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Topic: This Is All We Know Folks! (Read 860 times) |
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Walter Watts
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Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
  
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This Is All We Know Folks!
« on: 2007-05-24 21:37:23 » |
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Galaxy Song Lyrics
Artist: Monty Python
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
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Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
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Re:This Is All We Know Folks!
« Reply #1 on: 2007-05-25 02:32:56 » |
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Quote from: Walter Watts on 2007-05-24 21:37:23 | ...We go 'round every two hundred million years... |
[Blunderov] Hello Walter old friend 
Of course I can't resist a TS Eliot quote on the subject of time...
http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/
East Coker
"In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls
Across the open field, leaving the deep lane
Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,
Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,
And the deep lane insists on the direction
Into the village, in the electric heat
Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.
Wait for the early owl."
Source: 3 Quarks Daily
Re-Public
Richard Dawkins - About time
Time is pretty mysterious stuff – almost as elusive and hard to pin down as conscious awareness itself. It seems to flow – like an ever-rolling stream – but what is it that does the flowing? We have the feeling that the present is the only instant of time that actually exists. The past is a shadowy memory. The future a vague uncertainty. Physicists don’t see it like that. The present has no privileged status in their equations. Some modern physicists have gone so far as to describe the present as an illusion, a product of the observer’s mind…
For poets, time is anything but an illusion. They hear its wingèd chariot hurrying near; they aspire to leave footprints on the sands of it; wish there was more of it - to stand and stare ; invite it to put up its caravan, just for one day. Proverbs declare procrastination to be the thief of it; or they compute, with improbable precision, the ratio of stitches saved in it. Archaeologists excavate rose-red cities half as old it. Pub landlords announce it gentlemen please . We waste it, spend it, eke it out, squander it, kill it.
Long before there were clocks or calendars, we – indeed all animals and plants – measured out our lives by the cycles of astronomy. By the wheeling of those great clocks in the sky: the rotation of the earth on its axis, the rotation of the earth around the sun, and the rotation of the moon around the earth.
By the way, it’s surprising how many people think the earth is closer to the sun in summer than in winter. If this were really so, Australians would have their winter at the same time as ours. A glaring example of such Northern Hemisphere Chauvinism was the science fiction story in which a group of space travellers, far out in some distant star system, waxed nostalgic for the home planet: “Just to think that it’s spring back on Earth!”
The third great clock in our sky, the orbiting of the moon, exerts its effects on living creatures mostly via the tides. Many sea creatures order their lives according to a lunar calendar. The Pacific Palolo worm, Palolo viridis or Eunice viridis lives in crevices of coral reefs. In the early mornings of two particular days during the last quarter of the Moon in October, the rear ends of all the worms simultaneously break off and swim to the surface for a breeding frenzy. These are remarkable rear ends. They even have their own pair of eyes.
The same thing happens, 28 days later in the last quarter of the November Moon. So predictable is the timing that the Islanders know exactly when to go out in their canoes and gather up the squirming rear ends of Palolo worms, which are a prized delicacy.
Notice that the Palolo worms achieve their synchrony, not by simultaneously responding to a particular signal from the sky. Rather, each worm independently integrates cycles registered over many lunar cycles. They all do the same sums, on the same data so, like good scientists, they all come to the same conclusion and break off their rear ends simultaneously.
A similar story could be told of plants synchronising their flowering seasons by integrating successively measured changes in day length. Many birds time their breeding seasons in the same way. This is easily demonstrated by experiments using artificial lights switched on and off by time-switches to simulate artificial day-lengths appropriate to different times of the year.
Most animals and plants –probably all living cells– have internal clocks buried deep in their biochemistry. These biological clocks manifest themselves in all kinds of physiological and behavioural rhythms. You can measure them in dozens of different ways. They are linked to the external astronomical clocks, and normally synchronised to them. But the interesting thing is that if the biological clocks are separated from the outside world, they carry on regardless. They truly are internal clocks. Jet lag is the discomfort we experience when our own internal clocks are being reset by the external Zeitgeber after a major shift of longitude.
Longitude is, of course, intimately linked with time. John Harrison’s winning solution to the great longitude competition of the eighteenth century was nothing more than a clock, which stayed accurate even when taken to sea. Migrating birds, too, make use of their own internal clocks for similar navigational purposes.
Here’s a lovely example of an internal clock. As you know, worker bees have a code with which they tell fellow hive members where they have found food. The code is a figure-of-eight dance, which they perform on the vertical comb inside the hive. There is a straight run in the middle of the figure of eight, whose direction conveys the direction of the food. Since the dance is performed on the vertical comb, whereas the angle of the food is in the horizontal plane, there has to be a convention. The convention is that the upward direction on the comb in the vertical plane stands for the sun’s direction in the horizontal plane. A dance with a straight run straight up the comb tells the other bees to leave the hive and fly dead towards the sun. A dance with the straight run 30 degrees to the right of the vertical on the comb tells the other bees: Leave the hive and fly at an angle 30° to the right of the sun.
Well, that is remarkable enough, and when Karl von Frisch first discovered it, many people found it hard to believe. But it is true. And it gets even better. There’s a problem with using the sun as a reference point. It moves. Or rather, since the Earth spins, the sun appears to move (from left to right in the Northern Hemisphere), as the day advances. How do the bees cope?
Von Frisch tried the experiment of trapping his bees in his observation hive for several hours. They went on dancing. But he noticed something which really is almost too good to be true. As the hours advanced, the dancing bees slowly turned the direction of the straight run of their dance, so that it would continue to tell the truth about the direction of the food, compensating for the changing position of the sun. And they did this, even though they were dancing inside the hive and therefore couldn’t see the sun. They were using their internal clocks to compensate for what they “knew” would be the changing position of the sun.
What this means, if you think about it, is that the straight run of the dance itself rotates at the same rate as the hour hand of a normal clock. But anticlockwise (in the Northern Hemisphere), like the shadow on a sundial. If you were von Frisch, wouldn’t you have died happy, to have made such a discovery?
Even after clocks were invented, sundials remained essential for setting clocks and keeping them synchronised with the great clock in the sky. Hilaire Belloc’s famous lines are, therefore, deeply unfair:
“I am a sundial, and I make a botch
Of what is done far better by a watch.”
It is less well-known that Belloc wrote a whole series of verses on sundials, some humorous, some sombre:
How slow the Shadow creeps: but when ‘tis past
How fast the Shadows fall. How fast! How fast!
Creep, shadow, creep: my ageing hours tell.
I cannot stop you, so you may as well.
Stealthy the silent hours advance, and still;
And each may wound you, and the last shall kill.
Save on the rare occasions when the Sun
Is shining, I am only here for fun.
I am a sundial, turned the wrong way round.
I cost my foolish mistress fifty pound.
You may think of this last verse when you look round the exhibition and see the exquisite little pocket sundial. It has a built-in compass, without which it would be useless.
When I talked of the great clocks in the sky, I did not go out beyond one year, but there are potential astronomical clocks of hugely longer period. Our Sun takes about 200 million years to complete one rotation around the centre of the galaxy. As far as I am aware, no biological process has become entrained to this cosmic clock.
The longest timekeeper that has been seriously suggested as being influential on life is an approximately 26 million year periodicity of mass extinctions. The evidence for this involves sophisticated statistical analysis of extinction rates in the fossil record. It is controversial and by no means definitely demonstrated. There is no doubt that mass extinctions happen, and at least one of them is pretty likely to have been caused by the impact of a comet, 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs perished. Much more controversial is the idea that such events rise to a peak of likelihood every 26 million years.
Quite apart from the difficult demonstration that there is a slow clock turning with this frequency, there is the quite separate problem of explaining it. Perhaps the most exciting suggestion is that our Sun has a sister star, called Nemesis. The two are in mutual orbit. Once every 26 million years, Nemesis comes close enough to disturb the Oort Cloud of comets. This increases the probability that a comet will strike Earth. The Nemesis theory is being pushed hard by its proponents, but it is still accepted by only a minority of authorities.
Another suggested astronomical clock longer than a year is the 11 year sun spot cycle, which might account for certain cycles in populations of arctic mammals, such as Lynxes and Snowshoe Hares, as detected by Charles Elton, that great Oxford ecologist, in fur-trapping records of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This theory, too, remains controversial.
My favourite metaphor about time I didn’t invent, I hasten to add, although I did use it in one of my books. As follows:-
Fling your arms wide to represent the whole history of evolution from the origin of life at your left fingertip to the present day at your right fingertip. All the way across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria. Animal life begins to flower somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole story of Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail-clipping. As for recorded history; as for Babylon, as for the Assyrian who came down like a wolf on the fold, as for the Jewish patriarchs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the Laws of the Medes and Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks; as for Napoleon and Hitler, the Beatles and the Spice Girls, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust from one light stroke of a nail-file.
If I had been a historian, I would have told stories of how different peoples have perceived time. Of how some cultures see it as cyclical, others as linear, and how this influences their whole attitude to life. Of how the Islamic calendar is based upon the lunar cycle, where ours is annual. Of how clocks used to be made, in the days before Galileo used his own heart as a clock to work out the Law of the Pendulum, and engineers perfected escapements. I would have added that the Chinese had an escapement clock, driven by water, as early as the tenth century AD.
I would have remarked how the calibration of Egyptian water clocks had to be different at different times of year, because the Egyptian hour was defined as one twelfth part of the time between dawn and dusk –so one summer hour was longer than one winter hour. Richard Gregory, from whom I learned this singular fact, remarks, mildly, that “This must have given the Egyptians a rather different sense of time from ours…”
If I had been a physicist or cosmologist, my introduction to Time would have been perhaps most remarkable of all. I would have tried –and probably failed– to explain that the Big Bang was not only the beginning of the universe, but the beginning of time itself. To the obvious question, what happened before the Big Bang, the answer –or so physicists try in vain to persuade us– is that it is simply an illegitimate question. The word ‘before’ can no more be applied to the Big Bang than you can walk North of the North Pole.
If I had been a physicist, I would have tried to explain that, in a vehicle travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, time itself slows down – as perceived from outside the vehicle, though not within it. If you travel through space at such prodigious speeds you could return to earth five hundred years into the future, having yourself scarcely aged at all. This is not some therapeutic effect of high-speed travel upon the human constitution. It is an effect upon time itself. Contrary to Newtonian cosmology, time is not absolute.
Some physicists are even prepared to contemplate true time travel, going backwards in time –which I suppose must be any historian’s dream. To the non-physicist it is almost comical that one of the main arguments against this is the element of paradox. Suppose you killed your own great grandmother! Science fiction writers have responded by giving their time travellers a rigid code of conduct. Every time traveller must swear an oath not to mess about with history. Somehow one feels that nature herself must erect stronger barriers than fickle human laws and conventions.
If I had been a physicist, I would also have considered the symmetry or asymmetry of time. How deep is the distinction between a process running forwards in time and one running backwards? How fundamental is the difference between a film running backwards or forwards? The laws of thermodynamics seem to provide an asymmetry. Famously, you can’t unscramble an egg; and a shattered glass does not spontaneously reassemble itself.
Does biological evolution reverse the thermodynamic arrow? No, for the law of increasing entropy applies only to closed systems, and life is an open system, driven upstream by energy from outside. But evolutionists, too, have their own version of the question whether time has an arrow of direction. Is evolution progressive?
Well, I may not be a physicist but I am an evolutionary biologist, and you had better not get me started on that fascinating question.
This text is based on Richard Dawkins’ speech at the opening of the “About Time” exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
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