HoodedHawk

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander dug a trench about four days ago, and this image shows that the bright substance (see lower left, in shadow) has disappeared. Scientists believe that it must have been ice (presumably water) which sublimated away, as other substances such as salt do not behave like this. Woo Hoo!

[Read 1/14/2008] History/Science. 2007

The Archimedes Codex is the story of the Archimedes Palimpsest, formed when a medieval prayer book was created by taking parchment (sheepskin pages) from several ancient codexes, scraping off the old text and re-using the parchment. One of these ancient manuscripts happened to be the earliest surviving copy of Archimedes Codex C. An informative website is dedicated to the Archimedes Palimpsest.

The old prayer book/palimpsest was purchased in 1998 at auction for $2million. The new owner entrusted Noel, the curator of the Walters Museum in Baltimore, to unlock its secrets. Netz is a Stanford classicist; the two authors alternate chapters.

I was more interested in the technology used to uncover the Archimedes text than in the text itself however a majority of the book is on the text and how it contributes to our understanding of Greek mathematics (geometry, combinatorics, etc.). Only the last 20 pages focus on what caught my attention initially, namely the use of a beamline at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) to do X-ray absorption studies on the palimpsest. These studies reveal hidden text via the iron in the original Archimedes text’s ink. I’ve done X-ray absorption (EXAFS) studies myself at SLAC so I liked the tie-in.

I think Noel is either being tongue-in-cheek or is a new earth Creationist (ick!). He once says that sheepskin evolved “or was Intelligently designed” with more antibiotic properties on the side facing out. In another passage , when discussing dates in the codex, says the dates as written by the orthodox monk were from the origin of the earth – “which as everyone knows was 5500 BC”. He can’t possibly believe that the earth was created ~7000 years ago! Anyway, the Archimedes text was written ~6-900 AD, while the Prayer Book it was made into was written ~ 1200 AD.

Interestingly (and sadly), as described in the book, most of the damage and deterioration of the book took place not in the past, but in the 20th century! The book today was very brittle, moldy, and glued(!) together.

[Read 11/2007] Religion. 2007

In God’s Mechanics Brother Consolmagno discusses religion from a “techie” standpoint. Br. Consolmagno is an astronomer, and many of his friends/coworkers are either scientists or in other technical fields. He tells both his and their stories about how to reconcile a life of faith with a life in science. I enjoyed this book tremendously; Br. Consolmagno shows how he (and others) can have “unprovable” religious beliefs and still work every day in highly scientific or technical fields.

He poses three questions that postulating the existence of God is useful in answering:

1. Why is there something instead of nothing?
2. What is the source and object of my deepest yearnings?
3. How do I make sense of my life?

Some notes on what Br. Consolmagno says in this very engaging book:

The urge to find something “out there”, or the longing to find meaning is the search for the transcendent. It is very unsatisfying to just have a God who is responsible for the creation of the universe (question 1) but then has no further interest in it. What then, would be the point of our lives?

Religion: The various “sacred” scriptures serve as a sort of database – a record of the community’s history of interaction with the transcendent. It’s a template against which we can compare our own experiences of the transcendent. The collective religious wisdom (and Tradition) gives us the tools to “throw out” data points too far from the norm.

Sacraments are a concrete “thing” that only a Church can provide. The function of religion is to get closer to God, and the function of God is to address the fundamental questions of meaning and purpose. However, you cannot insist (or assume) that religious doctrines are a complete and final description of nature and God. Our understanding of God is always incomplete – as St. Paul says, “through a glass, darkly”.

Catholic theology notes that all doctrine, no matter how authoritative, embodying divine truth, still requires interpretation because our understanding of that truth is expressed in a given time and in an historically conditioned language and culture.

He recommends Saint Augustine (~400 AD): “On the literal meaning of Genesis” (trans. by John Hammond Taylor, S.J. 1982). Augustine puts a creative spin on biblical passages, as when he says “Let there be light” actually refers to instilling rationality into intellectual creatures.

A particular strength of Catholicism over denominations where worship depends totally on music and preaching is that even the most tasteless liturgy with the most inane homily from a priest who’s an outright scoundrel doesn’t stop a Mass from being a valid and worthwhile source of grace.

The absence of an electron looks mathematically like the presence of a hole [ in a semi-conductor ], just as the absence of good can look like the presence of an entity called evil.

A 5200 year-old goblet (see image below) from the Burnt City in Iran has a series of images depicting a wild goat jumping up to get leaves from a tree. The animation shown is from an 11-minute documentary about the goblet (which was actually found ~1970). Basically, if you take each image in succession (like a flip-book), you get the animation. Neat.

Note that the post-revolutionary Iranian archaeologists kinda got things wrong; they attribute the tree on the goblet to the “Assyrian Tree of Life”. But the goblet is from 1000 years before any mention of the Assyrian civilization in historical records. Ooops.

This giant frog lived 70 million years ago in Madagascar, and was the size of a beachball. From what scientists can tell, it ate whatever could fit in it’s (huge) mouth. The thing looks like it could eat a Yorkie. The little frog in front of it in the picture is the largest frog living in Madagascar today…