The Damned

Today, July 21, 2011, an age of exploration and discovery came to an end.

Rarely does a simple youtube video re-invigorate my imagination and stir my emotions like this great compilation of the NASA Space Transportation System (STS) program by nature video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From the summary:

The Space Shuttle fleet delivered the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, and dozens of satellites, space probes, crew and supplies. Two Shuttles were lost: Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. The touchdown of Atlantis at Kennedy Space Center marked the end of an era, after 135 missions. This video shows all of them in chronological order. http://www.nature.com/spaceshuttle

As the great astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson put it on July 8, the day of the final shuttle launch:

neiltyson

(Neil deGrasse Tyson)

Many lament the shuttle era's end. But that's misplaced sentiment. Lament instead the absence of an era to replace it.

On 8-7-2011 13:30:35 from TweetDeck

Where do we go from here as Americans? Where do our dreams lie, if not in the great universe around us? Russia and China continue while we stop. What’s next? What will the next generation dream about as children? Will space be a thing of science fiction or a reachable, accessible experience to them?  Will space travel be a product of business? I am completely ignorant of all that lies ahead.

Thank you, NASA, for the Shuttle program. It was grand.

Thanks to TheRationalizer for the link

RICHARD FEYNMAN, Nobel laureate and physicist extraordinaire, called it a “magic number” and its value “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics”. The number he was referring to, which goes by the symbol alpha and the rather more long-winded name of the fine-structure constant, is magic indeed. If it were a mere 4% bigger or smaller than it is, stars would not be able to sustain the nuclear reactions that synthesise carbon and oxygen. One consequence would be that squishy, carbon-based life would not exist.

Why alpha takes on the precise value it has, so delicately fine-tuned for life, is a deep scientific mystery. A new piece of astrophysical research may, however, have uncovered a crucial piece of the puzzle. In a paper just submitted to Physical Review Letters, a team led by John Webb and Julian King from the University of New South Wales in Australia present evidence that the fine-structure constant may not actually be constant after all. Rather, it seems to vary from place to place within the universe. If their results hold up to the scrutiny, and can be replicated, they will have profound implications—for they suggest that the universe stretches far beyond what telescopes can observe, and that the laws of physics vary within it. Instead of the whole universe being fine-tuned for life, then, humanity finds itself in a corner of space where, Goldilocks-like, the values of the fundamental constants happen to be just right for it.
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