Cosmic Rays And The Cygnus Mystery
Since the discovery in the 1920s that all types of radiation can cause gene mutations, scientists have wondered what role high energy cosmic rays might have played in human evolution. However, it was an idea destined never to find favour among geneticists, who could determine no hard evidence that the background flux of cosmic rays might have had any noticeable effect on human cells.
All this is about to change, as an examination of ice cores extracted from sites in Antarctica and Greenland provides new information on the level of cosmic rays reaching Earth in past ages.
Quote: cosmic ray activity, mass extinctions, supernova explosionThe Magic Furnace – The Search For the Origin of Atoms, by Marcus Chown
“If the atoms that make up the world around us could tell their stories, each and every one of them would sing a tale to dwarf the greatest epics of literature”, Chown proclaims in the prologue of this book. The work is his attempt to chronicle humankind’s efforts, commencing with Democritus in Ancient Greece over two millennia ago, to discover what the smallest constituents of matter are, and from where they came.
It’s an enthralling, comprehensive history lesson in the development of astronomy and atomic physics, encapsulating key moments and discoveries in the search to answer the question why 98% of the mass of visible matter in the universe is composed of hydrogen and helium, and where the remaining 2% of ‘metals’ came from.
Quote: discovery of electrons, electrons protons and neutrons, neutron stars and black holesDid the God Create the Universe?
Firstly, before further delving into the issue, let us examine the scale of universe or in other words the universe that we perceive. In the universe what you see now has happened a hell a lot of time before or billion and billions of year ago. What we call universe is our perception of the universe. So the distant universe that we see now is a perception of universe that is billions and trillions of light years away. Light from outer edges of universe that human can see reach earth in billions of light years.
So the time and space or distance involved in defining the universe is not possible for human race that thrives only on a small size star, that is our sun. If we assume that life of universe is 100 years than the life of our sun and the solar system can be no more than a few weeks at the most.
Quote: billions and trillions, intergalactic distances, sun and the solar system