Free Thought

"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there." -Richard Feynman Scientists have long had a reputation for being uptight, serious, and even killjoy personalities. But 50+ years ago, Richard Feynman was forcing everyone who felt that way to challenge their assumptions. With his brash attitude and fun-seeking personality, Feynman seemingly was most at home when he was at his most outrageous. Feynman at the Myths and Legends Party dressed as “God.” His wife, Gweneth, is dressed as Medusa, with a rock as her date. Image credit: from Christopher Sykes, No…

"To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves." -Federico García Lorca In an episode filled with Vulcan mindmelds, Klingon treachery, a spectacular nebula, themes of racial purity, and PTSD, you’d think all the ingredients were there for a spectacular episode of Star Trek: Discovery. Instead, describing it as a hot mess would be overly generous; this episode is just a disappointment as far as just about every avenue is concerned. Except for the Captain Lorca / Admiral Cornwell scenes, there’s really nothing to like about where this goes.…

“You endure what is unbearable, and you bear it. That is all.” -Cassandra Clare Well, the cat's out of the bag. A little over a week ago, Scienceblogs announced to us writers that they no longer had the funds to keep the site operational, and so they would be shutting down. They asked us to keep quiet about this, people didn't and now you know. As of the end of this month, there will be no new articles here on Scienceblogs, and hence, no more comments of the week or synopses, or a chance to interact here. So what can you do? Well, the top thing I'd like you to do is support me on Patreon,…

"You are... six years old. You are weak and helpless! You cannot... hurt me!" -Captain Picard, a badass, while being tortured Star Trek has always been a way for us to look at the best and worst aspects of humanity, often through our confrontations with alien races. Different aspects of our fears, our personalities, and our sense of ethics play out on the stage of futuristic science fiction. Our frailties are exposed, and the crew is challenged to rise to the occasion, and to demonstrate the best of humanity, often in the worst situations. For the first time in five chances, Star Trek:…

“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.” -Augustine of Hippo Science isn't the easiest endeavor you can undertake. Sure, the rewards are tremendous: you can wind up understanding any phenomenon in the Universe as well (or better) than any human has ever understood it before. But on your way there, you're going to have to do some of the most difficult work you've ever done. It isn't just mathematical and scientific work, either, but internal work on your own psyche. You'll need to learn how to be wrong. From the distant Universe, light has…

"You were always a good officer. Until you weren't." -Saru, from Star Trek: Discovery Science is full of great ideas and brilliant discoveries, and some of those more recent ones have made their way into the popular consciousness. TED talks, popular blogs and online magazines, and Facebook pages and internet memes have helped disseminate bits of knowledge to millions. But how much of what's come through is actually worth knowing, versus how much is simply science-sounding buzzwords that's content-free? Outside the event horizon of a black hole, General Relativity and quantum field theory are…

“Something is happening here and this is going to have an impact.” -Robert Dijkgraaf, on Verlinde's work There are many attempts out there to reconcile the quantum field theories that describe the electromagnetic and nuclear forces with general relativity, which describes the gravitational force. Certain questions, about gravitational properties in strong fields and on small scales, will never be answered otherwise. In order to make that happen, we'd need a quantum theory of gravity. While string theory is the most popular idea, there are others, such as asymptotic safety, loop quantum…

"If I die trying but I’m inadequate to the task to make a course change in the evolution of this planet…okay I tried. The fact is I tried. How many people are not trying. If you knew that every breath you took could save hundreds of lives into the future had you walked down this path of knowledge, would you run down this path of knowledge as fast as you could." -Paul Stamets When you look at the dark matter network of the Universe, what do you see? Do you see patterns similar to other networks, like neurons in your brain or the mycological mats found beneath the soil on Earth? Of course you…

“It's always seemed like a big mystery how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we found its secret. It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe.” -Stephen Wolfram In the mid-20th century, computers allowed us to explore a brand new idea: that a discrete space, with a simple set of rules and straightforward initial conditions, could evolve in steps to create a rich, life-like environment. While many of us have played or seen simulations of Conway’s Game of Life, a deeper idea is at the core of such a…

For nearly as long as I can remember, I've been a fan of Jeopardy! Indeed, if I'm at home at 7:30 PM on a weeknight, Jeopardy! will usually be on the television. Given that, I remember what was basically a bit of stunt programming in 2011, when Jeopardy! producers had IBM's artificial intelligence supercomputer Watson face off against two of the most winning champions in the history of the show, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson won, leading Jenning's to add to his Final Jeopardy answer, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords." Watson's next challenge was similarly highly hyped:…

"Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not." -Neil deGrasse Tyson Last week, millions of people across the United States got to experience the awe and wonder of a total solar eclipse, many for the very first time. But in a puzzling event, astrophysicist and one of the world’s most famous science communicators, Neil deGrasse Tyson, decided to use his fame to put down a great many people who were excited about this rare cosmic event. And sadly, when someone explained to him why they would (correctly) say that eclipses are rare…

The 75th World Science Fiction Convention took place in Helsinki and seems to have had the second-highest attendance ever: more than 7000 people in the Messukeskus convention centre, 2000 of whom had (like myself) never attended a WorldCon before. There were 250 programme items only on the Friday between 10 am and 10 pm, so there is no way that I'll be able to tell you everything that went on. (Check out the programme here.) Instead I'll tell you the bits I enjoyed the most, plus some observations. The WorldCon crowd was incredibly diverse even if you disregarded the cosplayers. Men and women…

Some flaw in the over-eager Sb security, or more likely an intermediate layer, locked me out over the weekend, so my apologies for any delayed approvals and so on. One of which was to a reference to Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States by Solomon Hsiang et al., Science 30 Jun 2017, Vol. 356, Issue 6345, pp. 1362-1369, DOI: 10.1126/science.aal4369. Which says: Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. Here, we develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and…

“The ability to listen and learn is key to mastering the art of communication. If you don't use your verbal skills and networking, it will disappear rapidly.” -Rick Pitino It’s been a week full of amazing and controversial stories about the Universe here at Starts With A Bang! Did you catch the fantastic live event on Wednesday at Peddler Brewing Company in Seattle: Astronomy on Tap, starring me and the incredible Sarah Tuttle? If not, you can catch it now! If you're in a multimedia mood, you're in luck, because the newest (and twentieth!) Starts With A Bang podcast is now live: on the Fate…

“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.” -Theodore Roosevelt It's been an incredible week here at Starts With A Bang! We've covered everything from the night sky's newest supernova to the possible fates of the Universe to what might be our window into the next unexplored mysteries of physics. Moreover, I'll be giving a public talk in Seattle this Wednesday, May 24th, for Astronomy On Tap, at Peddler Brewing Company! Join me if you can, and I promise you'll be left with plenty to wonder about! With that out of the way,…

It's the first week of May, which means we're due to see flowers watered by all this damn rain soon, and also a recap of the various posts I wrote for Forbes during April: -- Why Are There Too Many Papers In Theoretical Physics?: A look at the origins of "ambulance chasing" in high-energy theory, where dozens of people jump on the slightest hint of a new effect. -- A Little Luck Is Essential For Success In Science: Some historical examples of physicists who succeeded thanks to a lucky break of one sort or another. -- What Sorts Of Problems Are Quantum Computers Good For? Prompted by news of a…

[Orac note: A combination of power outages, travel to Seattle, and trying to write something for my not-so-super-secret other blog conspired to leave me with nothing for this morning. So I thought I'd resurrect this old gem, which hasn't been reposted in at least four years. I actually did try to remove the dead links (this post dates back nearly 12 years in some form or another), but I probably missed a couple. I also changed the post a little, just to remove clearly outdated stuff. In the mean time, be assured that, with no more travel planned and our power restored, things should get back…

“A theory is a supposition which we hope to be true, a hypothesis is a supposition which we expect to be useful; fictions belong to the realm of art; if made to intrude elsewhere, they become either make-believes or mistakes.” -G. Johnstone Stoney It's been another exciting week here at Starts With A Bang! This coming Thursday, I'll be speaking at Jacksonville University in Florida; if you're around that area come and say hello! Before we get any further, I'm pleased to announce that thanks to two very generous new Patreon donations from Ryan Schultz and Samir Kumar (shout-out!), we've now…

This is not a time to be distracted, to turn away from politics, to eschew activism. In fact, if you are an American Citizen, you have to look back at your life and recognize that you screwed up, in two ways. First, whatever time you spent agitating and activating and acting out, turns out, was not enough. You needed to spend something like 10% more time on that. Second, whatever decisions you made as to exactly what sort of activism you would do on a given day were likely flawed. Instead of yammering about Bernie after the primary you should have been going after Trump. At the beginning of…

The Makeblock mBot Add-on Pack-Six-legged Robot V1.1 is an add on for the Makeblock DIY mBot 1.1 Kit (Bluetooth Version) - STEM Education - Arduino - Scratch 2.0 - Programmable Robot Kit for Kids to Learn Coding & Robotics - Pink or any of its variants. The makeblock robot is an arduino technology robot. It can be controlled with a supplied controller, or operated from any of several different kinds of computing devices (such as your cell phone) using an app. It can be programmed using the Arduino interface (from a Mac, Windows or Linux computer), but the robot comes with built in…