ars magna
greg posted in Uncategorized on May 13th, 2008
“Getting scooped” is an ongoing occupational hazard for astronomers. An interesting idea pops into your head, or a significant peak starts to emerge in a periodogram, and you drop everything to do an analysis and write up your idea or discovery for submission. If your idea seems to work, and as your story takes shape on paper, it occurs to you that there are plenty of other colleagues who could easily have latched on to what you’ve just done. After all, there are only so many nearby red dwarfs in the sky!
The invention of the telescope at the beginning of the seventeenth century led to very rapid progress in astronomy, and because telescopes are relatively straightforward to make once the principle is understood, astronomers suddenly faced heightened competition, and with it, the ever-unnerving possibility of getting scooped.
Anagrams were brought into use as a method of protecting one’s priority of discovery while simultaneously keeping a discovery under wraps in order to obtain further verification. Galileo was an early adopter of anagrams. After observing Saturn, he circulated the following jumble of letters:
s m a i s m r m i l m e p o e t a l e u m i b u n e n u g t t a u i r a s
When he was ready to announce that Saturn has a very unusual shape when seen through his small telescope, he revealed that the letters in the anagram can be rearranged to read, Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi, or “I have observed the highest planet tri-form.”
Galileo’s telescope wasn’t powerful enough to allow him to decode what he was actually seeing when he observed Saturn. The true configuration as a ringed planet was first understood by Christiaan Huygens, who, in 1656, with the publication of the discovery of Titan in De Saturni luna observatio nova, also circulated an anagram to protect his claim to discovery:
a a a a a a a c c c c c d e e e e e h i i i i i i i l l l l m m n n n n n n n n n o o o o p p q r r s t t t t t u u u u u.
In 1659, Huygens revealed that the anagram can be decoded to read, Annulo cingitur, tenui, plano, nusquam cohaerente, ad eclipticam inclinato, or “It is surrounded by a thin flat ring, nowhere touching, and inclined to the ecliptic.”
The most appealing anagrams rearrange the true sentence into a satisfyingly oblique haiku-like clue. In connection with his discovery of the phases of Venus, Galileo issued an anagram that read, Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur, or “These immature ones have already been read in vain by me.” When properly reconstructed, the letters reveal that, Cynthiae figuras aemulatur Mater Amorum, or “The Mother of Loves [i.e. Venus] imitates the figures of Cynthia [i.e. the moon]“.
So, in service to this venerable tradition, but without adhering to the hoary custom of couching everything in Latin, let me just say that,
Huge Applet, Unsearchable Terrestrials!
Note that according to the wikipedia,
The disadvantage of computer anagram solvers, especially when applied to multi-word anagrams, is that they usually have no understanding of the meaning of the words they are manipulating. They are therefore usually poor at filtering out meaningful or appropriate anagrams from large numbers of nonsensical word combinations.
May 13th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Hmmm… of the interesting possibilities, both “transitsearch” and “superearth” are in there, but after taking both of those out I don’t get much that makes sense. Unless “pale blue gel” has anything to do with anything.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Just some random speculation, bawsed on Andy’s post.
Transit SuperEarth, Pale Blue Gel.
Transits would be most easily detected around red dwarfs. “After all, there are only so many nearby red dwarfs in the sky!”.
Pale Blue gel? Whatever the image is that Greg posted somewhat fits “blue”.
Then again, we’re expecting HD 80606 b data. At least… I think we are. Maybe the planet has been detected in transit?
May 14th, 2008 at 3:42 am
at the risk of sounding over-hopeful, and by taking some liberties with customary astronomical nomenclature, a possible solution seems to be
“grail result, alp cent bee has super earth!”
I’ve checked it twice, but it’s late here and I may have made a mistake…
Mike
May 14th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
I can get “Gliese super Earth search” but I am then left with “blue planatrt”. Suggestive, but no revelations there!
May 14th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
“grail” means, according to ‘teh internets’, “the object of any prolonged endeavor”. In which case, indeed, I would guess a planet around Alf Cen B would make sense.
And I confirm, that “grail result, alp cent bee has super earth!†can indeed be made from “Huge Applet, Unsearchable Terrestrials”
May 14th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
“Super Earth At Alpha Cen B. Rigel, Less True???”
May 14th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
(or of course, “Super Earth At Rigel. Alpha Cen B, Less True”, but I didn’t think anyone targetted blue supergiants for planet searching.)
May 15th, 2008 at 1:46 am
How about: “Bells greet Alpha Centauri’s super Earth!”?
May 15th, 2008 at 2:10 am
Or: “The spectral lines reap a Regulus B Earth.”.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:23 am
Or: “Rigel B planet search seals up true earth.”
May 15th, 2008 at 3:26 am
“This huge pulsar celebrates rare planet.”
May 15th, 2008 at 6:21 am
Extending the entry from Mike Hall above on 5/14/2008 @ 1:06 gives:
Search Star G, lie super blue earth planet
Maybe Star G is Gliese?
May 15th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
I’m pretty sure looking for planets around Rigel is pointless. Most B and O stars have something wrong with them (pulsations, B’e’ issues and so on, on top of enormous surface jitter). Unless, of course, Rigel is in reference to ‘Rigel Kentaurus’.
May 15th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Has anyone looked at the title of the post for anagrams?
May 15th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
The title is probably “Anagram”.
May 15th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Greg, thank you for such a provocative posting!
Can you say whether the anagram is hiding a secret that was obtained observationally or theoretically?
And can you estimate how long we have to wait until the secret is unveiled?
I hope these questions aren’t rude, but it also sure would be interesting to know whether you and your colleagues have already observing Alpha Centauri. (In the comments section of http://www.oklo.org/?p=269, you commented that the first observing run of one Alpha Centauri project was scheduled to start on May 19th…) Thanks for any extra info!
May 15th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
wandering anagram stars
Greg Laughlin at Systemic has put out a teasing hint about a potential major extrasolar planet discovery….
May 15th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Dear Hungry4info3,
Doh!
wb.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Wbianco, thanks. Left for a while due to what seems to be everything stalling (I’ve lost track of how many things I’m waiting on data to be released for, Ups And system inclination, LHS 288 b?, Periodicity variations in OGLE-TR-111 b, the list goes on and on). I’m trying to get more seriously active in using the console though.
eric, from what I can tell from the progress of the HD 80606 data, we could be waiting a while.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:40 am
Or: “BL Ceti has sure planet: large super-earth.”
May 16th, 2008 at 3:08 am
Or: “The secure planet b pushes larger Altair.”
May 16th, 2008 at 5:36 am
Wow! I’m amazed at the seeming plausibility of some of these rearrangements.
So here is a bit more information: (1) I’m hoping that we’ll be able to announce the solution soon, but the analysis is proving to be more computationally intensive than we’d initially projected. (2) The words “super” and “Earth” don’t appear in the solution, and (3) HD 80606 news will be forthcoming quite soon, but is quite unrelated to the anagram…
cheers,
Greg
May 16th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Rätselhafte Ankündigung einer Entdeckung
Eine wissenschaftliche Entdeckung wird verschlüsselt veröffentlicht.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
On the German language blog listed above, Greg gave another clue:
“The solution contains a German name.”
- Greg Laughlin (via the Google translator)
May 16th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
iPod iChing - magna ras
Friday commences, and it rains. So, Oh Mighty iPod - what is the deal with Oklo’s dark cryptic hints? A planet discovered, and where? Whoosh goes the randomizer. Whoosh….
May 17th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Gliese could be the german name, wikipedia says he was a german born in Poland though, so this could be wrong.. A catologue number is harder to come up with, maybe the anagram holds other clues to it’s position, maybe the constellation?
“Har! at hercules a planet perturbs gliese!”
Or maybe we could use some of the letters to spell the catalogue number, with the right font gliese 581 looks almost the same as gliese SBl.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
“The solution contains a German name.â€
Gliese is a German name. And it’s well established that Gliese can be found in the anagram, which may not be surprising: it isn’t a very small anagram. If we take out Gliese, we’re left with
(HueAppetUnsearchablTerrtrals)(Gliese)
May 17th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Another good relevant German name in the jumble is Herschel. There is a Herschel telescope at Palomar (anyone know if Greg and crew book time there?) and there are stars that Herschel (Sr. or Jr.) first cataloged. No luck so far finding good anagrams using it though.
May 17th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_astronomers lists Gliese, Herschel, Copernicus, Gauss among others. I’m rooting for Thiessen, myself. It does help that there’s no W or Z or K in the anagram as that narrows the search space.
Just an opinion, but I think Greg wouldn’t confabulate numbers and letters here, or use cryptic abbreviations in his starting sentence. That just doesn’t seem to fit with the spirit of the anagram process.
Chris
May 17th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Tisessen died in 1961, if Greg’s announcement is indeed news, I don’t think Tiessen would be in it.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
[...] Huge Applet, Unsearchable Terrestrials! Geen lezer zal vermoeden waar ik ‘t over heb, maar het heeft wel degelijk met sterrenkunde te maken. Het is namelijk een anagram, een woord of zin, die volledig bestaat uit de letters van een ander woord of een andere zin. Het anagram is gemaakt door Greg Laughlin, sinds 2007 Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics op de Universiteit van Californië in Santa Cruz (zie hier z’n CV). Geheel in de traditie van onder andere Galileo1 en Huygens2 maakte Laughlin het anagram. Het vermoeden bestaat dat hij met het anagram doelt op een bijzondere ontdekking. Hij is met anderen bezig om aardachtige exoplaneten te ontdekken, dus wellicht doet hij op deze ludieke wijze een aankondiging. Afijn, op internet zijn al diverse oplossingen bedacht voor het anagram: [...]
May 17th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Translation, via the great Google Translator
”
No reader will suspect that I ‘t talking about, but it has to do with astronomy. It is an anagram, a word or phrase, which is fully composed of the letters of another word or another sentence. The anagram was created by Greg Laughlin, since 2007 Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz (see his CV). In the tradition of, among other Galileo1 and Huygens2 Laughlin made the anagram. The suspicion exists that he has the anagram refers to a special discovery. He is working with others to discover exoplanets aardachtige, so perhaps he does on this playful way an announcement. Afijn, on the Internet are already various solutions devised for the anagram”
May 18th, 2008 at 9:37 am
My solution: Herschel ‘l see a big terraplanet: P Taurus. :-)
May 18th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Somebody on another webpage, http://www.astroblogs.nl/2008/05/17/huge-applet-unsearchable-terrestrials/
“Herschel bags terrestrial planet!”
However, this leaves “uApUe: =S
May 18th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
That somebody is me, it’s my blog. “Herschel ‘l see a big terraplanet: P Taurus” leaves nothing. Question is: is P Taurus something? I know what a T Tauri star is. But what is P Tauri?
May 18th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
[...] Astronomen och jesuitprästen José Funes tycker att det är i alla fall ’svÃ¥rt att utesluta’ att liv kan finnas pÃ¥ annat hÃ¥ll i universum. Foto: Vatikanobservatoriet I skarven mellan religion och vetenskapen kan det hända märkliga saker. Veckans bisarraste nyhet handlar om vad pÃ¥vens chefsastronom, José Funes, sagt i en intervju i vatikanblaskan Osservatore Romano om eventuellt liv pÃ¥ andra planeter (Catholic News Service, DN, Aftonbladet). Funes drar klokt ett teologiskt likhetstecken mellan eventuella utomjordingar och vÃ¥ra medjordbor djuren, och talar om vÃ¥ra ‘utomjordiska bröder’. Sen spekulerar han i om kanske sÃ¥na skulle vara mindre syndtyngda gentemot Gud än vi pÃ¥ jorden. Där är han rent vetenskapligt ute och cyklar innan han uppfunnit hjulet, kan man tycka. Men det gÃ¥r att diskutera — hos Ave Maris Stella till exempel — även om skeptikerna verkar vara fler (t ex Birger Schlaug, som förresten tror att samtliga stjärnor har planetsystem, nÃ¥got som nog ingen astronom skulle vÃ¥ga pÃ¥stÃ¥). ÄndÃ¥ gillar jag att religiöst bevandrade prövar sina tankar och tron mot vetenskapens upptäckter. Man vet nämligen aldrig när det kan bli skarpt läge. I veckan kungjorde exoplanetforskaren och bloggaren Greg Laughlin att en banbrytande upptäckt är pÃ¥ väg. Det gjorde han förresten i form av ett anagram, nÃ¥got som storheter som Galilei och Huygens före honom använt för att skydda sina mest explosiva framsteg. Sannolikt rör det sig om en jordliknande planet, men trots ivriga försök att tyda anagrammet sÃ¥ är det ännu oklart vad som är pÃ¥ g. Kanske anar José Funes nÃ¥got. Vi lovar att Ã¥terkomma när saken klarnar. [...]
May 19th, 2008 at 4:39 am
Hi Greg,
While your readers may have fun with your anagram, I don’t think that it will help to prevent you from being scooped. If you have a competitor working on the same that reads your blog, then they’ll be able to solve your anagram. And then they’ll know that they have competition, while you will not. This could spur them to get their result out more quickly. So, your anagram might spur your competition to scoop you. If the competition’s paper comes out first, your anagram is not likely to ensure that you get priority.
May 19th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Translation is rather jumbled (from Sweedish), but basically talks about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and commenting about the vagueness of the announcenement, then finally promising to report more information when it becomes clearer.
Greg, what kind of discovery is this on the (Mundane/Yay) scale? 1 being a typical hot Jupiter (imagine the reaction to CoRoT-Exo-2 b), and 10 being a transiting super-Earth?
(Feel free to go beyond 10 if it’s really, really good, i.e. SETI contact results or something, lol)
May 19th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Gliese charts a bluer, superearth planet!
May 19th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Two stars possibly referred to appear to be “Gliese 103″ and “Gliese 310Aa”.
You can spell out some numbers along with the word Gliese - for example, Gliese three ten, and then you are left with:
( gliese three ten Aa)(upplet,Usrchabl star!)
If I understand this table correctly: http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/datenbanken/aricns/gliese.htm , “Gliese 310Aa” and “Gliese 103″ are valid star designations.
Other possibilities for spelling out the numbers so that star catalog designations can be used include “three”, “ten”, “eight”, and “thirteen”…
May 31st, 2008 at 2:13 am
Argh, that’s what I’d call a bait for a former astronomy student turned rpg designer (and just fiddling around with near star data). So my guess is:
u r right, a real planet at Bessel’s, cheer up!
(where “Bessel’s” is 61 Cyg (sometimes “Bessel’s Star”; first parallax discovered in 1838).
Thomas
June 14th, 2008 at 5:22 am
This post keeps changing.
First the image,
now the title. We now have an additional ’s’ with our “ar magna”, so I guess the title is “anagrams”. That’s a bit of a hint?
June 22nd, 2008 at 6:09 am
As a light-hearted attempt, how about these?
Triple blue planet ushers a gatecrasher
Relish a blue planet; gatecrasher erupts
Planet AAA Cheeseburger Erupts, Thrills!
Alpha Centauri a bestseller; regret push
Dr Chromo
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:17 am
Large super Earth there, it’s Sun B Capella!
June 25th, 2008 at 3:33 am
I just started on this anagram and my knowledge of astronomical terminology is poor at best, but I did find another German (in origin at least) surname associated with red dwarfs. Haberle, Robert. Hopefully that will help someone. Lacaille 8760 anyone?
July 2nd, 2008 at 12:45 am
Appears Light Returns Reheatable Clues
July 6th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
[...] as a case of wishful thinking, I chalked the slowdown to the traffic spike that came in when the anagram post got written up at the NY Times [...]