Hot Jupiters and Wandering Jupiters. And how Mars became the runt of the rocky litter. I must confess that I thought of our planets to have settled since day one but they in the program put across an interesting alternative. People winge about the BBC but this was good stuff.
But Oss, people cant always see what you see. Or are not looking. One of two. Yes, you are right. It is all fantastic. Incredible. I tend to come into all this from the other end of things. I occasionally take small parties around the Island here to look at some of the geological features and that includes ordinary office staff. It is quite amazing the response I get when I tell them "see that white line in the cliff face, that was created when two continents collided 400 million years ago" and this is in their own back yard. And that the hills that they go out walking on were once the size of the Himalayas.
Ah was that what it was about, I will certainly enjoy it, I know about all those things already but not in any real depth. The models are just full of problems that is part of the fun, we kind of know we are on the right track but nothing quite fits, that is really fun and a great way to spend a a life trying to figure it out, I have a lot of respect for the real scientists, like you sir, that actually work in the field, me I work with computers and pretty much always just on business systems, real science is just a hobby or interest for me these days I will never make any real contribution to the body of knowledge, a lot of poor choices back when I was young.
Yes the vast majority don't care, in the secular world most are content with the rewards of technology without getting too deep into the detail or philosophy of where it came from, but some do get a glimpse if they take the time to be shown things the way you describe. Scale, Scale and Scale, 'geology' scale in time, 'micro scale' where physics and the whole of modern life lives (electronics computing and so on), the macro cosmos scale where relativity and yet more modern life lives (GPS at one tiny corner). Been published often but there is an odd fact about scale, and that is this, we are roughly about the same number of orders of magnitude from the tiniest things as we are from the total 13.7 billion year dimension of the Universe, as many orders of magnitude above us as there are below us, like so much of life we live in a Goldilocks zone
Well, I am not saying it is easy to prove things at the gelogical end of the spectrum because it isnt, but it is a lot easier than prooving events that happened in the solar system. Geological events and features are a bit more tangible, at least the ones here on earth. In the program last night they interviewed the man who has sent the probe to Jupiter. It was interesting to note that if they dont get it right the probe will just whizz on past, without stopping. Due to arrive in 2016 ?
It's the Goldilocks zone that appears to be too much of a coincidence. And is why I sometimes ask the question of who set it up in the first place. As a scientist it is best to keep an open mind. Having said that it doesn't make me a bible thumping christian, it is just me trying to fit the jigsaw together. On the cosmological end of the geological spectrum, I find the astrophysical stuff very useful in getting my head around the large catastrophic events in the earths history. Dinosaur extinction and other cataclysmic events. The notion of a Jupiter wandering about at some stage in the past adds weight to the whole idea of collision between planets and between planets and other bodies. Just another piece in the big jigsaw. It also adds weight to the idea that the earth or at least its inhabitants will someday meet its demise by cosmic collision. I wonder where that discarded planet ended up? Probably in someones back garden?
The anthropic principle, that's what that is and it is pretty much inevitable that creatures like us would end up in a finely tuned Universe because it is only in that kind of Universe that we could exist, hoist by our own bootlaces again And interestingly if you look at a fractal image you will see incredible detail, detail that appears out of the simplest of mathematical equations, and those fractals have an interesting appearance of critically tuned complex borders, but they appear naturally out of incredible simplicity, stuff like that is why I don't get perturbed by that apparent fine tuning of the world gives you this
And what's more that image can be magnified for ever and ever and all you will find is more and more complextity
If someone came across a picture like that they would almost certainly think that it had been 'created' by someone with incredible talent, and yet it is a completely spontaneous result of plotting a simple bit of maths.
Actually fractals are great for designing world scenery in movies and video games and have been employed that way for a good couple of decades now
The Mandelbrot set is very similar to the pattern from my home town but there are many types of fractals and they are extremely useful in the modern world
I had a fractal programme for the pc about 20 years ago and enjoyed using it for a day or so. A friend of mine spent weeks on end just changing the maths slightly to see what patterns emerged. He wasn't working so he had lots of spare time, I think he became obsessed with it.
I had a DOS based Mandelbrot (and other fractals) generator program back then too Mike, it was probably the same one, one of the good ones on the magazine covers it used extended memory and was very fast for that era. I spent a fair bit of time exploring the Mandelbrot set, it never got boring for me. Although there appears to be repetition, it does not actually repeat exactly and there are always new features to be found at different scales. That is the truly impressive thing about fractals, they are an example of the notion 'that from almost nothing vast complexity can simply appear' that's why I include it in this thread.
Watched it, yet another superb Horizon program, I knew most of it, but seeing some of the actual research that they were doing and avenues they are exploring was very very interesting. It does come out on the fine tuned and incredibly unlikely side re our solar system however as they point out even if we are only one in a million there are a hell of a lot like us. Interestingly this particular program did not expand on future issues with our orbit, there is a considerable body of thought that believes that our orbit is nowhere near as stable as we think it is and for sure it will change as the sun ages due to the redistribution of the suns mass when it hits old age and the red giant phase. Excellent program, I will watch it again later.
Harrison Schmitt, the only geologist we sent to the moon brought back the single most interesting rock from any of the missions, sending trained specialists is always a good idea As you know, it is all science John, you have the big scale stuff and the small scale stuff and all the stuff in between and we need all of it, all of it contributes to our understanding, Geology is fascinating in its own right as the macro behavior of materials that constitute our world is far from the homogeneity that common sense might lead one to imagine, all those strata and formations in different locations, fascinating! And the simple dynamics of why the crust still has a fair share of heavy elements, as Mike commented on earlier, is also a fascinating question, what happened early on that all the gold and uranium didn't just sink? Or maybe 99% of it or the likes did sink to the mantle and core?
Well, I have to say I do not know what is in the core but I know what is thought to be in the core and the explanation why. So why are there still heavier metals on the surface? Maybe you are right about residual amounts remaining on the surface, but dont forget that rocks such as basalt are iron rich, for example, so they get pumped back to the surface from deeper down. Have a google on basalt. Depends what we refer to as the "surface". A lot of the metals we mine are of igneous origin originally. And back to the astrophysical side of things, there is a school of thought that says that some metals have arrived at a later date from debris etc from space?
Yeah that's what I said to Mike earlier, the crust has been recycled many many times and convection in the mantle albeit very very slow keeps stuff moving around. Maybe the 'late heavy bombardment' was responsible for much of our mineral wealth in the crust or through rapid recycling from the mantle of such bombardment Interesting subject though!
