Big Bang; Facts and Misconceptions.

		Big Bang Theory	- An Overview

		Big Bang Theory - The Premise The Big Bang theory is an effort to explain what happened at the very beginning of our universe. Discoveries in astronomy and physics have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that our universe did in fact have a beginning. Prior to that moment there was nothing; during and after that moment there was something: our universe. The big bang theory is an effort to explain what happened during and after that moment. According to the standard theory, our universe sprang into existence as "singularity" around 13.7 billion years ago. What is a "singularity" and where does it come from? Well, to be honest, we don't know for sure. Singularities are zones which defy our current understanding of physics. They are thought to exist at the core of "black holes." Black holes are areas of intense gravitational pressure. The pressure is thought to be so intense that finite matter is actually squished into infinite density (a mathematical concept which truly boggles the mind). These zones of infinite density are called "singularities." Our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense, something - a singularity. Where did it come from? We don't know. Why did it appear? We don't know. After its initial appearance, it apparently inflated (the "Big Bang"), expanded and cooled, going from very, very small and very, very hot, to the size and temperature of our current universe. It continues to expand and cool to this day and we are inside of it: incredible creatures living on a unique planet, circling a beautiful star clustered together with several hundred billion other stars in a galaxy soaring through the cosmos, all of which is inside of an expanding universe that began as an infinitesimal singularity which appeared out of nowhere for reasons unknown. This is the Big Bang theory. Big Bang Theory - Common Misconceptions There are many misconceptions surrounding the Big Bang theory. For example, we tend to imagine a giant explosion. Experts however say that there was no explosion; there was (and continues to be) an expansion. Rather than imagining a balloon popping and releasing its contents, imagine a balloon expanding: an infinitesimally small balloon expanding to the size of our current universe. Another misconception is that we tend to image the singularity as a little fireball appearing somewhere in space. According to the many experts however, space didn't exist prior to the Big Bang. Back in the late '60s and early '70s, when men first walked upon the moon, "three British astrophysicists, Steven Hawking, George Ellis, and Roger Penrose turned their attention to the Theory of Relativity and its implications regarding our notions of time. In 1968 and 1970, they published papers in which they extended Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to include measurements of time and space.1, 2 According to their calculations, time and space had a finite beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy."3 The singularity didn't appear in space; rather, space began inside of the singularity. Prior to the singularity, nothing existed, not space, time, matter, or energy - nothing. So where and in what did the singularity appear if not in space? We don't know. We don't know where it came from, why it's here, or even where it is. All we really know is that we are inside of it and at one time it didn't exist and neither did we. Big Bang Theory - Evidence for the Theory What are the major evidences which support the Big Bang theory? First of all, we are reasonably certain that the universe had a beginning. Second, galaxies appear to be moving away from us at speeds proportional to their distance. This is called "Hubble's Law," named after Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) who discovered this phenomenon in 1929. This observation supports the expansion of the universe and suggests that the universe was once compacted. Third, if the universe was initially very, very hot as the Big Bang suggests, we should be able to find some remnant of this heat. In 1965, Radioastronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered a 2.725 degree Kelvin (-454.765 degree Fahrenheit, -270.425 degree Celsius) Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB) which pervades the observable universe. This is thought to be the remnant which scientists were looking for. Penzias and Wilson shared in the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery. Finally, the abundance of the "light elements" Hydrogen and Helium found in the observable universe are thought to support the Big Bang model of origins. Big Bang Theory - The Only Plausible Theory? Is the standard Big Bang theory the only model consistent with these evidences? No, it's just the most popular one. Internationally renown Astrophysicist George F. R. Ellis explains: "People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations….For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations….You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that."4 In 2003, Physicist Robert Gentry proposed an attractive alternative to the standard theory, an alternative which also accounts for the evidences listed above.5 Dr. Gentry claims that the standard Big Bang model is founded upon a faulty paradigm (the Friedmann-lemaitre expanding-spacetime paradigm) which he claims is inconsistent with the empirical data. He chooses instead to base his model on Einstein's static-spacetime paradigm which he claims is the "genuine cosmic Rosetta." Gentry has published several papers outlining what he considers to be serious flaws in the standard Big Bang model.6 Other high-profile dissenters include Nobel laureate Dr. Hannes Alfvén, Professor Geoffrey Burbidge, Dr. Halton Arp, and the renowned British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who is accredited with first coining the term "the Big Bang" during a BBC radio broadcast in 1950. Big Bang Theory - What About God? Any discussion of the Big Bang theory would be incomplete without asking the question, what about God? This is because cosmogony (the study of the origin of the universe) is an area where science and theology meet. Creation was a supernatural event. That is, it took place outside of the natural realm. This fact begs the question: is there anything else which exists outside of the natural realm? Specifically, is there a master Architect out there? We know that this universe had a beginning. Was God the "First Cause"? We won't attempt to answer that question in this short article. We just ask the question: Does God Exist? Footnotes: Steven W. Hawking, George F.R. Ellis, "The Cosmic Black-Body Radiation and the Existence of Singularities in our Universe," Astrophysical Journal, 152, (1968) pp. 25-36. Steven W. Hawking, Roger Penrose, "The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series A, 314 (1970) pp. 529-548. Mark Eastman, Chuck Missler, The Creator: Beyond Time and Space, (1996) p. 11. W. Wayt Gibbs, "Profile: George F. R. Ellis," Scientific American, October 1995, Vol. 273, No.4, p. 55. See http://www.halos.com/reports/ext-2003-022.pdf See http://www.halos.com/reports/arxiv-1998-rosetta.pdf and http://www.halos.com/reports/ext-2003-021.pdf; see also http://www.halos.com/reports/arxiv-1998-redshift.pdf and http://www.halos.com/reports/arxiv-1998-affirmed.pdf

Pencil and Eraser Trivia

Pencil and Eraser Trivia

Graphite is a form of carbon, first discovered in the Seathwaite Valley on the side of the mountain Seathwaite Fell in Borrowdale, near Keswick, England, about 1564 by an unknown person. Shortly after this the first pencils were made in the same area.

The breakthrough in pencil technology came when French chemist Nicolas Conte developed and patented the process used to make pencils in 1795. He used a mixture of clay and graphite that was fired before it was put in a wooden case. The pencils he made were cylindrical with a slot. The square lead was glued into the slot and a thin strip of wood was used to fill the rest of the slot. Pencils got their name from the old English word meaning 'brush'. Conte's method of kiln firing powdered graphite and clay allowed pencils to be made to any hardness or softness - very important to artists and draftsmen.

Charles Marie de la Condamine, a French scientist and explorer, was the first European to bring back the natural substance called "India" rubber. He brought a sample to the Institute de France in Paris in 1736. South American Indian tribes used rubber to making bouncing playing balls and as an adhesive for attaching feathers and other objects to their bodies.

In 1770, the noted scientist Sir Joseph Priestley (discoverer of oxygen) recorded the following, "I have seen a substance excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the mark of black lead pencil." Europeans were rubbing out pencil marks with the small cubes of rubber, the substance that Condamine had brought to Europe from South America. They called their erasers "peaux de negres". However, rubber was not an easy substance to work with because it went bad very easily -- just like food, rubber would rot. English engineer, Edward Naime is also credited with the creation of the first eraser in 1770. Before rubber, breadcrumbs had been used to erase pencil marks. Naime claims he accidentally picked up a piece of rubber instead of his lump of bread and discovered the possibilities, he went on to sell the new rubbing out devices or rubbers.

In 1839, Charles Goodyear discovered a way to cure rubber and make it a lasting and useable material. He called his process vulcanization, after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire. In 1844, Goodyear patented his process. With the better rubber available, erasers became quite common.

The first patent for attaching an eraser to a pencil was issued in 1858 to a man from Philadelphia named Hyman Lipman. This patent was later held to be invalid because it was merely the combination of two things, without a new use.

At first penknives were used to sharpen pencils. They got their name from the fact that they were first used to shape feather quills used as early pens. In 1828, Bernard Lassimone, a French mathematician applied for a patent (French patent #2444) on an invention to sharpen pencils. However, it was not until 1847 that Therry des Estwaux first invented the manual pencil sharpener, as we know it.

John Lee Love of Fall River, MA designed the "Love Sharpener." Love's invention was the very simple, portable pencil sharpener that many artists use. The pencil is put into the opening of the sharpener and rotated by hand, and the shavings stay inside the sharpener. Love's sharpener was patented on November 23, 1897 (U.S. Patent # 594,114). Four years earlier, Love created and patented his first invention, the "Plasterer's Hawk." This device, which is still used today, is a flat square piece of board made of wood or metal, upon which plaster or mortar was placed and then spread by plasterers or masons. This was patented on July 9, 1895.

One source claims that the Hammacher Schlemmer Company of New York offered the world's first electric pencil sharpener designed by Raymond Loewy, sometime in the early 1940s.

In 1861, Eberhard Faber built the first pencil factory in the Utah.

Niels Ryberg Finsen..Nobel Prize in Medicine 1903

Niels Ryberg Finsen

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1903 was awarded to Niels Ryberg Finsen "in recognition of his contribution to the treatment of diseases, especially lupus vulgaris, with concentrated light radiation, whereby he has opened a new avenue for medical science".

10 inventions that gave high-living a new meaning

In the past half-century, scientific and technological advances have transformed our world. But have we ever sat back and thought about the popular mechanics, or electronics that had the biggest impact on our lives and, especially, our lifestyle? If today we are able to live it up, and party hard, it's these gadgets, that can take care of everything from our kitchen to the outer space. Here they are...

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TV Remote control (1955)
It marks the official end of humanity's struggle for survival and the beginning of a really relaxing afternoon, or night. The first wireless remote, designed by Eugene Polley, is essentially a flashlight. When Zenith discovered that direct sunlight also can change channels on the remote-receptive TVs, the company came out with a model that used ultrasound... which lasted till the '80s and then we discovered infrared.

Microwave Oven (1955)
In 1945 Raytheon's Percy Spencer stood in front of a magnetron (the power tube of radar) and felt a candy bar start to melt in his pocket: he tries placing popcorn kernels in front of the magnetron and the kernels explode all over the lab. Ten years later Spencer patented a 'radar range' that cooked with high-frequency radio waves. And gave women the time to discover the real meaning of a night of partying...
Jet Airliner (1958)

The Boeing 707-120 debuts as the world's first successful commercial jet airliner, ushering in the era of accessible mass air travel. The four-engine plane carries 181 passengers and cruises at 600 mph for up to 5,280 miles on a full tank. The first commercial jet flight takes off from New York and lands in Paris... and gives the rich and the famous a high-flying, fashionable lifestyle statement - the jetsetter is born!

Laser beam (1958)
Whitens teeth, removes tattoos, corrects vision, erases wrinkles, reduces weight... gives cosmetic beauty a new meaning altogether. And all this while trying to track missiles too!

The computer (1959)

The phrase 'dot com' became a part of our lingo only in the 1990s, but the sequence of innovations that leads to the Internet goes back at least 40 years. In 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created Hypertext Markup Language' (HTML) to make Web pages and the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to identify where information is stored. Two phrases that has ever since shrunk the world, brought friends closer, increased efficiency, improved communication, and brought the world to our bedroom at the click of a button.
Cordless devices (1961)

Black and Decker release its first cordless drill. A simple tool that becomes a keyword for easy living - cordless phones, radios, computers.

Digital Music (1970)

James Russell, a scientist, invents the first digital-to-optical recording and playback system. Something that today, makes us dance to the tunes of rap, remix, club and lounge music.
ATM (1969)

On September 2, our bank will open at 9 am and never close again! Read a Long Island branch of Chemical Bank advertisement in 1969. And today, who goes to a bank when in need of cash?
MP3 player (1998)

Depending on who you ask, the MP3 is either the end of civilization (record companies) or the dawn of a new world (everyone else). The korean company Saehan introduces its MPMan in 1998, long before Apple asks, "Which iPod are you?"
Video games (1962)

MIT programmers write Spacewar and 44 years later, 89 per cent of school-age kids, and 63 per cent adult professionals own video games.

Discoveries which influenced mankind

Top Ten Scientific Discoveries of the 20th Century

Transistor: Transistor is a semiconductor device that is used to amplify or switch electronic signals. It is an important component of many electronic devices such as telephones and computers. In 1925, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, an Austrian-Hungarian physicist filed a patent for the principle of field-effect transistor. Dr. Oskar Heil, a German physicist patented another field-effect transistor in 1947. William Shockley contributed to a deeper knowledge about the working of a transistor, which is regarded as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century.

Television: Today, one will hardly find a home without a television set. Watching TV is a favorite leisure activity for most of us. But not many know about the discovery of television. During its early stages of development, a television included the technologies, which were used to capture, transmit and display images. Leon Theremin, an inventor from Russia developed a drum-based television system. Later that year, moving images were transmitted for the first time ever from Washington DC to New York City. By the end of 1930, televisions were available in markets across the globe.

World Wide Web: The World Wide Web, commonly abbreviated as WWW is defined as a system of hypertext documents that are accessed over the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee, an English scientist is credited with the invention of the World Wide Web. Its development began in 1990 and it was made available to the public in April 1993. Thanks to the WWW, we can access the Internet through easy means.

Xerography: It is a technique of photocopying documents and visual images. Charles Floyd Carlson, an American physicist and inventor developed this technique in 1938. The technique was patented in 1942. Today, it is used in laser and LED printers as well as photocopying machines worldwide. It is interesting to know how the name ‘xerography’ was born. It is derived from Greek words, ‘xerox’ meaning ‘dry’ and ‘graphos’ meaning ‘writing’.

DNA Profiling: The technique that is used in the identification of individuals on the basis of their DNA profiles, is known as DNA profiling. Forensic scientists use this technique commonly. Sir Alec Jeffreys, a British geneticist working at the University of Leicester in England reported the DNA profiling technique for the first time in 1985.

Microprocessor: A silicon chip that contains the central processing unit of a computer is referred to as a microprocessor. It is the central controlling unit of most of the digital devices as also computers and workstations. Microprocessors were introduced in the 1970s. Following their introduction, there has been a continuous growth in their capacities and speeds. Today, they are a part of a wide variety of electronic devices, ranging from embedded systems right up to supercomputers.

CD: Everyone knows what a CD is. Yes, it refers to an optical disc format that is used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store digital audio, but came to be used as a standard data storage media. It is capable of storing about 700 MB data. CDs hit the market in October 1982. The CD-ROM was introduced in 1985 and the CD-Recordable format came up in 1990.

Penicillin: The discovery of penicillin is attributed to Sir Alexander Fleming, a biologist and pharmacologist from Scotland. His research on antibacterial agents resulted in the discovery of an antibiotic substance called penicillin, which was derived from the fungus Penicillium notatum. The year 1928 witnessed the brilliant discovery of this antibiotic. This achievement of Alexander Fleming earned him the Noble Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

Flip Flop: An electronic circuit that has two stable states is referred to as a flip-flop. British physicists, William Eccles and F.W Jordan invented the flip-flop in 1918. Initially it consisted of two radio tubes. Today’s flip-flops consist of two control signals and a clock signal and require power and ground connections. They are used to store data and can be used to build finite state machines.

Computer Mouse: A computer mouse is a pointing device that detects two-dimensional motion in relation to a computer screen. It is an integral part of a computer system. Do you know when was it invented? Well, it was invented in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart, an American inventor working at the Stanford Research Institute. The invention of the computer mouse was taken as a very small discovery that was a part of a much larger project and Engelbart received no royalties for his invention. He continued with research on pointing devices and conceptualized many more. He is surely to be thanked for his brilliant discovery of this most popular pointing device, a computer mouse.

Leaders who were motivated and overcame adversity and became successful

Reading has been a life-long passion and great inspiration for me. I credit a loving grandfather for introducing me to the value and pleasure of a good book. “Gramps” introduced me to the inspiring “rags-to-riches” works of Horatio Alger. To this day, I treasure a good story of anyone who overcomes obstacles and barriers to reach great heights of success and achievement.
There is much to be learned from observing the efforts of others as they strive to succeed. Over the years, I’ve compiled a number of short anecdotes that have provided inspiration and motivation in times of need. In the coming months, I’d like to share a sampling of these narratives in hopes that you, too, will find them inspiring. Be certain to check back on this column from time to time as we continue to add anecdotes to this growing collection of stimulating observations.

Sir Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton is remembered for his explanation of the Law of Gravity. Newton said that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. Some people who have suffered the most from life are the same ones who rise the highest. They find ways to take energy from obstacles. Newton, by the way, began as a poor farm boy whose father died before he was born and whose mother raised him on a total income of $400 a year.
Benjamin Franklin The 15th of 17 children of a poor candlemaker, he had only one year of schooling. Therefore, he taught himself four languages, science, finance, politics, the classics, and how to write for publication. He went on to become a best educated and world famous inventor, diplomat, and author … Benjamin Franklin.
Babe Ruth Babe Ruth is remembered as the “Home Run King.” He was also the “Strike-Out Champion,” having failed at bat 1,330 times, more than any other player in the major leagues at that time.
Lucille Ball In 1927, the head of a drama school advised Lucille Ball to try another profession because she would never make it as an actress. She went on to have a history-making television series and eventually owned her own movie and television studio.
The Beatles In 1962, an executive of Decca Records made the following statement about a singing group: “We don’t like their sound. Besides, groups playing guitars are on the way out anyway.” He was talking about the Beatles.
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, co-authors of the world renowned Chicken Soup for the Soul® book series, were turned down by 33 of New York's biggest publishing houses in the first month of their efforts to promote their labor of love! They heard, "Anthologies don't sell." "We don't think there is a market for this book." "We just don't get it." "The book is too positive." "It's not topical enough." All totaled, they were rejected by 140 publishers. To top it off, their agent said, "I can't sell this book — I'm giving it back to you guys." They finally found someone willing to take a risk on their project, Peter Vegso, President of Health Communications, Inc. The first books were published on June 28, 1993, and had become a Christmas favorite by the end of December. Word of mouth soon led to a groundswell of popularity. To meet the demand, the publisher had to subcontract printing. With over 60 million copies sold to date, 48 titles in print in the United States and translations in over 30 languages, Chicken Soup for the Soul® has made international publishing history. At one time or another there have been at least eight Chicken Soup for the Soul® titles simultaneously in the top fifty on the USA Today best-selling books list. Jack and Mark hold the record in The Guinness Book of World Records for having the most books on the New York Times bestseller list at one time; seven books on May 24, 1998.