Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

I have wanted to write this post for some time now. It is basically a list of things you know are true, but aren’t. You may very well know most of them, but I’d wager there will be at least one that you are surprised about.

Fact: The hottest layer of the atmosphere is the Mesosphere.

Not really true, if you use the average Joe’s definition of hot!

Temps. in the Mesosphere approach 600C. This is true. However, there are so very few molecules of air at that altitude, your hand would freeze instantly if you took off the glove of your space suit. Actually it would freeze, while your blood boiled. As far as the feeling of warmth, the Troposphere is the warmest layer of the atmosphere. The bottom 10 miles or so. The scientific definition of temperature is the average kinetic energy, of the molecules. Using that definition, the Mesosphere wins out. Even though it would feel very cold!

Fact: Clouds act like a blanket to keep the temperature warmer than on clear nights.

Nope, not so. The clouds do not “hold the heat in”. They absorb the heat, and radiate their own heat in all directions. Every object, that has a temperature, radiates electromagnetic waves. The hotter the temperature, the higher the frequency of the radiation. The sun is 6,000 degrees C, and radiates almost all of it’s light in the part of the spectrum we call visible light.

The Earth is about 15C , and radiates most of it’s energy in the Infrared wavelengths. Both are still light. Radio waves, from your favourite FM station, are light as well. We humans can only see a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This IR radiation is why I can show satellite images of the weather on TV at night.

If your camping, and you sleep under a tree, you will escape most of the dew compared to your buddies, who slept right out under the stars. The tree did not catch the dew, it just radiated energy to the ground around you, and kept it warmer. Warmer ground, less dew! The same affect applies to your car windows on a frosty morning. Have you noticed, there is a lot more frost on your wind screen, than on the side windows. You can thank the radiation from nearby bushes, and trees, and walls for that!

Fact: The Wind Chill is how cold it feels, and the Heat index is how hot it feels.

I have written about this before in this space. Neither is true. The wind chill, and heat index are measures of your body’s rate of heat loss. You lose heat much faster in a breeze, than in calm air. The heat index measures the ability of the body to cool you by sweating. In a more humid airmass, water will evaporate slower. The cooling affect will be less.

Fact: The more powerful the weather radar, the farther it can “see”.

TV News promotions are probably responsible for this belief. TV stations love to say “We have the most powerful radar around!”. Actually, power is important, up to a point. The radar beam travels in nearly a straight line from the transmitter. The Earth curves away beneath the beam. So, beyond a certain distance, you’re just sending all that power into outer space!

We typically run our Radar at an elevation of 0.8 degrees above the horizon. Because of the curvature of the Earth, the beam is over 3 kilometers high, when I look at a thunderstorm 150 miles away! A shower at 1,500 meters is below the beam, and not visible.

To see a storm on radar, more than 300 miles away, it would have to be over 15 KM tall. Well into the stratosphere. I once spotted on radar,  a very severe storm over Omaha Nebraska, from Tulsa, Oklahoma. That is about the limit. To spot the circulation around a tornado, you need to be rather close. Only a strong tornado could be seen more than 150 km away on a radar. A weak one is ideally within 50 km.

Fact: The Hiroshima Atom Bomb was tested in New Mexico

Nope.

The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was tested in New Mexico, at the Trinity test site. The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, was a bomb that used Uranium 235. The difficulty in making it was getting the U235, from U238. The Physics was understood well, and the Manhattan Project scientists expected it would work. It did.

The bomb that was tested, was a bomb that split atoms of Plutonium. Plutonium is easy to get, but very difficult to make into a bomb. A sphere of it has to be crushed to get nuclear fission.  Only three, or four countries on Earth, are thought to have the technical ability to do it.

Fact: Plutonium is the most toxic substance known to Man.

Horse hockey. Even Homer Simpson knows that.

You can hold it in your hand. As long as you do not breathe in tiny particles of it, you are not likely to be harmed. However, I would suggest you not stick a chunk in your back pocket, and walk around in the same jeans for a month. There is no real risk of you getting it to explode. See above!

Fact: Relativity, Climate Change, Evolution, Landing on the Moon (Insert your conspiracy here) is just a theory, and has not been proven.

Science never proves anything. To be a theory it MUST be falsifiable. In other words, it must be possible to do an experiment, that COULD prove it wrong. This is the difference between a belief, and a scientific theory. In Science, theories OUTRANK laws. Oh, and so far, no one has yet been able to falsify any of the above. Actually, nearly every experiment done has made the theories even more solid.

To which Einstein might reply:

Fact: It can be too cold to snow.

It can be too cold to snow a lot. It cannot be to cold to snow some.

As air gets colder, it can hold less moisture.  This is why the Antarctic is the greatest desert on Earth. It’s drier in many places than the Sahara! Climate change is expected to cause more snow in polar regions, not less. Now you know why. (warmer air means it can snow more)

Fact: Richard P. Feynman was smarter than (Insert any name here)

This one is a trick, because he was!

Feynman Lives!

Later,

Dan

When I hear a scientist, talking about some astronomical object, and they say something is (for example) 8 billion miles away, I cringe. No doubt, the reporter asked for the distance in miles, or kilometers, because that unit of distance is familiar to most people. Does it really tell you anything?

I say no.

Yes, it tells you it is very far away, but nothing much more than that.

To really understand these distances, you need to compare it to something! When I talk with school kids about weather and earth Science, I try to compare measurements to something they can relate to.

Here is a little project you can use to teach your kids about the solar system. We will use a unit of distance called an Astronomical Unit. (AU). An AU is simply the distance from the Sun to Earth. Earth is 1 AU away from the Sun!

Grab a tape measure, and a football (Americans: Read that as soccer ball). A couple of small marbles, and some crumbs from week old brownies. Tiny pieces of gravel will do. Small enough that 8 or 9 of them will fit on your thumbnail.

Now, Go outside and put the ball in an open area. Use the tape measure to mark 1 meter. Put a piece of tiny gravel down. A persimmon seed will work too. At 5 meters from the ball put down your large marble. (A jaw breaker works really well here) At 9.5 meters put down your second biggest marble. At 19 meters put down a small marble and then another one at 30 meters.
Almost done now.

At 39.5 meters put down a tiny grain. now measure all the way out to 84 meters away from the ball. drop your tiniest grain on a piece of paper.

Welcome to the solar system. You have just built a pretty darn good model that is correct in size and scale!

At one meter is the Earth. You can put down a seed at 1.5 meters for Mars, and another seed about earth size at 70 centimeters. That is Venus.

The big marble at 5 meters is Jupiter. The one at 9.5 meters is Saturn. Neptune is at 30 meters, and while not a planet, Pluto is at 39.5 meters. Step back to Earth and look at the ball. It should look about as big as the disk of the sun in the sky. Now walk out to Neptune. Notice how tiny the sun looks!

Lastly, walk out to your grain of dust at 84 meters. Look back at the sun. This is where Voyager One is now. It is the most distant man made object from Earth. Launched in 1977, it now so far from sun, that the stream of particles from our Sun (The Solar Wind) is nearly gone. It’s not as big as the grain you have, it’s as big as the cold virus on the grain!

The fastest anything can travel is light speed. Physics people refer to it as “c”. Now, I can tell you that this is 186,282 miles per second, but I would be guilty of doing just what this post is about!

Lets do it this way.

At light speed, you can go around the Earth 7 times in one second. In our scale model, it takes light, 8.15 minutes (489 seconds) to go from the ball, out to Earth at 1 meter. In other words, on our newly built solar system, light speed is one meter every 8 minutes. I will let you do the math to figure out how long it takes to send a message to Voyager One, by radio.

The nearest star to our Sun is 272,021 Astronomical units away. Since we used 1 meter as an AU in our solar system, we can put it on our scale. Get a rubber ball 5 centimeters wide, and drive 272 kilometers away. Set it down, and write Proxima Centauri on it! It will take a radio signal moving at 1 meter every 8 minutes, over 4 years to get there.

That should give you an idea of the size of the solar system! Cool ay?

Dan

I watched last night as the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory launched from California. What looked like a successful launch, ended with the spacecraft falling into the Pacific Ocean just short of Antarctica. Apparently the protective shell around the satellite, failed to separate.  The extra weight meant the rocket could not get enough velocity to make it into orbit.

The observatory reached an altitude of over 300 miles, but then fell back into the South Pacific near Antarctica. (The CNN Web Site incorrectly says it fell  into the ocean 3 minutes after launch. Obviously, you cannot reach Antarctica in 3 minutes from Northern California. Even if you were going at escape velocity!)

It probably took it about 25-30 minutes to come down. Kudos to the BBC web site for getting the story correct.

This is a big loss to the Climate Science Community. There are big questions about how, and where, Carbon is emitted, and absorbed in the atmosphere. The Carbon Observatory would have solved many mysteries.

You can see the post launch press conference on the NASA Web site.

www.nasa.gov

A sad “Later” from Dan

Have you seen Comet Lulin. I spotted it tonight here in Huntsville Alabama.

Dim and green, just next to Saturn. Sky and Telescope magazine has an excellent article with charts to help you find it. Do use binoculars. It will be hard to see with the naked eye except in very dark locations.

www.skyandtelescope.com

A viewer here in the Huntsville area sent this pic. Thanks to Bryan Shirkey of Madison Alabama.

The second “THING”

A new study by an MIT group is getting some real notice this morning. The Climate Progress blog has a nice summary here:

http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/23/mit-doubles-global-warming-projections

The quick and dirty of it is this. Updated model runs (using more realistic assumptions and forecasts of emissions, and of the Carbon cycle) show the possibilities of a catastrophic rise in temperature have increased. The median rise in temperature, by 2100, of the model runs is 5.1C. That may not sound like much, but trust me, we would be living on a different planet. I have asked a couple of very bright Climate experts to comment on it. Stay tuned.

You can read the entire publication HERE. Be warned you will need a graduate level understanding of statistics. Still you can get the basics if you take the time. Climate Progress has done an excellent job of summarizing it for non scientists, and I see no reason to attempt to do better. I’d probably fail!

My Mom likes to tell me of listening to radio programs like “The Shadow” and Soap Operas like “The Guiding Light” on the radio when she was little. She remembers clearly running all the way home from school the day they got their first television set. Since the advent of TV, radio has changed dramatically. Especially here in America.

I think it has changed for the worse.

An exception is NPR. They do a decent job when not begging for money. Don’t get me wrong, I give them some!

With that exception, most of what is on now is not broadcasting. It’s narrow casting to  soccer moms wanting traffic reports mixed in with music from 70’s groups like Styx and Journey. The AM radio band is even worse! Mostly populated by extreme political talk shows, where eager listeners are told what to think by extremist political propagandists.

Why can’t we have a station that does radio as if TV had not been invented??

 I’m talking hour long top quality news, and interview programs. Thirty minute comedy programs. A soap opera, or two!  Let’s not forget a game show or two. Oh, and how about a book at bedtime, and an afternoon play. How about a weekly show on gardening? Top it all off by wishing everyone a good night at the end of the day, and playing the national anthem.

I know what your thinking. “Dream on buddy”. “Those days are gone”. “Get over it”.

“No one would listen anyhow”.

Your wrong. It does exist. 

Best of all, you can listen to it just about anywhere in the world.

BBC Radio 4.

They have all of these things. They even wish you good night, and play God Save The Queen at 1AM.

BBC Radio 4 is truly, IMHO, the best radio station on the planet.

If you live in the UK, you can listen to it on a radio. It has a huge audience world wide, and in the UK.

The rest of us have to listen online. Their morning news program, “The Today Show” is the gold standard among news programs in the UK. “The Archers” is the longest running soap opera in the world. It helped me pass many days flat on my back after back surgery 4 years ago! (Brian your still a cad and everyone in Ambridge knows it!).

“The NOW Show”, “The News Quiz”, and “PM with Eddy Mair” are all programs I listen to frequently. I could go on, but why don’t you discover it for yourself. I have only scratched the surface on the offerings of Radio 4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4

I keep one dial of my watch on London time, just so I can know what is on radio 4. Radio 4 keeps me tuned into the world. I learn Science, and Economics. I even know a bit of gardening, thanks to “Gardeners Question Time.” 

For those reading this post in America, think of NPR with real money!

The next time you are tempted to turn on the TV, and watch some mindless drivel. Do yourself a favor. Tune in to Radio 4. You will either learn something, or be entertained. More likely, both. Let your mind draw the pictures. It worked great with my grandparents!

So to all of you in the UK who work for the BBC and make radio 4 possible. Take this as a thank you. You are truly appreciated!

later,
Dan