Oh blast! I shouldn't have asked. I'm really happy that we've got so many speakers lined up and I hate to miss a single one. mc On Mar 2, 2006, at 12:01 AM, Richard Tenney wrote:

Loved it. Took my 84-y.o. dad with -- he loved it too. Dr. Palen is a wonderful speaker, very entertaining (and obviously powerfully smart). Has her PhD in Astro-Physics from Iowa State, and did post-doc work at Washington State. We should get her to come again soon (hint to Lowell)...

Quoting Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com>:

I don't know what that woman eats for breakfast, but with her high energy level, I'd like to start eating it too. -:) Canopus56 (Kurt)

Nope! I ain't a gonna do it... ;)

I enjoyed the lecture especially the interplay between theory and data. There wasn't time to go into more detail (you have to take her course for that) but it should be noted that Hubble's data didn't cause General Relativity to "come unraveled". Einstein was able to remove the cosmological constant from his equations and make GR more simple and elegant. What the new Super nova data means for GR is still up in the air. We need a lot more data before we can determine whether the Cosmological Constant (or variable) is back in or not. Either way GR is still here and still works for everything from tiny particles traveling near light speed on up to super massive black holes sitting in the center of galaxies squirting jets of matter out each pole. I was disappointed that Dr Palen didn't more directly address the issue of the "Rotating Universe". Her data graphs contained all that is needed to refute this idea. Maybe she was just being polite as a "guest speaker. But basically a rotating universe would only have expansion in the plane of the equator and would have none along the axis of rotation. That's why the earth, sun and large planets are all wide around the equator and flat at the poles. The lack of expansion in two opposite directions along the pole of the rotation would be evident in the WMAP data. The fact is the expansion is extraordinarily isotropic. That means it's exactly the same in every direction. We've been looking for anisotropic expansion data for the last 80 years and haven't found it only micro variations exist and they are totally random. That's what the "A" in WMAP stands for. It would have also shown up in the 1999 Super nova data and the 1925 Cepheid data as well if it existed. The Rotating Universe is a dead issue. DT __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com