A Ghost Takes You to Dinner E-Book

Ulisses Capozzoli

• Herausgeber: Edições Sesc SP
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Coleção Ciência no Cotidiano
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 135

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In what way could using a GPS to circulate in city traffic be connected to cosmic stars lying a billion light-years away from planet Earth? The intriguing answer is that they are irrevocably bound by a relation that traverses centuries of scientific knowledge, quasars located billions of light-years away from the Milky Way and names like Galileo Galilei, Max Planck, Tycho Brahe, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus , Herschel and Albert Einstein. In an inventive and information-rich narrative, the journalist and Master and Doctor of Science Ulisses Capozzoli starts out from the commonplace use of satellite-based geolocation systems to illustrate how science reveals itself in much of our daily lives. The book is the first title of the Science in Everyday Life series, published exclusively in digital format.

Leseprobe

:: Science in Everyday Life Series ::

The daily life and its connections with the frontiers of science

DEDICATION

To the memory of Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), the last of the ancients and the first of the moderns.

Acknowledgments

Among other people whom I will always owe a debt of gratitude, I thank the team at Edições Sesc São Paulo. However, that does not mean they can be held accountable for possible mismatches in this uneven terrain of different areas of knowledge. That responsibility is mine.

Epigraph

Symmetry seems to be absolutely fascinating to the human mind. We like to look at symmetrical things in nature, such as perfectly symmetrical spheres like planets and the sun, or symmetrical crystals like snowflakes, or flowers with are nearly symmetrical (…) What is symmetry? If you look at me I am symmetrical, right and left – apparently externally, at least.

Richard Feynman

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Presentation

Preface

Chapter 1

Fiction and Reality

Chapter 2

The Moon, Out of Reach

Chapter 3

The Dethronement of Earth

Chapter 4

The Foundations of the Sky

Chapter 5

And Yet It Moves

Chapter 6

Kant Establishes the Concept of Galaxy

Chapter 7

Science is Blurred With Fiction

Basic Bibliography

About the Author

Credits

PRESENTATION

In the past few decades, a large number of scientific publications have introduced non-specialized audiences to scientific themes and discoveries ranging from mathematics and neuroscience to stem-cell research and astronomy, drawing on a common resource: clear, reader-friendly language.

Alongside periodicals like magazines and newspapers, an ever-increasing number of books with ingenious and interesting approaches have paved the way for scientific knowledge to gain ground in people’s everyday life. Committed to dispelling myths about the impossibility of understanding the problems of science, they are works that generally involve specialists on complex subjects such as cosmology or quantum physics dedicated to the challenge of communicating with the public in a simple way, without, however, dumbing down the subjects to the point of compromising their richness.

That is precisely the case of this information-rich and inventive narrative by Ulisses Capozzoli, a journalist specialized in science writing and Master and Doctor of Science, which Sesc has the satisfaction of making available to the public. It is the first title of a collection that proposes to introduce readers to the relations between scientific knowledge and daily life. In each of the five titles that make up the Science in Everyday Life series, a central theme leads to an investigation of how discoveries and advances in science are present in much of our daily lives.

For this first book, the author chooses geolocation systems, known as GPS, as a starting point. A common feature in the daily lives of a large number of people getting around in cities all over the world, these satellite-controlled systems afford Ulysses Capozzoli a guiding thread to travel through scientific knowledge, theories and concepts that have accumulated since ancient Egypt and even more distant times, and on which the operation of a GPS depends.

Readers are referred to cosmic stars such as the quasars, located billions of light-years away from the Milky Way and used as reference points to guide the direction of satellites that send information to Earth. It is this relationship between quasars (“animals of the cosmic zoo” discovered by the American astronomer Allan Rex Sandage in the 1960s, as Capozzoli informs us) and satellites that raises questions for the text to lead readers to centuries of knowledge and discoveries.

Interestingly enough, the very title of the book reflects the operation that guides us through traffic in cities based on information collected by satellites. The light from these stars located billions of light-years away – which reaches the Earth’s orbit and serves to orient satellites – originated from explosions that happened millions or even billions of years ago. The satellites orbiting our planet, therefore, use as their main reference point the light of bodies that have been dead for eons. As the author wittily suggests in the title, they are the ghosts of such stars.

Over the route outlined by Capozzoli, topics and fields of knowledge are continuously offered to readers, and names such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Max Planck, Herschel, Albert Einstein, Edwin Powell Hubble, Kant, Lord Kelvin, Eratosthenes and Hipparchus are evoked for their contributions in centuries of scientific transformations and advances.

The author’s ability to narrate good stories also stands out among the numerous discoveries and inventions of science contextualized in the text. In particular, the careers of men like Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe and Kepler are related in such a way that details of their lives further enhance interesting work that definitively marked the history of knowledge. A book that undoubtedly uses attractive language to bring non-specialized audiences closer to a universe that, in certain situations, as the author says, is indistinguishable from magic.

This title, and the entire Science in Everyday Life series, expands a new pathway for the circulation of knowledge by Edições Sesc: the creation and publication of exclusively digital titles. Alongside the publisher’s printed titles already converted to this format, this publication reaffirms the institution’s investment in the development of the so-called digital book. Committed to building a more equal and inclusive society, Sesc recognizes in the encouragement of reading, enhanced by new technologies, an effective tool in the development of a critical, creative and renovating social environment.

Danilo Santos de MirandaRegional Director of Sesc São Paulo

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PREFACE

The world in this second decade of the 21st century is deeply influenced by science, although most people do not realize it.

The changes have been so intense, and have happened over such a short period of time, that it has been virtually impossible for most people to establish an intelligible connection between theory and practice. Among the developments at the frontiers of science and the applications incorporated into daily life are objects that have become modern household appliances: smart television sets, personal computers and smartphones, among others.

Nowadays one can use apps such as Waze to go to a restaurant having only an address, that is, without actually knowing the way there. Such a service is an example of how devices, to operate accurately and efficiently, combine developments ranging from the frontiers of cosmology to the theory of relativity to theoretical advances at atomic and subatomic scales. The latter, due to a certain dose of mysticism, have become known as “quantum mechanics.”

In this book we will take a look at how that happened. We will address from quasars, stars billions of light years away that allow us to calibrate the satellites of networks like GPS (Global Positioning System) in orbit, to refined calculations to compensate for the curvature of space-time, a creation of Einstein’s general relativity. But we will, obviously, look into the electronic developments based on the quantum microuniverse.

We will start with a literary account, a short story by the American author Ambrose Bierce, to demolish the belief that at that time when his book was written (1888), daily life was understood as part of a diverse and consistent reality, while being at the same time measurable, known in seemingly definite detail.

But all that has changed radically and definitely. Our launch pad – from a predictable and measurable world – to the probabilities of uncertainty that arrived at the turn of the 20th century shows the breadth and depth of such transformations, capable of shaping a new social behavior.

An immersion in history – in this case, the history of science – is essential for us to explore how technical-scientific knowledge has created what can be called a brave new world.

To a certain extent, the changes began in the microcosm. And then they expanded to the macrocosm, to the whole universe, and more recently to the notion of multiverse – a concept which seeks to justify the notion that, contrary to what was believed for some time, there is not only one universe, but several. Something like a cluster of soap bubbles.

The changes started there, but were always based on what was previously known. Hence the need to visit classical times, including advances such as the Copernican revolution and the return to the heliocentrism, perceived in ancient Greece by astronomers such as Eratosthenes and Aristarchus of Samos.

Copernicus was at one point a fresh start. A resumption of knowledge abandoned during the long darkness of the Middle Ages. After him, in the construction of the forms of the present, came talented and genius men as Tycho Brahe, a Danish astronomer, and Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer who interpreted the data patiently and doggedly collected by Tycho Brahe.

Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo Galilei, an Italian physicist and astronomer. If Poland’s Copernicus dethroned the Earth, Galileo dethroned the Sun as the supposed center of the universe. But yet to come was Isaac Newton, the solitary English genius, and his universal gravitation theory. Thus the motions of the sky, of the planets, comets, asteroids and moons gained harmony and predictability.

There were other advances in related areas, or apparently distant ones that nevertheless composed a whole, such as typography, which enabled the popularization of books, among them the Bible, with implications for religion and customs.

However, the world’s machinery, as we know it today, was still incomplete. After Newton, astronomy witnessed the arrival of the composer William Herschel, an Englishman of German origin. And from philosophy came the contribution of Immanuel Kant, with the first concept of galaxy as a cluster of billions of stars, as is the case of the Milky Way, the galaxy of the Solar System.

Other developments followed. The notion that the universe was born out of a singularity, something akin to a point of infinite density and curvature. A cosmic egg that gave birth to everything we observe – as far as the naked eye can see and the power of the latest generation of telescopes is capable of exploring.

The idea was developed of a universe in motion, expanding with the plasticity of a birthday balloon: a useful image as a metaphor but which does not express the complexity of what has become known as “recession of galaxies”.

That all happened throughout the 1930s, when a world depression hit the West, triggering a change in conceptions and behaviors, both individual and collective.

Einstein’s relativity, which complemented Newton’s advances and lies at the basis of everyday mundane functions, such as the operation of Waze as a geonavigation resource, also altered classic concepts of physical reality. Time ceased to be absolute, flowing like a river from source to mouth, to become relative. That is, depending on the condition of a particular observer.

More recently, a broader consequence of such advances has led to the idea of multiverse, i.e., the possibility of universes parallel to ours, with settings that until recently existed only in fiction.

The journey of exploration of how it all happened over the last 2,500 years is the account you will now follow. This is the saga of human beings, determined to build, based on the creativity and potentiality of science, a surprising world. Where everything changes as time flows. Or seems to flow.

CHAPTER 1

Fiction and Reality

If you have never heard of Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842-1914), it is certainly the case of explaining who he is. But if the man is familiar to you, it suffices to add that the intention here is to refer to the weirdest among all of the consistently strange short stories he wrote: “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” from 1888.

Taking the liberty to assume that most people are unfamiliar with either the person or the career of Ambrose Bierce, it should be said that he was an American writer, journalist and acid critic of social conventions. Sharp as a razor, he would slash out at whatever crossed his path: from the concept of family to the notion of humanity, including, of course, the idea of nation. To be brief, let’s just say that at the age of 71, Bierce disappeared during a trip to Mexico.

The most recurrent version of his disappearance is that he was shot dead by men belonging to the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa, one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution. The exact place and date of his death are unknown, but rumors place it sometime between 1913 and 1914. And that is all that is known about the end of his life.

As to the essence of “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” the story relates to the observations of a certain Armour Wren and his 13-year-old son about what had happened to a neighbor, Mr. Williamson, to whom Wren had sold some horses. The delivery date of the animals had been postponed, and as they passed by the Williamson residence, Mr. Wren decided to turn his carriage around to inform him of the delay.

That’s when it all happened. One of the coach horses stumbled, attracting Wren’s attention, but his son watched as Williamson walked over to Andrew, the overseer, precisely to talk about the animals’ arrival. The man was walking across a close-cropped pasture, with nothing between him and the horizon. Then the boy cried in amazement, “Father, what has become of Mr. Williamson?” The fact is that the purchaser of the horses had disappeared!

And Bierce, as he always did, explained that the text he was publishing had no intention of clarifying that phenomenon. It merely reproduced a somewhat controversial record of Williamson’s disappearance; the surprise of a few slaves who had seen him leave the porch of this house and close the gate with the purpose of seeking the overseer; and finally, the madness that took over his wife, unable to find an explanation for such a disappearance.

Unexpected occurrences, such as the disappearance of Mr. Williamson narrated by Bierce, were for a long time restricted to literature. However, especially at the turn of the 20th century, phenomena just as strange or even stranger also invaded the universe of science, and since then have not ceased to reveal themselves with increasing intensity. From cosmology, the macro approach, which deals with the origin and evolution of the universe, to quantum mechanics, the realm of the microuniverse, atoms and particles, without forgetting the fundamentals of the everyday world.

Between the late 20th and early 21st century, in turn, a series of extraordinary discoveries of initially unthinkable connections exited the science labs to permeate the daily lives of most of the planet’s population. Billions now, and not merely millions of people.

In order to demonstrate that all scientific research, basic or applied, transforms daily life, we will return to the example of the Waze app, which is used on a planetary scale. For most users of this technology, it may appear to bear no relation to indispensable concepts of cosmology and frontier physics, as is the case of general relativity, which is a theory of gravitation and how celestial bodies interact. It may also seem unrelated to one of the more exotic creatures that astronomers call “cosmic zoo animals”: quasars, the brightest bodies known in the entire breadth of the universe.

We will investigate here what a quasar is and the history of their location in the sky. Before doing so, it should be said that in their classification of “cosmic zoo” animals, astronomers include a wide variety of stars: from a planet like the Earth to black holes, cosmic cannibals from whose voracity not even a light beam escapes.

1

Waze is a combination of recently emerged technologies, and its increasing use transforms habits and customs on a daily basis. Thus, while facilitating navigation in different regions of the planet, Waze is at the same time a social network.

In this application, interaction between different users of the system feeds the network efficiently. The alert of an accident, bottleneck or roadblock hampering traffic in cities and motorways, among other occurrences, allows safe travel, saving time and fuel.