Key Concepts Flashcards
Estimating Distances
- if you observe the period of the star, you can look up the (absolute) luminosity in the chart
- you know the brightness decreases with the square of the distance
- therefore, since you know the absolute luminosity and you measure the apparent luminosity it yields the distance to the star
Static universe
- Newton: infinite universe; I’m changing; created by God at the beginning of creation; the universe was made of stars of uniformly distributed
- I’m stein: find it, static universe… But problem call me equations from GR showed a dynamic universe
Cepheid variable stars
There luminosity varies overtime – the brightest star in the laundry. – Relationship between. An illuminati and 16 of the stars (that were all part of the same cluster, and hence same distance from earth) – helps to explain distance
Steady state universe – 1940s
- Fred Hoyle, an atheist, disliked be a religious flavour of the Big Bang
– Universe was homogenous, unchanging in space and time
“The two cultures”
- Written by CP snow, A British scientist and novelist
– Saw a great divide between the sciences in the humanities
– Chart that many scientists struggled to read novels – brought up Shakespeare, etc. for dinner parties and was horrified at the general lacking response - and many humanists didn’t know any science and openly to stained it as an inferior branch of knowledge
Deffusion Model
- Science produced by experts yields knowledge diffused to general audience your general audience learn science
– In fact, audiences not passive; knowledge is reinterpreted, redefine (social Darwinism, vaccines)
– Sometimes science project it all together and the authority of science questioned
The grand tour (mid-17th- 18th to early 19th century)
– A long trip to Europe in which young men of upper-class families visited cultural sites (a cultural right of passage into adult hood)
– Cabinets of curiosities
Institute of the sciences, Bologna
– 18th century wax models in Bologna
– The blending of arts and science
– Anna Morandi Manzolini would make anatomically correct wax figure organs as well as people
The great exhibition (of the works and industry of all nations – 1851)
– Different countries open their amazing inventions/Proto types
– Run contest to see who would end up here
– Chicago 1893, big, electrical displays, cities competed with each other to get the commissions to host
The greenhouse effect
– Greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane CH4 for, nitrous oxide and N2O, etc.
– Trap heat in the atmosphere (absorb and emit infrared radiation)
- gasses in atmosphere -> heating
The Kyoto Protocol (1997)
An international agreement linked to the United Nations framework convention on climate change, which commits it’s parties by settling intentionally binding omissions reduction targets
Global warming - the controversy
Anthropogenic or natural?
(Caused by people or natural)
The age of the earth
– Traditionally biblical (4004 BC)
– But the nature in origins of fossils – really rocks or organic
Stratigraphy
Studying Strada lines – mining was taking off minerals tied to rocks
Catastrophism
Extinction due to a catastrophic event
