Martian Anniversary

At 686.98 days, the Martian orbital year is roughly twice the length of the Earth year, so perhaps we can be forgiven for being jubilant early. as it has not been a full Martian year. However, it has been an Earth year since the Mars rover, Curiosity landed on the red planet, and scientific community is abuzz with excitement with what has been gathered so far. The rover has sent back to Earth over 70000 images and has tested rock samples, the presence of water and methane in its bid to discover signs of past life. All indications are that water has existed, but methane (an emission of organic life). Curiosty's findings are seen as the prelude to the much talked about manned colonisation. (I wouldn't mind myself!)

Of course the debates about the billions spent on the project do surface when this kind of attention is paid to the mission. This counter balances the argument and are very valid. After all we still haven't solved the imbalances on this planet - from poverty, to diseases, lack of opportunity and so on. 

Two post from the comments left on the BBC news article about this:

dpr1017 

So theory behind the 'spend more money on education argument'. Spend more money on education, our children grow up to be smart. Maybe they become successful scientists & meet up with other scientists. Since they are smart, they will probably have a sense of curiosity, they will want to learn new things. They might even send something to another planet to learn about that planet. Oh wait...
 
George

To all those decrying the costs of this and other exploratory space missions when millions of humans live in hunger and poverty - perhaps you should send your comments to the governments of India, Pakistan etc. They have staggering amounts of poverty and hunger yet seem well able to afford nuclear weapons and space programmes

Oh yes - we stupidly give big dollops of cash to them as "aid". 

 Read more: Independent, BBC, National Geographic, NASA

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two - is gone.

Edward Fitzgerald (1859)

Omar Khayyám (1048-1131, Neyshapur, Khorassan) was a mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet. He spent his early childhood in Balkh, Smarkand and then Bukhara and later taught  when he returned to Neyshapur. A selection of his rubaiyas (4 line poems known as quantrains) are collected in Edward Fitzgerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám are in fact transmogrifications of the Farsi rather than translations. 

A closer translation of the rubaiya shared above is shown here:

Take all the worldly goods, but in lieu
Let the beauty of nature renew
And at night on the grass like dew
And in the morn take me away from view

ایدل همه اسباب جهان خواسته گیر

باغ طربت به سبزه آراسته گیر

و آنگاه برآن سبزه شبی چون شبنم

بنشسته و بامداد برخاسته گیر 

Omar Khayyám

aidal hama asbab jehan khoasta geer 

baagh tarbat ba sabza aarasta geer

wa aanga baraan sabza shab-e chon shabnam

banishta wa bamdad barkhasta geer

A Short History ...

... of Nearly Everything

There's a page dedicated to the errata, so not everything you will read in Bill Bryson's book, A Short History Of Nearly Everything, is accurate, but the book is otherwise a very interesting document that charts the journey from the Big Bang to the Rise of Civilization.

Consider this quote taken from the book:

The Big Bang theory isn't about the bang itself but about what happened after the bang. Not long after, mind you. By doing a lot of maths and watching carefully what goes on in particle accelerators, scientists believe they can look back to 10^-43 seconds after the moment of creation when the universe was still so small that you would have needed a microscope to find it.

Scientists, thus can go back in time as far as one ten million trillion trillion trillionths of a second after the Big Bang took place (that is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds) after time began, before which there was nothing - no time, no universe, no matter. The rest of the book is an interesting story of numbers, figures, scientific biographies charting major discoveries, hurdles and theories of the rise of life on earth. One major consideration is how life is said to have appeared on Earth around 3.85 billion years ago.

Considering the Earth is generally considered to be 4.54 billion years old (4.54 × 109 years ± 1%) and the surface is said to have cooled around 3.9 billion years back, life appeared early.

I feel that I must mention that as a Muslim I strongly believe that ultimately Allah is all knowing and that what we put together as knowledge here is ever-changing and only a fraction of the truth. Bill Bryson himself notes that 99.9% of life that ever crossed the surface of this planet did not leave behind fossil evidence and whilst I think this is completely possible, how does anyone know, for example that this figure is 99.9%?

The book however got me thinking about a number of things, some of which I will return to in future posts, InshAllah.

Listen to the Bill Bryon interview here.