The Avengers: On Dark Energy and Gamma Radiation

It was an Avengers fever last Saturday. A lot of my fellow comic-fanboys have been raving about the movie that it stirred my fondness to the nth level, with the variable "n" to mean infinity, contrary to the algebraic paradigm of indefinite integer. 

Two things that caught my attention: the mentioning of Dark Energy and Gamma Ray. You know that it tickled my bones whenever the subject of my discipline in the field of astronomy/astrophysics gets a special casting. Indeed science is getting into the mainstream media. 

1) Loki: "How much dark energy did the All-father have to muster to conjure you here?"

For those who aren't aware, estimated distribution of the entire cosmic components are: 74% Dark Energy, 22% Dark Matter(which I think may just be a Dark Gravity, or a gravitational feature we are not fully aware of), and 4% Ordinary Matter(us, everything we see, stars and intergalactic gases and every known matter to mankind). To that, I can modestly say that however intelligent you are, what you know is just a meager 4% of the entire cosmos. The rest are unknown, except for some of its properties. 

Dark Energy was required by All-Father Odin, Thor's father, to transport him to Earth. If this is true, Thor's civilization maybe a kind of planetary civilization that is able to understand the powers of galactic energy source, more precisely the knowledge of the continuum, the ability to manipulate time, space, matter and energy. Well, good for them. We, human beings, only understood a fraction of it. We know that Dark Energy is a repulsive force of the vacuum that rips apart the fabric of space and time. We know that it is an antithesis of gravity, but unlike gravitational force, it is not dependent on mass. If gravity is being held together by a "force carrier" called graviton, we don't know what  sticks the Dark Energy together. So our understanding of Dark Energy is only limited to the fact that it is a main contributor to the metric exponential expansion of space. 

2) Black Widow: "He wants you to track the Tesseract's gamma radiation signature." 

The traces of gamma ray emission from the Tesseract can be easily detected by amplifying the Fermi-Gamma Ray Space Telescope's Gamma Ray Burst Monitor to its highest resolution, peak intensity and optimal photon energy. This can be done by increasing the number of scintillation detectors(containing bismuth Germanium crystals) and mapping it out into the Earth latitude and longitude spot points. 

It was a good movie nonetheless. 

And it didn't end there. I even grabbed Petron Avengers Tumbler promo. For those non-Petron fuel guzzler, the Avengers tumbler can be availed for only Php60 for every Php1,000 worth of fuel at Petron. I have two of my favorites, the brainiac billionaire, Iron Man(Tony Stark) and the god of thunder, Thor. 

Another Earth???

I am neither Butch Francisco who rightfully tagged movies according to number of stars depending on how it fared to the viewing public's preference, nor am I like MobilityReel who reviews according to artistic content, plotting complexity and cinematic technology. So for this entry, let it be cleared that it isn't a movie review, neither objectively nor unwittingly.

My arcane purpose though is to cite content improbabilities based on the light of a scientific fact.

1) There is a second Earth. If the fact that there is a second Earth with exactly similar geographical features, same meteorologic strata, same atmospheric condition, and absolutely same inhabitants, it has to come from an Extended Universe. It's essentially the same universal sphere that we belong to, only that it is too far that we couldn't see it. Ergo, if there is a second Earth, we will never see it(unless we have come to a point of technological maturity that we have mastered the science of interstellar transportation).

2) A second Earth suddenly appeared close to the Earth. All planets are "gravitationally locked" to their star systems. There is no way that a second Earth was flung out in the vastness of space, only to have been captured in our Solar System. Even if there is one, we would have progressively spotted its trajectory to our orbit, a lot like how we spot meteors, comets and other NEOs(near Earth objects). And speaking of meteors, if this second Earth is hit by a meteor, causing it to have flung out of its orbital path, it would have earned crust scars and inhabitants and all symbiosis of life would have been destroyed. Ergo, the lead character would never have met herself in another Earth.

3) A second Earth orbits beside our Earth. From the previous statement, if there is a second Earth drifting in the vastness of space that will be captured by our Solar System, by gravitational law, it will orbit right beside a planetary body with the biggest mass. Ergo, the second Earth would have been orbiting beside Jupiter.

4) A second Earth orbiting very close to Earth without adverse effect on the Earth's geologic condition. You know what happened when a Moon gets close to the Earth? The gravitational tug will create a tidal bulge. Oceans will rise and seismic activities will heighten. Now imagine if another celestial orbit, the size and mass of the Earth comes so close to the Earth, imagine how detrimental it has on our environmental geodynamics. Tsunamis will occur, volcanic activities stirred than normal, tectonic plates will be disturbed. Ergo, either our life or the second Earth's life forms would have been destroyed by its coming.

5) A second Earth pops up into existence close to Earth. Since we have debunked the possibility that the second Earth will suddenly appear to us without noticing its primrose path, or the likelihood of it to halt on Earth's orbit having the median mass in the Solar System, let's take into account the astrophysical probability of a multiverse. A universe close to our universe but remained intangible because of a dimensional parallelism. Now, for the second Earth to pop up near our Earth in an instant, the civilization of that second Earth should be far more advanced than our very own. They should have mastered the aspect of harnessing the powers of the cosmos by blasting a gaping hole to our dimension for them to pass through and appear on our Earth at an instant. A civilization this advance would have known and poked around our String Theory, which is so far one of the most difficult but grandest scientific exploration of our time. Ergo, the people of the second Earth would never be like our very own, they would be highly evolved beings.

X-Men: First Class

I read comics a lot to fill in the missed TV episodes of my fave animation while I wash the dishes and my brothers are watching TV(middle child syndrome exasperation, bwahaha) One of them is "The Uncanny X-Men". And as if it ends there, with the advent of internet infrastructure, I downloaded all X-Men series I could find in Torrent.

That brings me a brimming pride to profess myself as a comic purist. So when we watched the X-Men: First Class, I couldn't help but notice some inconsistencies with the comic vs the movie version.

Although I must say that the movie was executed well and as if rewriting some comic part isn't difficult enough, they have proven that a change although leaning towards commercial mainstream is sometimes cinematically pleasant.

Here are some inconsistencies that I noticed:

1) Alex Summers(Havoc) is supposed to be the younger sibling of Scott Summers(Cyclops), not the other way around

2) Darwin belonged to an Omega mutant, a higher class of mutant along with Jean Grey and Iceman, so I was a bit disappointed when he just died in a snap

3) I noticed a less-than-stellar bond between Xavier and Magneto, unlike the older Xavier and Magneto in the X-Men 1 and 2 movie

4) Azazel and Raven Darholme(Mystique) ought to have an intimate relationship but in the movie, they don't seem to know each other. That intimacy, in fact, brought along Night Crawler, their love child.

5) Moira is Scottish and not American, as opposed to the movie. And she has an erratic, on-and-off relationship with Banshee. Also that part was never shown.

The movie is good, and I couldn't help but notice the HOTNESS of Mystique.

Thor and the Einstein-Rosen bridge

This is not a movie review.

My childhood was a cartoon epidemic. I grew up with it just as everybody grow up with it as an integral part of their childhood, however mine was a little non-popular medium, comics, particularly Pinoy komiks. Unlike the general public who get fascinated Marvels, I on the other hand, followed Mars Ravelo. While everyone was so immersed with Thor, I, in my seclusion, was dipped with Dodong Maso.

It was just during college that I added DC and Marvel characters to my very few superhero assembly in the likes of Silverhawks, Centurions, and Bionic Six. One of that Marvel characters is Thor, so when the news about it released as a motion picture, I was hit by my anxiety attack.

I thought of watching it at Ultra 7(Php400) but I was informed that it's just LaZ Boy and not 3D, so I opted for the Cinema 6(Php350) instead. I have been sleeping in a LaZ Boy in the office, so that seating option has not been a luxury for me anymore.

One thing that got my attention in the movie is Einstein-Rosen bridge. For those of you who are into astronomy and astrophysics, this is not the first time that you encountered such a word. In fact, you'd probably hear it over and over, countless times. This is the holy grail of time travel, I should say.

Let me explain to you in layman's terms: Every solid surface in this world is NOT ABSOLUTELY solid. It has full of holes and crevices in a quantum scale. The same can be said of time. It is this gaping hole in the fabric of time that might give way to space travelers in unfathomable distances, the tunnel of the past and future. This tunnel is conveniently called WORMHOLE.

Hold your horses and don't sell your real estate in exchange for time travel ticket yet, wormhole is highly unstable and right before you can make your first step, it may have already closed. Second, it is humstrung by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, one that states that you will be transported to an unknown distance and dimension in random order. Who knows you would end up at the core of a star.

As I lectured this Einstein's field equation, one student ask: can we just make an artificially created wormhole? The answer to that is YES, but it will take the power of a star to do that. And our planetary civilization can't harness that immense power, just not yet.