Pickles by Brian Crane for January 05, 2021

They’ve been there a long, long time, too.

yeah, who knew Earl was such an astronomer?

Well he ain’t no Neil Degrasse Tyson, that’s for sure.

As the saying goes, “If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your ……..!”

;-)

Carl Sagan got famous with not a lot more specificity.

The national mall has a scale model of the solar system. The sun is a basketball at the Capitol. Jupiter is a golf ball at the Smithsonian Castle. On this scale the nearest star is in California.

Nelson …. Earl … Enjoy the moment of “Star” bonding ! The only cost is your time together :-)

At a local jogging trail there is a depiction of the planets and are spaced in scale from how far each one is from one another and from the earth, very interesting!

If you enjoy a nice walk along Corpus Christi Bay, there’s the “Voyage”, which has the sun and solar system (http://voyagesolarsystem.org/community-network/corpus-christi-texas-voyage-mark-i/)

Explain to me about Laniakea, Grandpa!

So here is the question: When you look up do you see more stars and or more galaxies?

Yes Nelson, in the 60s I watched a lot of Star Trek!

Stop talking, Lucy is trying to count them.

There are biiiiillions and biiiiillions and….

I don’t think Neil de Grasse Tyson has anything to worry about. . .astronomy I can pretty much understand while I listen/read. Physics, on the other hand. . .

I once got into a battle of “Wits” with a gal who told me the earth was flat, and covered with a dome. The stars are NOT far away; they are quite close, but twinkle because we are looking at them through both the dome, and the water that covers the dome. I was amazed that she knew so much . . .

Several reasons Astronomy is the superior choice for a college lab-science course: 1. No pickled dead animals to be handled, smelled, and (in the hands of the average college freshman) mutilated. 2. No smelly, potentially explosive chemicals, open flames, caustic acids to be exposed to or handled (especially important if you’re somewhat accident prone, such as I am – I once took out a corner and a bank of windows in my high school chemistry lab; no injuries or fatalities but the smoke lingered for days). 3. Staying up late at night to observe, locate, and identify the stars. 4. The labs are mostly math calculations (not a necessarily a plus for those like me who are numbers-challenged but doable) and you’re allowed calculators (and in my day, the “calculator” was a slide-rule).

Well, Dr. Tyson had to start somewhere. He probably did start with Lots and Lots Far Away…

Earl should buy Nelson a telescope and they can both learn together….lol

actually, the earth is flat

The wisdom of the aged.. and Earl has more than his share

Grandpa’s made things simpler for grand kids.

I think he needs one more “lots” and two more “longs.” I’ll leave the math as an exercise for the student.

supguys!

Back in the 1970’s I took a college astronomy course from Dr. James Van Allen of the Van Allen Belt fame. Who knew that there was so much chemistry and math involved in looking at the stars and planets? That turned out to be a tough elective for this liberal arts – History major.

Earl speaks the truth.

“That’s right, Nelson, I’m an expert in astronomy. For my doctoral thesis I wrote ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’…”

Billllllllllllllllions and billlllllllllllllllions of them… (apologies to Carl Sagan)

“…so far away that some of the light we see now has been traveling thousands of years to get here now.”

Originally the word “google” was invented by an astronomer to handle the vast distances between stars. It is a “1” followed by one hundred zeroes. It wasn’t big enough. Someone else had to invent the “googleplex”, which is a “1” followed by a google zeroes.

The universe is big, really big. Deep Space 1 would take over 81,000 years to traverse the 4.24 light-years between Earth and Proxima Centauri.

Googol (not Google):

The term was coined in 1920 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta (1911–1981), nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner popularized the concept in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination. Other names for googol include ten duotrigintillion on the short scale, ten thousand sexdecillion on the long scale, or ten sexdecilliard on the Peletier long scale.

A googol has no special significance in mathematics. However, it is useful when comparing with other very large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of hypothetical possibilities in a chess game. Kasner used it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in teaching mathematics. To give a sense of how big a googol really is, the mass of an electron, just under 10−30 kg, can be compared to the mass of the visible universe, estimated at between 1050 and 1060 kg. It is a ratio in the order of about 1080 to 1090, or at most one ten-billionth of a googol (0.00000001% of a googol).

Googolplex:

In 1920, Edward Kasner’s nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, coined the term googol, which is 10^100, then proposed the further term googolplex to be “one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired”. Kasner decided to adopt a more formal definition because “different people get tired at different times and it would never do to have Carnera a better mathematician than Dr. Einstein, simply because he had more endurance and could write for longer”. It thus became standardized to 10^10^100.

(Continued)

(Concluded)

A typical book can be printed with 106 zeros (around 400 pages with 50 lines per page and 50 zeros per line). Therefore, it requires 1094 such books to print all the zeros of a googolplex (that is, printing a googol zeros). If each book had a mass of 100 grams, all of them would have a total mass of 1093 kilograms. In comparison, Earth’s mass is 5.972 × 1024 kilograms, the mass of the Milky Way Galaxy is estimated at 2.5 × 1042 kilograms, and the mass of matter in the observable universe is estimated at 1.5 × 1053 kg.

To put this in perspective, the mass of all such books required to write out a googolplex would be vastly greater than the masses of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies combined (by a factor of roughly 2.0 × 1050), and greater than the mass of the observable universe by a factor of roughly 7 × 1039.

In pure mathematics, there are several notational methods for representing large numbers by which the magnitude of a googolplex could be represented, such as tetration, hyperoperation, Knuth’s up-arrow notation, Steinhaus–Moser notation, or Conway chained arrow notation.

Nelson your Grandpa is trying to make you think that.

Us grandpas know a lot that we never have a chance to share until a grandchild arrives.

My father knew the constellations and would point them out in the night sky. I miss that.