Thought for the Day
Yesterday I was in Glasgow for a meeting to celebrate 50 years of the laser. It was quite good fun listening to various eminent speakers (including three Nobel laureates) talk about whatever their latest research was and how it tangentially involved lasers.
That's the thing though. Lasers are everywhere in the modern lab and everywhere in the modern world. CD players, the internet, bar code readers all wouldn't work without them. If you look at the modern green laser pointer it's not one laser but one laser pumping another laser which pumps a crystal so hard that it doubles the energy of the photons from infra-red to green. That's a laser pumping a laser pumping a laser. Yours for 15 pounds plus postage and packing.
The key note speaker was Steven Chu, who used to work for President Obama as Secertary of State for Energy. He's been distributing 30 billion dollars of the stimulus spending on various renewable energy projects and aside from the science he discussed a big chunk of his talk was about global warming and why it's important to do something about it.
He wasn't alone in appocalytic scenarios: Eric Cornel talked about why it's a mystery that the universe doesn't implode upon itself because of the gravitational pull of zero point energy and Stephen Barnett talked about how quantum computing could destroy the global financial system.
Steven Chu ended with a quotation from Carl Sagan that I found particularly moving. In 1990 NASA turned the cameras of Voyager 1 back towards earth just as it was leaving the solar system and took a final picture of Earth before leaving for the darkness of interstellar space.
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
That's the thing though. Lasers are everywhere in the modern lab and everywhere in the modern world. CD players, the internet, bar code readers all wouldn't work without them. If you look at the modern green laser pointer it's not one laser but one laser pumping another laser which pumps a crystal so hard that it doubles the energy of the photons from infra-red to green. That's a laser pumping a laser pumping a laser. Yours for 15 pounds plus postage and packing.
The key note speaker was Steven Chu, who used to work for President Obama as Secertary of State for Energy. He's been distributing 30 billion dollars of the stimulus spending on various renewable energy projects and aside from the science he discussed a big chunk of his talk was about global warming and why it's important to do something about it.
He wasn't alone in appocalytic scenarios: Eric Cornel talked about why it's a mystery that the universe doesn't implode upon itself because of the gravitational pull of zero point energy and Stephen Barnett talked about how quantum computing could destroy the global financial system.
Steven Chu ended with a quotation from Carl Sagan that I found particularly moving. In 1990 NASA turned the cameras of Voyager 1 back towards earth just as it was leaving the solar system and took a final picture of Earth before leaving for the darkness of interstellar space.
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."