1. What masquerades as the Greek crisis is in reality a general solvency crisis of profligate sovereign borrowers. The dilemma presented still demands a long-term response. The situation makes one conclude that Europe’s economic union is composed of bits that do not fit. Or that the pieces fit – but only in another picture. A union – whether political or economic – can be forged out of parts that have, while still separated, developed underlying similarities. This criterion amounts to a spontaneous convergence. Lacking this pre-condition, creating by fiat an association for the purpose of cajoling incompatibles mix into a new brew, will totter at the first challenge. Economically and politically, the EU has been made to grow too fast and too far.A History of Astrophysics - 4
A History of Astrophysics - Part 3
Only One Country Meets EU Criteria. It Is Not In EU
A History of Astrophysics - Part 2
Can We Coexist With The Left?
A History of Astrophysics - Part 1
Saturday, 22 May 2010
From the desk of Paul Belien on Thu, 2010-05-20 23:50
The American astronomer Gerald Neugebauer (born 1932), son of the great Austrian historian of science Otto Neugebauer, did valuable pioneering work in infrared astronomy. He spent his entire career at the California Institute of Technology. Together with the US experimental physicist Robert B. Leighton (1919-1997), also at Caltech, he completed the first infrared survey of the sky. Leighton is also known for discovering five-minute oscillations in local surface velocities of the Sun, which opened up research into solar seismology. The American physicist Frank James Low (1933-2009) became a leader in the emerging field of infrared astronomy after inventing the gallium-doped germanium bolometer in 1961, which allowed the extension of observations to longer wavelengths than previously possible. He and his colleagues showed that Jupiter and Saturn emit more energy than they receive from the Sun.
» 5 comments | 431 reads
From the desk of Fjordman on Sun, 2010-05-16 11:20
The process of combining light elements into heavier ones – nuclear fusion – happens in the central region of stars. In their extremely hot cores, instead of individual atoms you have a mix of nuclei and free electrons, what we call plasma. The term “plasma” was first applied to ionized gas by Irving Langmuir (1881-1957), a physical chemist from the USA, in 1923. It is the fourth and by far the most common state of matter in the universe in addition to the three we are familiar with from everyday life on Earth: solid, liquid and gas. Extreme temperatures and pressure is needed to overcome the mutual electrostatic repulsion of positively charged atomic nuclei (ions), often called the Coulomb barrier after the French natural philosopher Charles de Coulomb, who formulated the laws of electrostatic attraction and repulsion.
» 5 comments | 1113 reads
From the desk of George Handlery on Sat, 2010-05-15 11:00
» 7 comments | 3273 reads
From the desk of Fjordman on Thu, 2010-05-13 17:07
Photography made it possible to preserve images of the spectra of stars. The Catholic priest and astrophysicist Pietro Angelo Secchi (1818-1878), born in the city of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, is considered the discoverer of the principle of stellar classification. He visited England and the USA and became professor of astronomy in Rome in 1849. After the discovery of spectrum analysis by Kirchhoff and Bunsen, Secchi was among the first to investigate the spectra of Uranus and Neptune. On an expedition to Spain to observe the total solar eclipse of 1860 he “definitively established by photographic records that the corona and the prominences rising from the chromosphere (i.e. the red protuberances around the edge of the eclipsed disc of the sun) were real features of the sun itself,” not optical illusions or illuminated mountains on the Moon. In the 1860s he began collecting the spectra of stars and classified them according to spectral characteristics, although his particular system didn’t last.
From the desk of Fjordman on Sun, 2010-05-09 08:59
The American writer Lawrence Auster had a debate with his readers regarding the possibility of splitting the USA along ideological lines. According to reader Tim W, modern Left liberalism is a universal totalitarian ideology, not a “live and let live” concept. The goal of its adherents is a world government from which no one can escape. Leftists “need conservatives but conservatives don’t need leftists. To be blunt, they can’t let us go. We’d be happy to be rid of them, because to us they’re nothing but parasites and/or oppressors. But they can’t get rid of us because we do most of the work, pay most of the taxes, provide the stability and morality that allow their depravity to thrive with less damaging results. Furthermore, the white conservative population is the buffer protecting white liberals from the minorities.”
» 18 comments | 8271 reads
From the desk of Fjordman on Sat, 2010-05-08 09:49
The introduction of the telescope in Western Europe in the 1600s revolutionized astronomy, but it did not found it as a discipline. Astronomy had existed in some form for thousands of years prior to this. It is consequently impossible to assign a specific date to its founding. This is not the case with astrophysics. People in ancient and medieval times might speculate on the material makeup of stars and celestial bodies, but they had no way of verifying their ideas.
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