What are supernovae? Human and nature. Just a few centuries ago, the influence of man on nature was extremely insignificant, but in the course of scientific and technological progress, civilization has become so

Linguists tried to understand when people learned to distinguish a new color for themselves.

When we talk about a cloudless sky, we don’t think twice about imagining it as blue. Pushkin's old man lived with his old woman “near the very blue sea”; blue and indigo are among the colors of the rainbow... These colors seem to us to be a familiar part of the world around us, but this was not always the case.

In 1858, British writer William Gladstone noticed that there was not a single mention of the color blue in Homer's Iliad.

The version that Homer was blind has long been rejected by scientists: colorful and detailed descriptions of weapons, faces, animals, details of clothing, and so on are scattered throughout the pages of the Iliad.

However, many things are “painted” in colors that are unusual for us. Thus, Homeric honey is green, and the sea and sheep are purple.

Gladstone took the time and decided to count all the mentions of color in the great book. It turned out that black appears in the Iliad about 170 times, and white - 100. By a large margin, red is in third place (13 times), yellow and green got about 10 mentions, and purple - 7.

The researcher looked up other ancient Greek texts and found that none of them contained the word "blue."

At the same time, noting the absence of such known colors as pink or orange, Gladstone suggested that the ability to clearly distinguish colors in humans developed relatively recently.

Not only Homer, but also his contemporaries saw the world in contrasts between light and darkness.This bold idea was developed by his contemporary, the German philologist Lazarus Geiger.

He turned to the Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Hindu and Chinese texts, and the Hebrew version of the Bible. Everywhere you can find poetic and rich descriptions of any phenomena.

“The only thing that is not there is the blue color of the sky,” the researcher concluded.

Only one ancient culture had its own word for blue: we are talking about the Egyptians, who knew how to obtain a blue dye. In nature, indeed, the blue color is not very common: blue eyes are not common, blue animals and flowers are rare.

For example, the famous “blue whale,” known to man since the 17th century, received the word “blue” in its name only two centuries later. And the blueness of the sky is a relative concept. Returning to the Iliad: in Homer’s text the sky is “wide”, “great”, “starry”, “iron” or “copper”, but never blue or blue.

Deciding to find out exactly when blue first appeared in our usual sense, Geiger discovered that in all the languages ​​he examined, the first colors were black and white, characterizing everything dark or everything light.

At the next stage of human development, red appears throughout the world: the color of wine and blood. Then people looked at yellow and green, and the last one in this series was blue.

In the Old Russian language, the word “blue” can be traced at least from the 11th-12th centuries, but then people also saw colors differently. Soviet literary critic Yu.M. Lotman, studying ancient Russian texts, notes that blue was synonymous with black or crimson-red. In particular, the “blue eyes” in one of the texts belong to a drunkard with bloodshot eyes.

When talking about gray animals and birds, our ancestors used the word “blue”, and called gray eyes, which we would now characterize as blue. And just like Homer and other ancient authors, in ancient Russian texts the sky is never called blue.

The colors of the rainbow deserve special mention. It is believed that there are seven of them, and this number includes blue, but this interpretation was proposed by Isaac Newton in the 17th century. Aristotle named only three colors: red, green, violet, and some African tribes still distinguish only two colors in the rainbow - dark and light.

And even Newton first identified only five primary colors: red, yellow, green, blue and violet, but later he included orange and indigo, by analogy with the number of notes in the musical scale. Previously, apparently, people saw a rainbow as a transition from red to purple, without unnecessary detail.

In the 21st century, Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher returned to the question of the connection between language and color perception of the world in his book “Through the Mirror of Language”.

Building on the research of Gladstone and Geiger, he collected a large collection of examples from modern languages ​​among a few peoples, discovering that in most cases they did not have a separate word for blue.

Thus, the inhabitants of the island of Nias in Sumatra operate with only four color concepts: black, white, red and yellow. Green, blue and violet are shades of black among them. And representatives of the Ovaherero tribe in Namibia see the difference between blue and green, but consider it too insignificant to come up with their own word for “the same color,” and classify blue as green.

Among modern languages ​​spoken by a relatively large number of people, Serbian is an example: the word applied to blue objects is also used to mean "light".

You have to guess based on the context of the phrase (the sea will be more blue than light, and the hair will be more blond than blue). In English, the separate adjective “blue” never appeared; This is just one shade of blue.

On the eve of the first celebration of Russian Unity Day on November 4, associated with the end of the Polish intervention and the Time of Troubles of the early 17th century, a scientific conference organized by the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and dedicated to the stages of the formation of civil society in our country was held in Moscow on Wednesday. The main idea of ​​the assembled scientists was that it is wrong now to talk about the formation of civil society in modern Russia, since it has existed and been functioning in our country for a long time, and one of the first and most striking manifestations of civic activity was precisely the militia under the leadership of Minin and Pozharsky , created at the beginning of the 17th century.

According to scientists, it is impossible to say that now we are only building a civil society in modern Russia. The question should be posed differently - what is it, how much and how to modernize it, and how it develops. If we state that there is no civil society in our country, then we also indirectly deny the viability of the Russian state and Russian society as such.

This state of affairs has an extremely negative impact not only on the international image of Russia, but also on its citizens, because in this case they do not have the right to respect their freedoms, rights, sovereignty, etc. Scientists also noted that the dilemma that has been talked about a lot lately - “how to build a national idea and national identity in a multinational state” - was already solved several centuries ago by civil society itself and the multinational people of our country. Thus, just fifty years after the Kazan Khanate joined Russia, its residents sided with the militia of Minin and Pozharsky.

Scientists have noted that at the beginning of the 17th century, almost all layers of society were on the side of Minin and Pozharsky, and their most active supporters were representatives of the then “middle class” - those who were associated with trade, townspeople, etc. Simultaneously with the Time of Troubles, quite progressive state processes for that time took place in Russia; in particular, it was then that the first experience of limiting royal power took place. It was especially noted that before the accession of the Romanov dynasty, for a year and a half, the vast territory of the Russian state was governed by a collegial body - the Council of the Whole Land.

Separately noted was the fact that after the end of the Time of Troubles, Russia faced a difficult dilemma, which subsequently appeared more than once in Russian history. On the one hand, during the turmoil, the people and Russian civil society made a breakthrough to self-government, on the other hand, the country needed rapid centralization, which, given the vast territory, is most appropriate to carry out under an authoritarian regime. Although at first glance it may seem that after the restoration of the monarchy and the accession of the Romanovs, Russia abolished a number of “democratic” innovations of the Time of Troubles, in reality, a consensus was found between various layers of society, between the authorities and the population.

In particular, after the Time of Troubles, there were practically no repressions (the exceptions were those who were associated with the Poles), while the remaining participants in the conflict, who acted on the side of False Dmitry, the first and second militias, etc., remained within the framework of society and the state. At the end of the Time of Troubles, representatives of these warring parties worked together in the administrative system and other bodies of the state apparatus. Also, artisans, merchants, and the urban population received significant benefits, since emergency taxes were abolished and a preferential tax was introduced, which allowed them to first “get on their feet.” This tax policy of reconciliation of interests ensured rapid growth and restoration of cities. We can say that then the Russian authorities applied an old principle, which is not always translated into Russian unambiguously: “Divide and conquer” - another translation of this phrase sounds like: “Differentiate interests and rule taking into account these interests.”

As for which path for Russia after each bifurcation point - a more liberal or a more authoritarian one - would be more correct, this is a long-standing dispute among representatives of historical science, on whose political views their assessment of certain historical events largely depends. So, if we open Nathan Eidelman, we will see that Russian society from its very birth strived and at one or another stage of its development implemented “liberal” models, starting from the Novgorod and Pskov veche. The abolition of these institutions, according to the historian, was anti-progressive and detrimental to the development of the country and democracy. On the other hand, for the famous monarchist and ex-revolutionary Lev Tikhomirov, everything is exactly the opposite: it was precisely the revolutionary upheavals and uprisings that did not allow grassroots democracy to develop normally, and thus it could not take more progressive forms.

Much has been said about the fact that civil society existed both before and after the Time of Troubles. From some of the speeches it could be concluded that if there were no civil society, the country would not be faced with the need for many government reforms. Moreover, this applies both to the Tsarist and Soviet periods, and to modern times. However, it was noted that the most striking manifestations of civic activity in the history of Russia occurred during wars and difficult trials for the country as a whole, but in more favorable conditions this civic activity decreased somewhat.

In addition to assessments of the historical period of the early 17th century and the role of civil society at that time, a hypothesis was put forward that the constitutional development of Russia has a certain cyclical nature. Each cycle is similar to the previous one both structurally and functionally. And if at the beginning of the 17th century the first “constitutional revolution” took place in Russia, now we are dealing with the third in its final stage. There was another “constitutional revolution” in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century - from 1905 to 1918.

Just a few centuries ago, human influence on nature was extremely insignificant, but in the course of scientific and technological progress, civilization began to have such a strong impact on the environment that today the environmental issue is one of the most pressing in the whole world. In the twentieth century, there was a significant leap in production and development of human activity, as a result of which industrial plants and factories appeared, which began to produce technical means that make life easier for all people. Significant comfort, however, has caused negative consequences that have affected natural resources and the entire biological community on Earth.

For example, deforestation over a long period of time has led to the migration of animals, birds and mammals. And since everything in nature is interconnected, if the chain in the food system is disrupted, processes of extinction of individual animals, plants or insects begin to occur. That is why at present they are trying to reduce the human impact on nature and, if possible, compensate for the consumed resources (planting forests, desalinating salt water, and so on).

It should be noted that man, being the only creature on Earth with reason and will, should not have a consumerist attitude towards everything that the planet gives him. On the contrary, humanity must try to harmonize its life activity and bring it into conformity with the laws of nature. This is precisely what the efforts of the world community are currently aimed at, and as a result of this, our civilization is gradually beginning to move to a qualitatively new level of its development. More and more environmentally friendly technological innovations are being introduced into the production, examples of which can be: in the field of motor transport - electric cars, in the field of heat supply - geothermal boilers, in the field of electricity production - wind and solar power plants. Therefore, today we can say that the negative impact of humans on nature is gradually decreasing. Of course, good environmental performance is still a long way off, but a start has already been made today.

It is also encouraging that people themselves are beginning to realize the disastrous nature of further destruction of nature and are gradually switching to a healthy lifestyle. Slowly but surely there is an outflow of residents from city centers to the suburbs and rural areas, since in most large cities the maximum permissible standard of CO (carbon monoxide) exceeds the maximum permissible concentration several times. The number of cottage towns where human influence on nature is minimal is growing. All this suggests that humanity is gradually beginning to move away from the wholesale system of consumption of natural resources and is moving to a system of harmonious development.

The modern oil and gas industry is also in the stage of gradual winding down, since all the explored oil on Earth will last for a maximum of another 50 years. This is a very short period of time even by human standards, so all developed countries have long been investing their capital in the environmentally friendly production of new resources. A radically new approach is to search for renewable fuel sources. Here, as an example, we can cite biofuel, which can be grown in a specially designated area. As a result of all this, human influence on nature is gradually becoming positive.

Summing up the results of this interesting topic, we can conclude that our civilization has finally realized that it is impossible to continue depleting natural reserves, since this will not lead to anything good. The negative impact of humans on nature is already manifested in the form of cataclysms and global climate change. All this once again emphasizes the fact that all people on Earth are responsible for what is happening to the planet today, and only through joint efforts will our civilization be able to overcome all difficulties.

A few centuries ago, astronomers noticed how the brightness of some stars in the galaxy suddenly increased by more than a thousand times. Scientists have designated a rare phenomenon of a multiple increase in the glow of a cosmic object as the birth of a supernova. This is in some way cosmic nonsense, because at this moment a star is not born, but ceases to exist.

Flash supernova- this is, in fact, an explosion of a star, accompanied by the release of a colossal amount of energy ~10 50 erg. The brightness of the supernova, which becomes visible anywhere in the Universe, increases over the course of several days. In this case, every second, the amount of energy released is as much as the Sun can produce during its entire existence.

Supernova explosion as a consequence of the evolution of cosmic objects

Astronomers explain this phenomenon by evolutionary processes that have been occurring with all space objects for millions of years. To imagine the process of a supernova, you need to understand the structure of a star. (picture below).

A star is a huge object with colossal mass and, therefore, the same gravity. The star has a small core surrounded by an outer shell of gases that make up the bulk of the star's mass. Gravitational forces put pressure on the shell and core, compressing them with such force that the gas shell becomes hot and, expanding, begins to press from the inside, compensating for the force of gravity. The parity of the two forces determines the stability of the star.

Under the influence of enormous temperatures, a thermonuclear reaction begins in the core, converting hydrogen into helium. Even more heat is released, the radiation of which increases inside the star, but is still restrained by gravity. And then real cosmic alchemy begins: hydrogen reserves are depleted, helium begins to turn into carbon, carbon into oxygen, oxygen into magnesium... Thus, through a thermonuclear reaction, the synthesis of increasingly heavier elements occurs.

Until the appearance of iron, all reactions proceed with the release of heat, but as soon as iron begins to degenerate into the elements following it, the reaction from exothermic becomes endothermic, that is, heat ceases to be released and begins to be consumed. The balance of gravitational forces and thermal radiation is disrupted, the core is compressed thousands of times, and all the outer layers of the shell rush towards the center of the star. Crashing into the core at the speed of light, they bounce back, colliding with each other. An explosion of the outer layers occurs, and the material that makes up the star flies away at a speed of several thousand kilometers per second.

The process is accompanied by such a bright flash that it can be seen even with the naked eye if a supernova ignites in a nearby galaxy. Then the glow begins to fade, and at the site of the explosion a...And what remains after the supernova explosion? There are several options for the development of events: firstly, the supernova remnant could be a core of neutrons, which scientists call a neutron star, secondly, a black hole, and thirdly, a gas nebula.