Synaptic Sugar

Though posts have become scarce around here lately, there’s always time for my roughly bi-seasonal column of reading recommendations. On this occasion I will expose what I’m currently reading or planning on reading this Summer; either way, the quality of the following books is apparent even before getting any close to the final chapters. Without further ado:

Death by black hole and other cosmic quandaries, by Neil deGrasse Tyson, 384 pages, published by W. W. Norton - ISBN-13: 978-0-393-06224-3 - this book is a collection of essays on the cosmos written by an astrophysicist who has the gift of being able to render complex concepts, such as the inner workings of black holes (or what is currently understood about them) or the Doppler effect, very clear without trivializing them in the process. And, as the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, he also knows what he’s talking about. I find his presentations always enlightening and at the same time very user-friendly.

3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development, by Fletcher Dunn and Ian Parberry, 476 pages, published by Wordware Publishing - ISBN-13: 978-1-55622-911-4 - for some reason I did not have a specific, introductory book on 3D mathematics, and although I have managed to live without one by studying information in other books and/or the Net, I’ve been wanting for some time to find all such information neatly collected in one spot. This book may be what I was looking for, as it spans from the basics of coordinate systems up to and including space partitioning techniques, and contrary to similar books on 3D math it explains the concepts rather than just presenting results. Moreover it intermixes formulas, figures and code samples (rather than relegating code to a CD for example) in a way that I find useful for keeping the focus on the matter that is being read at any given time.

More Effective C++: 35 New Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs, by Scott Meyers, 336 pages, published by Addison-Wesley Professional - ISBN-13: 978-0-201-63371-9 - there is not much to say about this book than is not already known. If you really want to learn C++ (much beyond simply syntax), and you’ve liked the previous book by Meyers on the subject (”Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs” - wait, if you really want to learn C++, then you must have read that one and loved it by now), then this is for you, too. Covering more advanced techniques than the first in the series, it will be a useful addition to your library.

It’s hot outside, stay home and read a book. Unless it’s Winter where you live, in that case you can start over with my wintry recommendations ("Books for the Fall of Winter").

This is kind of old news by now, but I have some backlog to go through and I know my dear readers (who?) will forgive me. I find it’s always fascinating when something as elusive and unknown as a black hole is sought after at length and finally found — you know it must be (or must have been) somewhere in that portion of space you’ve been looking at, but you’re never quite able to point your space telescope at it. Therefore, it can only be that much more fascinating when someone happens to find hundreds of black holes at once. It’s what’s happened as part of the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, also thanks to consistent observations by Fabrizio Fiore and his team of Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, in Italy, Mark Dickinson of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, and Emanuele Daddi of the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique in France. The research focused on around 1000 galaxies 9 to 11 billion light years away from Earth (and so existing when the universe was very, very young), which were thought not to have any quasars inside, unlike others that do have a quasar at their core (note: a quasar is a class of black holes that feed on a toroidal cloud of gas matter that surrounds them, emit high amounts of X-rays, are the most luminous objects in the known universe and are responsible for the evolution of a galaxy — in case you weren’t paying attention). Surprisingly, quasars were instead found in at least 200 of those galaxies, thanks to the modern technology of space telescopes Spitzer and Chandra, which are constantly helping us to discover the secrets of the universe.

The implications of this discovery are manifold, and primarily concern our knowledge of the evolution of galaxies. It is now believed that most galaxies build up stars and black holes at the same time, until they become too big and their black holes suppress star formation. Moreover, it was previously believed that collisions between galaxies were fundamental in their evolution, allowing them to merge and to form quasars, but this research has instead determined that quasars also form in galaxies that manage to be left alone. More conclusions will be drawn as the research progresses and the results will be published starting next year, but this is clearly another very important step in the discovery of how galaxies are born and grow, and thus of how the universe itself was born (see below "Mysterious radiation could lead to less mysterious gravitation"). And if that’s not appealing enough, then I don’t know what else would be.

On April 20, periodic comet Encke was hit by a Coronal Mass Ejection from the Sun. The ensuing interaction of magnetic fields, the same responsible for creating auroral displays when a CME hits Earth’s magnetosphere, ripped the comet’s tail off. By clicking on the image above you can see an animation of the event created from images taken by the Heliospheric Imager on board the STEREO A spacecraft.

A mysterious single blast of radio waves was observed in archived imagery data from 2001 detailing the portion of space containing the Small Magellanic Cloud; its cause: unknown. The burst may look insignificant at first, a single 5-millisecond blip during a 480-hour observation, but what makes astronomers excited is the fact that its location and wide dispersion indicate it must come not from the Cloud, but rather from very far away, about 3 billion light years from Earth; unfortunately, it’s impossible to pinpoint it to any galaxy or celestial object, making it harder to find out what caused it. However, Duncan Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University in Morgantown and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory who led the team behind this discovery, says events like this could be detected a couple hundred times per day, if only they were looked for with the right equipment.

Why is a finding like this important? One hypothesis is these waves were emitted when two neutron stars collided or during the death of a black hole, meaning their observation could help find proof of the existence of the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity (which theoretically should be emitted by titanic events like those) but were never directly observed. In turn, these could teach us something more about black holes and ultimately about the inner workings and origin of the Universe — surely no small result for a 5-millisecond blip and worthy of ending up in my gallery of Mysterious Mysteries.

Mars will be transformed into a habitable planet by the end of the century, according to physicist Lowell Wood, through a long process known as terraforming by scientists and science fiction writers and fans. The process involves changing the characteristics of a planet to make it more hospitable, by acting on its ecology, atmosphere and temperature; according to Wood, something that humans have been doing for at least ten thousand years on Earth, and that it’s now time to do on other planets if mankind wants to really conquer Space.

Mars appears to be the right candidate, as it would be much easier to terraform than, say, the Moon. All that is needed is to raise its temperature, for example with a controlled greenhouse effect, get rid of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and generate soil usable by agriculture; then, after around three decades of preparation, things should have a way of sort of working themselves out and evolve in a Martian Spring-like chain reaction. Only then will mankind be able to colonize the newly restored planet.