You have read me write about the jitter that is present at in vacuum. (Timestamp 16:00.) Now there is something weird being studied at Fermi-Lab. (Chicago). That is the lowly Muon. It is a fat electron with 200X a normal electron's mass. The takeaway for that fat Muon is that physicists have two measurements for its magnetic spin and two theoretical predictions. None of the four valuers agree. If and when the physicists figure out which of the predicted values is the one they want to declare is their best theoretical answer, then Mister Fat Muon may tell us which dark matter candidate is the correct answer to investigate. Wimps or Axions. My money is a side bet on Wimps, so with my Los Vegas luck, it will turn out to be Axions.
Now to cosmology. (Timestamp 32:00.) If you know about the expanding universe, you know about
Edwin Hubble. This silly goose took the pioneering work of a psychotic
Henrietta Swan Leavitt on Cepheid Variables, to give us that headache. The idiot who funded the work was
John Daggett Hooker. Another nitwit,
Vesto Slipher, figured out what the RED SHIFT meant in all this cosmological investigation, so he was glad to inform us that the universe is speeding up to its “"pop”. Thanks, lady and gerbils.
Anyway, the rate of expansion, known as Hubble's Constant, has run into exactly the same problem as the Mister Fat Muon's magnetic spin measurement has encountered. What we measure and what we predict by theory do not agree.
Here we have measurements from parallax, Cepheid Variables and Type 1 supernovas that tell us the Hubble Constant is ~74 km/s per mega parsec. Fine. It almost fits General Relativity. Then along comes some idiots who measure the cosmic microwave background radiation for velocity shift. The CMBR measurement came out to 67.2 km/s per megaparsec. Uhh, that is a big enough difference to provoke fist fights among cosmologists. The Hubble crowd went back to the drawing board. The problem is that Cepheid Variables are a shaky “standard candle”.
Enter the James Webb Telescope. The JWST checked the measurements of the Hubble Telescope, and the measurements MATCHED.
What the presenter is NOT TELLING YOU, is that there is a lot of scientific politics going on. The Europeans are doing the theory and the Americans are doing the measuring. In the case of the Fat Muon and the Hubble Constant, the Europeans argue that the Americans are fouling up the measurements.
Well, TOUGH TIDDLY WINKS. Our scientists put in the work. Their results have stood peer review. The Naysayers had better climb off their nags and start looking at their math, because THEY are the wrong numbers crowd.
Enter
Adam Riess. His explanation is that we don't know what is the explanation. Lacking a ready-made theory to explain the observation, scientists lack the imagination to try a new one. They refuse the observation.
Or in other words, the Americans produced the weird observations. The Europeans, who have their set theories, are reluctant to see current quantum mechanics and General Relativity go away.
========================================================================
How about a crash course (PUN!) in plate tectonics?
Think of the Earth as a hot rock with dried mud patches on it. Somehow, that hot rock shifts its hot spots on its outer surface around, causing the mud to flow together and apart. That is plate tectonics. Where the mud bumps into each other, you get ridges.
Anyhow, the takeaway is that as supercontinents came together and broke apart, the flora and fauna had opportunities to face new ranges and climates. This was a nifty diversification and extinction mechanism. There is a lot of guesswork involved in how that process worked. For your average ape (me), the result is that migrations and heat and cold, and volcanos produced by continental collisions made the dinos go bye bye and left behind us mammals. The big rock that nuclear wintered us 65 million years ago was the offal cherry on top of that manure sandwich.
You notice that supercontinent breakup causes a LOT of mass extinctions (Snowball Earth). Of course, we got multicellular life and mobile animals out of that freezer burn. (Rodinia and Snowball Earth.
Gondwana wiped a lot of animals out. We got land plants, though. More freezer burn. Then a burn off that killed 86% of life. Pangaea, which came next, wiped out 96% of life. We are doing real great on this planet, guys? Shallow seas became plains or deserts. Goodbye amphibians and lots of shallow sea life. Hello lizards and salt flats! Lots of carbon dioxide in the air. No Snpwball Earth 2.0 (fortunately).
The Supercontinent of the future is supposed to kill US. But inasmuch as we have 250 million years to get ready, I am hopeful we can give that prediction the raspberry.
Avatar
