Almost 40 years ago, the Apollo 8 astronauts took this famous photograph of the Earth above the horizon of the Moon.

Eventually entitled “Earthrise,” the December 1968 image was a Christmas greeting from the first humans to leave near-Earth orbit and visit another celestial object. It became an icon of the late ’60s, appearing on T-shirts, posters and greeting cards. Space enthusiasts loved it, since it gave earthlings their first real glimpse of what space travel might look like. Environmentalists loved it, because it showed “this island Earth,” a small blue sphere in the dark of space, the only home to humans (that we’d better not muck up).

A few months later, two members of the Apollo 11 crew actually walked on the Moon. They brought back another iconic photograph:

This one also ended up posters and greeting cards. NASA should have demanded royalty fees on these two; they could have funded another Moon landing!

It’s been a long while since anyone walked on the Moon, or even orbited it. The Apollo program petered out in the mid-’70s, and manned space exploration has receded from the public consciousness. The Space Shuttle program, except for two fatal catastrophes, has made space flight about as exciting as watching Greyhound buses leave the station. The International Space Station meanwhile whirls above our heads with a small crew who do who-knows-what, since the regular media rarely pay them any attention.

December 6th, 2007 | Tags: The media | Category: Astronomy | Leave a comment

The video conference came off well, despite some minor technical glitches and the seeming inability of some teenagers to avoid talking altogether.

We were using iChat on an eMac, with a webcam I brought from home. The video quality was pretty bad, largely because of the equipment on our end. I suspect NASA/JPL has somewhat more sophisticated video equipment. Still, you could tell there were people on the screen, despite the pixellation and slow response time.

Audio was a different issue. The audio through the network was garbled, like those early webcasts using RealPlayer. I gave up on the iChat video finally, and just connected my desk phone to their teleconference line and put it on speakerphone. Then at least we could understand what they were saying.

So, we had blocky video from iChat and somewhat clear audio from the telephone. Not ideal, but it worked.

The format was straightforward. We introduced ourselves (not individually, by schools) and the four Cassini scientists introduced themselves. Then they opened the floor to questions from the students. Each school took a turn, until the hour was up.

From what I could gather, at least two of the conferees entered the contest individually. The rest of us participated as science classes. The individual students had fairly sophisticated questions about the moons of Saturn and the planet itself; the classrooms had less technical questions. One can assume the individual students were more interested in space exploration than the typical student, and had spent more time delving into the Cassini mission.

December 5th, 2007 | Tags: Education & schools, Technology | Category: Astronomy | Leave a comment

It’s been a long while since I participated in the science blog carnival called The Tangled Bank. So, I submitted my post on zero point energy. Hopefully, the physicists reading it won’t laugh me off the stage.

December 5th, 2007 | Tags: Science, The media | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

My students will participate in a video conference with real space scientists at 2 this afternoon. It’s a first for me, for them and as far as I know, for the school.

The Cassini imaging team at the Jet Propulsion Lab sponsors a contest each year, which challenges students to write short essays relevant to the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. This year, the challenge was to argue why the team should choose one of four possible targets for a 91-minute imaging sequence. The essays could be no longer than 500 words, and students could work in teams of not more than four members.

Among the 188 essays accepted for judging were our 13 submissions. On Friday, I received two identical emails telling me that one of our essays had made to the final judging round, and inviting our students to an hour-long teleconference/video conference with the Cassini scientists this week.

I was excited enough to photocopy the message and hand it to my 34 students as they took a scheduled chapter test. Some admitted to being excited; others were outwardly more blasé, but apparently intrigued at least.

Having never organized a video conference before, I had to take a crash course by surfing the Internet. After frantically reading all kinds of information, asking an alumni parent for some corporate-America help and downloading a copy of CuSeeMe, I emailed the Cassini team for advice.

Turns out we can do the whole thing with iChat. Thank you, Apple Computers!

December 5th, 2007 | Tags: Education & schools, Technology | Category: Astronomy | Comments (1)

James Willmot, a former science teacher at our sister school, lays down the law in an opinion piece that appeared in the Sunday Courier-Journal.

It begins:

There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

It gets better after that. Willmot basically slams down creationism and pins it to the floor. It’s worth reading.

Willmot taught science at St. Francis School in Goshen, Kentucky, a K-8 school that sends a lot of kids to St. Francis High School. He now lives and writes in England.

Needless to say, the fundies among the C-J’s readers were none too pleased. Comments ranged from suggesting Willmot was intolerant to predicting he would burn in Hell for questioning a literal interpretation of Genesis.

We have a long way to go. Religious intolerance and closemindedness is alive and well in mid-America.

December 3rd, 2007 | Tags: Education & schools, Professional skeptic, Science, The media | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Check this link from the San Fran Chronicle. Mark Morford tells it like it is.

Thanks to PZ Myers.

December 3rd, 2007 | Tags: The media | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment

Cocoa Beach (Florida) High School made the news recently when a group of students started wearing peace-oriented T-shirts to school, to which some students objected. Now a tragedy has put the school in the public eye again.
A sophomore soccer player, Rafe Maccarone of Merritt Island, collapsed during practice Friday evening, and later died in Cape Canaveral   Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Women in Orlando Hospital. He was 15.

CBHS sophomore Skylar Stains, one of the organizers of the Peace T-shirt Coalition, told me over the weekend that the entire school is in shock.

The complete story about Rafe’s death is here.

My thoughts are with Rafe’s family and the entire CBHS community.

December 3rd, 2007 | Tags: Education & schools | Category: General stuff | Comments (2)

Once in a while, a student will ask me a question that sends me back to the books (as it were) to learn something new. He wanted to know about zero point energy (ZPE), and Wikipedia was not helping him out much.

I couldn’t either at the time, so I dutifully poked around the web to learn more about ZPE. For a “zero,” the concept has some pretty far-reaching effects.

As it turns out, ZPE (and its cousin, the zero point field) is connected to the very questions of where mass and inertia come from, and may provide an explanation of why electrons, for example, have both wave and particle properties.

Anyone who spends any time at all learning physics sooner or later learns that everything in the science is connected. So it is with the ZPE, it seems.

First, we need to understand what the ZPE is, then we can investigate how it connects to all these other basic physical phenomena.

In classical physics, it was assumed that the internal kinetic energy of a substance could theoretically be reduced to zero, by cooling the substance to absolute zero (-273 C or 0K). And indeed, we can chill things down to a mere fraction of a degree above absolute zero. It is, for a couple of reasons, impossible to reach zero, however.

November 29th, 2007 | Tags: Science | Category: Physics | Comments (3)

As its Dec. 7 premiere approaches, be prepared to hear a growing hue-and-cry about the supposed anti-Christian messages in The Golden Compass.

The Golden Compass is yet another fantasy movie epic based on literary epics, like The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia series. [We might also throw in Harry Potter as another example, though HP is an entirely different kind of story.]

Written by an avowed atheist, British author Phillip Pullman, the Golden Compass is like anti-Narnia. Rather than supporting the idea of defending an all-powerful authority against rival forces, Pullman’s trilogy depicts its young heroes as bringing the reign of the authority to an end.

Some Christians who see the anti-Christ lurking behind every tree have already declared The Golden Compass anti-Christian and are encouraging parents to keep their kids out of the theatres, lest their tender minds be subverted by the Evil One.

The Harry Potter books and movies, after all, have created an entire generation of Satanists and wiccans. The Golden Compass might now create an entire generation of doubters or agnostics. It’s the end of civilization as we now it!

C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series began as a fantasy epic for young readers, but Christian allegory worked its way into the books. Many Christians adore the books, since they offer a more obviously religious alternative to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and other fantasy epics.

November 26th, 2007 | Tags: Professional skeptic, The media | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment