Today’s going to be one of those days when I cheat just a little bit and my blog slips ever so much away from photography into the realm of physics. A team of scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has announced detection of the very first direct evidence for what is referred to as the cosmic inflation and as a result published the first ever images of gravitational waves.  These can be seen on the Center for Astrophysics’ website.  They are essentially maps of the sky showing the gravity waves.

Say what! Cosmic inflation?  Gravity waves?  Cosmic inflation is the massive initial explosion of the Big Bang, when the universe was born and expanded exponentially.  And with this cosmic nativity should come waves or ripples in space time.  You may remember a short while ago that we spoke about quantum mechanical waves in the context of Schrodinger’s Cat and quantum mechanics.  Therein lies the significance of gravity waves.  They were predicted by Albert Einstein and they represent a unification, if you will, a missing linking between gravity theory and quantum mechanics.  And now after at least forty years of hard looking we have not only found them, but we have seen them.

How can that be? Think about the great 19th century volcano Krakatoa. A sound wave from that blast circled the globe multiple times and was recorded on sensitive barometers.  If you think about it, those waves are still circling the globe, except that they have become lost in the background variations in atmospheric pressure.

Similarly, scientists found the gravity waves from the cosmic inflation by examining the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Remember that visible light has wavengths which are fractions of a micron.  Microwave wavelengths are ten or more times that.  That’s very low energy stuff, but gravitational waves left their signature there, a pattern imprinted on the faint glow leftover from the Big Bang.

Figure 1 – Dying the Chicago River Green on Saint Patrick’s Day 2009. Image from the Wikipedia Commons, an original work by Mike Boehmer from Chicago, IL, USA and in the public domain under creative commons attribution license.

Today is the day where everyone is Irish – or seeks to be Irish.  And, I suppose, that tomorrow is that day when everyone is hung over.  So I thought that I would celebrate the occasion today on Haiti and Skill with the quintessential Saint Patrick’s Day image.  Every year on Saint Patrick’s Day in Chicago, they dye the Chicago river green.  Have you ever wondered who the proverbial “They” actually are?  Hmm!  Anyway I found on the Wikipedia Commons this absolutely beautiful photograph of the festivities in 2009.  The photograph is by Mike Boehmer from Chicago, IL,  and is spectacular and, well, gloriously green.  So let me wish everyone “Éirinn go Brach”

I for one have a tendency to leave my camera at home on days that are heavy laden with rain.  It makes sense.  You’ve got to get yourself one of those fancy rain enclosures for your camera or have a significant other, who is willing and friendly enough to hold an umbrella over your head.

However BBC News recently challenged its photographically inclined readers to send in their best rain/puddle shots and the results, in my opinion, are pretty astounding. 

Rain and wetness are, if not magical, then at least transforming.  Dull pebbles at the beach or in a stream become magnificent” gems.”. Urban settings come alive with the reflection of street lights, especially at night. And then there is the blurred out image as sheets of rainwater run down a window.  It can be quite enthralling, and the BBC News series has a number of just beautiful photographs.  My personal favorites are Neil Harvey’s picture of a woman sitting and having a beverage at an outdoor table, under a massive umbrella, and talking on the cell phone  untroubled by the deluge around her. And then there is Sambid Vilas Pant’s just wonderful image of a two drops or rainwater forming at the tip of a spoke on an umbrella. 

And it is raining heavily today.  That gives me an idea…

Today is when I proselytize about the new future that science is offering us.  I say offering because in the end that is all that we scientists can do.  We provide the human race with choices, and these can often be used for either good or bad.

But to make a long self-righteous moment short, I was looking at images in a spare moment today and came across this wonderful picture by Oli Scarff of Getty Images showing this rather cute little fellow named Leo.  Leo is nine months old and he is taking part in an experiment at the Birkbeck Babylab Center for Brain & Cognitive Development, in London.. Leo is outfitted with a halo of electroencephalogram electrodes (he’s even managed to pop one of them) to study brain activity while he examines various objects.

From the Birkbeck Baby lab’s website we have what that their mission is to learn:

•  how babies recognize faces
•  how babies learn to pay attention to some things and not others
•  how they learn to understand what other people do and think, and
•  how their language and understanding of the world develops

As a picture this photograph tells a wonderful story.  Baby Leo is happy.  The smile and the beautiful catch light tell us this. He is deeply involved in his work.  It is interesting how strong the association of pink with girls.  Because of the strong pink background, our first assumption is that Leo is a girl.  Of course, we wonder what he is thinking.  We even wonder how he is thinking.  And that after all is the whole point.

Well, it is Sunday.  Readers will be happy to know that as of Friday women of Massachusetts are “safe” from upskirting!

I always enjoy at week’s end to scan the photo sites in search of beautiful images from the week – something to take my mind off all the gruesome news from around the world.  And today I was really struck by the oh so simple beauty of an image by Red Huber of the Orlando Sentinel showing a women with an umbrella walking passed a boarded up building on Washington Street in Orlando’s downtown.

I really love this picture: the soft pastels, the rain, the water running down and blurring the window so that the image is just so smeared out.  Then, of course, there is the beautiful young woman and the intent look on her face as she is determined to keep both herself and the papers that she is carrying dry against the deluge.

We have spoken before about the days of film and the unique artistic characteristics of various films.  And really this was the first aspect of the image that came to my mind when I saw it.  Pastels to me spell Kodachrome.  But a reader recently reminded me of the wonderful properties of Agfachrome so I am in a conundrum.  Perhaps some of the cognoscenti out there would like to share their impressions.  In the meantime bravo to Red Huber.

I have been complaining a lot about the snow and cold this winter. Nobody seems to be listening, and we are being hit yet again on the East Coast by the same storm that flooded California.  So I continue to look for the silver lining, the hidden beauty in all of this.

A while back we discussed the work of Snowflake Bentley who pioneered the technique of photographing snowflakes.  And if ever there was a place that the hidden beauty of nature is revealed, it is in the six point symmetrical structures of snowflakes revealed in a microscope.  Today I came across the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov, who takes this a step further by capturing the formation of these glorious ice crystals in wonderful time lapse sequences.  BTW – I think that I could live without the musical underscoring.

Ivanov torments us by not revealing the secret of how these images were made.  He is true to the “magicians’ code of secrecy.”  Crystal growth tends to evolve from a tiny point, a seed crystal, acting as what is referred to as a nucleation center.  The crystal just builds up and maintains symmetry. So i am thinking frigidly cold supersaturated water vapor chamber and a pin with a tiny crystal of ice.  Another possibility is a cold sheet of glass. Or perhaps it is indeed magic!

There is way too much bad weather and way too much bad news!  So when I hit my computer this morning I decided to look for some fun images, and I found two in MSN’s photoseries.

The first is the series “Oddly around the world in February.”  There are a lot of fun images in that series, but I think that my favorite is Mikael Buck’s of Rex Features image showing London commuter Daniel Amankwah surprised on his way to work, as the 17th century plague doctors invade the tube in London.  Men in black dressed as ravens? Hmm! Now the reaction would certainly have been different in the New York City subway.

Then there is a really amusing series entitled “Celebrities as masterpieces.”  This series originally from Worth1000.com (their Celebrity Time Travel series) depicts photographs of celebrities photoshopped into great paintings from the renaissance and beyond.  It is not an expression of celebrity ego.  There are a lot of images here that brought a smile to my face.  As ever, Natalie Portman stuns! But really there is none better than “Mike Tyson as the “Mona Lisa.”