dozens and they cover about 40% of the planet’s surface, mainly in the southern hemisphere.

For years, researchers thought the umbrellas protected the Martian atmosphere, shielding pockets of air beneath them from erosion by the solar wind. Surprisingly, Brain finds that the opposite can be true as well: "The umbrellas are where coherent chunks of air are torn away."

Addressing his colleagues at the Workshop, he described how he made the discovery just a few months ago:

Brain was scrolling through archival data from Global Surveyor's particles and fields sensors. "We have measurements from 25,000 orbits," he says. During one of those orbits, MGS passed through the top of a magnetic umbrella. Brain noticed that the umbrella's magnetic field had linked up with the magnetic field in the solar wind. Physicists call this "magnetic reconnection."

What happened next is not 100% certain, but Global Surveyor's readings are consistent with the following scenario: "The joined fields wrapped themselves around a packet of gas at the top of the Martian atmosphere, forming a magnetic capsule a thousand kilometers wide with ionized air trapped inside," says Brain. "Solar wind pressure caused the capsule to 'pinch off' and it blew away, taking its cargo of air with it." Brain has since found a dozen more examples. The magnetic capsules or "plasmoids" tend to blow over the south pole of Mars, mainly because most of the umbrellas are located in Mars' southern hemisphere.

Brain isn't ready to declare the mystery solved. "We're still not sure how often the plasmoids form or how much gas each one contains." The problem is, Mars Global Surveyor wasn't designed to study the phenomenon. The spacecraft was only equipped to sense electrons, not the heavier ions which would make up the bulk of any trapped gas. "Ions and electrons don't always behave the same way," he cautions. Also, MGS sampled the umbrellas at fixed altitudes and at the same local time each day. "We need to sample many altitudes and times of day to truly understand these dynamic events."

In short, he told the audience, "we need more data."

Brain is pinning his hopes on a new NASA mission named MAVEN. Short for "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution," MAVEN is an upper atmosphere orbiter currently approved for launch to Mars in 2013. The probe is specifically designed to study atmospheric erosion. MAVEN will be able to detect electrons, ions and neutral atoms; it will be able to measure both magnetic and electric fields; it will travel around Mars in an elliptical orbit, piercing magnetic umbrellas at different altitudes, angles, and times of day; and it will explore regions both near and far from the umbrellas, giving researchers the complete picture they need.

How Should We Presume?

Mel Acheson: How Should We Presume?

The burden of proof is on gravity theorists to explain some mechanism that suppresses the large initial electromagnetic energies and then enables the weak force of gravity to build them back up again.

Several astrophysicists have told me that, although plasma cosmology appears interesting, they won’t consider it until proponents can prove that some mechanism can produce charge separation in space from neutral matter on an astronomically significant scale.

At first thought, the presumption that neutral matter is the starting condition appears reasonable. It’s consistent with our everyday experience, and it fits with our other physical theories. It’s compatible with “secure knowledge.” Until the space age, human experience was almost exclusively that of neutral earth, air, fire, and water. Except for a few intermittent events such as lightning, plasma phenomena occur only in the high-energy domains of outer space. The concept of plasma didn’t exist until the twentieth century.

Investigations of plasma phenomena in the past century now confront us with another possibility. We’ve become aware that most of the observable universe is composed of plasma. The starting condition could just as well be separated charges, and what we observe is the consequential charge combination (not recombination).

Consilience with the “already known” is a circular argument because our other physical theories are also based on this presumption. After removing tautologies, “reasonableness” reduces to “familiarity” and parochialism.

Geology provides an illustration of this bias. The formations on Earth have been exclusively described in terms of mechanical action, and the resulting facts are turned back to justify the presumption. A river flows down a valley, and the valley’s existence and form are attributed to the water’s erosion acting over a long time. Then the existence of the valley and the river as the only apparent instrumental agency is thought to justify the attribution.

Stephen Smith, in many Thunderbolts Pictures of the Day, has examined these formations in the light of a presumption that plasma forces may have caused them. The valley could have been formed in a short time by planetary-scale electric arcs, and the river would have been opportunistically “captured.” After all, we see similar formations on planets and moons that don’t have, and probably never had, water.

The electrical presumption is as general as the mechanistic one: the ocean floor may be understood as the scar of an Earth-engulfing plasma discharge, a small-scale version of what we see in planetary nebulae, and the water subsequently collected at the bottom. Changing the familiar presumption changes the familiar landscape into an unfamiliar one.

Awareness of the “bias of familiarity” then provokes a second thought. The bias arises not from where we live but from the peculiar limits of our senses. Plasma activity proclaims itself largely in frequencies such as radio and x-ray that lie outside the sensitivities of our senses. We are unfamiliar with plasma because we are blind to it. Modern astrophysicists are in this sense correct to claim that 90% of the universe is undetectable “dark” substances. Their error is to fill in the blank with mathematical extrapolations from familiar theories and to leave their thinking blind to plasma.

The space age has provided us with instruments and techniques that extend our senses to detect plasma. We are now able to experiment with it in laboratories. Our thinking tends to remain stuck in familiar habits and ideas, however. We must make an effort, sometimes a great and frightening effort, to root out our familiar presumption and to adapt our thinking to an unfamiliar new empirical foundation.

Cosmic Ray Hot Spots Puzzle Researchers

Ball, P., Cosmic-Ray Hot Spots Puzzle Researchers, Nature, Nov 26th 2008. (Hat tip: Dave L.)

Proton discovery may cast doubt on dark-matter theories.

Philip Ball

The Milagro detector has seen cosmic-ray hot-spots. Hot on the heels of speculation that cosmic rays may have revealed the signature of elusive dark matter in space, new observations could challenge that idea and reinforce an alternative explanation.

A seven-year-long experiment at the Milagro cosmic-ray detector near Los Alamos, New Mexico, has revealed 'bright patches' of high-energy cosmic rays in the sky1 – something incompatible with a dark-matter source.

Cosmic rays are charged particles, mostly protons and electrons, that are produced in space and generally have a characteristic energy spectrum — the higher their energy, the rarer they are.

But last week, researchers working on the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) experiment, which uses detectors borne by a high-altitude balloon to measure cosmic-ray electrons above the Antarctic, reported an unexpected bump in this energy spectrum, corresponding to a surfeit of electrons with energies between 300 and 800 gigaelectronvolts2.

Hints at such an anomaly have been seen before. A satellite observatory — Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) — detected an excess of cosmic-ray positrons, the anti-particles of electrons, at similar energies3. And a Japanese detector called the Balloon-borne Electron Telescope with Scintillating fibers (BETS) also found a small excess of cosmic-ray electrons at high energy4.

These cosmic rays may be the decay products of hypothetical particles of dark matter, thought to make up about 85% of all matter in the Universe. Astronomers have invoked dark matter's gravitational effects to explain why rotating galaxies don't fall apart as they whirl through space. But as the name implies, dark matter can't be seen directly and its identity remains obscure.

A common assumption is that dark matter consists of a hitherto unknown particle that interacts weakly with other forms of matter. In some theories, two dark-matter particles are predicted to annihilate when they collide, producing a high-energy electron–positron pair. These could account for the ATIC cosmic-ray bump and the hints of it in the PAMELA data. But if that's so, the anomalous cosmic rays should be distributed more or less evenly across the sky.

In contrast, the Milagro team, led by Jordan Goodman at the University of Maryland, College Park, found cosmic-ray protons bunched up in two 'hot spots': one between the Orion and Taurus constellations, the other near Gemini. They think that the excess cosmic rays may be coming from exotic sources such as the rapidly rotating neutron stars known as pulsars, rather than dark-matter annihilations.

Dark-matter mystery

Goodman stresses that it's not yet clear if the ATIC and Milagro results are related, because the former measure cosmic-ray electrons whereas the latter detect protons. But he says the sources of the protons they have seen could also plausibly generate the electrons and positrons found in the earlier studies. "If it's the same phenomenon making them all, then it's not dark matter," he says.

But the dark-mater explanation still cannot be ruled out. "I've been totally perplexed by the hot spots but I don't see any reason to connect them with the ATIC findings," says Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

The Milagro detector isn't aimed primarily at investigating cosmic rays, but is instead used for gamma-ray astronomy. When high-energy gamma rays hit our atmosphere they trigger a shower of exotic particles. These particles annihilate when they collide with water in Milagro's giant tank, producing a flash of light that can be recorded by sensors.

But 99.9% of the flashes seen by Milagro originate from collisions of cosmic-ray protons, explains Goodman. That creates a background signal that has to be subtracted in order to identify gamma rays from energetic astrophysical sources. Goodman says that finding localized sources of cosmic-ray protons in this background came as a surprise to them.

An earlier cosmic-ray experiment called the Tibet Air Shower Array, run by a team of researchers in Japan and China, saw broad differences in the cosmic-ray intensity between the two hemispheres5, but no one had previously seen such smaller-scale concentrations.

The Milagro team suggests that the protons, with energies of around 10,000 gigaelectronvolts, may be generated in the extreme astrophysical environment of a super-dense neutron star or pulsar. At least some high-energy cosmic rays have previously been shown to come from super-massive black holes in nearby galaxies6.

"We don't know what is causing it," Goodman admits. He suggests that the localization may be partly caused by magnetic fields focusing the protons' trajectories.

But in general, magnetic fields in interstellar space should exert a randomizing influence, destroying any bright spots, says Hooper. "I can't imagine how they're created, and I don't know if anyone has any great ideas," he says.

Of White Whales and Dark Energies

Dylan Thuras: Of White Whales and Dark Energies.

It would appear that something is blasting our universe apart— an awkward situation, to say the least. As a resident of the universe, one feels as if he should have a say, a vote in the cosmic election. "Nay on Proposition Omega - The Blasting Apart of the Universe!" But alas, the universe is cruelly undemocratic. Despite one's uncomfortable feelings about it, the galaxies will continue to fly away from each other at an ever-increasing speed, and they will seemingly do so forever, until the universe turns cold and empty— a cosmic desert.

This is the standing theory anyway. To understand how we got here, to this strange and disconcerting flinging to pieces, we must go back (or at least I feel like taking us back) on a curious journey. A journey through rough seas and darkened basements, up mountain observatories and into the furthest reaches of dying starlight. We'll even learn about whales! We begin this tale one hundred and thirty years ago in Nantucket, with the unfortunate tale of a young whaler named Owen Coffin.

It was 1819 and seventeen year old Owen was bored of the Nantucket life. Bored. To. Tears. To escape his folks and enjoy a little adventure, Owen and his friend Charles took jobs aboard a whaling ship. It was a stroke of good fortune that Owen's cousin was George_Pollard_Jr, the captain of the Essex. He had gladly secured Owen and Charles positions on the ship. They were going to see the world! The intended voyage would be a two and half year trip around the west side of South America and into the South Pacific in search of Sperm Whale.

They had been out to sea for about a year, and things were going well. In fact, if things kept up at this pace, the crew of eighteen would be home, and rich, in no time at all. On the morning of November 20, 1820, whale spouts were spotted on the horizon. Three small whaling boats set out from the Essex. In the midst of the Sperm Whale hunt, a seemingly improbable disaster struck. The whale fought back.

The crew had already speared two sperm whales when, in a flash, an 85-foot bull whale 1 slammed its huge head into the side of the boat, causing the boat to rock violently "as if she had been struck by a rock," the first mate recalled. "We looked at each other with perfect amazement, deprived almost of the power of speech." As young Owen and the crew regained their footing, the whale struck the Essex again, this time staving in the bow of the huge ship. Nothing could be done. Within ten minutes, the 238-ton ship was underwater. The first mate wrote of the incident,

"Amazement and despair now wholly took possession of us. We contemplated the frightful situation the ship lay in, and thought with horror on the sudden and dreadful calamity that had overtaken us...To shed tears was all together unavailing, and withal unmanly; yet I was not able to deny myself the relief they served to afford me."

Melville wasn't kidding when he wrote "forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time."

Two of the whaling boats were too far away to see what had occurred. When they returned to find the ship, it was nowhere to be found. Things only got worse for the crew of the Essex from there on out. Owen, George, and the rest of the crew survived in the three small whaling boats, before finding the uninhabited Henderson Island. They remained on land for a week, eating every available food source, until they had exhausted all natural resources. All the remaining crew but three set off on water in an attempt to make their way back to civilization. Back on open seas, many soon succumbed to exposure and starvation. Without some kind of sustenance, they would surely die. It was only a matter of time before they would have to answer the delicate question of which one it would be.

When Owen drew the black dot, he knew what it meant. His cousin George tried to take his place, as did his friend Charles, but Owen was steadfast. He drew the black dot and it was he who would be killed and eaten. In a cruel twist of fate, his friend Charles drew the black dot which decided who would be the one to kill Owen. Pollard pleaded with his cousin once more saying "My lad, my lad, if you do not like your lot, I'll shoot the first man that touches you," to which Owen lay down his head and replied "I like it as well as any other." Owen's 28-year-old cousin George and captain of the Essex, who had sworn an oath to protect Owen, looked on in horror as Charles shot his best friend Owen in the head. And then they ate. 2

Eventually, George and Charles were rescued along with a few other members of the crew. The ship's first mate went on to publish a book about his experiences titled Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex. You can be sure Melville read it with horrified delight, and the sinking of the Pequod is based largely on the tale. 3

Horrible as it was, Owen Coffin's death was not in vain. Besides saving the lives of his fellow shipmates— albeit in a horrible and gruesome manner— and inspiring Moby Dick, there is another legacy that can be found in the tale. In a funny roundabout way, the way in which I am taking you on this strange tale, Owen, and other whalers like him, were of significant importance to the advancement of modern physics. Without whalers like Owen, we might not have achieved one the great discoveries of physics or been lead to one of the greatest scientific mysteries of our day.

Albert Abraham Michelson also once served on a ship in the US Navy. Born in Poland, but raised in the rough-and-tumble mining towns of California, the Jewish Albert had to work twice as hard to get by. While serving in the Navy, he had shown great skill in the fields of optics and heat. Now in his thirties, he was working as a scientist at the Case School in Cleveland, Ohio. One thing in particular interested Albert Michelson: He was obsessed with light and how it got where it was going. The year was 1887, and Michelson had just met another scientist named Edward Morley, who was also curious about light and the substance that carried it across the universe. They called it "the luminous ether."

Waves move through water as sound does through air. They knew there was no water or air in the vacuum of space, but there had to be something, some kind of medium in which light waves could propagate. That something was the ocean that made up all of space, it was ether, and together Michelson and Morley were going to measure it. The basic idea was that the Earth, sun, everything was spinning and moving in this ethereal stuff, like apples in a bobbing bucket. As the Earth spun in the ether it would create an ether wind, and the speed of the light aligned with the direction of the ether. Wind would be faster, like a runner with a breeze at his back. To measure this, they would use a curious instrument which Michelson had been perfecting for the past 10 years.

An inferometer is a delicate device. It is made of a steady light source, a half silvered mirror, two (or more) regular mirrors, and a "detector" or something for the light to shine onto. To detect the ether, a beam of light is sent to the half silvered mirror, a mirror that lets half of the light through and reflects the other half, split at a right angles. Then using the normal mirrors, the beam was sent back to the half silvered mirror where it would recombine into one beam and shine onto the detector.4 The speed of the light would change depending on how the Earth was positioned to the ether wind, and this difference would be shown in a tell-tale pattern on the detector. Measure this, and you'd measure the ether.

Michelson and Morley often had to wait to do their experiments until late in the evening, when the city had quieted down, to make sure there would be no disrupting vibrations. To protect against vibrations and interference, the inferometer was kept in a basement and built on a massive slab of marble, which was then floated on a pool of mercury. One can picture them now, sitting there, bowler-hatted and mustachioed in a dark basement, ready to use the apparatus. All they needed was a steady and reliable light source. For this they looked to the sea.

And here is where the whales come back in. Are you ready to learn more about whales? Here goes. Physeter macrocephalus, or the Sperm Whale, is a remarkable creature. They have the largest brain 5 ever to exist in any known animal; they can survive in a huge range of environments and are found from the Arctic to the equator; they feed primarily on giant and colossal squid (and have been known to snack on Great Whites); they collectively eat more tonnage of seafood then the entirety of humanity; the bull males have no natural predators and are the largest living toothed animal; they use echolocation to help see and find mates; they produce the loudest sounds known in nature; and they can live for over 70 years! Whew! Sperm Whales are bizarre, majestic, and truly fantastical creatures.

To the people of the 19th century, whales were a lot like a floating Wal-Marts; huge, ugly, and full of desirable products. Whale bone was used in clothing and as decoration, whale meat could be eaten (though it rarely was 6) or used as feed for animals, and whale teeth were carved into artful decorations called scrimshaw. Even more valuable was whale fat, used in soaps, cosmetics, and as machine lubricant. A foul-smelling mass called ambergris, when aged, was worth almost its weight in gold and was used as an ingredient in expensive perfumes7. But more than anything, Sperm Whale hunters were after spermaceti.

Today the finite [sic] resources of petroleum pose a major problem, but in those days, they had a different kind of dependence on foreign oil. The head of a Sperm Whale is one fourth the length of it's entire body, and it is filled with a waxy white substance known as spermaceti. It is used by the whales as ballasts. When the fluid was first discovered in the 1700s, it reminded whalers of sperm, hence the name Sperm Whales. 8 To collect this liquid, the whale's head would be cut off and lashed to the side of the ship. A whaler would then bore a man-sized hole in the whale's head and climb inside, chest deep in spermaceti, and hand out buckets— often up to three tons— of the of the waxy liquid. This messy job was done because spermaceti proved to have one exceedingly valuable property. It burned brightly, and it burned evenly. 9

Candles were a big business in the 19th century. William Procter and his brother-in-law James Gamble (you might recognize their last names) made their fortune selling candles. During the Middle Ages, candles were made of either animal fat (known as tallow) or beeswax. Tallow candles were smoky, the light was uneven, and they smelled of seared flesh as they burned. The more expensive beeswax candles burned better, but spermaceti candles proved to be the best. They burned brightly and evenly— evenly enough so that they could be used to produce a standard measurement of light, something of great importance to anyone that might, for example, be trying to control the variables in physics experiments.

Let's take a moment here to talk about units of measurement. It may not seem like it, but units of measurement are fascinating and really quite wacky. The cubit, span, yard, fathom, handbreadth, and foot all measure the same thing: length. In a 1958 MIT fraternity prank, members used their fraternity brother Oliver R. Smoot to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge in a unit of measurement they termed "smoots." They layed Smoot end over end across the entire bridge. (The bridge's length was measured to be 364.4 smoots plus or minus one ear 10.) So really, anything can be a unit of measurement, as long as it is agreed upon. But of course, they weren't agreed upon at all until recently. An "inch" was measured as the width of a man's— any man's— thumb, and the weight of a pound was based on the weight of grain, which was different in each town. Uniformly agreed-upon units of measurement are extremely important, because without them, activities like building a house, paying someone for a bag of feed, or asking someone how far to the next town become very, very difficult. So when people did manage agree on a new unit of measurement, it was worth noting.

And so it was defined in 1860 that a unit of candlepower was the light produced by "a pure spermaceti candle weighing one-sixth of a pound, burning at a rate of 120 grains per hour." Spermaceti candles weren't just an excellent source of oil, but were now a scientific instrument as well. When Michelson and Morley lit their spermaceti oil-filled lamps, they understood that it burned at a scientifically calibrated rate of eight candlepower units per hour.

But what Michelson and Morley didn't understand was why they couldn't see the ether. They tried the experiment again and again, but they couldn't seem to measure anything substantial. What they did measure was 1/40th of what they expected— so small, in fact, as to fall within the margin of error. It was almost as if the ether didn't even exist. But that couldn't be right, for if the ether didn't exist and light traveled at a constant speed... well, it would mean that Newton, Galileo, and the entire basis of physics was wrong! The lack of an ether was a shocking discovery, and the Michelson-Morley experiment became known as the most famous failed experiment. This is not to say it wasn't valuable; indeed, it may have been one of the most important physics experiments ever conducted. Michelson went on to receive the Nobel Prize for his work on the experiment. (For his part, Morley never fully believed the results of his own experiment, and he went on to test for the ether in several more experiments.) But there was one young man who became sure the experiment had been a success. He was only eight years old at the time of the Michelson-Morely experiment, busy reading geometry books, and it would be another eighteen years before he would say exactly how they were wrong. But when he did explain, the world took notice.

Albert Einstein was positive the inferometer had worked. He was sure that it proved there was no ether. As it turns out, ether is kind of unwieldy. If you consider a universe governed by a mysterious and unmeasurable substance and a universe without it, this mysterious ether quickly seems like a bizarre assumption. All you needed to do was forgot all your assumptions and imagine a universe without ether, which Einstein promptly did. 11 Einstein developed this idea further, saying that the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment meant that light traveled in all directions, at once, at a constant speed. Einstein slowly began to realize that even if Michelson and Morely had been doing the same test while flying through space at half the speed of light, their results would have been the same. There was no light faster then light, no light slower than light— there was only the speed of light and it was a constant. 12 Einstein called this idea his special theory of relativity and it was to turn the world of physics upside down.

Ninety some years later, Einstein's special theory of relativity, with all it's strange space-time implications 13, as well as his general theory of relativity have been established as tried and true physics and the basis for modern cosmology. At first Einstein fitted the universe with what he called the cosmological constant, a sort of antigravity ether of his own devising. Einstein was embarrassed by the cosmological constant, as it was an awful lot like the ether, but his belief was that the universe was static and the anti-gravitational constant was a way of explaining why gravity hadn't simply crushed everything. But when Einstein was confronted with evidence that the universe was expanding, he took back his cosmological constant, calling it the biggest blunder of his life. The stars, it seemed, would not allow for a static universe.

Galaxies have a color, some are red and some are blue. To us humans at least. This sounds a bit whimsical, but these colors are how we first realized that the universe was doing more then just sitting around, hanging out. Discovered by a shy and secretive astronomer named Vesto Slipher and made famous by braggart Edwin Hubble, astronomers realized that by measuring the colors of galaxies, they could tell which way the universe was moving. In the spectrum of light, blue light is more energetic (shorter wavelengths) and red light is less energetic (longer wavelengths). When light moving through the galaxy is all scrunched up and moving toward us, it appears blue, known as a "blue shift," and when the light is all stretched out and moving away from us, it appears red, known as a "red shift." 14

Slipher and Hubble clearly saw that things in the universe were, by and large, very red. Not only that, but the red shift coming from distant galaxies was proportional to the distance. Most galaxies were red, and the further away the galaxy, the redder it appeared. This meant that the universe was indeed expanding, and the Big Bang Theory was born shortly thereafter. High fives were had, and it seemed, for a while at least, that cosmology was really beginning to make some sense. That is, until astronomers watched a star explode. There were still some very big surprises in store for physicists, involving another measurable unit of light or "standard candle" as well. This candle, however, would be even more exotic than the one crafted from spermaceti.

And this is where we learn about giant, fiery, exploding stars! Imagine a star, the sun for example. It is a huge, massively gigantic fireball, capable of fitting roughly 1.3 million Earths inside. Now imagine it exploding... are you picturing it? If what you see isn't cool, you are not imagining it right. As the star explodes, the explosion rips through its solar system, destroying everything in its path. Planets are incinerated like garbage, moons are vaporized, all in its path ceases to be. It is a big damn explosion. Stars go supernova when the star suddenly has too much (or not enough) energy to remain stable. Sometimes the star's core abruptly turns off and the star collapses into a black hole, releasing massive waves of energy. The other and even more spectacular result is when, like someone who eats himself to death 15, a star sucks up too much fuel from a neighboring star and undergoes "runaway nuclear fusion," literally blowing itself to smithereens.

It probably goes without saying that supernovae are also extremely bright. Five billion times brighter than the sun kind-of bright. In 1006, a supernova occurred that was seen around the world. Chinese, Arab, and Native American astronomers all recorded the stellar event, and it was bright enough that, according modern astronomer Frank Winkler, "people could probably have read manuscripts at midnight by its light." A single supernovae can emit as much light in a couple of weeks as our sun will in its entire 4.5 billion-year life span. Really. Really. Bright. Lucky for us they are also very far away. For astronomers looking to gauge the rate at which the universe was expanding, something really, really bright and really, really far away was just what they needed.

Astronomers knew that the universe was expanding. Slipher and Hubble had already proven this, but what they didn't know was how fast it was happening. Measuring the red shift of galaxies to find the rate was problematic due to interfering light from other galaxies. In the words of astrophysicist and writer Michael Brooks "it is like trying to measure the properties of human speech by listening to a soccer crowd." No, to figure out the the speed of the universe's expansion, they needed something of uniform extreme brightness, a "standard candle" as they called it. Enter the supernova.

Set on mountaintops in Chile, Hawaii, and Arizona are three observatories with exceedingly powerful telescopes. In 1996, they were all trained on an exploding star in the far reaches of space. Like the spermaceti candle before it, certain types of supernova have a uniform brightness, so they can be used as a unit of measurement to calculate the distance and acceleration in the farthest reaches of the cosmos 16. By measuring the rate at which the light from these massively bright star explosions shifts red, the astronomers would be able to tell the rate at which the universe was expanding. From that, they could project when they thought the expansion would end. The general assumption was that 13.5 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe should be getting tired and slowing down a bit. It would still expand, but slower and slower. Eventually, astronomers agreed, it would stop expanding and begin contracting in a process known as "the big crunch." But in 1996, as the research teams watched a star explode and looked at the data from the supernova, they saw something no one had expected.

One head researcher, when looking at the data, said his reaction was "somewhere between horror and amazement." Just like Michelson and Morley, they looked through the data again and again, knowing it couldn't be correct. It all pointed to one impossible thing. The supernova was further away than they thought it to be, and the red shift was much greater than they expected. And it was increasing exponentially. The universe was not just expanding, the expansion was growing faster and faster; the cosmos, in the words of Michael Brooks, was literally "blowing itself apart."

This was a fate was not only terrifying, but it made no sense. For the universe to be exponentially expanding, something, some energy— you might even say some sort of ether— must be pushing it. When the astronomers tried to account for this by calculating the quantum energy in the vacuum of space, they got an even more confusing answer. It suggested that the vacuum energy was 1 followed by 120 zeros larger than the expansion of the universe, which meant the universe should have effectively ripped itself into pieces in the first microseconds of its existence. On the one hand, you had a universe accelerating for no reason, making no sense in the context of the Big Bang, and on the other, there was a number derived from quantum physics that suggested we shouldn't even have a universe to watch accelerate in the first place. Into this unpleasant void stepped a theory, or more accurately, a name for something— the something that has no explanation, but fills the cosmos and is pushing it apart with untold force. Luminous ether, meet your evil twin: dark energy 17.

And that is how we, and this tale told via Owen Coffin, whale attacks, cannibalism, Moby Dick, spermaceti, the weird history of the ether, inferometers, smoots, relativity and time dilation, red shifts, and exploding stars, have arrived at the rather problematic cosmological situation we are in. No one knows what dark energy is, or how it works, or what it is made up of. But we know that without it, our current understanding of the universe ceases to function. Like the debunking of the ether, the accelerating universe has left a smoking theoretical hole in the cosmological underpinnings of our universe, and we humans are in the odd position of living in a frightening universe where everything is constantly getting further from everything else. But scientific confusion makes for opportunity, and the unexplainable often leads to entirely new scientific paradigms. Perhaps somewhere out there, there is an eight-year-old child studying geometry books, a child who will one day turn the world of astrophysics on its head and present humanity with an entirely new model of creation.

Whales live an exceedingly long time. Some, like the Bowhead Whale, can live for more than 200 years. A whale that could have been a baby swimming in the Artic Ocean in 1820 when the Essex was sunk and Owen Coffin drew the black dot, a teenager when Moby Dick was published, a young adult in 1887 when Michelson and Morley disproved ether and Einstein presented the theory of special relativity in 1905, and reaching old age when we humans discovered that the universe was flying to pieces in 1996— that whale, that aged and magnificent creature, may yet still live to see yet another revolution in physics. Hopefully, this time, it won't come at the cost of his head.

Happy thanksgiving!