Annular solar eclipse tomorrow

November 2, 2013 • 7:07 am

According to a long and informative post at space.com, tomorrow will be a rare “annular” eclipse, where parts of the world (unfortunately not mine) will be able to see the Moon blotting out the Sun except for a ring of the Sun’s light around the edge. Sadly, most of our readers, who are in the U.S., Britain, Europe, and the Antipodes, won’t be able to see it, but if you’re in Spain or southern France you’re in luck. And the few readers in Africa and northern South America are in for a treat.

For most North American observers, the partial eclipse will coincide with sunrise.  But within a very narrow corridor that extends for 8,345 miles (13,430 kilometers) across the planet, the disks of the sun and the moon will appear to exactly coincide, providing an example of the most unusual type of eclipse: a “hybrid” or “annular-total eclipse.”

During annular solar eclipse, the sun looks like a “ring of fire,” while the moon and sun line up perfectly during a total eclipse. Throughout a hybrid eclipse, however, the celestial sight transitions from annular to total.

Here is a video (path of eclipse is the pale, elliptical shadow that moves across the Atlantic) as well as a map of its path:

SolarEclipse2013Nov03H

In the U.S., it starts at about sunrise: 6:45 ET (don’t forget to set your clocks back tonight!).  If you’re sleeping then, you can watch it streamed live here.

solar-eclipse-november-3-2013-overview-map

Here’s what it will look like if you’re in the good zone:

Ring of Fire Sequence

Space.com has a lot of info, but I’ll just give a bit more:

During the 21st century approximately 4.9 percent of all central solar eclipses — those eclipses where the moon crosses directly in front of the disk of the sun — fall into the hybrid classification.

In most cases, an annular-total eclipse starts as an annular, or “ring of fire” eclipse, because the tip of the moon’s dark shadow cone — the umbra — falls just short of making contact with the Earth; so the moon appears slightly smaller than the sun producing the same effect as placing a penny atop a nickel leaving a ring of sunlight shining around the moon’s edge.

Then the solar eclipse transitions to total, because the roundness of the Earth reaches up and intercepts the shadow tip near the middle of the path, then finally it reverts back to annular toward the end of the path.

However, as pointed out by the renowned Belgian eclipse calculator, Jean Meeus, the hybrid eclipse of Nov. 3 will be a special case: here the eclipse starts out as annular, then after only 15-seconds it will transition to a total eclipse, and then it remains total up to the very end of the eclipse path. The last time this happened was on Nov. 20, 1854 and the next such case after 2013 will occur on Oct. 17, 2172.

Here’s a picture of a solar eclipse taken from space (the dark sphere in northern Africa is the moon’s shadow):

Picture 4

Caturday felid: Nubbins the cat gets rescued, befriends budgie

November 2, 2013 • 4:25 am

The ASPCA website tells the story of “Nubbins,” the appropriately named rescue cat.  He had tumors on his ears, was emaciated, needed a blood transfusion, and was peppered with birdshot.  What a horrible life he had, and he surely had would have died without the big heart of the vet who saved him after amputating his ears (hence his name) and nured him back to health.

Dr. Patricia Wagner, a veterinarian at the ASPCA, performed surgery on the sweet feline and fell in love with his kind demeanor. Soon after, Nubbins joined Dr. Wagner’s household. He is incredibly grateful for his second chance and gets along swimmingly with the family’s resident parakeet.

Here is the ASPCA’s video:

nubbins-his-bird-buddy-pose-2014-calendar

I have to say, Nubbins still looks a bit lugubrious in the video and photo above.

h/t: Diane G.

Two Germans with a MacBook prove that God exists

November 1, 2013 • 11:53 am

A new report at ABC News, “Computer scientists ‘prove’ God exists”, says that two German scientists using a MacBook have proven the existence of God.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that it appears to be old news: that is, they have somehow mathematically formalized the ontological proof of God, which has always been known to be wrong, as channeled through Kurt Gödel, who had his own modal-logic proof of God resting on similar arguments.

In case you’ve forgotten this old chestnut, the ontological argument, first formulated by St. Anselm, runs like this (I give Wikipedia‘s characterization of Anselm’s argument, which resembles all the succeeding ones):

  1. Our understanding of God is a being than which no greater can be conceived.
  2. The idea of God exists in the mind.
  3. A being which exists both in the mind and in reality is greater than a being that exists only in the mind.
  4. If God only exists in the mind, then we can conceive of a greater being—that which exists in reality.
  5. We cannot be imagining something that is greater than God.
  6. Therefore, God exists.

The problem with this is that “existence” is not a quality of an object like beauty or size.  There may be a most beautiful existing horse, if you define your notion of horse beauty in advance, but you can’t do the same thing for God, for, as the philosophers say, “existence is not a predicate.”  Finding the most beautiful horse (“the God horse”) takes as a given that horses exist. Having an idea of something says absolutely nothing about whether it exists or not.

Using such arguments, one could “prove” the existence of many nonexistent things, like unicorns, fairies, or Santa (“a unicorn that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind.”

I was only dimly aware that Kurt Gödel had constructed a logical proof for the existence of God (read about it here), but that’s been criticized as well, though I don’t understand modal logic. All I know is that you simply can’t prove that something exists by logic alone.

But the two Germans seem to claim otherwise. As the ABC report notes:

When Gödel died in 1978, he left behind a tantalizing theory based on principles of modal logic — that a higher being must exist. The details of the mathematics involved in Gödel’s ontological proof are complicated, but in essence the Austrian was arguing that, by definition, God is that for which no greater can be conceived. And while God exists in the understanding of the concept, we could conceive of him as greater if he existed in reality. Therefore, he must exist.

Even at the time, the argument was not exactly a new one. For centuries, many have tried to use this kind of abstract reasoning to prove the possibility or necessity of the existence of God. But the mathematical model composed by Gödel proposed a proof of the idea. Its theorems and axioms — assumptions which cannot be proven — can be expressed as mathematical equations. And that means they can be proven.

That is where Christoph Benzmüller of Berlin’s Free University and his colleague, Bruno Woltzenlogel Paleo of the Technical University in Vienna, come in. Using an ordinary MacBook computer, they have shown that Gödel’s proof was correct — at least on a mathematical level — by way of higher modal logic. Their initial submission on the arXiv.org research article server is called “Formalization, Mechanization and Automation of Gödel’s Proof of God’s Existence.”

The fact that formalizing such complicated theorems can be left to computers opens up all kinds of possibilities, Benzmüller told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “It’s totally amazing that from this argument led by Gödel, all this stuff can be proven automatically in a few seconds or even less on a standard notebook,” he said.

Yes, it is amazing, and it surely must be wrong. (As always, I suspend judgment on God until the data are in, but that data cannot be purely logical).  I kindly request some math-minded reader to find the arXiv paper and provide us with a brief analysis.  The ABC article ends as follows:

Ultimately, the formalization of Gödel’s ontological proof is unlikely to win over many atheists, nor is it likely to comfort true believers, who might argue the idea of a higher power is one that defies logic by definition. For mathematicians looking for ways to break new ground, however, the news could represent an answer to their prayers.

I don’t get the last sentence at all.  Why is this kind of mathematical trickery “breaking new ground”?

h/t: Karl

Public Prayers: Town of Greece v. Galloway

November 1, 2013 • 10:03 am

This is the kind of stuff that should not precede public meetings.  In exactly 5 days, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of Town of Greece v. Galloway, which Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has characterized as “the first legislative prayer case to be heard by the high court in 30 years.” At issue is the incessant use of prayers, almost invariably Christian, before meetings of the Greece, New York, town council.  This is an important case and, given the present conservative and Catholic composition of the Court, a dicey one.

If you want to hear the prayers, Americans United has compiled a bunch of videos of them here.  Just the top one will suffice. They’re long, insufferable, and repeatedly invoke Jesus. They are an unconscionable breach of the wall between church and state, mandated by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. And they also privilege one religion over others.

Have a look. If the court rules for the town, it’s all over in the U.S.  We’ll have prayers in every public function—maybe even in high-school sporting events.

Kudos to Americans United, which noted this in an email about the videos:

Americans United has used video links in previous cases, but never as extensively or with such high stakes – and to do so required an unprecedented effort by Legal staffers.  They reviewed 130 videos from Greece Town Board meetings from 1999 to 2010, comprising nearly 150 hours of footage.  From the raw footage, they created 10 video compilations, each approximately 10 minutes in length.  The compilations were organized by theme – opening proceedings, awards, public hearings, public comments, swearings-in, segments that included children as participants and, of course, a compilation of the prayers themselves.

The Legal team estimates that they “easily” spent 1,000 hours working on this project.  Not only did they review nearly 150 hours of raw footage, but each video had to be converted from a DVD to a format that could be edited using computer software.  They estimate that each 10 minute compilation took 100 hours to complete!