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Six Short Scientiﬁc Entertainments

©Martin Lesser 2005

Theoretical and Applied MechanicsRoyal Institute of TechnologyStockholm, Swedenmlesser@mech.kth.se

The following contains several short pieces about some surprising aspects of science andthe people who do science. They are meant to entertain more than to edify. The piecesfollow a short description of the contents.

Counting the Stars:

Describes a wonderful but strange and contentiousmethod for ﬁnding the number of visible stars in the sky.

The Trouble With Ringworlds:

In “hard core” science ﬁction one triesto keep the science accurate. Sometimes this can get an author into trouble,but it is always a challenge to ﬁnd mistakes.

Beyond the Second Millennium:

An interesting tale about failing topredict something in “hard core” sf. In this case the famous author Robert A.Heinlein got it very wrong!

Faster than Sound and Backwards in Time: A ScienceSurprise:

Tachyons are imaginary particles that go faster than light. Thisseeks to explain in simple terms why this implies going backwards in time.

Explaining the Obvious:

s obvious that water will fall out of a glassturned upside down. It turns out that this is not quite as simple a fact as onemight think.

Six Degrees and the Erdös Number:

A tale of how mathematiciansmake a claim to fame by their degree of separation from one of the 20thcenturies mathematical greats.

Counting the Stars

One of the hurdles I had to face in the 1960's, as a graduate student at Cornell, was thePhD qualiﬁer exam. After a year or two of study you had to prove that you were worthy ofcontinuing by facing an oral exam by the members of your graduate committee made up ofthree or four professors from your areas of major and minor study. An interesting aid to thisordeal was a book where students that had undergone this rite of passage recorded theirexperiences. Naturally the entries of most interest were those in which the inquisitorsmatched the members of your own committee. Thus I was particularly concerned with onecase where one of the professors was Phillip Morrison , a man known for his keen mindand interesting history. Morrison had the reputation of asking questions that called forimagination and that even reﬂected his views of how one should think about science. Inthis case the question asked was; What is the number of visible stars? The student wassupposed to arrive at an answer to this question using whatever data he had at hand, andit had to be reasoned out, he couldn't just give a number he recalled from reading a bookon astronomy. As I recall the student didn't answer the question to Morrison's satisfactionand Morrison's own answer met with an argument from another member of the committee,the mathematician Mark Kac (Kac is pronounced kahts). Kac was as much a "character"as Morrison and according to the student, they became so involved in the argument thatthey forgot all about him.The argument involved Morrison's use of probability. The hint he gave the student was thatthere is a North Pole Star but no South Pole Star. Now consider how close two objects canget and still be distinguished as individuals by the human eye. In optics thedistinguishability of objects is calculated by taking account of diffraction, a property due tothe wave nature of light. The English physicist Raleigh suggested a measure of this, nowcalled the Raleigh Criterion. The angular separation in radians that is separable by a lensof diameter D is, according to this, given approximately by L/D, where L is the wavelengthof the light. This corresponds to a discernible area on a unit sphere of

(L/D)

. Now thearea of a unit sphere is 4

, so dividing the total area by the discernible area gives thenumber of objects that can be distinguished in the entire sky by a particular lens for aspeciﬁc light wavelength. The wavelength of visible light is roughly 400 to 500 nanometersand the size of the eyes lens is about one centimeter. But the human visual system is notquite up to the Rayleigh Criteria and we can adjust for this by decreasing the effective sizeof the lens to account for this (same as increasing the distance for an object to beobservable. Doing this by something like 400 gives about 20,000 visible stars that could beseen. But the "experimental result" that there is only a North Pole star says that we onlyobserve half of them (in one out of the two experiments a star is observed). If light pollutionis minimized this is about what is obtained by other methods. The other method most oftensuggested for counting visible stars is very similar to Morrison's procedure. Take acardboard tube (say from a paper towel roll) and point it at a number of places in the skyas randomly as possible. Count the stars seen in each case and average the result. Dividethe area of a sphere with the radius of the tube by the area of the opening and multiply bythe average to get your result. There are a number of web sites that discuss this method.Given all this you can see why an argument developed. The small number of twoobservations makes the statistics questionable, and this is what drew Kac's attention. Onthe other hand getting the right result also depended on making an estimate of the eye'sacuity. Maybe the experiment is more of a way of measuring this than the number ofvisible stars? Still I think the problem does show a way of thinking when one has limited

data. The acuity of the eye could presumably be determined by another experiment.Frankly I have not looked into this.By the way, Morrison gave me another problem at my exam. It was easier in a way. Heasked me to guess an answer to the three body problem of computing the positions of theEarth, Moon and Sun system. But I'll leave that for another day.

The Trouble With Ringworlds

Hard science ﬁction writers play by the rule that for the most part their stories should notviolate the known laws of physics. This still gives plenty of latitude. Thus cosmic scaleengineering, though not feasible at our level of technology, is allowed. One of the moregigantic cosmic constructs was proposed by the physicist Freeman Dyson. In the searchfor extraterrestrial intelligence, Dyson suggests we should look for large infra red sources.The rational is that an advanced civilization would make use of the entire energy output ofits star. Hence it would surround the star with a shell that would intercept all the emittedradiation. Dyson's idea has been misinterpreted by most science ﬁction writers, includingthe writers of the Star Trek scripts. They literally interpret the Dyson sphere as a solidshell, with the inhabitants living on its inside. Dyson's idea is impressive enough, histhinking being that the star would eventually be surround by so many space habitats thatessentially none of its radiation would be able to escape. In either case the only indicationof the star's presence would be the infra red re-radiation of its energy output.The SF writer, Larry Niven, proposed an impressive variant of the Dyson sphere,suggesting that a rotating ring be constructed around the star. In his book, "Ring World",the ring spins about the star fast enough to provide enough centrifugal force to simulatethe gravity of an earth like planet. Thousand mile high walls on the edges of the ring areused to retain the atmosphere. The resulting living area is vast and provides a nicebackground for his characters to roam around.

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Six Short Scientific Entertainments

Six very short essays on some surprising things connected to science and scientists. They include a strange way to count visible stars, why water should not fall out of an uptur... (More)

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Category:	Creative Writing
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Upload Date:	02/06/2009
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Tags:	probability humour stability Popular Science tachyons ringworlds six degrees of separation (more tags) probability humour stability Popular Science tachyons ringworlds six degrees of separation erdös number (fewer)