Tag Archives: experiment

The Ancient Earth 6. Life and all that… Part 2

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The Origin of Life? – Science persists in asking…

Not your ordinary enquiry - Galileo before the Inquisition

Galileo Before the Holy Office  Joseph Nicolas Robert-Fleury

When our Renaissance heroes Galileo, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe cogitated the celestial sphere and removed humanity from the centre of the physical universe, they must have developed cricks in their necks – regularly looking over their shoulders for the ever-watchful ecclesiastical authorities who brutally insisted on maintaining the status quo.  Six hundred years later we still want to understand the unknown and persist in our curiosity, although the consequences of our enquiry are not usually as dire as those faced by Copernicus.  We continue to ask questions and one of these, for which there are still few answers, is ‘how did life begin?’.  Embedded in a question like this are metaphysical quandaries that consider consciousness and our humanity; one wonders whether such attributes will ever enter the realm of the empirical.  However, science can attempt to deal with explicitly empirical parts of the question, such as ‘how might organic molecules, that are critical to functioning cells, have formed on the ancient earth?’.

The first article on this thorny topic dealt with an iconic set of chemical experiments conducted in the early 1950s. This post takes these experiments incrementally further.

 

The molecularstructure of amino acidsIn 1953 Stanley Miller, then a young postgraduate student under the tutelage of Harold Urey, conducted experiments that produced several organic compounds, including amino acids. The chemical reactions were all abiotic. They demonstrated that some of the important chemical ingredients of living cells could be produced without the interaction of life-forms. This was a huge step forward in scientists’ understanding of how life arose on earth.

However…

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Make your own meteorite crater – comparing experiment with the real world

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What a meteorite impact might look likeClick on the image to make it larger

Make your own meteorite crater – comparing experiment with the real world

This post shows you how to make your own meteorite crater – it’s pretty easy. There are also many interesting questions we can ask of our experiments with craters, like “how do they compare with real craters?”

Meteorites in earth/solar system history

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