Arquivo para a ‘Física’ Categoria
Eclipse, shadow and twilight
12
Oct
We have seen historical and mystical aspects of
the annular Eclipse, now let us focus only on the phenomenon.
The Eclipse is a natural phenomenon that occurs when a body is within a region of shadow caused by another body that has enough light to reduce the luminosity. In the case of a solar eclipse, the Sun is the luminous star and the Moon is positioned between the Sun and Earth, producing a shadow on Earth.
For the Moon to cast a shadow on the Earth, it must be in the New Moon phase, which is when it is between the Sun and the Earth and has a slight semi-arc on one of its edges.
To better understand how eclipses occur, we need to know the concepts of shadow and twilight.
A shadow is when from a point source of light (that is, its dimensions can be neglected as if it were a single point) it is projected onto a smaller intermediate object that will produce a shadow on the larger object, this shadow can also be called an umbra.
In the penumbra there is an extensive source of light, which must be taken into account when the light source is very large or is close to the object, in the case of the Sun it is large enough to produce, from the light on the Moon, a shadow and a penumbra over the Earth (figure).
Thus, the rays of light do not come from a single point, due to the size of the Sun, but from several points, so there will be a region in which it produces a shadow, but others with partial lighting that produce some shades of twilight.
In the figure, the shield disk is the Moon and the larger disk is the Earth. For educational purposes, only one region of shadow was produced, but they are diverse and weaken as they move away from the shadow region.
The phenomenon of the lunar eclipse next Saturday (10/14) is special because an arc around the Sun becomes visible and is therefore called an Annular Eclipse (in the form of a ring).
Eclipse, the Theory of Relativity and town Sobral
11
Oct
In addition to mystical and historical factors,
the eclipse helped the development of both physics and astronomy, there is a curious relationship between an eclipse, the Theory of Relativity and the Brazilian city in the State of Ceará: Sobral.
On May 29, 1919, the sky over the city of Sobral, a city in the interior of State Ceará, Brazil, dawned cloudy (photo taken by the National Observatory in 1919) and the effort of the delegation of astronomers who went there to observe the eclipse and prove their ideas Albert Einstein’s revolutionary ideas would be in vain.
Fortunately, at nine o’clock in the morning a space opened between the clouds and it was possible to make the desired observations.
Einstein’s ideas were that there would be a distortion in the space-time dimensions and that this would be linked to the proximity of massive bodies, stated as follows:
“The trajectory of light can be distorted if there is a massive body distorting space-time in its trajectory, so it appears that the source that emitted that light is in a different position.”
With sensitive equipment, it was possible to make this comparison in the positions during the eclipse and after it, which occurred in May 1919. In December, after months of studying the observations, it was announced that Einstein’s theory was correct, and this is a fact which made the theory of absolute space and time obsolete.
The observation took place thanks to intense collaboration between Brazil and England, including the famous English astronomer Arthur Eddington, from the Royal Astronomical Society and the Brazilian Henrique Morize, then director of the National Observatory (ON), and Sobral was chosen because it had better visibility. of the eclipse.
One hundred years after the event, in 2019 the Brazil-United Kingdom partnership in Science and Innovation was celebrated, Brazilian physicist Anelise Pacheco, director of MAST (Brazilian Astronomical and Sciences Related Museum) declared at the time: “Without cooperation, there is no science”, this also applies to the days of today.
Annular eclipse: historical and mystical data
10
Oct
On October 14th, an annular eclipse should
take place, one in which the moon leaves a small ring with southern light and settles in the center of the king star, and which has curious historical and mystical data.
The first historically narrated eclipse, by Herodotus, describes the battle of the Medes and Lydians (590-585 BC) which ended with an agreement after they realized that the day turned into night and in their understanding the darkness should cease for peace, Herodotus describes it like this:
“In the sixth year of the war, a battle took place, and when the fighting had begun, suddenly the day turned into night. (…) The Lydians and the Medes, when they saw that the night had replaced the day, ceased their fight, anxious for peace to be established between them.” Herodotus (1.74).
Before calculating the date of the eclipse, it was believed that the battle would have been fought on September 30, 610 BC (according to William Smith’s Dictionary of the Greeks and Romans), but modern astronomical calculations have established the date as May 28 from 585 BC
The second data was established with the help of the biblical reading of the battles in Israel of Ajailon and Gibeon, which helped, according to the BBC, to reveal the date of an even earlier eclipse, at the time of the retaking of Israel by the Jews returning from Egyptian exile. , the reading that helped reveal this date, also known as Joshua’s prayer, is this (Joshua 10:12-14): “Sun, stand over Gibeon, and you, Moon, over the Valley of Aijalon”.
The BBC report, physicist Colin Humphreys, director of research at the University of Cambridge in England, and astrophysicist Graeme Waddington using this passage calculated the date of the annular eclipse and found October 30, 1207 BC.
The report also mentions that the first person to suggest such a date was the linguist Robert Wilson (1918) and that he even suggests a re-reading of the biblical text:
‘Eclipse, O Sun, in Gibeon,
And the Moon in the Valley of Aijalom´.
Since today we know that there will be a band where the eclipse is total (image) and bands next to it where the eclipse gives a partial shadow.
Heródoto, Histórias, Livro I, Clio, 74.
God and time do not exist
24
Aug
We hardly explain quantum physics and general
relativity well and physics seems to be in crisis, philosophers and physicists seem to have found strange paradigms and phenomena in observations of the universe and particle physics, what is the relationship with God, to exist is in space-time.
It is not the discovery of the Higgs particle or God particle, its existence proven, but an ontological speculation that is now taken seriously, we always affirm a principle of duality, that is, A is false or True and it cannot be the two two at the same time and also if we go from A to B we must go through intermediate B, this is the traditional ontology.
Thus, from the pre-Socratics to Kant, time was absolute and this physics was proven, however the physical discovery of the third included, this so-called “level of reality” brings the contemporary questioning of the questioning of what is existence and Being, a new scientific approach , social and spiritual under a method called Transdisciplinarity.
It was not religious people who proclaimed it, but physicists like Barsarab Nicolescu, educators and philosophers like Edgar Morin and artists like Lima de Freitas, a Portuguese serigrapher and painter, who signed Arrábida’s Charter of Transdisciplinarity.
For theologians and mystics who agree with this principle, God exists since he entered history through the “Deus Homo” Jesus, God is through the eternal divine Being, and God is communication through the Holy Spirit, the Trinitarian hypothesis seems perfect.
If there were divine manifestations, theophanies almost always subject to contestation despite innumerable contestations, both theoretically and practically, a moment of great opening of the “clearing” of a general conscience seems ever closer.
Of course, there are counterfeiters, as there have always been in philosophy, science and religion, where fantasy and imagination can take wing, but there are serious people who know that the phenomenon exists at least in the consciousness of billions of believers around the world, in all cultures and also scientists, philosophers and serious psychologists have their beliefs.
The present reality, at the same time that counterfeiters and false prophets have increased, seems to approach that moment in which the historical Homo Deus Jesus affirmed (Jn 1,51): And Jesus continued: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, You shall see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man,” hich was how Jesus curiously referred to his own existence to say that he became man.
Events in many aspects seem to converge towards this and it is great hope for a confused humanity, a civilization in crisis and a harsh reality.
Theophany existed, does it?
03
Aug
When we have a clarification or an insight we
can say that there is a re-velation, something new emerges, but we still don’t have a final or total idea about a given mystery.
It cannot be confused with sentimentality or even a very strong emotion, it can be revealing (in the sense of revealing again) but the consequences and the ultimate end of that emotion will depend on other new revelations, they are temporal affects and emotions.
Unveiling is something much deeper, it means taking the veil off, science itself has evolved throughout history, the so-called “structures of the scientific revolution” by physicist and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, in another line, Karl Popper developed the idea of method falsifiability, which is always to be aware of the limitations of scientific theories.
Unveiling means not restricting oneself to the material, empirical and quantitative aspects of reality, it aims to rationally understand the real entity as a whole from its ultimate causes, so temporal causes and affects are not at stake, that is, it is not revelation.
It is possible to unveil mysteries through scientific paths, the quantum ideas since Werner Heisenberg (The part and the whole), passing through Einstein (Theory of Relativity) and Neils Bohr who wrote about the correspondence theory (atoms and radiation): “it seems to be possible throw light on the immense difficulties, by trying to draw an analogy between the quantum theory and the ordinary theory of radiation, as closely as possible”, later the model advanced.
In the unfolding of the biblical narrative, a theophany takes place, a divine manifestation where no human explanation is reasonable and there is some “eternal” truth that confirms it.
In the biblical-historical path that we travel from the exodus, there is a passage from the Theophany (Ex 40:34-35): “Then the cloud covered the Tent of Meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the sanctuary. Moses could not enter the Tent of Meeting, because the cloud remained over it, and the glory of the Lord filled the entire sanctuary”.
This also happens today, are there manifestations and theophanies? Yes and even religious institutions doubt it, and they have nothing to do with false prophecies with vested interests.
I read a book in my youth by an Indian yogi and guru Paramahansa Yogananda, in which he described a person he met in Germany who ate only a consecrated “host” and did not look weak or sickly, also a hero of the unification of Switzerland, Nicholas de Flüe (1417-1487) lived out the end of his life like this, with the permission of his family and wife.
The Jewish photographer Judah Ruah from “Fatima Miracle”, from a traditional Jewish-Portuguese family, published a photo for the newspaper Illustracao Portugueza, on 09-29-1917 a photo of the so-called miracle of the Sun promised to the 3 shepherd children of Fatima (Portugal), which occurred on October 13, 1917, which was previously announced by them as proof that the mystical signs they received were true, almost 100,000 people went there (photo), all of whom saw the Sun dancing in the sky.
Of course, later there were several scientific explanations for the phenomenon, but it is interesting that the 3 shepherd children anticipated the exact day on which the phenomenon occurred and therefore the crowd present, in a village that is still small and far from large centers.
In the case of the Portuguese Theophany, it is important to note that it precedes the 1st. World War and asks for prayers for the future of humanity, with the danger of war could happen today too?
Bohr, Neils (1928). O Postulado Quântico e o Recente Desenvolvimento da Teoria Atômica. Trad. Osvaldo Pessoa Jr. In: Fundamentos de Física I – Simpósio David Bohm. Org. O. Pessoa Jr. São Paulo: Livraria da Física, 2000. p. 135-159 (portuguese).
Heisenberg, Werner (2008). A Parte e o Todo: Encontros e Conversas sobre Física, Filosofia, Religião e Política. 4a. reimpr. Trad. Vera Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2008. (portuguese), in english:
Heisenberg, Werner (1971). Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations. World Perspectives vol. 42. Translated by Pomerans, Arnold J. New York: Harper & Row.
Seeing far and blinding near
11
Jul
Recently James Webb’s special observatory
saw the most distant galaxy that man can ever observe, the galaxy called JADES-GS-Z13-0 (photo) is approximately 320 million years from the Big Bang, which for us is a great measure, for a universe of 13.5 billion years old means relatively a few seconds after the Big Bang (one of the theories of the formation of the universe).
On the other hand, we are witnessing an increasingly unstable, unfair, ruthless and dangerous world, and with a catastrophic nuclear danger close at hand, it seems that a good part of humanity treats everything as if it were normality, not caring much about the fate of the planet. and the civilizing process that is not stagnant, but regressing in frightening steps.
The strangeness of this discovery of the universe is at the same time that we find amounts of Carbon and Oxygen in these bodies, the same James Web discovered a little later that six more galaxies (Jades was discovered with another three “near”), which were very massive where bodies smaller than those found there were expected at the beginning of the Universe.
The discovery showed that they have masses of approximately 100 million solar masses, while the normal would be for younger galaxies smaller masses, our Milky Way for example “older” has a mass of 1.5 trillion solar masses.
Furthermore it is a nursery of stars, about three suns are born there every year, and their masses are poor in metals of chemical substances heavier than helium and hydrogen (remember that they are at the top of the chemical periodic table on the left and right ).
If this restores humility to the knowledge we have of the universe, the same does not happen with social scientists, anthropologists and paleontologists, who the more they discover about our origin on the planet, for example that Neanderthals and homo sapiens coexisted and even crossed paths creating a diverse humanity, little tolerant we are with races and cultures.
And intolerance means less peace, more dangers and now we don’t have stones, axes and bows, we have nuclear weapons and dangerous atomic power plants that are subject not only to human limits, but also to natural and geological ones.
The geosphere and biosphere depend today as never before in the history of the noosphere and on what we cultivate as a civilizing culture and as a vision of other cultures and races.
Cosmogony, cosmology and eschatology
04
Jul
We have already developed here the
idea of Kosmos in Greek philosophy, which is a time that designates the entire universe as a whole, but it is also “order”, “beauty” and “harmony” for the Greeks, now with powerful telescopes such as the Hubble and James Webb we know that there is also chaos and disharmony in the universe, but the deeper question remains: how did it all begin?
Cosmogonies are a body of doctrines, from religious and mythical principles to scientific ones that seek to explain the order and principle of the universe in its cosmogenesis.
As man became more sedentary, he tried to better adapt to nature to satisfy the needs of animals and plants, needing to look at the sky and understand the seasons to better control crops and pastures for animals.
Practically all civilizations (or civilizational eras) elaborated their cosmogonies, for example, in Western civilization the geocentric model of Ptolemy (the earth is the center), passed to the Copernican model (the heliocentric model), now with the power of James Webb we are looking at the first galaxies and this is possible because the light reaching us has already traveled several light years, so we are seeing a picture of the past.
Thus, our vision of cosmogenesis is gradually changing, at the moment, for example, the telescope that works with a different spectrum of light, the infrared, managed to spot a galaxy 400 million years after the big bang (if this theory is right), which means 13.5 billion years ago (photo), that is, we are seeing almost our cosmogenesis.
Cosmology is then increasingly closer to cosmogesis and this would mean a vision of both, but the essential questions are still missing: where did we come from and where are we going?
Thus, an eschatological vision, beginning and end, is lacking, and one question is already certain, although the planet could collapse and with it our civilization, due to the action of an external cataclysm or a destruction of human artifacts: a war, the very danger of there are so many nuclear power plants on the planet, remember the incident of Fukushima in 2011 and Chernobyl, the planet now has 440 active and 23 under construction, in addition to the military arsenal in several countries.
In the midst of the stormy wind of our time, Christian cosmogony takes shelter and waits in the divine presence of that reading that says (Mt 8:27): “What sort of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” when the apostles wake him up on the boat because of the weather and the rough ocean.
Noosphere and True
28
Jun
The concept of Noosphere comes from Volodymyr Vernadsky (1863-1945)
later adopted and developed by Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), it is the idea of a third layer beyond the Geosphere and the Biosphere (biological life) that develops human thought, not only from the point of view of knowledge, but of everything that motivates the Being, the passions, cultures and decisions that are taken and develop the way we relate and live in society.
But since we organize ourselves in society, cultural development where the layers of structures and forms of transfer of cultures happen and develop already form a layer of “thought” of society.
Teilhard de Chardin, who in addition to being a paleontologist was a Jesuit priest, elaborated that the entire universe is enveloped in this layer of “thought” and that it is in constant evolution, which for a long time was worth some objections on the part of religious people.
With a look at Google and also attentive to the “intelligence” of mechanisms such as ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, Microsoft’s Bing and others, it necessarily leads to a discussion of what Artificial Intelligence is.
We have already indicated the book by Jean-Gabriel Ganascia “The myth of singularity” about the falsity of some technoprophecies about the machine overtake the Human Intelligence, we have also indicated the recent interview with Miguel Nicolelis, a renowned Brazilian scientist, known for his research in neuroscience.
So this sphere of thought lives in constant evolution and the tools and technologies are underlying parts of this evolution, however it is necessary to understand what in fact they are and how they can contribute to life on the planet, it is the collaboration of the noosphere with the biosphere.
The truth is that which is established as reality in the face of human challenges, many things are outside human thought, such as cataclysms and events in celestial bodies, but the healthy development of this sphere of human thought is important.
For Teilhard de Chardin, the spiritual part also collaborates and participates in this development, for him the whole universe is divine and Christocentric, that is, a revelation of love for man and life.
About false prophecies it is good to remember the passage of Mt 7,15: “Beware of false prophets: They come to you dressed in sheep’s clothing, but inside they are fierce wolves”, but it is easy to recognize them alert reading: bad trees bear bad fruit.
The question of the consciousness of Being
04
May
Thanks to the new and surprising advancement of deep intelligence machines
(deep learning), the issue of consciousness, which was already thought of in philosophy, now spreads across all areas of thought, and what we dealt with in previous posts also dealt with this.
Now it is a matter of deciding whether it is possible to think of consciousness only as something logical and instrumental, so the machine, through deep and elaborate algorithms in dialogue with humans, could reach this level, if something beyond, which we reformulate in the category for-itself, then we have to think of a consciousness of the universe and it cannot be a thing, but a Being.
Why is there something and not nothing is a question raised since Leibniz, who solves it through the monad, and God is (would be) the “Monad of monads” (the phrase is from Hegel, sic!), then the universe was putting into movement, then in a quantum space-time, the Big Bang, and now the James Webb telescope captures an image that would be of a possible origin of the universe, with many galaxies, something is wrong.
In an article published in the journal Nature on February 22, “A population of red candidate massive galaxies 600 Myr after the Big Bang” (Labbé et al.) (Myr, millions of light years) indicates that close to the big bang there would already be massive galaxies and not the first formations of nebulae, for example (see our post), so could it be that there was already a universe in formation from the beginning?
Regardless of this, the question remains: who what or what mystery sent the beginning of everything.
Just as one cannot speak of ethics without metaphysics, it is not something substantial but spiritual, one cannot speak of consciousness only as something natural, based on experience.
Starting from Husserlian phenomenology, his disciple Heidegger elaborated consciousness as follows: the phenomenology (experience) of consciousness is not a path that lies before natural consciousness and leads it towards the absolute, like an itinerarium mentis in deum (Heidegger, 2007 , p. 169), rather it is the course that the absolute itself follows on the way to the truth of its complete appearing. (Heidegger, 2007, p. 169)
But Heidegger continues as in any modern building, he has the question of knowledge as a pillar of natural consciousness, he does not admit a transcendent revealed consciousness (for-itself), thus being a knowledge that has not yet realized in itself the whole truth (Heidegger 2007 , p. 169).
So it is about denying the truth revealed as truth, although your consciousness remains linked to the Being (it is ontological as your thought), there is no possibility of a pure primordial Being, a Being-for-itself, omniscient and omnipotent, so we are left looking at the telescope image.
There is a transcendent for-itself that surrounds this question, and thus a consciousness that projects beyond even the beginning of the universe, and that at the same time is present in every being-in-itself.
Heidegger, Martin (2007). Hegel. Translation by Dina V. Picotti C. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2007.
.
Changes in earth and sky
25
Nov
Little is analyzed about the great social changes in the history
of the earth and in human life, the earth came long before human life, they also represented man’s vision of the universe and its mysteries, and thus there is a correspondence between earthly changes and their corresponding cosmogony , whether this is just a coincidence or divine providence depends on the cosmovision itself, but it has changed for sure.
Thus, the vision of the cosmos at the beginning of Classical Antiquity is as evident as the birth of the Greek polis and its consequences for the modern world, Aristarchus of Samos (310 BC – 230 BC) came to calculate the radius of the Earth long before the circus navigation ( Fernão de Magalhães 1512), and also at the end of the Middle Ages the Ptolemaic idea of Geocentrism gave way to Copernican heliocentrism and the change from feudalism to modern liberalism can be linked to this change in astronomical vision.
In current times, initially Hubble and now James Webb have made man look to the ends of the universe and even a change in the modernity of relativity theory, black holes and wormholes show a universe in greater mutation than we expected, thousands of galaxies are born and die throughout the universe and our system is just a grain of sand.
Perhaps the great revolution is the change in the conception of time, we can look at the birth of the Universe (see our post on the divine locus) which may not be called eternity, but is more than a simple absolute dimension of time and space, and perhaps it is more than Einstein’s space-time dimension.
In the biblical path Adam and Eve appear at a time when man is already sedentary and no longer nomadic, since Cain was a farmer of the earth and Abel a shepherd of sheep, who knows, the death of Cain was the first land conflict of humanity, the It is certain that this fact is linked to a new sedentary worldview, just as Noah would correspond to a deluge, or perhaps a simple flood that occurred in the Arabian peninsula, since it is located below the Negro, where we can observe the narrow Bosphorus, the path of sea between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea.
Thus, the time of Noah may have meant a geographical change, at least in that region of the planet that involved the transformation that took place further down between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the cradle of Arab civilization, and if there is no historical record of Noah, there is of his descendants: the Semites, from his son Shem, who had populated the region.
Thus, when speaking of the transformations that heavens and earth would undergo, the biblical reading of Luke (Lk 24, 37-39): “The coming of the Son of Man will be like in the time of Noah. For in the days before the flood, people were running and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark. And they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away. So shall it be in the life of the Son of Man,” the second coming called the Parousia.
The great civilizational crisis will not have to be just a change in the social structure, but it will certainly accompany a physical change on the planet, since its environmental forces are running out.
