Getting a Sense of Scale

One of the hardest things in studying either the cosmos or the fundamental structure of matter is wrapping your head around the sizes of things. Atoms and particles are so unfathomably small, and galaxies and galaxy clusters are just so unfathomably large.

Of course, the classic video "Powers of Ten" still does a great job of conveying these vastly different scales. I still love this - it is elegant and thought-provoking:

Also, it's worth checking out the interactive web version, based on the film.

An updated take on a similar story is this video from the American Museum of Natural History, which incorporates modern astronomical data into the illustration of the cosmos so that they more accurately represent what we know about what's out there.


Finally, a couple of students have sent me links to versions of this cool interactive graphic that shows the size scales of a whole bunch of things with a slider bar to move around. It's not made by scientists and has a couple of not-100%-accurate bits, but it more than makes up for that by having random weird and cool facts throughout. Definitely worth your time to play with for a while:
The Scale of the Universe version 2 by HTwins

Earth from the Space Station

My current pick for "best thing ever" is below... a compilation of NASA videos of the earth from the International Space Station, edited by Michael Konig.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

This is just mind-blowing, isn't it? The timing of the compilation has been redone so it doesn't quite match the speed at which the space station travels. However, the original NASA videos do approximately represent the "real time" experience. View those at:
http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Videos/CrewEarthObservationsVideos/

Imagining the Big Bang

There is a lovely story by Italo Calvino called "All at One Point" that I often assign in the beginning of my classes on cosmology. In it, a narrator discusses the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe as if he and many other characters had been present since the beginning. Describing the events of cosmic history in human terms highlights the absurdity of trying to picture the Big Bang at all. It's just impossible - what would it even mean to picture everything truly being at one point?

One of my students sent me the following link to a video art piece by Taras Hrabowsky:

THINGPIT_HD from taras hrabowsky on Vimeo.

First of all, this is just cool. But also, to me, this brings up some similar themes as the Calvino story (maybe because I just reread it again). Everything around us is part of a constantly changing and evolving cosmos. As we run the "movie" of cosmic history backwards and forwards in our heads, how can we not attempt to literally picture it?

Magnetic Movies!

I love love love this animated piece by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt.  In it, they imagine magnetic fields running wild over a laboratory.  The audio comes from recordings of the magnetic field of the Sun.  Spooky, beautiful, and definitely one the Best Things Ever.

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

For a different approach to magnetic field art, take a look at what people have been able to create using "ferrofluids." These fluids contain iron, and the iron will react to the presence of magnetic fields. Novel geometries of electromagnets can be used to control the ferrofluids and create truly bizarre sculptures. Here's an example piece from 2001 by Sachiko Kodama and Minako Takeno.

The Best Thing Ever

Lately, I have been reading a lot about the impact that Carl Sagan had on the public interest in (and understanding of) space.  Every time I think about Sagan, I end up with "A  Glorious Dawn" stuck in my head.  I love this ridiculous video - everybody loves it!  It's the best thing ever.

Resonance!

A classic example that is always amazing to watch:

(Incidentally, the engineering term for this is "aeroelastic flutter". Isn't that great?)

Rice on a speaker (turn down your volume!):

Finally, this is a little physics demo that for some reason I like, even though it is a little slow. While you're watching it, imagine that the little test objects are buildings in an earthquake.



Can you figure out how all of these relate to each other?

The Gravitas Project: Supercomputer Simulations Recast as Art

This is a short video showing simulations of what would happen if you put several identical galaxies together in space and allowed them to collide according to the equations of gravity.  It takes a scientific tool (supercomputer simulations of galaxy collisions) and uses it to create beautiful patterns that are impossible to find in nature.  Astrophysicist John Dubinski is responsible for the simulations, and he works with musician John Kameel Farah to set the images to original music.  

Real galaxy collisions, when multiple galaxies crash together, merging or passing through one another, are some of the most spectacular and seemingly violent events we can see with telescopes.  In one sense they truly are violent, making a surprising and often beautiful mess out of what were once orderly spiral or elliptical collections of stars.  However, not much actually "collides" in a galaxy collision.  Rather, the stars and other materials just get rearranged in reaction to the changing gravitational fields.  The collisions also take place very slowly.  All of the telescope images of galaxy collisions in the universe are essentially static snapshots; we are unable to watch them evolve because of our limited human timescales.

To study the physics of galaxy collisions, we therefore turn to computer simulations.  The basic idea to these simulations is to make three-dimensional numerical models of imaginary galaxies, and then to set them on a collision course.  The computer programs use the mathematical equations describing gravity to figure out how the system will evolve over time.  These simulations are a key part of the scientific effort to better understand how galaxies grew, merged, and interacted over the history of the universe.

The process of "visualizing" the simulations is a secondary step:  the simulation output consists of vast amounts of numerical data, recording the position of every individual "particle" in the simulation at every simulated time.  You can take these simulations and represent them visually, though, and the results are some of the most awe-inspiring movies you will ever see.

Dubinski, recognizing this, has created a series of stunning animations based on his simulations, which you can find here.  While it does not model anything that truly happens in nature, the animation I posted above still teaches some interesting lessons about, as Dubinski puts it, "the emergence of chaos".  It's also  just really pretty.