JimsAstronomy: October 2018

Wednesday, October 31, 2018

The Origins of Life in the Universe.

- 2148 - The Origins of Life in the Universe. Life is highly ordered and has low entropy. Life must operate far above thermodynamic equilibrium in order to stay alive. When we die entropy wins and we reach thermodynamic equilibrium in the grave. Life must continuously expend energy, metabolism, in order to avoid thermal equilibrium with the ground.

---------------------------------- 2148 - The Origins of Life in the Universe

We have been writing as a civilization for about 5,000 years.

Zoey is laying next to me as I write this. We have domesticated dogs for about 10,000 years.

------------------------ 35,000 years ago - On our vacation in Mexico we visited the Huicholes Indians about 3 hours by bus into the mountains from Puerto Vallarta into the state Nayarit. There were 130 Indians in this tribe and there are about 35,000 Indians in these mountains living as they did 100’s of years ago. It is believed their ancestors came down the Pacific Coast over the Aleutian Islands about 35,000 years ago.

------------------------ 100,000 years ago .- Humans left Africa

------------------------ 500,000 years ago. - Homo sapiens first emerged

------------------------ 2,500,000 years ago. - Stone tools were used by huminoids

------------------------ 3,500,000 years ago. - The first huminoids emerged

------------------------ 65,000,000 years ago - Dinosaurs died out .

------------------------ 250,000,000 years ago - The first dinosaurs emerged.

------------------------ 400,000,000 years ago. - The first vascular plants, those with veins, emerged

------------------------ 500,000,000 years ago - The first fish emerged.

------------------------ 800,000,000 years ago - The first multicultural life appeared .

------------------------ 1,900,000,000 years ago - The oxygen atmosphere appeared.

------------------------ 3,500,000,000 years ago - The oldest fossils ever found existed .

------------------------ 4,000,000,000 years ago. - First life appeared on Earth

------------------------ 4,200,000,000 years ago. - The oldest rocks found on Earth existed

------------------------ 4,600,000,000 years ago - The age of Earth.

------------------------ 13,800,000,000 years ago - The age of the Universe.

- When supernovae explode they seed heavy metals into interstellar gas (Astronomers call all the elements above beryllium, heavy metals, because hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium were formed during the Big Bang. Any element heavier were formed afterwards in the explosions of supernovae.)

- These elements from the stars became the building blocks of life. All forms of life on Earth came from the same underlying chemistry, the chemistry that created amino acids.

- The genetic information for all life on Earth is encrypted in RNA and DNA molecules. Slim mold and lawyers share the same genetic code. This code always uses amino acids that are left-handed. Sugars, on the other hand, are all right handed. Nature produces amino acids in both left-handed and right handed varieties. All life forms on Earth use only left-handed amino acids.

- Life’s left-handed amino acids are made of the elements of the stars: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Right-handed sugars are made of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Other elements found in life forms include phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, chlorine, all formed in the heat of exploding supernovae.

- RNA molecules represent a code that tells life’s organisms how to grow. Life’s first formations branched into three directions: bacteria, eukarya, and archaea. When RNA molecules have accumulated mutations to a certain extent a new species, a new bud on the tree of life, branches out. Eukarya is the branch that includes all plants and animals, in fact, all forms of life that are made of more than one cell.

- Bacteria on the other hand are all single celled. Bacteria are often associated with disease, however, many bacteria live symbiotically with plants and animals. For example, E. coli bacteria in our intestines digest our food.

- Archaea is a third branch of single celled organisms. These creatures populate the most extreme environments on Earth. They survive in temperature up to 340 F, in the deepest parts of the ocean, deep underground, and in the sulfur hot springs of Yellowstone Park, Wyoming.

- How did life first transform from chemistry to biology? We have yet to answer to that question.

- Once we have biology though, we can explain the variations in life forms through genetic mutations.

- To explain the first transformation from chemistry we first need to define what is life.

- All life has replication and metabolism. Replication is something that can make a copy of itself. Metabolism is the process life uses to circumvent entropy. Entropy is the law of physics, thermodynamics, that states disorder always increases, never decreases, in a system.

- Life, on the other hand, is highly ordered and has low entropy. Life must operate far above thermodynamic equilibrium in order to stay alive. When we die entropy wins and we reach thermodynamic equilibrium in the grave. Life must continuously expend energy, metabolism, in order to avoid thermal equilibrium with the ground.

- There are 20 different varieties of amino acids. The number of possibilities for amino acids to combine is 10^100. (1 followed by 100 zeros possibilities). Primitive life has existed on Earth for a very long time, over 4,000,000,000 years ago. The oldest known rocks are only 200,000,000 years older than that.

- So, life started early in Earth’s history. If this rate of life formation is typical then 99% of the stars in existence will live long enough for their planets to develop primitive life. Most of Earth’s terrestrial history remained stuck with primitive life, one-celled organisms. Multicellular life required another 3,000,000,000 year gestation period.

- Complex animals only arrived 540,000,000 years ago (the Cambrian Era).

Random mutations gave rise to new species. The development of life’s complex structures continued to overcome the law of increasing entropy.

- The decrease in entropy within the life forms is possible because other parts of the system experience even greater entropy increase to pay for it. Most of this increased entropy is in the form of radiation.

- For life forms on Earth to decrease entropy, the biosphere, Sun - Earth system expel heat and radiation, increasing entropy enough to compensate. Entropy of the whole system is still increasing as the laws of physics require.

- Entropy has another interesting property. It may be considered information. Increasing entropy is increasing randomness, or decreasing information. For life to assemble a molecular structure out of 20 amino acids, and to do it 51 times in a row in order to randomly create the simplest form of live, the probability is 10^66, one chance in 1 followed by 66 zero chances.

- Therefore we must conclude that life occurred by some non-random process. Some information, or higher intelligence, was involved. Somehow 10^360 possible combinations of DNA strands actually arranged themselves to create life. The number of known versions of life in the Universe is 1. And, all life known is based on this same DNA. The odds of you being here are overwhelmingly slim. Miracles do happen. You are one.

- October 25, 2018. 609 Origins of Existence by Fred Adams

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--------------------- Wednesday, October 31, 2018 -------------------------

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Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Ernst Rutherford, Discovers the atom

- 2147 - Ernst Rutherford, discovers the atom. - In 1908 Rutherford devised the experiment to fire alpha particles at a sheet of gold foil that was only 1/50,000 of an inch thick. Alpha particles. Beta particles, Cathode Rays and Gamma Rays were early names given to these mysterious particles when they were first discovered.

---------------------------------- 2147 - Ernst Rutherford, Discovers the atom

- Ernst Rutherford was a Kiwi. His grandfather migrated from Scotland to New Zealand in 1842. Rutherford was also the physicists that discovered the structure of the atom. The atom is only 10^-10 meters thick. That is 0.000,000,0001 meters in diameter. Rutherford discovered that the nucleus of the atom was 1/10,000^th that size. Here is how he did it:

- He started as the 2^nd child out of 12 children growing up on a farm in New Zealand. He worked hard in school and when he was accepted to college he proclaimed, “ I have dug my last potato.” He went to Cambridge University in England in 1895.

- He went to work for J.J. Thomson who was the inventor of the Cathode Ray Tube. The CRT is what all our TV’s and computers used for a display before the flat screen liquid crystal display was invented.

- J.J. Thomson was using the CRT to study the cathode ray, which was a stream of electrons. He shot the electrons through the tube at a phosphorus screen and ran them through a magnetic field to see how much they were deflected with their negative charge. From the data he collected he determined that the electron was 1/1836 the mass of the atom, or ion, which were atomic nuclei.

- He got the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his discovery. This idea must have had quite an influence on Rutherford’s thinking because he devised a similar experiment to determine the structure of the atom. At the time J.J. Thomson and other scientists thought the atom was similar to a very small ball of positively charged pudding full of negatively charged raisins. This is how science visualized the atom. The proof was in the pudding.

- In 1908 Rutherford devised the experiment to fire alpha particles at a sheet of gold foil that was only 1/50,000 of an inch thick. Alpha particles. Beta particles, Cathode Rays and Gamma Rays were early names given to these mysterious particles when they were first discovered. Beta particles and Cathode Rays turned out to be electrons. Alpha Particles turned out to be the ions of helium atoms.

- Ions are atomic nuclei that have lost their electrons. In the case of helium the nucleus is two positively charged protons. So, I will refer to Alpha Particles as helium nuclei. Rutherford is firing these helium nuclei at the gold foil and to his amazement most all of them passed straight through the foil and hit the photographic on the other side. The gold foil was about 2,000 atoms thick so he had to conclude that the structure of the atoms was mostly empty space since most of the time the helium nuclei did not hit anything.

- However, a few of the helium nuclei did scatter. And, some even bounced straight backward. This was totally amazing to Rutherford. He said it was like firing a canon ball and having it bounce right back at you. From this he had to conclude that somewhere inside the atom there was a massive positive electric charge that repelled the positively charged helium nuclei with a tremendous electric force.

- He announced his theory in 1911 that atoms were made up of a massive nucleus of positive charge in the center with very light electrons orbiting the nucleus. Most of the atom being empty space. This theory is how most of us visualize the atom today.

- Rutherford died in 1937 three years before I was born. He was buried in Westminster Abbey in London next to J.J. Thomson, Isaac Newton, and Lord Kelvin. Kathy and I visited his grave in 1967. Debbie was home with our English nanny babysitter. Debbie was one year old.

- Now comes the math, sorry. We can calculate the size of the atomic nucleus using the data from Rutherford’s experiment. It is fun to do. We will use the formulas for Kinetic Energy, Coulomb’s law for electric charges and Newton’s 2^nd law of motion:

- A helium ion is two protons. Each proton has a positive electric charge and a mass of 1.67*10^-27 kilograms. The Kinetic Energy is mass times velocity squared.

------------------ K.E. = ½ m*v^2. (See note 1)

- The velocity of the helium ions fired at the gold foil was 34 million meters / second.

(See note 2) Therefore, the Kinetic Energy is 10^-12 joules of energy for each ion.

This is the energy of each helium ion that is entering the thin wall of gold atoms.

- The gold atoms have an atomic weight of 80, therefore, each gold atom has 80 protons in the nucleus. When the 2 helium protons approach the 80 gold protons they are repelled due to their like charges. And, if they are repelled straight backward at the same velocity then the change in their momentum is 2* mass* velocity.

----------------------The Change in Momentum = 2*m*v.

- The force that caused that repelling comes from Coulomb’s Law for electric charges. The force is directly proportional to the amount of the electric charges, “q“. And, inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them:

----------------------- Electric Force = k*q*q / d^2.

- “k” is the constant of proportionality for the units we are using in the equation which is 9.10^9 kilograms * meters^3 / seconds^2 * Coulombs^2. The charge on each proton is one electron charge which is 1.6*10^-19 Coulombs. The charge on the helium ion is therefore 3.2*10^-19 Coulombs and the charge on the gold ion is 128*10^-19 Coulombs.

---------------------- The total Electric Force must be 3.7*10^-26 / d^2.

- “d” is the distance we want to calculate. And, “d” is roughly the size of the gold atom nucleus. The thinking is that the largest possible force that repelled the helium nucleus backward must be when the protons approached each other at the minimum possible distance, “d“. “d” is the diameter of the atomic nucleus.

The force going in is the Momentum Force of the helium ion and the force sending them back out is the Electric Force of the like positive charges of the helium ion and the gold nuclei ion. These two forces must be equal and opposite. Action = Reaction.

- We have calculated the Electric Force. To calculate the Momentum Force we need to use another definition for a force. A force is defined as a change of momentum over time. We have already calculated the Change in Momentum = 2*m*v.

-------------------------- Momentum Force = 2*m*v / t

-------------------------- Since distance = velocity * time, t = d / v

------------------------- Momentum Force = 2*m*v^2 / d

- Lastly we set these two forces equal to each other:

------------------------ Electric Force = Momentum Force

----------------------- 3.7*10^-26 / d^2 = 2*m*v^2 / d

----------------------- d = 3.7* 10^-26 / 2 * m* v^2

- From our first calculation for the helium ions, ½ m*v^2 = 10^-12 joules.

----------------------- d = 3.7*10^-26 / 4 * 10^-12

----------------------- d = 10^-14 meters

- The diameter of the atom is 10^-10 meters.

- The diameter of the nucleus of the atom is 10^-14 meters.

- Therefore, the nucleus is 10,000 times smaller than the size of the atom. This would be like a softball in the center of a football stadium. The softball would be the nucleus on the 50 yard line and the electrons would be circling the field. The electrons would be 1 / 1,836 the size of the softball, or about the size of a grain of salt.

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(1) We can derive the formula for Kinetic Energy from Newton’s 2^nd law of motion stating that a force is what changes the velocity of a mass. A change in velocity is called acceleration. Therefore, Force = mass * acceleration.

---------------------------- F = m * a

- A definition for Energy is the work used when a force operates over a distance. Energy = Force * distance.

---------------------------- E = F * d

---------------------------- E = m*a*d

- Kinetic Energy of motion is mass times acceleration times distance. We want K.E. as a function of velocity. Acceleration is the change in velocity per unit time.

--------------------------- a = v / t

- Distance is the average velocity times time. d = V average * t. Average velocity is ½(initial velocity + final velocity). We are assuming the initial velocity is zero since the helium protons come to a dead stop and turn around. ( Most of these formulas should be using differential equations but I am simplifying with special cases to avoid calculus.)

--------------------------- d = ½ v * t

- Combining the last two equations together we get:

--------------------------- a*d = ½ v^2

- Substituting into our E = m*a*d equation we get:

--------------------------- E = ½ m*v^2

- Since this is the energy of motion we call it Kinetic Energy:

--------------------------- K.E. = ½ m*v^2

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(2) 34 million meters / second is 77 million miles per hour , or a little less that 12% the speed of light.

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- October 30, 2018. 950