Questions, etc, from students, grouped by episode
Most recent first, here are things you have expressed interest in talking about. Each entry with date and time of receipt.
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May 2, 2021, 5:53 PM
Talking genomes - so for the right kind of scientist look at different genomes could say to himself (or his cohorts) this this genome here tells us this animal/person is different from that genome over there. Or, is there a computer program that will tell you that? So our scientist would know that he/she is looking at two different entitles?
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May 2, 2021, 3:27 PM
Just want to extend my thanks for a great class. While my background is science, it was great to refresh some of my chemistry and physics. In addition, with all that is happening in the world, climate change, over population, etc, etc, i have concluded that we are headed to extinction or will evolve differently, so it was comforting to hear that confirmed! Have a great summer.
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May 2, 2021, 3:11 PM
This is a good example of the modern world being somewhat of a mismatch for our naturally selected tendencies. Food on the African savannah was not nearly so abundant compared to its availability in much of today's world.
Watch "Robert Winston - Human Instinct - Hunger.avi" on YouTube
https://youtu.be/SnTK-46DHPY
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May 2, 2021, 11:32 AM
If matter and energy never diminish but only change in this universe, when all the stars have "burned out" and it "goes dark" should there still be the same amount of energy/matter remaining? (to possibly begin something all over again?)
Also would you talk about what things you plan to cover in your summer session course?
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May 1, 2021, 1:59 PM
The Scientific American article states that from the genetic material they could determine the timing of major demographic events. How can they determine the timing of these events from the genetic material. Is it possibly by the genetic tree? However I'm not sure that tells you how many thousands of years ago unless is correlated with archeological dating of tools/artifacts/bone.
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Apr 29, 2021, 3:36 PM
A few years ago there were two major models for human migration into North America, a three-wave model which proposed entry into the "New World" at around 12,000 years ago, and a multiple migration model that claimed that the first migration was 30,000 years ago or more. Which model has better evidence ?
Gale replies: The most recent article I've read on the subject is the article I'm sending to you along with this week's assignments notice. There is still much speculation and debate about this subject, and certainly much more evidence to be discovered, which will feed future efforts to learn more about human history in the Americas. I can't imagine that we will ever have any more than a very general picture of this process.
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April 27, 2021, 1:12 PM
Regarding this article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/creation-of-first-human-monkey-embryos-sparks-concern-11619442382?st=7osndjil4q81lxz&reflink=article_email_share
Is this type of work considered an aspect of natural selection or is it somehow "unnatural"? In other words, is human intervention to affect genomes different from coyotes and cheetahs?
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Apr 25, 2021, 4:47 PM
I have a couple of pieces of petrified wood at my home. Could DNA be extracted from them?
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April 25, 2021, 4:46 PM
How did this organic material survive to our time without rotting away or being consumed by some bacteria or organism, or by transforming to basic chemical components like CO2 or O2 and drifting away?
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April 20, 2021, 9:39 PM
What is the name and manufacturer of the drone you showed us?
Gale replies: Search Amazon for "UFO interactive drone" to see the current selection of similar drones. The exact listing I ordered from is no longer present, but it appears to be much like THIS ONE.
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Apr 18, 2021, 7:54 PM
given the complexity of life that exists at this time do you think that the explanation that it all happened randomly and spontaneously is given only because it is the "easiest" explanation. Is it equally possible that a previously undescribed life force may exist and may be responsible?
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Apr 18, 2021, 6:06 PM
Why doesn't dark matter accumulate the fine particles travelling through space so that dark matter could be "seen"?
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Sun, Apr 18, 6:05 PM
I am trying to understand how much rain was required to cool the earth and where did this come from? I would have thought an incredible hot earth would have evaporated water.
Gale replies: The origin of Earth's water is still a topic of debate, at least in the quantitative details. See
https://earthsky.org/space/origin-earths-water-asu-solar-nebula,
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/27/906791690/where-did-earths-water-come-from
and probably the most comprehensive and up-to-date,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_water_on_Earth
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18 April 2021 9:29 AM
Are vaccines full of alive or dead 'cells'?
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18 April 2021 9:24 AM
WOW! This 'stuff'' just boggles the mind. In very simple words/concept is life like a very complex symphony that pulls all the different forces we've learned about so far and (somehow) they get directed to do their various dances to make more and more complex 'things' to happen that eventually produce an amoeba swimming in the ocean?
If that idea is true, how come those forces aren't (or are they) producing more and more complex examples of life? And, why or why not?
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12 April 12 2021 9:10 AM
I'm just now watching for 2nd or 3rd time the video on how the earth came together over the millions of years showing how the continents slowly came together to be what they are now. I suddenly noticed that the continents of So.. America and Africa were at one time 'best buddies' and then they got pulled/pushed apart to where they are now. Seems like I recall seeing a NOVA/PBS show about scientists trying to figure what the earth billions of years looked like. Or, how they got to where they are now. I'm remembering that someone happened to notice that something (land mass, nature of the soil, mts., etc) in South America seemed very similar to a similar part of Africa - same rock formations, etc. And they concluded that this was because way back when they were all one land mass! Am I right?
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11 April 2021 8:19 AM
What was making plate tectonics to move?
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Every star burns different chemicals or gases to make it what it is?
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Do stars get bigger and smaller?
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What are vectors?
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Are plate tectonics still moving underneath our feet?
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Do we have all the water we ever will have? There isn't 'new' water being created.
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As a grade school kid I remembering thinking 'was it just my imagination that the land mass including Africa seemed to fit nicely into North and South America = like a jigsaw puzzle!'
It wasn't until I finally saw a diagram of 'Pangea" that I learned my guess about those two land masses was correct. How cool was that!!
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7 April 2021 5:12 PM
In case you have not seen this, I thought you might be interested:
https://www.bbc.com/news/56643677
Gale replies: A handful of people notified me about this story, which describes potentially exciting deviations from the expected behavior of the muon, a cousin of the electron, in the presence of a magnetic field. The measurement is difficult, the measured effect is small, and the calculation of what the result should be (according to currently accepted theory) is difficult and fraught with uncertainty. Until more data are collected (a couple of years, one physicist said), it cannot yet be concluded that the deviation is real. But if it is real, the standard model of the families of subatomic particles does not explain this behavior.
It will be exciting if the discrepancy turns out to be real. Some previous 4-sigma results in particle physics have disappeared with more data. I always look forward to Thursday night, when the latest Science magazine has its say about something like this that “gets out” before there is any peer-review publication. Often the press get the story from a journal like Science or Nature, where there is considerably more reason and caution than found in the commercial press. Today's Science (4/8) does indeed run the story, but with explanation that is a little bit more technical, and with more caveats from cautious scientists in the field.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6538/113
But we’ll see. It would certainly be nice if physics could get “unstuck” from the standard model, which clearly does not explain everything (what theory does?). It’s just so perfect at the very much that it does explain.
Here is a summary of the Standard Model, the physicist's periodic table, supposedly ALL of the fundamental particles. Click to enlarge.
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4 April 2021 11:55 AM
Understanding Velocity Curves: I 'get' the basic concept here - but I can't put in words. Is there a simple way in every day words to explain/think about this formula?
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4 April 2021 11:06 AM
Is time "packaged" in quanta? It is my understanding that matter, electro-magnetic fields and gravity can be broken down until they reach a limit. An infinitely decreasing series has a sum? Do divisions of time reach a limit?
Gale suggests: Take a look at this Wikipedia entry, Planck Units, on "natural" units of physics for time, length, energy, force, momentum, and temperature, all based on four fundamental "constants of nature", namely
- the speed of light in a vacuum, c,
- the gravitational constant, G,
- the reduced Planck constant, ħ,
- the Boltzmann constant, kB.
In Planck units, all of these constants equal 1.000. Planck units are considered the natural units for use in quantum theory.
A Planck time unit is the time required for light to travel a distance of 1 [Planck length]] in a vacuum, which is a time interval of approximately 5.39×10−44 s.[
If time is "packaged" in quanta, this would be the appropriate unit for expressing the size of those packages. At the moment,
"There is no conclusive evidence that time is quantized, but 2) certain theoretical studies suggest that in order to unify general relativity (gravitation) with the theories of quantum physics that describe fundamental particles and forces, it may be necessary to quantize space and perhaps time as well."Oct 21, 1999, Scientific American
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28 March 2021, 6 PM
1. Define quantum?
2. So helium and hydrogen they were the 'starters' for a planet?
3. How come some galaxies form an elliptical pattern instead of a perfect circle?
4. What are 'radio jets' ...I heard it on episode 2 - but I could not hear/find
the meaning.
5. Can telescopes that we send off to see Jupiter, etc., can they see beyond the "cosmic horizon"?
6. What's 'wrinkle'?
28 March 2021, 4 PM
1) Has anyone calculated the force which would have been required to create the Big Bang?
2) Please explain thermodynamic disequilibrium again and why there is not movement to equilibrium (over time)
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25 March 2021, 12:37 PM
Some smaller stars may have life spans of hundreds of billions of years, while larger stars tend to not live as long. Is this due to larger stars using up more hydrogen and helium or are there other causes?
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March 22, 2021, 11:46 AM (just after class #2)
If I understood one of the videos, "in the very beginning" everything was so hot and dense that the laws of science broke down. They didn't exist. Therefore, we have no frame of reference or context. So can we assume that there were energy fields and perturbations? Is there any evidence that these states exist and function outside of the laws of physics? Aren't they constructs of those laws?
From Gale: Remember first that we don't know any of the laws of physics. (WHAT?) We are trying to infer and construct them from what we learn through our senses and instruments. A law is a human creation, in the same sense that a poem is, but a creation constrained by our observations. We are trying to generalize the laws from specific observations, to construct laws that fit the facts of our observations. The only feedback and encouragement we get is when our ideas fit together in a sensible way. We can't tell if something does not obey the laws, because we don't know what the laws are. We assume that everything obeys laws of some kind (that is, that the Universe is not capricious), and we try to incorporate what we observe into the simplest set of laws that work for everything we know. We will never get any closer to "knowing" anything than this unity of law and observation. Exceptions to what the laws tell us to expect means we are wrong about the laws we have constructed, so we have to revise them to fit what we observe. To me, the widely-touted literary "human condition" is exemplified nowhere better than in a deep understanding of what a scientific "law" really is.
Student replies:
After I read your answer, I began to question my understanding of what the guy in the video meant. To me, the laws of physics are the fundamental relationships and patterns that exist in the universe whether we observe them and get them right or not. So maybe these fundamental patterns are the Laws of Physics. And then we write down equations that we think match what we have observed. If they don't, we rewrite the equations. But the Laws of Physics are always there and have been because our universe is made of particular stuff and this is the way systems with this stuff react. If the universe was made of different stuff, there would be different relationships and patterns. And different Laws of Physics.
So, was the guy in the video saying that the Laws of Nature are out the window? The complex system of relationships and patterns that make our universe tick? Or just that the equations we have developed so far are out the window?
If he's referring to the 2nd one, it seems we still have a shot understanding how this all started. But if he's referring to the first (Laws of Physics), it seems to me we're out of luck.
From Gale: I say he's saying neither. He did not say that the laws "broke down" or "did not exist", and he's talking about laws, not Laws. He said in effect that under the extreme conditions that we infer for the first moments after the Big Bang (inferred mostly from back-extrapolation of universal expansion), the forces we know for ordinary matter under ordinary conditions did not apply, because the high energies dwarfed the energies of these ordinary forces, and so these forces had no effect. So our task in looking farther back is to try to infer laws that operate under such high energies that they render insignificant the forces we know in our ordinary world (electricity, magnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity).
The question whether there really are The Laws of Nature (capitalized) that the universe obeys is unanswerable. So we do like geometers and make it axiomatic, or taken as true without question. Then we proceed, trying to infer laws of nature (no capitals, no The), broad or limited, whatever we can manage. This process has worked spectacularly. It is unbelievable how well so much of what we have inferred has worked to guide our actions in managing our lives and environment. So the axiom gives us good results, but it's still just an axiom, which we have no way to question or check. But it does seem to work.
In science, a law is not a Law. It's a rule we think some part of the world obeys, not a Rule that the world must obey. A law is tentative, subject to disproof or revision, and of limited range, all of which suggests that we still have no deep insight into the Laws.
Perhaps we have not yet even stumbled upon the kind of mathematics in which The Laws could be expressed.
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What could have initiated the big bang to cause the singularity to begin to expand?
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Example of anti-matter - that topic is so hard to imagine, never mind understanding, but here's my idea of how to envision it: Imagine walking somewhere in your house at night with no indoor/outdoor lights. But you know where you are = say a short, narrow hallway. As you try to navigate that space, you find you can only go so far before you literally run into something that keeps you from reaching the end of that hallway. You can't see, hear, feel or smell it, but it won't let you walk thru it. Does that make ANY sense?
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Although I have been exposed to the concept of space time several times I still do not comprehend it. Can you direct me to an explanation or explain this concept?
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The implication in the video for this week is that the cosmic background radiation is from the big bang. How do we know that?
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Thanks! This is fascinating/extremely interesting. Really interested in the Big Bang theory info, which is new to me. Have long been student of both Chinese medicine and energy concepts it involves and Yoga practice and philosophy. Both seem congruent with this mathematical theory (also a Nurse Practitioner and very grounded in science). The ground of undifferentiated energy might also be the total potential nothingness before separation into yin and yang, or the Shiva (male) of pure potential before being activated by the sound energy vibration of Shakti {female} chanting "Ohm" , or the nothingness before the Christian God spoke.
Amazing!
My question is whether there are energy/potential/matter interactions that echo the "big bang" that scientists have found that occur in nature now?
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