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Tuesday, 12 April 2011

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Main reason for Yuri’s selection was appearance:

Nice face wins space race


Vostok I lift-off

Yuri Gagarin - the Russian astronaut was the first human in space. The flight was a massive victory for the Soviet Union as the United States could not put a man in space before Soviet Union. This brought about changes in political, social, cultural and technical perspectives in many ways.

On April 12 1961, Vostok 1 lifted off with astronaut Yuri Gagarin on board. Gagarin’s capsule was controlled from the ground. His flight circled the Earth once, lasting only one hour and 48 minutes. The launch of the first shuttle mission on April 12, 1961 was a huge success achieved by Soviet Union in space missions.

Space race

In 1961, the Mercury Project - first manned space mission was prepared for launch by the United State. Alan Shepared was the astronaut who was in charge of the project. But due to technical difficulties the mission was postponed until May. On May 5, 1961 he became the first American in space.

However the Soviet Union took the opportunity to launch the first manned space mission before America and they were first to win the space race with a huge success. Though the Soviets space mission was a shock to the American government, President Kennedy congratulated the Soviets on their achievement.


Soviet Union chose Yuri because his outward appearance was perfect for space race propaganda

Gherman Titov and Yuri Gagarin were the two capable and qualified astronauts to fly the Vostok. But only one astronaut could be accommodated. Both Titov and Gagarin were smaller in height and build, smart, and both were excellent pilots. But only Yuri had the charisma and outgoing personality to deal with the media. He was handsome, polite and humble. Soviet Union chose him because his outward appearance was perfect for space race propaganda.

Due to the popularity made by the first man in space the Soviet government did not use Gagarin for later space missions. Soviet government did not want to loose their space hero as the space missions were too risky and dangerous. Instead he trained other astronauts.

Traditions

It is said that Gagarin emptied his bladder on his way to launching site. It later became a tradition for astronauts to urinate on the back tire of the transport bus before their flights.

However there are some arguments regarding that Soviets lied about Gagarin’s space flight. A book published for the 50th anniversary of Gagarin’s flight 108 Minutes That Changed the World by Russian journalist Anton Pervushin, revealed that Soviet scientists have made an error on the landing of the space flight. Soviet literature claims that Gagarin and the Vostok landing capsule had landed on the proper site. But the book says that there was no one on the ground to meet Gagarin when he was arrived 500 miles south of Moscow because he was supposed to land nearly 250 miles further south.

The book further reveals that “nobody was waiting or looking for Yuri Gagarin. Therefore the first thing he had to do after landing was set off to look for people and communications equipment so he could tell them where he was”

The author says that Gagarin has landed separately by a parachute and not inside the capsule as the Soviets claim.

Gagarian was only 34 years when he died in a jet crash during a training flight. A year after his death Neil Armstrong, an American astronaut, became the first man to walk on the moon. Somehow the Americans went into the annals of space history for Apollo 11’s flight to the Moon in July 1969.


Inquisition of Galileo Galilei:

Astronomer who moved the earth

In the dark ages, whoever was contrary to the Catholic Church could be caught by the inquisitors. Those who were accused of heresy and blasphemy would often go through intense torture, perpetual incarceration or painful and slow death. Galileo Galilei in April 1633, head bowed, sat before the Roman Inquisition, an old man, tired and broken. Yielding to irresistible pressure, he recanted his heretical view that the Earth goes around the Sun rather than is stationary at the centre of the Universe, as taught by Aristotle and, most significantly, the Church. It is the defining folk image of the clash between science and religion.


Inquisition of Galileo

Galileo Galilei, born in Pisa Italy in 1564, was a mathematician, physicist and astronomer who defended the Copernican model named after the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Corpenicus - of the heliocentric theory of the universe that the Earth and other planets revolved around the sun and not the opposite as scriptures suggested.

His observations provided powerful support for the idea, though they were still just about compatible with the Ptolemaic idea in which the Sun and planets described weird “epicyclic” circles within circles about completely empty points in space. Nevertheless, Galileo felt confident enough to present the merits of the Copernican view in his book ‘Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems’ in 1632. It was a fatal mistake.

Galileo Galilei was a genius. Of that there is no doubt. He discovered that the period of a pendulum is independent of the size of its swing, reputedly by comparing the duration of the swing of the bronze chandelier in the cathedral in Pisa with the regular throb of his own pulse. He deduced the laws governing falling bodies by timing them as they slid down gently inclined planes.

Learning of the invention of a magnifying device containing a convex and a concave lens by the German-Dutch lens maker Hans Lippershey in 1608, Galileo threw himself into the construction of his own version. Recognising that its magnification depended crucially on the ratio of the “focal” length of the main, “objective”, lens to the focal length of the “eyepiece”, he rapidly evolved a telescope which could make distant objects appear 30 times bigger.

He immediately turned it on the heavens. Galileo was not the first to sweep a telescope across the night sky or even to draw what he saw. The credit for that goes to the Englishman Thomas Harriot, who sketched the crater-strewn Moon in the summer of 1609. But Galileo was a supreme publicist - not to mention an artist and communicator - and it was his book ‘The Starry Messenger’, published in Venice in spring 1610, that set the intellectual world of 17th-century Europe on fire. Like Harriot, Galileo discovered that the face of the Moon was not perfect, but sullied by craters and mountain chains.

He witnessed the planet Venus go from crescent to full and back under changing illumination from the sun. And he discovered that the planet Jupiter was orbited by four moons, irrefutable evidence that not all bodies circled the Earth. Galileo was aware of the Catholic Church’s 1616 edict against the Copernican worldview. So he carefully concocted a fictional debate between adherents of the various world systems, purporting to be even-handed but favouring the evidence-based Copernican view.

A devout Catholic, he even had the book approved by the Vatican. It was to no avail. In 1633, Galileo, a frail old man of 69 who had to be carried in a litter, was forced to make the arduous journey from Florence to Rome. He was never actually tortured by the Roman Inquisition but it knew the terror value of allowing the threat to hang unspoken in the air.


Galileo Galili demonstrating the telescope

In September 1632, the Inquisition accused Galileo of violating the injunction of 1616 and ordered him to Rome. Galileo faced a trial before ten cardinals in April 1633. The cardinals’ decision read: “We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo . . . have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the centre of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the centre of the world.” 

The great irony is that many of the intellectuals of the Church were well versed in the latest scientific ideas and happy to embrace them. But this was not a trial about which scientific idea was supported by the evidence, as Galileo had naively believed.

His arguments - which he thought were so strong they would easily win over the Roman Inquisition - were barely even alluded to. The trial was about one thing and one thing only: power. Who wielded it and who yielded to it. The Roman Church at the time was reeling from the Protestant Reformation, which had reinterpreted the Scriptures. Seeing its power eroded in northern Europe, it felt a desperate need to reassert its authority against any act of defiance.

The publication of Galileo’s book, despite its approval by the Vatican, was just such an act. In truth, Pope Urban VIII was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. Insisting on a literal interpretation of the Bible was of course bound to come into conflict with observations as scientific instruments improved.

On the other hand, the Church had to reassert its slipping power over the minds of men or face oblivion.

The Inquisition’s uncompromising message was simple: “You will believe this because we say so.” Galileo was led away to spend the last years of his life a prisoner in his own home. And a pattern was set for the clash between science and religion, which has echoed down the centuries to this very day.

Galileo was supposed to be imprisoned, but the Pope commuted this sentence to house arrest at Galileo’s home near Florence, where he died blind at the age of 78. Despite the Church’s attempt to stop free thinking and hide the truth, the message of the great thinker did not die along with his body. All the pain and the lost years in jail seem insignificant when compared with the greatness of his thoughts.

After being forced to recant his ‘heretical’ views, legend has it that as he shuffled away to imprisonment, he muttered, in defiance of his ecclesiastical tormentors: “E pur si muove!” - “And yet it does move” - an explicit contradiction of the biblical doctrine that the Earth is fixed in space.

It will actually never be known that he actually did say the words. But still, it’s nice to think he did.


Filiki Eteria

Filiki Eteria or Society of Friends was a secret 19th Century organization, whose purpose was to overthrow Ottoman rule over Greece and to establish an independent Greek state. Society members were mainly young Phanariot Greeks from Russia and local chieftains from Greece. One of the leaders of the society was Alexander Ypsilantis. In the spring of 1821 the society initiated the Greek War of Independence.


Chaos theory

The term ‘chaos theory’ comes from the fact that the systems that the theory describes are apparently disordered, but chaos theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data. According to the Chaos theory seemingly random events are actually predictable from simple deterministic equations.

In a scientific context, the word chaos has a slightly different meaning than it does in its general usage as a state of confusion, lacking any order. Chaos, with reference to chaos theory, refers to an apparent lack of order in a system that nevertheless obeys particular laws or rules.


Homing instinct

Homing instinct is the ability exhibited by animals including birds, bees, salmon, rats, cats and even snails to find their way back home even after traveling long distances over unfamiliar territory.

 

 

 


Schoolboy befriends jackdaw



 Bird brained: Sunderland schoolboy Emmanuel Adams has amazingly befriended this wild jackdaw he passes each day on the way to school

Parents and pupils at St Mary’s RC Primary School in Sunderland complained of being tormented by this jackdaw when it first began appearing at the gates in early December. It menaced pupils, divebombing children whenever they ventured outside the classroom. Children were so terrified that teachers shortened playtimes and kept them inside to prevent further attacks.

The council even gave the school a high-tech bird scaring device to try to drive it away. But now, like a real life Kes, the bird has befriended one pupil who passes it on his way to school. Amazingly, the bird started landing on ten-year-old Emmanuel Adams’ shoulder as he walked to class. His feathered friend, who he has named Jack, has taken a shine to Emmanuel, who says the bird is ‘not a bully’.

Just like the 1969 film Kes, where a Northern schoolboy tames and befriends a wild Kestrel, the bird and the boy have become firm friends. And for the past few days the curious crow has even been living with the Adams family, alongside three dogs, four fish and Emmanuel’s sisters, Rebecca, 16, Alexi, 11, and Androniki, nine.

Emmanuel’s mother, Carolyn Adams, 46, a full-time mum, said: ‘The bird took an instant liking to Emmanuel, he would approach him as he walked to school.

He picked him out from the other schoolkids. ‘One day he just sat on Emmanuel’s arm and from then on he would go to school with the bird perched on his arm or shoulder. ‘A lorry driver nearly crashed watching him, he was so amazed by it. ‘On Tuesday it wouldn’t leave his arm and he walked straight into the house with it. It seems to have settled here and it sits and lets Emmanuel stroke it. ‘Emmanuel has been sat with Jack on his shoulder watching telly and while he had his revision work on his lap, Jack was trying to turn the pages. ‘I’ve got some wild bird feed and I’ve read online that they’re omnivorous so I gave him some of our mince and pasta last night. I’ve given him fruit too.

Mrs Adams admitted she feels bad about having a wild bird in the house and said she has contacted bird charities for advice on looking after Jack.

Daily Mail


1633 - The formal inquest of Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition begins.

1820 - Alexander Ypsilantis is declared leader of Filiki Eteria, a secret organization to overthrow Ottoman rule over Greece.

1831 - Soldiers marching on the Broughton Suspension Bridge in Manchester, England cause it to collapse.

1927 - Chiang Kai-shek orders the Communist Party of China members executed in Shanghai, ending the First United Front.

1934 - The strongest surface wind gust in the world at 231 mph, is measured on the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire

1937 - Sir Frank Whittle ground-tests the first jet engine designed to power an aircraft, at Rugby, England.

1945 - US President Franklin D Roosevelt dies while in office; vice-president Harry Truman is sworn in as the 33rd President.

1961 - Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human to travel into outer space, in Vostok 3KA-2 (Vostok 1).

1980 - Samuel Doe takes control of Liberia in a coup d’état, ending over 130 years of national democratic presidential succession.

1980 - Terry Fox begins his ‘Marathon of Hope’ at St John’s, Newfoundland.

1988 - Harvard University patents genetically engineered mouse (1st for animal life)

1990 - First meeting of East German democratically elected parliament, acknowledges responsibility for Nazi holocaust and asks for forgiveness

1999 -US President Bill Clinton is cited for contempt of court for giving “intentionally false statements” in a sexual harassment civil lawsuit.

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