After Saturday’s launch abort, SpaceX is attempting another launch early tomorrow of its Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Dragon capsule on the first-ever visit of a commercial spacecraft to the ISS. Launch is scheduled for 3:44 a.m. EDT. Live updates and video coverage are available from Spaceflight Now.
UPDATE:
Filed under Space Exploration
Over at his blog, Edward Feser is defending the metaphysical principle of causality from the common claim that it has been overturned by science, quantum physics in particular:
“One billiard ball knocking into another, melting and freezing, electromagnetism, gravitational attraction, plant and animal growth, volitional behavior, divine creation, all involve very different sorts of efficient causality. There are also distinctions to be drawn between essentially ordered and accidentally ordered causes, between causes that contain what is in their effects formally and those that contain what is in their effects only virtually, between total causes and partial causes, between the causality of substances and that of accidents, and so forth. If you think that all efficient causality reduces to some crude, deterministic billiard-ball model, then QM might seem to be a challenge to the very notion of causality. (“Look, there’s no little billiard ball deterministically pushing the electron into a higher energy level! Causality itself crumbles!”) But no Aristotelian or Scholastic would buy this simplistic conception of efficient causality in the first place.”
Filed under Philosophy
UPDATE: After a bit more research, I’ve found that the icon is a copy of Our Lady of Kazan, one of the most revered images in Russian Orthodoxy. The icon was brought aboard the ISS last year after it was donated to the Russian space program by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. The cosmonaut in the photograph to the right is Yuri Gagarin.
While watching the latest “This Week at NASA” segment, something in the background caught my eye–one of the icons brought aboard the ISS by the station’s Russian crew. You can see the image in the screen capture above just over the left shoulder of astronaut Don Pettit on the left, or in the video below at about 1:53″. It’s good to see that, even onboard the most distant outposts of human reach, the fundamental human spirit still cherishes such subtle reminders of what is both truly man’s highest aspiration and closest to his heart.
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Filed under General
UPDATE: Saturday’s launch was scrubbed due to a problem during launch. The next launch attempt is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday morning. Details here.
This Saturday, May 19th, the first commercial spacecraft to fly to the International Space Station will be launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rocket will launch carrying the company’s Dragon capsule, packed with supplies for delivery to the ISS. SpaceX designed the Dragon and the Falcon rocket that launches it as a commercial replacement for the NASA-led missions and spacecraft used in the past. Unlike previous capsules, the Dragon is designed to be re-used, and although this launch is unmanned, SpaceX plans to fly crewed versions of the Dragon into orbit in the future. Tomorrow’s launch is scheduled for 4:55 a.m. EDT, and can be viewed at Spaceflight Now or NASA TV.
And what do the astronauts think of this?
Expedition 30 Flight Engineer Don Pettit talks about the SpaceX Dragon vehicle, which will be the first commercial spacecraft to deliver supplies to the International Space Station.
Filed under Space Exploration
An annular eclipse will occur this Sunday around sunset for most of the United States. Watchers in the western US will have the best view, although viewers from elsewhere may be able to see at least some of the eclipse. For more, read here. Also, if you cannot view the eclipse due to location or weather, Sky & Telescope has a roundup of links to sites that will be broadcasting the eclipse live over the internet.
Filed under Astronomy
I recall that when I first saw Jurassic Park, one of the things that really contributed to the movie was Spielberg’s ability to convey even the non-visual atmosphere of his locations so well. Not only was the animation of the dinosaurs impressive, but by capturing the subtle details, the humid tropical landscape was almost palpable as well, contributing to the prehistorically exotic overall “feeling” of the dinosaur story. A key component of that atmosphere was, of course, sound. Insects, in particular, contribute greatly to the auditory environment of forested locations, and now scientists studying prehistoric insects have now replicated some of the sounds of the ancient Jurassic landscape. By constructing an intricate and precise replica of a Jurassic katydid’s wings, they have been able to reproduce the sound created when the ancient katydids, like their modern counterparts, rub those wings together to signal others of their kind. The researchers found that the ancient insects produced a characteristically low note, one that they suspect was well-adapted to convey the katydid’s songs through the leafy environs of Jurassic jungles. You can hear the replicated sounds in the video above, and read more about this story here.
Filed under Paleontology
The thought of English philosopher David Hume was influential in shaping the intellectual climate in which modern science developed, and yet, as George Marlin explains in today’s article from The Catholic Thing, Hume’s principles actually undermine the possibility of science altogether:
“If ideas are only copies of sense impressions, then if one has an idea, which cannot be referred to a sense impression, that idea must be false. And because there are no sense impressions corresponding to substance or to cause or universals or necessity, Hume holds they do not exist. Thus, with one sweep, there remain no substances, no bodies, no minerals, no organisms, no men; in a word, no things.”
Filed under Philosophy
