2011 - 09/2011 Meeting

Page Created: 06/22/11. Last Update: 05/17/14.

KEVIN MANNING / HELIO TAKAI

Kevin Manning Astrophysicist

..........Look Up to the Stars!, Official Kevin Manning Site: http://www.lookuptothestars.com/

..........Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/kevin-manning/1a/858/87

Helio Takai, Particle Physicist

..........Brookhaven National Laboratory: http://bnl.academia.edu/HelioTakai

..........Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/heliotakai

MEETING SUMMARY:

Meeting Date: September 10, 2011.

Meeting Site: Saddle River Valley Cultural Center, Upper Saddle River.

Official Attendance: 19 .

Meeting Program: Talk / Slide Show / Star Gaze.

Notes:

Newsletter Account:

The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County held its monthly General Meeting at the Saddle River Valley Cultural Center in Upper Saddle River on Saturday, September 10, 2011. Astrophysicists Kevin Manning and Helio Takai spoke, answered questions, and led a star gaze after the meeting. The evening began with a screening of episodes of the anime series, DESERT PUNK, by our Animation Associates. It continued with an energetic Ice Nine discussion of books (The Iron Druid series by Kevin Hearne), science (Pluto is not a planet), television (RINGER), the bankruptcy of Borders Books & Music, and more.

Kevin Manning is a former consultant for NASA and has worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a multi-discipline Federal laboratory. Since retiring from his career as an astrophysicist, he has kept busy writing (THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO BUILDING YOUR OWN 8-INCH TELESCOPE) and speaking on various aspects of astronomy at schools, libraries and other venues. His website is: < http://www.lookuptothestars.com/index.html.>

Helio Takai is a nuclear and particle physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and teaches at Stony Brook University in New York. He is involved with the Mariachi cosmic ray detector, the Quarknet program and the Atlas Heavy Ion Physics experiment with the CERN collider. His website is <http://takai.web.cern.ch/takai/>.

Feeling that "Cosmic Horizons: Elementary Particles and the Structure and Evolution of a Violent Universe," the actual title of the duo's talk was a bit intimidating, I chose to bill it as "The Small Bang Theory."

The evening started with a "Powers of Ten" slide show. This began with a picture of a group of people in a city. The next shot showed the same scene from ten times more distant. The third, ten times more than the second, and so on. In a very short time you are outside the solar system, the spiral arm, the galaxy, the local neighborhood, and the very universe. The process is then reversed and brought down to the microscopic level.

The frist part of the presentation was handled primarily by Mr Takai and focused on sub-atomic particles including fermions, bosons, the seven types of leptons, the six flavors of quarks, as well as theoretical particles like gravitons. Regarding the theoretical Higgs-Boson, the so-called "God Particle," Kevin Manning stated that it is referred to by many in the physics community as the "goddamn particle."

Particle physics is far from my area of expertise, so if you want to know more about why trying to observe quarks is like playing Texas Hold-em, wimps, or the differences between the CERN super-collider and the one in Texas, Google sub-atomic particles and move on from there.

Mr Manning played team leader with the big stuff. He talked about string theory and membrane theory, the three types of black holes (stellar, intermediate and super-massive), solar flares (they ten to come out of the arms of sunspots) and the probe of the asteroid Eros by the Shoemaker Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.

They also spoke about rambos (dark clusters of brown dwarfs), magnetars (neutron stars which spin quickly and emit massive amounts of x-ray radiation) and the Virgo (European) and Ligo (American) Laser Inferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories.

I though that the most interesting part of the talk dealt with how we observe the heavens. A series of successive slide depicted completely different renderings of the same area of the galaxy, depending if you viewed it through the Hubble telescope (employing the optical spectrum), the Spitzer Space Telescope (infra red), the Chandra Observatry (x-ray) and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (gamma ray).

After the talk and Q & A were over, Kevin Manning brought out his reflector telescope and pointed out lunar and planetary phenomena for an hour.

We thank everyone who helped out with the smooth running of the meeting.