ac Where available.
ad Sym = together, bio = life; a symbiotic relationship is one in which at least two different organisms live together, usually (but not always) providing a benefit to both creatures. For example, we provide cats with shelter and a steady food supply; cats provide us with aloof companionship and rodent control.
ae Specifically, the sperm’s mitochondria are marked for elimination by the egg’s cytoplasmic destruction machinery. Talk about being a ballbuster.
af Incidentally, the use of the term “Eve” is not meant to indicate that she was the only human female of the time, simply that she was mother to us all.
ag The article that Angel Six reads over Ron Moore’s shoulder purports to say Tanzania.
ah Or do we? Head Baltar gleefully said, “Along with her Cylon mother . . . and human father!” It’s totally reasonable to think that once the Fleet settled on Earth, other Cylon-Colonial pairs had offspring in the same generation as Hera, perhaps even Six and Baltar. Imagine if their child was Mitochondrial Eve!
ai Not that you’re likely to see an advertisement claiming a new drug is “Twice as powerful as morphine!”
aj Or if you are really, really enjoying this book.
ak Contrary to popular belief, chocolate does not contain caffeine; it contains a close chemical relative—theobromine.
al Cocaine blocks the reuptake of dopamine, caffeine blocks the uptake of adenosine, and nicotine blocks the reuptake of acetylcholine in the brain. With all those excess neurotransmitters floating around your synapses keeping your neurons firing away, it would be surprising if you didn’t feel tweaked.
am This makes sense, given what we have learned about antidepressants. SSRIs keep more seratonin between your synapses, bringing your mood from sad to okay. Amphetamines bring even more seratonin to your synapses, bringing your mood from okay to great!
an In rare cases, the pairings don’t match: G pairs with A, T, or another G; T pairs with C, G, or another T, and so on. This causes no end of genetic problems. These mistakes are totally natural, and can usually be fixed by the body’s own repair mechanism. Usually. Sometimes, if the body is exposed to a toxic chemical or to certain forms of radiation, the error rate is increased to the point that the repair mechanism is overwhelmed and the genetic mistake remains. Sometimes this expresses itself as cancer, sometimes as a harmful mutation. Very rarely, it serves as a helpful mutation.
ao “In wine, truth.”
ap Scopolamine also can cause short-term amnesia. It was commonly given to women in labor not as a painkiller, but as a pain forgetter, in the expectation that when the drug wore off they wouldn’t remember how horrific labor had been. If you were born in the United States between roughly 1940 and 1970, there’s a good chance your mother was looped on scopolamine at the time.
aq The man just has no luck at all.
ar And exactly what is a second, you may ask? A second is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
as Watch any documentary on nuclear weapons and you’ll see the same film clips over and over—wood-frame and brick houses, built specifically for the test and sitting like pariahs in the middle of the Nevada desert, implode and catch fire when the bomb goes off. Fake pine forests, planted in cement like Mafia victims, sway and break in the blast wave.
at By squaring the speed of light, we are multiplying the mass by approximately 300 million times 300 million. That’s a lot of energy. c2 = 8.99 × 1016 m2/s2.
au Recall from the episode “Final Cut” that CBDR means “constant bearing/decreasing range”—a collision course.
av The term “speed of light” is somewhat parochial: a more correct term is the “speed of electromagnetic radiation” or the “speed of photons.” See chapter 13.
aw c for celeritas, Latin for “swiftness.” A beam of light could travel around the circumference of Earth almost seven and a half times in one second. Think of that next time you’re waiting for an email to arrive.
ax In 2001 a team of researchers passed a beam of light through a substance called a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) and slowed the measured speed of the beam to a mere 17 meters per second. The individual photons actually still traveled at c, but the atoms within the BEC temporarily captured and reflected the photons so often that they appeared to move through the medium very slowly.
ay Don’t look directly at the sun.
az For some reason, vast numbers of people think that the “north star” is the brightest star in our sky. The truth is that Polaris, the current North Star, is barely in the top fifty brightest stars. The brightest is Sirius. Seriously.
ba There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. But that’s for another book entirely.
bb LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.
bc Read: crackpot.
bd Except maybe at his hair. And his absent-mindedness. And his lack of socks. And the way he would put a whole egg in his soup, boil them both for ten minutes, and have a meal of hot soup and a hard-boiled egg. But nobody laughed at his work.
be We realize that she’d feel the Viper being tipped back, and she’d also feel the vibrations of her Viper on the rails at launch. Work with us here.
bf Of course, there is no point in space that is totally isolated from any gravity field, so the Raptor will never travel in a perfectly straight path, but for significant distances the Raptor’s trajectory can be a very good approximation of a straight line.
bg Or free positrons. They don’t discriminate.
bh Yes, this was more or less the idea behind the Doomsday Machine in the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
bi In the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica, the terms “galaxy,” “universe,” and “star system” were used willy-nilly, often interchangeably, endlessly confusing—or at least annoying—viewers who knew anything about astronomy.
bj “Se yonder, loo the Galaxie, Which men clepeth the Milky Wey” Geoffrey Chaucer, “The House of Fame,” c. 1380. http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/me/chaucer/HF.html, lines 936-937.
bk Remember, we’re talking about 1771. Back then, they had no idea the Andromeda Galaxy was a galaxy. To them, the whole fuzzy patch of light was called the “Great Spiral Nebula” in Andromeda.
bl Aka the Seven Sisters of Greek mythology. In Japan, it’s called “Subaru.”
bm Episode 620, “Good Shepherd.”
bn A material’s melting point and its freezing point are the same thing—we simply use one term or the other depending upon whether the substance is heating or cooling.
bo Today planetary scientists use the term “planetesimal” as a generic name for both comets and asteroids—the leftover bits of planet formation.
bp The difference between the final location and desired location for FTL jumps beyond the red line is more significant the farther the jump. One Raptor pilot alluded to this in the “Face of the Enemy” webisodes. When they realized that their Raptor had jumped beyond its red line, the pilot said, “The calculations just became nonlinear.” Rephrased, that meant, “We’re screwed.”
bq This text, written by the series Executive Producer Ronald D. Moore, is the basis for the Second Law of The Science of Battlestar Galactica.
br Light would take 50 years to cross from one edge of the nebula to the other. Another way to put it is to say that the cloud is 50 light-years in diameter.
bs Light would take about 2 months to cross from one edge of the core to the other. The core is 2 light-months, or of a light-year, in diameter.
bt Named for the star T Tauri, the next-to-last brightest star in the constellation Taurus the Bull. As you might expect, T Tauri is a newborn star, barely one million years old.
bu The opening narration to the 1955 science fiction masterpiece Forbidden Planet talks ab
out “the main sequence star, Altair,” perhaps as a way of falsely lulling us into believing that the place we’re about to visit is normal.
bv Where are the green stars? Stars that put out a lot of light in the green part of the visible spectrum also put out a lot of light in the blue and red part of the spectrum. To our eyes, roughly equal combinations of green, blue, and red light are seen as white light.
bw Memorialized in the mnemonic “Oh, Be A Fine Girl/Guy, Kiss Me,” which, if actually said anywhere outside of an astrophysics context will get you slapped with a sexual harassment suit so fast your head will spin. Alternately, if you wish to remember the sequence from cool to hot—M-K-G-F-A-B-O—then just remember the somewhat more disturbing mnemonic “Mickey Killed Goofy For A Body Organ.”
bx Made famous in Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Best of Both Worlds, Part II.”
by Not degenerate as in “pervert” (though there are certainly enough of those in the galaxy). Here degenerate refers to material that is made not of atoms, but of elemental particles: electrons, protons, neutrons, and quarks.
bz When this happens to our Sun, about 5.5 billion years from now, the Sun will expand until it is approximately 170 times its current diameter. But don’t worry. The Sun’s loss of about one-fifth of its mass will make Earth spiral outward until it reaches a stable orbit approximately 1.4 times its current distance from the Sun. Earth will probably not be swallowed up by the red giant Sun. Mercury, however, is a goner.
ca The name for this material, neutronium, actually originated in science fiction, but has become the accepted term.
cb The term “metal,” to an astronomer, means any element that is not hydrogen or helium.
cc The H-R Diagram is a graph that displays the relationship between a star’s luminosity and its temperature. With a few exceptions, most red stars are small and cool, most blue stars are large and hot, and most other stars fall in a continuum in between. The diagram was put together in the first decade of the twentieth century by the astronomers Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell.
cd Quark stars are still hypothetical at the time of this writing, but if they are true they might account for the missing “dark matter” in the universe.
ce At least until an accretion disk formed, and started radiating energy.
cf He sent his paper to Einstein, who was delighted with the findings. The two corresponded until Schwarzschild died of a skin disease he contracted on the Russian front.
cg To a physicist, the concepts of speed and velocity are related, but not synonymous. An object’s speed is a measure of how fast it is moving; its velocity is its speed in a given direction. With that definition, some claim that the term escape velocity should actually be escape speed, but to escape the gravitational pull of any celestial object the direction is implied—it must be radially outward.
ch Unless, of course, it’s FTL-capable. In the third episode of the series Star Trek: Voyager, Voyager, an FTL-capable vessel, is trapped within the event horizon of a singularity. No drama there.
ci We should mention that you don’t need a collapsing supernova to create a black hole—what you need is some mechanism that can create the same incredible densities that are found in a collapsing supernova. It is possible that the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, can create those densities when it slams subatomic particles into each other at enormous energies. One popular fear at the time of the LHC inauguration in the autumn of 2008 was that such experiments would create mini-black holes that would grow until they swallowed up the Collider, then Geneva, then Europe, and eventually Earth. If you’re reading this book, that obviously didn’t happen. Yet.
cj The most interesting arrangement from an astrophysics point of view is when one member of a binary star pair turns into a black hole: if the other star survives the initial supernova explosion, and if it doesn’t immediately get swallowed up by the black hole, then it will live a miserable life being slowly devoured, molecule after molecule, by its companion.
ck Thus answering the obvious question “If black holes are black, how can you see them?” The answer is that we don’t see the black hole itself, but a giant ring of material emitting powerful X-rays is going to be noticed. Some of the brightest X-ray sources in the galaxy are thought to be binary star systems in which a black hole swallows enormous amounts of gas from its companion star.
cl Always an iffy proposition, though he has no particular reason to lie in this case.
cm Mercury??? Hottest planet in the solar system? Closest planet to the Sun? That Mercury? That Mercury has ice?? Yes it does, in permanently shaded craters near its north pole.
cn Found in the form of ice, under the dirt of the Moon’s south pole.
co Ice is all over the planet, but mostly at the south polar region. There’s also some evidence of liquid water underground.
cp This moon of Mars is loaded with veins of ice snaking underground.
cq See Phobos.
cr This was the first asteroid discovered, in 1801. It was easy to see because it is covered in ice.
cs Huge amounts of water are found in the planet’s atmosphere.
ct A moon of Jupiter with an ocean of liquid water capped by a crust of ice!
cu Another moon of Jupiter, with large swaths of ice on its surface.
cv See Ganymede.
cw See Jupiter.
cx The rings of Saturn are largely made of ice or, like Ceres, rock coated in ice.
cy This moon of Saturn has ice geysers!
cz Named after the Greek goddess of fresh water, this moon of Saturn is made almost entirely of ice!
da Another moon of Saturn, about 50/50 rock and ice.
db Another moon of Saturn, about 25/75 rock and ice.
dc See Saturn.
dd See Uranus.
de This moon of Neptune has ice geysers!
df They were basically giant bottle rockets.
dg And yes, in Avatar James Cameron was having his little joke by naming Pandora’s magic mineral “unobtanium.”
dh Constant Bearing/Decreasing Range, a collision course. The term was first used in the episode “Final Cut.”
di A Faraday cage is a box covered on all sides by grounded fine-mesh metallic screens that absorb radio waves. Anything inside the box is effectively cut off from all electromagnetic interference in that part of the spectrum. Cell phones can’t get a signal, and radios play nothing but static, if that. Build one—it’s freaky.
dj Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition: the collective name for the computer systems that control traffic lights, sewage systems, factories, air traffic control towers, nuclear reactors, and so on—all the industries and facilities that keep our lives going.
The Science of Battlestar Galactica Page 28
