When I was a kid, none of the science textbooks could tell you what a quasar was. I don't even think they had good guesses. I heard something about "quasi-stellar radio sources" and from thenceforth always got quasars and pulsars confused. The best explanation at the time was that quasars were "proto-galaxies" that were so far away they were still in some mysterious stage of development. (Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate so quickly they give off bursts of energy, some in the form of radio waves--it was the radio connection that got me confused). I don't know what made me decide to check out quasars in my latest Wikipedia science binge, but I did.
I found out something new! We now have a pretty good guess that quasars are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that have such amazing amounts of energy pouring into them that it causes incredible friction around the accretion disk. The "accretion disk" is the whirlpool of energy being collected and draining into the black hole. For whatever reason (still unknown) all that energy in the accretion disk explodes outward along the north and south poles of these huge black holes--so, ironically, these black holes are some of the brightest (absolute magnitude) objects in the universe! I read somewhere else--if I recall correctly, that if the Milky Way had a quasar as the supermassive black hole at its center, then that quasar would shine in the heavens as brightly as the Sun now does, even though its 26,000 light years, not 96 million miles away (light year=6 trillion miles, and it takes 8 minutes, not 26,000 years for light to get from the Sun to the Earth). I love learning something new about the glorious cosmos--science for the win and for the glory of God! (On the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, check out the article on Sagittarius A on Wikipedia.)
I also learned last week that super-symmetry has all but failed the test of scientific rigor. I don't know about you, but I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe back in the day--I read all the exciting things about how some form of super-symmetry (linked to string theory somewhere) was bound to emerge as the poetic completion of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics. But, thanks to the new Hadron Collider, the scientific community is starting to throw in the towel. (Read about it more here at Scientific American.) It will be another couple of years before they have really finished the tests in order to be more certain, but hopes are dim that super-symmetry will be able to make a come-back, and whether they'll find the "super-partner-particles" of the already known particles that would have validated their theories. (And so much for a quick solution to dark matter, I imagine, though that may be conflating things.) Now everyone is back to the drawing board, and scratching their heads as to whether they can reasonable expect to find anything beyond the Standard Model. Personally, right now I'm excited about relativistic chemistry--which no one told me about in school--and want to know when we're going to solve that quantum theory of gravity!
When I read about the tests for super-symmetry failing, I (oddly) felt an immense degree of satisfaction--about the same feeling of satisfaction when they found (we think) the Higgs-boson particle. In both cases, I was immensely pleased because the hard work and years of labor had paid off--in the first case, it finally paid off with a discovery--scientists found more or less exactly what they wanted to find: how wonderful. In the second case, scientists are about to prove that they are never going to find what they wanted to find: equally wonderful. That is the point of science, after all--to devise methods and conditions of discovery and then to put those methods and conditions to the test with ever-increasing rigor until some little bit of the universe has been exegeted properly. Lovely. I love science. It reminds me that life (in general) is really worth all the effort and uncertainty, disappointment and ambiguity for long road of the progress of knowledge and the contemplation of beautiful and wonderful things.
When it comes to the history of civilizations, I am not a big believer in "progressivism": I don't really think the nations of the world are necessarily better or worse now than they were 500 years ago. I think we are better in some ways and worse in other ways to which we are mostly blind. But I do think every human being has the option before them of being better today than they were yesterday. I think we have the option, with God's help, of contributing to goodness each and every day, though that work is sometimes painstaking and difficult and tedious and it seems that not much comes of it except profound moral failure. But even accepting that failure and learning to live with it and with God and to move forward in the strength and grace of God and leave failure behind . . . that's what life is about in nearly every dimension. Science reminds me that some types of failure are just as important as success and sometimes just as helpful and meaningful and instructive. And living life well means being a good student of it as one learns to be a good student of the physical universe in science.
Some day, after years of striving, you discover the Higgs boson particle. On another, after years of striving, you discover that super-symmetry has failed. Both days can be worth the having. I want to pray more for the grace to move forward in a spirit of discovery and wonder.
**(You can take a quiz about your knowledge of black holes here at http://www.space.com/15906-black-hole-quiz-facts.html. I got 7/9 correct, and I gave you one of the answers that I originally got wrong in this post. I think they said Einstein and Eddington would be proud, or something like that.)
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