Time again to reach into the “Ask Mr. Cosmology” mailbag and see what readers want to know about . . . The Wonders of the Universe! First up, some questions from the comments portion of the previous installment of “Ask Mr. Cosmology.”
Q: Is protest against God morally acceptable?
Mr. Cosmology: Unlike Richard, Mr. Cosmology knows better than to venture into questions about God.
Q: I heard that in certain cases when light is traveling through a medium that slows it down, e.g. water, neutrinos are not so impeded and in these cases they can exceed the speed of light “in that medium.” Is this wrong?
Mr. Cosmology: Yes. Unlike with questions concerning God, Mr. Cosmology is willing to pronounce judgment on neutrinos exceeding the speed of light: not morally acceptable.
Q: I’m really upset about a vicious rumor I heard that Mr. Cosmology’s mailbag is really a big black hole and that questions go into it and never again cross the event horizon! Please, Mr. Cosmology, say it ain’t so.
Mr. Cosmology: Your question went into Mr. Cosmology’s mailbag, yet here it is. So either the mailbag isn’t a black hole, or your question is evidence that Hawking radiation exists. In which case, Mr. Cosmology will find a phone call from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to be morally acceptable.
And now . . . some new questions from the “Ask Mr. Cosmology” mailbag!
Q: When I read about the cosmic microwave background, I sometimes see references to baryon acoustic oscillations. What the heck are they?
Mr. Cosmology: Baryon refers to members of the nineteenth-century German surgeon, botanist, microbiologist, and mycologist Heinrich Anton de Bary’s fan club. Acoustic means the Baryons who prefer early, folkie Bob Dylan. And oscillations, because some Baryons admit to sometimes liking later Dylan, too.
Q: But how does this relate to the cosmic microwave background?
Mr. Cosmology: The two papers announcing the discovery of the cosmic microwave background appeared in July 1965, the same month Dylan went electric at the Newport Jazz Festival, and ever since then scientists have been able to use the frequency of Baryon acoustic oscillations in the cosmic microwave background to determine that the universe is older than Florence Green.
Q: Who?
Mr. Cosmology: Florence Green, born in 1901, had been the last surviving veteran of World War I when she died just last year. She was a member of Britain’s Royal Air Force. Well, not when she died. But in 1918. For all of two months, starting in September, serving meals at a mess hall in rural England, where, according to an interview she gave to the Daily Mail in 2010, “I met dozens of pilots and would go on dates.”
Q: I fail to see the relevance of this discussion.
Mr. Cosmology: Dozens of pilots, in two months. This is a science site: Do the math.
Q: I’m still not convinced this has anything to do with cosmology.
Mr. Cosmology: It has everything to do with our connection to everything else in the universe. Do you not feel a connection when a bird drops from the sky, or a plane, or an alien brandishing a glowing rod? Didn’t we all dance around the common campfire at the cradle of civilization, many of us probably naked? And so it is with Florence, especially the naked part. Who among us will not miss the gossamer experience of being able to look at a photograph or a newsreel from the Great War and thinking, “They’re probably all dead, but I can’t be absolutely sure, because maybe one or two are still alive, so that face over there, for instance, or that one over there—I can’t look at it specifically and say with certainty, ‘Oh, yeah, that person’s dead, no question.’ Because for all I know, he or she might be sitting in a veterans’ home in Britain, or a veterans’ hospital in the United States, or a veterans’ pasture in Bulgaria”? But now we do know. And are we not more united in our common humanity because of that knowledge? At the very least we are more united than was Mr. Cosmology’s family that time we were on a picnic and an alien brandishing a glowing rod dropped from the sky and we all went, “Probe her!” or “Probe him!,” depending on which loved one was nearest to where each of us was sitting.
Q: You’ve lost me. What’s your point?
Mr. Cosmology: Florence Green: morally unacceptable.
Uhh “morally unacceptable”? Pretty conservative of you.