The year of the astronomy

2009 not only is the year of Charles Darwin ( read more about this also here in “The bamboo raft” ), it is also the Year of the Astronomy, as has been decided by the UN and the International Astronomic Union (IAU) on December 20th, 2007.

Exactly 400 years ago Johannes Kepler published what he had discovered about the physics of the sky, the laws of planetary motion: "The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus." And: "A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time." (The third law has been added at a later time). Galileo Galilei, not the inventor of the telescope, was the first to use it – after making some improvements – to look at the sky. When he saw mountains, lowlands and the landscapes of the moon and when he observed the moons of Jupiter he discovered that planet earth is nothing special in the universe, just an orb like many others.

The knowledge those two gained was in total contradiction to what human mankind up to that time thought about the fundamentals of our world. Described more by philosophers like Aristotle and Ptolemy and strongly supported by religions and the Christian Church the picture of the world up to this time was a “geo-centric” one, describing planet Earth as the one and only centre of the universe. Some say that this gain of knowledge initiated by Kepler and Galileo has been the most dramatic one in the history of human mankind, it definitely was part of the Scientific Revolution, as well as Charles Darwin’s discoveries.

Geo-centric picture of the world according to Tycho Brahe.
Source: wikipedia.

You must imagine this time when only a few people knew what Kepler and Galileo knew at that moment. What they had discovered was not just a little improvement of our knowledge about the world, it was a revolutionary change in total conflict with traditional knowledge, an attack against religions and church.  People probably were not that open minded anyway these days but under these circumstances people like Kepler and Galileo had to make a tough decision whether they wanted to practice what we would call knowledge sharing nowadays. It probably was not really an option for them to hold back their knowledge, but with that they started a fight against those forces who claimed to know everything about our world at that time. Sharing knowledge in these times could easily have a major negative impact on those attempting this. Galileo actually found himself in front of the Inquisition where he had to argue about his findings and  finally confess that he was wrong. especially also in regards to his support of what Kepler had published.. At the end he has been found suspect of heresy and has been put under house arrest for the rest of his life. It took the church until 1992 to come up with an excuse how the Galileo affair had been handled and to admit that our planet is not stationary.

Knowledge sharing in these days is much easier, isn’t it ? At least for us as we live in an open and democratic world – which is still not the case everywhere on this planet. Nevertheless, who of us would ever be in the position to discover something as spectacular as Kepler and Galileo did ? Sharing knowledge about information technology or project management, discussing things like social software or SOA is by far less dramatic compared to those topics “discussed” 400 years ago. But still we have big discoveries to make: finding the theory of everything, explaining what happened during the first sub seconds after the big bang or even before it,  finding ways to produce the amount of energy we need without killing us and our planet, findings cures against our major diseases.

Source: bild der wissenschaft 2/2009 (article “Die Astro-Revoluzzer”) and wikipedia

The myth about multi-tasking

Multi-tasking is bad, this is my opinion.

Nevertheless, "bild der wissenschaft" published a nice article about multi-tasking titled "The myth of multi-tasking" in May 2008 with some interesting and surprising findings ( and I added a few of my own additions here ):

• The term multi-tasking comes from computer science and describes how an operating system performs "multi-tasking" by actually switching quickly between tasks to make it look like it would perform these tasks simultaneously.
• Our brain can sense multiple sources simultaneously but can act only on one task at a time. Thus multi-tasking of a brain works the same way as in a computer operating system: through frequent switching. Switching creates extra effort, that’s why I hold to my opinion: multi-tasking is bad. At the end activities take longer and much non-value-add time had to be invested to simply swap thoughts in and our from active parts of your brain. And this swapping is a source of many errors.
• When doing multi-tasking the productivity of our brain is decreased by around 40 %.
  

  "MULTITASKING" by akbar Simonse from Den Haag, The Netherlands

• It is not scientifically proven that women are better in multi-tasking than men, even 80% of people asked during a survey would think so and some studies seems to indicate this. It is as strenuous for women as it is for men. Keeping multiple items under control like the three kids in the living room, the pot with soup on the stove and the phone call with a friend is simply a matter of training, men could learn that as well. As long as the kids and the pot are fine and don’t require any action the situation is under control, but as soon as the woman or man would have to act on multiple events multi-tasking would be required for the price of reduced productivity and stress. The best example I always like to mention: watch people trying to drive a car and having a phone call at the same time and you know what is meant here.
• There are people who actually like that frequent switching and short periods of time to focus on one activity. These are typically people who can not focus on one thing for a longer period of time.
• Companies should try everything to avoid multi-tasking for their work force. This would reduce the rate of errors, stress and the risk of employees to become sick ( of that or because of that ).
• One hint here: check your e-mails only every two hours.

Astronomy software gadgets

NGC 1333

Those of you who like astronomy might be happy to read about two nice offerings I bumped into last week:

• Google Sky – a web based offering from Google obviously, allowing you to explore the sky. It works similar to Google Maps: you can zoom in and out, move around, view the sky with different filters like infrared or microwave, and you can actually share URLs, like this one here of NGC 1333, a reflection nebula in the constellation “Perseus”, a chaotic star birth area 1.000 light-years away from earth, with a very young ( only 10.000 years old ) star, IRAS 4B, where with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope a lot of water has been discovered, according also to an article in the latest issue of “bild der wissenschaft” I have been reading recently.
• Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, a nice looking virtual telescope on your desktop after you have downloaded and installed  it ( after you have checked the pre-requisites ! ). This allows very smooth navigation through the sky, searching for objects and retrieving additional information, discovering constellations and then traveling into the deep space to lots of objects of interest ( NGC 1333 is in there as well ). You can also view our planets, zoom closer, turn them and you even can zoom down to our blue planet and discover it like you can do with Google Earth by using different types of maps ( streets, hybrid etc … ).

The largest project of human mankind

“bild der wissenschaft” 9/2007 calls it the largest project of human mankind: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. 9200 engineers and scientists from 500 institutes in 80 countries are working on this 4 billion Euro expensive knowledge machine to become operational in May 2008 ( 5 month behind schedule )

Purpose of this machine is to find evidence of the existence of the Higgs boson, a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle, the missing piece in todays world model of physics to explain how elementary particles get their mass. It was discovered in theory by Peter Ward Higgs from the university of Edindurgh in 1964.

The LHC will be able to generate an environment as it existed 10^-9 seconds after the big bang. Protons or plumb atoms will collide with 99,9 % light speed. ATLAS, one of the detectors to deliver evidence of Higgs bosoms and other particles, has the size of Notre Dame in Paris: 46 meters long and 25 meters in diameter with a weigh of about 7,000 tonnes. 9300 magnets are used to accelerate particles, 6208 additional magnets are needed to control the particle beam. All supra conductive cables together have a length of 6,5 times the length of our equator. The energy consumption of this monster machine is 120 mega watt, as much as a city like Geneva needs. The main part of the LHC is a ring 50 – 175 meters under ground with a diameter of 26.66 kilometer.

In contradiction to other projects of such a size there is no strict hierarchy implemented in the organization for this project. Institute work on their own responsibility and progress is mostly based on the motivation of all participating teams to answer the next hot questions of particle physics. Discovering ( or not discovering ) an evidence of the existence of the Higgs bosom would yield a significant impact on the particle physics world model.

Interesting also this chart showing how more and more scientist have to collaborate in physics ( as in many other science disciplines like for instance genetic research ) to discover new particles: the y-axis shows how many discoverer were needed to find that particle. While only one man was needed to discover the electron and may be two to discover the neutron it will take thousands of people to finally discover the Higgs bosom. Internet and Web 2.0 technology now will be the means by which these huge accomplishments can be achieved through a seamless exchange of knowledge in big communities.