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* G * O * A * N * E * T **** C * L * A * S * S * I * F * I * E * D * S *
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Relaxing ways are watching National Geographic, Nature and other educational TV
channels. Recently there was a program entitled "Beyond the Big Bang". I
encourage those who come across this program to watch it. There are a few
points that Goanetters may find of interest, in light of prior discussions on
this web site.
In reviewing the progressive understanding of the planetary system, the
narrator states, Galileo's problem with the church was not his view of the sun
being center of our planetary system. This (heliocentric system) was first
presented (prior to Galileo), by many other astronomers, the most famous of
which were Polish Nicolaus Copernicus and German Johannes Kepler. In fact, one
Vatican cardinal told Galileo Galilei and the other cardinals, "The Bible tells
us how to go to heaven. Not how the heaven goes." Galileo's fall-out with the
church, according to the narrator, was Galileo's interpretation of the Bible to
meet his science, rather than sticking to his observational work, like his
other renowned predecessors and contemporaries working on the same concepts of
the universe. If Galileo lived in Northern Europe instead of Venice and later
Florence, his fate likely may have been different.
Later, the TV presentation proceeded to outline how the solar movements worked
and how the universe developed. The first individual to come up with the
widely accepted "Big Bang" theory as the creation of the universe (and as a
corollary, the end of the universe), was Belgian scientist, Georges Lemaître,
who happened to be a Catholic priest. (see Wikipedia below). Few scientists,
including Einstein, had difficulty accepting this concept and preferred the
"Steady State" theory which was the other scientific model in vogue.
The Big Bang is no longer just a theory. Proof of its occurrence was the
discovery of background electromagnetic radiation (generated at the time of the
Big Bang), by physicists Robert W. Wilson and Arno A. Penzias. For this
discovery, these scientists received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1978.
Later the research was continued by Leon Lederman, head of Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, in Batavia, Illinois (about 40 miles west of Chicago).
Fermi Lab is America's highest energy physics research laboratory; and is a
great place to work for researchers and certainly a tourist attraction. Dr.
Lederman and his team worked with the highly accelerated protons to create
neutrinos and other subatomic particles to theorize on the origin of matter,
receiving the Nobel Prize in physics 1988. I had the good fortune in 1978, to
work at Fermi Lab as a Research Fellow using Fast Neutrons (also created by
proton bombardment), to treat cancer.
Kind Regards, GL
From Wikipedia:
Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, predicted that the recession
of the nebulae was due to the expansion of the universe. In 1931 Lemaître went
further and suggested that the universe began as a simple "primeval atom",
echoing previous speculations about the cosmic egg origin of the universe.
Starting in 1924, Hubble painstakingly developed a series of distance
indicators, the forerunner of the cosmic distance ladder, using the 100 inch
Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory. This allowed him to estimate
distances to galaxies whose red shifts had already been measured, mostly by
Slipher. In 1929, Hubble discovered a correlation between distance and
recession velocity—now known as Hubble's law. Lemaître had already shown that
this was expected, given the cosmological principle.
After World War II, two distinct possibilities emerged. One was Fred Hoyle's
steady state model, whereby new matter would be created as the universe seemed
to expand. In this model, the universe is roughly the same at any point in
time. The other was Lemaître's Big Bang theory, advocated and developed by
George Gamow, who introduced big bang nucleosynthesis and whose associates,
Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, predicted the cosmic microwave background
(CMB). It is an irony that it was Hoyle who coined the name that would come to
be applied to Lemaître's theory, referring to it sarcastically as "this big
bang idea" during a radio broadcast. For a while, support was split between
these two theories. Eventually, the observational evidence, most notably from
radio source counts, began to favor the latter. The discovery of the cosmic
microwave background radiation in 1964 secured the Big Bang as the best theory
of the origin and evolution of the cosmos. Much of the current work in
cosmology includes understanding how galaxies form in the context of the Big
Bang, understanding the physics of the universe at earlier and earlier times,
and reconciling observations with the basic theory.
Huge strides in Big Bang cosmology have been made since the late 1990s as a
result of major advances in telescope technology as well as the analysis of
copious data from satellites such as COBE, the Hubble Space Telescope and WMAP.
Cosmologists now have fairly precise measurement of many of the parameters of
the Big Bang model, and have made the unexpected discovery that the expansion
of the universe appears to be accelerating (see dark energy).
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**** http://www.GOANET.org ****
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ECAP 2007 - Computer Society of India - Goa Chapter inaugurates its 15th
Exhibition of Computers & Allied Products at Hotel Mandovi, Panaji
at 9:30am on Sep 8, 2007 at the hands of Mr. M. N. Rao - Advisor & Director
(IT) Department of Computer Science - Government of Goa.
All are cordially Invited
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