This morning, the moon, Jupiter and Venus lay close together in the east. This photo was taken with a compact camera from Llano de La Venta viewpoint, one of the astronomical viewpoints on La Palma.
You must have noticed that the physicists have been jumping up and down lately, because the Large Hadron Collider has discovered the Higgs boson, nicknamed the God particle. I’m not a particle physicist. I’m not at all clear about how the Higgs boson creates the Higgs field and gives everything mass. Here’s the bit I’m clear about. The human brain evolved to hunt antelopes on the Serrengeti. Quantum physics is…
Professor Brian Cox gives his opinion in this short video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-18736011
Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, (Latin for “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”) was published 325 years ago today, on 5 July 1687. This is the book that laid out Newtonian Physics. It’s an astonishing book. In the section on the orbit of the planets and their moons, Newton showed that gravity depends on the square of the distance between massive bodies, and that the gravity acts as though it’s…
Modern telescopes have mirrors made of a material called vitro ceramic, which keeps its size and shape in spite of changes in temperature, covered with a very thin layer of aluminium. Domestic mirrors have glass in front of the aluminium, to protect it, but that means that the light passes through the glass twice – coming and going – which degrades the image. So telescope mirrors have the aluminium…
Yesterday the maintenance team took the tertiary mirror out of the huge GranTeCan telescope, and I was invited to take photos. (Starlight hits the huge primary mirror first, then bounces up to the smaller secondary mirror at the top of the telescope, then back down into a tube called the baffle to the flat tertiary at 45º, which sends it to the scientific instruments at the sides. The tertiary is elliptical, and…