Heaven on Google Earth

Yesterday I talked about using Google Earth to get a sense for the grandeur of the huge, landscape-sized machines of experimental particle-physics. But Google Earth is also perfect for touring the holy sites of the other big science, astronomy, whether you want to check out the world's biggest telescopes or explore the stars.

First stop: in the "Fly To" bar, type in "Very Large Array." Before you know it you'll be descending on a dusty, desolate patch of New Mexico that's home to 27 telescopes, each laden with a 25-meter-wide dish. The VLA is part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and "see" the universe in radio waves just as we see the world in visible light, allowing astronomers to study anything from the Cosmic Microwave Background to stellar corpses known as pulsars. Some of the data collected by these telescopes has even found its way into Google Sky.

The Very Large Array in New Mexico.

Apparently the Google Maps truck barreled down at least on dusty road in the complex; enter one of the photo-bubbles and look around. You're standing at the edge of the array with one of the giant listeners looming over you, dish cocked to receive a message you can only guess at. Pretty impressive.

One of the Very Large Array's telescopes, up close and personal.

Next, click the "Add Content" button on the Places bar. This will open up a window in the bottom half of Google Earth that lets you search extra material. Search for "Chandra X-ray Observatory," download the file that comes up, and open it in Google Earth. It will become a folder under places. Double click, and you'll fly over to the air above Cape Canaveral, where you'll see the purple-winged (actually, they're solar panels)Chandra hovering.

The Chandra X-Ray Observatory, hovering over the Kennedy Space Center.

The scale isn't quite realistic—Chandra's elliptical orbit takes her to an altitude that's about a third of the way to the moon, and she's not always above Flordia—but it's convenient for zooming down onto the Kennedy Space Center just below her and checking out the launch pad.

Now it's time to head down south. In the browser window, go to the Pierre Auger Observatory's Google Earth Page, where you can download a model of the cosmic-ray observatory and open it in Google Earth. Spanning an area of the Argentine Pampas that rivals the size of Paris, Pierre Auger uses 1600 water tanks to catch secondary particles from cosmic-ray showers. The Google Earth package is wonderful because you can really get a sense for the vastness of the enterprise, and how amazing it must be to stand on that desolate plain with the Andes looming in the distance.

The 1600 cosmic-ray detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina.

Tropical climes are next. Fly To Mauna Kea on the big island of Hawaii. Zoom in a bit and you'll likely see a cluster of enormous white domes: the Mauna Kea Observatory , home to the northern telescope of Gemini (the other is on the summit of Cerro Pachon in Chile) and the two telescopes of the KECK Observatory. In your "Layers" menu, turn on 3D buildings for a treat—the twin domes of KECK in 3D.

The KECK Observatory's twin telescopes, on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii.

Finally, "Fly To" Canary Islands and watch Chandra whip by as you zoom across North America to land in a remote, northeast corner of the Atlantic. Once you're there, "Fly To" Roque de los Muchachos, Canary Islands. When you land in a deep ravine covered in plant life, zoom out a bit. You'll spot a white dome in the upper left of your screen. Go to investigate—it's the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, home to an impressive suite of telescopes, including the world's biggest optical eye on the sky, the Gran Canarias Telescope.

The telescopes of the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands.

Plenty of the telescopes have been modeled in 3D, so make sure to turn on 3D Buildings. This shot of the Gran Canarias Telescope is as pretty as a painting.

The Gran Canarias Telescope on its perch overlooking the Atlantic.

Once you've had your fill of astronomy on earth, go to Google Sky, Moon, and Mars to do your own exploring.

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Google Earth your way to big science

I remember how excited I was when Google Maps first came into existence. I would seize anyone who seemed to show a particle of interest, sit them down in front of my computer, and click madly on the little square until I could discern my own house.

Well, Google Maps has grown up quite a bit since then. Now I can satisfy my need to stalk my own house by flying straight home on the wings of Google Earth. When that gets boring, I can zoom way out and give the earth a spin, as if it were an old-fashioned globe, or turn it upside down to check on Antarctica.

Google Earth is also a great way to tour big science in all its glory. How, you ask? Well, first download the program. Then make a list of your dream destinations —Fermilab, CERN, KEK in Japan, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory—and fly to each one.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory makes for a splendid aerial shot, even more impressive than the giant rings of Fermilab's Tevatron or the LHC. The two-mile-long linear accelerator ends in a fan of buildings that once housed enormous detectors that helped scientists probe inside the nucleus, among other things. The smaller ring you see is the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. You might notice that parts of the lab seem to be under construction— it seems like these images were taken when the lab was excavating for the Linac Coherent Light Source. This year the nearly half-century-old linac was reborn as the world's first hard x-ray free-electron laser.

The SLAC linac from above. Electrons start their journey at the left end.

Conveniently, Interstate 280 spans the accelerator. Use "street-view" to land on the freeway and look down at the accelerator's klystron gallery, the building that houses the accelerator's above-ground workhorses.

The accelerator from the I-280 freeway.

Next, wing it over to Fermilab. You'll see the patchwork of wetlands, woodlands, and grasslands that make up the 6,800-acre campus clearly marked by the distinctive white ring of the Tevatron, flanked by its booster ring. Are those fuzzy brown spots I'm seeing bison? They might be. Check the option for 3D buildings so you don't miss a pretty impressive 3D construction of the lab's famous Wilson Hall, with its curving walls and sentinel of international flags, a reminder of the cosmopolitan nature of particle physics.

Wilson Hall at Fermilab, rendered in 3D.

If the architecture inspires you, why not help Fermilab name their next accelerator? It's called Project X right now, but they're looking for something with a little less science fiction and a little more personality.

Here's a place you may not know much about: KEK, the high-energy physics lab in Tsukuba, Japan. You'll identify it from the air by its ring-shaped accelerator, the powerful KEK-B. It collides electrons and positrons for a collaboration known as BELLE. (Latitude: 36° 9'15.90"N, longitude: 140° 4'18.67"E)

The KEK-B electron-positron collider in Tsukuba, Japan.

Brookhaven National Lab is also distinctive aerially—check out the the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider at latitude 40°52'36.42"N, longitude 72°52'19.09"W.

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Fearful symmetry

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

—William Blake, The Tyger

Evariste Galois is perhaps one of the most romantic figures in mathematics. While still in school, he sent his great breakthrough in geometry to established Parisian mathematicians; unfortunately, the breakthrough was written out in such an ungodly scrawl that the wise men had no idea what to make of it. By the age of twenty, he was languishing in prison for his revolutionary acts (political, this time); with cholera threatening, he and other prisoners were sent to a clinic where he fell in unrequited love with a doctor's daughter. Then, on May 30, 1832, he died of a wound from a gunshot fired in a duel that arose under murky circumstances.

The night before, realizing that he might not have another chance, Galois did some major cramming. He gave his best shot at explaining his ideas about geometry in the clearest language he could muster. (The name of his beloved, Stephanie, dotted the margins.)

"Maybe the fact that he stayed up all night doing mathematics was the [reason] why he was such a bad shot the next morning and got killed", said Marcus du Sautoy in his TED talk on Galois and symmetry at the 2009 TED global conference. But du Sautoy, an Oxford mathematician, owes Galois quite a bit. The young mathematician discovered the rules governing symmetric shapes, shapes that can be rotated and flipped and look unchanged. Du Sautoy calls these manipulations the "magic trick" changes. "For Galois symmetry was all about motion, what can you do to a symmetrical object so it can looks the same," du Sautoy said.



Symmetry, Marcus du Sautoy says, is "nature's language." It arranges the atoms in a ruby, and the piles of molecules that form a virus. Humans consider symmetric faces to be beautiful, he says, because symmetry, being difficult to achieve, is a token of strong genes and the sign of a desirable mate.

When Spain was under Muslim rule in the mid 14th century, the rulers built themselves a splendid palace known as the Alhambra, or the red fort. Because Muslim artists were forbidden from depicting animals or people, they found beauty in patterns and symmetry. Using Galois rules, you can determine that the gorgeous, intricate mosaics on the walls of the Alhambra contain 17 different kinds of symmetry in all, making it a treasure-trove for mathematicians. (A paper on the geometry of Islamic art appeared in Science in 2007.)

Walls and ceiling of the Alhambra. (Justus Hayes/Shoes on Wires/shoesonwires.com)

Du Sautoy goes on to say that there's no stopping mathematicians from using Galois rules to go beyond three dimensions.
His breakthrough, du Sautoy says, "allows us to create symmetrical objects in the unseen world"—four, five, six dimensions and more.

"That's where I work," he says. "I create mathematical objects, symmetric objects using Galois' language in very high dimensional spaces."

As a final treat, du Sautoy named a new mathematical object he'd created after the person who could get closest to estimating the number of symmetries in a Rubix cube. (Try it yourself - he gives the answer at the end of the talk.) Of course, you can't see a symmetric object in twelve dimensions, so the winner had to be content with a picture drawn in Galois' mathematical language.

If you fancy having your own multidimensional symmetrical object named after you, you can donate $10 to a Guatemalan charity that du Sautoy supports. He will then "stay up all night" building a new intangible, symmetric toy to stick your name on. He's raised about $3,000 this way—that's a lot of late nights!

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What is reality?

As a child, Anton Zeilinger used to pull the heads and limbs off his sister's dolls. "I liked taking things apart," he explained in an interview with the Institute of Physics (see video below). This childhood tendency grew up into scientific curiosity; Zeilinger is now a well-respected physicist, the head of a quantum optics group at the Institut fur Quantenoptik and Quanteninformation in Vienna.

We generally believe that Zeilinger can satisfy his scientific curiosity through experiments, either by doing his own or by learning of the results of others' work. When we ask nature a question, she will answer truthfully, as long as we ask the question honestly and know how to interpret her response. Our observations, then, can create a picture of reality, mapping the facts of the world "out there" in one-to-one correspondence with ideas in the mind "in here."




In a talk at the recent Quantum to Cosmos Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Zeilinger raised a question that might seem, at first glance, naïve.

"What do we really describe in physics?" he asked. "Do we describe reality? Is it out there?"

Classical physicists would have said yes, resoundingly. Studying physics reveals nature's workings, providing an explicit map of reality's subtleties. Those subtleties would be there whether we figured out how to question and extract them.

But in the early part of this century, quantum mechanics put that happy belief on the chopping block. Quantum mechanics, for all its ability to describe the atomic and subatomic world, blurs the distinction between the observer and the observed. As a result, it calls into question the essence of scientific curiosity and inquiry.

According to quantum mechanics, an electron's position is a smattering of possibilities. It's likely to be found, perhaps, within a certain boundary, and less likely to be found outside it. When we ask the electron where it is, this smattering will collapse into a definite value.

But what about the electron before we observe it? What is the reality of the electron? Einstein believed that the electron must know where it is. And Heisenberg's uncertainty principle only makes this little gedankenexperiment more preposterous for classicists: once we know the electron's position, we can know nothing about its momentum.

Einstein believed that this was evidence that quantum mechanics was in some way incomplete. His formal argument is known as EPR, for his collaborators, Podolsky and Rosen. Joshua Roebke writes in an article in SEED on Zeilinger's work:

The EPR paper begins by asserting that there’s a real world outside theories… EPR argued that objects must have preexisting values for measurable quantities and that this implied that certain elements of reality could not be determined by quantum mechanics.

Quantum entanglement is one particular case that wreaks havoc on Einstein. In his talk at Quantum to Cosmos, Zeilinger explained the effect:

If you have a pair of dice that are quantum entangled—you can't buy them yet but I'm sure in a hundred years you can buy them as a Christmas present—a pair of quantum dice would be such that if you throw one die here and one die there they always show the same number. Now this can only be if they have a common cause, or if they are talking to each other somehow.

Zeilinger studies entanglement with photons; in lieu of the face of a die, the photon's polarization is the property in question. Separate two entangled photons by a galaxy, then have an observer measure the polarization of each. They will see the same polarization.

In 1997, Zeilinger demonstrated this effect in the lab; it was hailed as "teleportation," with information (the photon's polarization) being beamed instantly from one particle to another. In 2007, he demonstrated in spectacularly across two of the Canary Islands. It's as if one photon, the moment it was measured, sent an instantaneous, light-speed-limit-breaking signal to the other, telling it what polarization to have; accepting this non-locality would allow physicists like Einstein to hold onto realism, the idea that the photons must have a determined polarization before they are measured.

A physicist named Anthony Legget formulated this possibility into a testable theory, which he brought to colleagues who brought it to Zeilinger's lab. To Legget's chagrin (quantum entanglement upsets him nearly as much as it upsets Einstein), fastidious experiments proved that this wasn't the case (for further reading, see the full text of "Reality Tests"):

It took [Zeilinger and his colleagues] months to reach their tentative conclusion: If quantum mechanics described the data, then the lights’ polarizations didn’t exist before being measured. Realism in quantum mechanics would be untenable.

"What this tells us also in a deeper way is that there are situations where what we observe in experiment is not some reality which was there before," Zeilinger explained in his talk at Quantum to Cosmos. "Our experiment creates reality in a sense. What is then reality, really? What are we describing now with physical theories?"

In his talk, Zeilinger suggests that physics sorely needs new ideas that can comprehend these facts. "I mean, quantum mechanics is a hundred years old. Relativity is a hudnred years old. A new breakthrough is due," he said.
For Zeilinger, that new idea that makes everything clear might be the unification of these two big theories, something physicists have been grappling with for several decades now. Or it might involve another sort of unification altogether.

"Maybe we have to unify the idea of reality and information, which is my own personal theory," he said.

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Right again, Einstein

Gamma-ray tie: Einstein wins. Photo from NASA.

On May 10, 2009, two photons reached the end of a 7.3-billion-year race at a detector on the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope. First one photon blinked into the Large Area Telescope's detector ; then, 0.9 seconds later, the second photon crossed the finish line. The second photon had been beaten by a whisper; divide that truncated second by the 7.3 billion year journey, and you'll see that their traveling times differed by less than one part in one hundred million billion (that's 10^-17 for fans of scientific notation).

Both photons were gamma rays, from the most energetic end of the electromagnetic spectrum, up to 300 billion times more energetic than visible light. They were from the same gamma-ray burst, a blast of radiation from the collapse of a massive star far in the past (and away from us in space.)

All this is to say, score another point for Einstein, the obscure patent clerk turned physics giant, and for the invariance of light speed.

In a vacuum, Einstein said, all electromagnetic radiation should travel at the same speed. Glass or water slows down light, but in a vacuum, even to an observer on a speeding rocket, it always travels at 299,792,458 meters per second.

Four years ago, things didn't look so good for Einstein. In 2005, the MAGIC telescope on the Canary Islands recorded the last-place finisher in another galactic race, 500 million years long, as lagging four minutes behind. This seemed to support some cosmologists who proposed that higher-energy photons might travel more slowly than lower-energy photons.



Einstein's general theory of relativity is immensely powerful, but it's still fundamentally classical. Einstein bristled at the very idea of quantum mechanics, which makes it meaningless to speak of a photon's properties before one observes that photon, collapsing the probabilistic wavefunction into a definite value (and rendering another property entirely unknowable, as in the case of position and momentum.) The onus on modern theoretical physics is to reconcile Einstein's picture of gravity with the other greatest theory of the twentieth century, quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics says that energy is quantized. Some proponents of loop quantum gravity think that space-time, too, comes in fundamental chunks. If you could shrink down so that 10^-35 meters was a comfortable walking distance, they say, you wouldn't see that silky smooth "fabric" of space-time everyone talks about. Instead, you'd be tossed and battered by a swirling sea of Planck-scale foam.


Since higher-energy photons have shorter wavelengths, some cosmologists say, they might be more vulnerable to this fluctuating foam, while lower-energy photons' longer wavelengths would keep the sailing smooth. As Dennis Overbye at the New York Times puts it:

One way to think about it is to envision the photons as boats on this choppy sea. The small ones, like tugboats, have to climb up and down the waves to get anywhere, while the bigger ones can slice through the waves and bumps like ocean liners, and thus go a little faster.

On small scales these slight differences would be negligible. But after long distances, the tiny discrepancy in velocity would start to become visible. The lower-energy photons would begin to pull ahead, and the higher-energy photons would start to fall behind. Fermi, with its ability to make precise gamma-ray detections, is one of the few telescopes that can observe this kind of lag. The most recent results set a limit on how much a photon's energy could change its speed.

But how did MAGIC get such a different result? Rachel Courtland at New Scientist explains:

The MAGIC time delay may be down to an astrophysical process where particles are accelerated to enormous energies within the hearts of galaxies. Follow-up calculations after MAGIC's 2005 result showed that is possible to produce flares that release lower-energy radiation before higher-energy radiation, according to MAGIC collaborator Robert Wagner of the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Munich, Germany. "I think what we can say for the time being is quantum gravity effects cannot be the dominant effect," he says.

The man may not have believed in quantum mechanics, but for now, chalk up another point for old Einstein.
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Halloween party physics

"Sure looks like a lot of fun in there, doing all those physics experiments."
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vintagehalloweencollector/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

If there's one holiday that seems tailor made for the physics enthusiast (besides Pi Day), it's Halloween. You can trick out your home or Halloween party with spooky effects and decorations, courtesy of science and a few readily-available ingredients.

Blacklights

The light coming from these bulbs isn't black at all, but ultraviolet. We can't see ultraviolet light; instead we see a violet glow (ultraviolet light's visible neighbor on the spectrum) from the bulb, and a white glow from teeth and white shirts and socks. That's thanks to phosphor, an element that glows in the visible spectrum when excited by higher-frequency wavelengths (confusingly, this phenomenon is called fluorescence.) Laundry detergents contain phosphor to make white clothes seem brighter in sunlight, and phosphor is second only to calcium as the most abundant mineral in the body and is found in our bones and teeth. Phosphor is also responsible for the fluorescent colors of highlighters. Buy some blacklight bulbs, hang a huge sheet of butcher paper along one wall, and play fluorescent pictionary with highlighters.

Dry-ice burn and cauldron bubble

Here's a recipe for a bubbling cauldron that requires neither eye of newt nor toe of frog, nor wool of bat nor tongue of dog. The main ingredient is dry ice—frozen carbon dioxide. Start with a juice-based punch, and the dry ice will add both carbonation and spooky smoke to your jungle juice as it sublimates.

Concoct your punch as desired at room temperature—this will make the sublimation more dramatic. Add large chunks of food-grade dry ice once your guests arrive for a spectacular smoky effect. (This site recommends 3-5 pounds for a big bowl.) For a floating hand, freeze a latex glove full of tonic water and add it to the mix.



Is using dry ice dangerous? As with anything fun, it requires a bit of caution, but in a word? No. Dry-ice is much colder than regular ice; at standard pressure, carbon dioxide freezes at about -110 Fahrenheit. That's freaking cold, and is likely to burn you if it touches your skin, so wear thick rubber gloves. For that reason, and one other, you should not serve your guests any solid ice when you're ladling out the punch. Even if it's water ice that's formed as a result of cooling, it could enclose a nugget of dry ice which would rapidly expand to enormous volumes once ingested, via PV=nRT. (Dry ice in a closed container also becomes a terrible idea in about two seconds.) So don't serve up any solids. Finally, using food-grade dry ice will guarantee it's free from impurities—your punch won't get any added "flavors" besides the same carbonation found in soda. (Read this "Ask a Scientist" column from Argonne National Lab for more about dry ice safety, and here are a few additional tips on achieving smoky effects at home.

These unsuspecting peeps will soon be at the mercy of your mad physicist whims.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sis/ / CC BY 2.0

No peeps were harmed in this experiment

This little experiment really brings out the kid—and the evil scientist— in me. You'll need a bell jar and a hand vacuum pump—think of it as investment in endless amusement.

Place an unsuspecting Halloween peep in the bell jar, ask an assistant to hold the lid tightly to the bottom of the bell jar, and start pumping out air. As the air pressure drops in the jar, the air bubbles in the peep expand, bloating the peep to (relatively) monstrous sizes.

At this point you can challenge your brawniest friend to pry the lid off; the air pressure on the outside of the bell jar will likely foil your friend's muscle. Then unscrew a small valve in the pump's tube to let air back into the chamber suddenly—it will crush the peep. Luckily, it will still taste just as terribly, terribly good.

Other physics recipes for Halloween making a statue whose eyes seem to follow the viewer , magic two-way mirrors, and slime.

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Nightmarish physics

A nightmarish image?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/agelakis/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

On some nights, physics haunts my nightmares. I dream I'm once again in my last week ever of university. I have an exam in a few hours on perturbation theory in quantum mechanics—but I haven't been to a single class all year. The nauseating certainty of "I'm never going to get my bachelor's degree!" feels so real that I often wake up wildly thinking how I'm going to get my hands on some course notes. And this is two years after the fact.

I'm probably not the only one who's had nightmares about physics tests or felt trepidation at the thought of approaching a particularly thorny professor during office hours. But physics itself is rife with terms that sound menacing. I mean, just look at the Large Hadron Collider—all they did was name it literally after what it does, yet the name couldn't be more ominous. So in the spirit of Halloween, let's take a look at some of the seemingly nefarious terms found in physics and see if the fright is real or just in the name.

Destructive Interference

Light waves interfere to form patterns of bright and dark lines, which correspond to where they interfere constructively and destructively, respectively.

Sounds like: a bureaucratic euphemism for spy work in East Berlin. More like: a humdrum phenomenon. When waves—light, sound, you name it—overlap, sometimes they are perfectly out of synch, with a peak of one wave occurring in the same place as the trough of another. When this happens, the waves cancel out; in a tank of water, you'd see a smooth surface. This is destructive interference—the interfering waves destroy each others' amplitude. In constructive interference, where the waves line up perfectly, they construct larger peaks and deeper troughs. Verdict: not scary.

Maxwell's demon
Sounds like: a 19th century poltergeist. More like: a thought experiment by 19th-century father of electromagnetism, James Clerk Maxwell. A demon crouches atop a box filled with a gas at some temperature. He places a partition across the box, dividing it into two halves; the partition has a little slot the demon can open and shut. The demon watches the gas molecules approach the barrier. When a slightly slower-than-average molecule approaches the barrier from the left, or a slightly faster-than-average one approaches the barrier from the right, he opens the door. Eventually, working exactly in opposition to the second law of thermodynamics, he separates the molecules into two gases with a temperature difference, which can be used to do work. Verdict: Not scary, unless you consider an implication of the fact that Maxwell's demon doesn't exist: heat death.

Dark energy
Sounds like: an evil power fighting against Sailor Moon. More like: the poorly-understood mechanism for why all the galaxies in the universe are accelerating away from each other. Verdict: not scary in itself, but it's kind of scary that dark energy is deciding the fate of the universe, yet we know almost nothing about it except that it's there.

Ultraviolet catastrophe
Sounds like: face-melting radiation. More like: One of the first huge clues that classical physics, which, at the turn of the century, felt so secure in its understanding of nature, didn't have the whole story. Classical physics predicts that the intensity of light emitted by a heated object scales up infinitely with the frequency. This would mean that sitting next to a fire would leave you charred. The failure of classical physics to explain the actual relationship, which peaks at a certain frequency depending on the temperature, and then slides back down at frequencies higher than that, opened the door for quantum theories. Verdict:Absolutely terrifying—if you're a classical physicist.

Klystron

One of 242 klystrons powering the beam at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Sounds like: an alien race, intent on destroying humanity. Actually is: a really big microwave. Klystrons are the engines of particle accelerators; they produce microwaves, which are funneled into the accelerator cavity to give particles a kick.
Verdict: They look sort of scary, but they come in peace.

Nemesis
Sounds like: an intergalactic force, intent on destroying humanity. Actually is: an intergalactic force, intent on destroying humanity. Well, sort of. In the '80s scientists proposed that a star was responsible for periodic mass extinctions on Earth. They theorized that the star, as it swung by every 32 million years or so, flung comets toward the inner solar system. They dubbed the star Nemesis.
Verdict: Pretty frickin scary, if it weren't for the fact that scientists have largely discarded the idea.

Heat death of the universe
Sounds like: the fiery end of all creation. More like: the slow, plodding, inevitable end of all creation. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe's entropy only increases. It's a familiar concept with a lot of relevance to life; a baseball can smash a window in one second, but all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put it back together again. The second law acts in the opposite way of Maxwell's demon; dump hot and cold gas into a container, and you'll always get lukewarm gas. Take this idea to it's logical conclusion, and you'll realize that eventually the universe will reach a point where all reservoirs of hot and cold mix, reducing the universe to a lukewarm bathwater from which no useful work can be extracted. That means definitely no life. Verdict: scary, but it's billions of years away. Does put certain things into perspective, though.

Project Monster
Sounds like: A CIA plot to unleash a frozen dinosaur on enemies of the free world. More like: The nick name for the Stanford Linear Accelerator when it was being dreamed-up and built in the 1960s.

Runners up: Project X, Krypton, and Landau ghosts, which let physicists write papers with titles like "Exorcizing the Landau Ghost in Non Commutative Quantum Field Theory."

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