Burst 28 - The Cosmic Archipelago, part III

Released: 6 February 2018
Duration: 24 minutes, 48 seconds

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A hundred years ago cosmologists were struggling to understand the nature and structure of the universe, and at the heart of this struggle was the island universe hypothesis. Today we find ourselves confronted with a similar question posed at a far greater scale. In order to resolve our cosmic archipelago problem we will have to attempt to reconstruct a history of our universe as a part of a far larger cosmological system, and to do this we will have to extend cosmology beyond the observable universe -- but what, exactly, is the observable universe?

Links:

The Cosmic Archipelago, Part I
The Cosmic Archipelago, Part II
Normal science

The Snapshot Effect

Radio Technology and Existential Risk

Boyajian's Star (KIC 8462852)

Supernova iPTF14hls
Przybylski's Star

Scientific Historiography: Past, Present, and Future

The Face of the Past

The Face of the Past, Part Two

Credits:

Writer and Host: Nick Nielsen
Producer and Announcer: Paul Carr
Music: by kind permission of the artist, Jason Robinson

The Wow! Signal is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license.

Burst 27 - The Cosmic Archipelago - Part 2

Released: 25 January 2018
Duration: 21 minutes, 51 seconds

The geologic time spiral

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The Cosmic Archipelago, part 1.

A hundred years ago cosmologists were struggling to understand the nature and structure of the universe, and at the heart of this struggle was the island universe hypothesis. Today we find ourselves confronted with a similar question posed at a far greater scale. As we confront these great questions of cosmology, whether a hundred years ago or today, we find ourselves faced with as many philosophical questions as scientific questions when we challenge the boundaries of our understanding. In Part II we focus on cosmological scales of time and what this means for human observation of a very old universe.

Links:

The Realm of the Nebula, Edwin Hubble

Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, Immanuel Kant

The Great Debate

The Scale of the Universe, Shapley and Curtis

The 1920 Shapley-Curtis Discussion: Background,Issues, and Aftermath, V. Trimble

NGC 6822, a remote stellar system, Edwin Hubble

F. H. Bradley

deep time

Stellar Movements and the Structure of the Universe, Arthur Eddington

The Retrodiction Wall

Addendum on the Retrodiction Wall

Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life and sharpening the Fermi paradox, Stuart Armstrong and Anders Sandberg

The End of Cosmology? Lawrence M. Krauss and Robert J. Scherrer

Credits:

Writer and Host: Nick Nielsen
Voiceover and Producer: Paul Carr
Music: Jason Robinson