April 14, 2016
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life." -Jean-Luc Picard
The cosmic story common to all of us -- where we came from, how we got here and where we're headed into the future -- is both amazing and daunting. But when we're first exposed to the…
April 13, 2016
"It's ironic: in order to observe the Sun, you need to go kilometers underground." -Art McDonald
Imagine you finally thought you understood how the Sun worked: how light elements fused into heavier ones, emitting energy in the process. And when you finally completed your calculations, you got…
April 13, 2016
"There was a long history of speculation that in quantum gravity, unlike Einstein's classical theory, it might be possible for the topology of spacetime to change." -Edward Witten
Quantum gravity is one of the holy grails of physics, and showing that gravitation is an inherently quantum force would…
April 12, 2016
"That’s all regular matter, just five percent. A quarter is “dark matter,” which is invisible and detectable only by gravitational pull, and a whopping 70 percent of the universe is made up of “dark energy,” described as a cosmic antigravity, as yet totally unknowable. It’s basically all mystery…
April 11, 2016
“This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” -W.G. Sebald
In the 1600s, the earliest telescopes saw that…
April 9, 2016
“I guess I have a short attention span! I'm interested in new worlds, new universes, new challenges. I always said the only reason to make a film is not for the result but for what you learn for the next one.” -Alfonso Cuarón
April has gotten off to a great start here at Starts With A Bang, with…
April 9, 2016
"An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us." -Elon Musk
The possibility of getting hit by a…
April 8, 2016
"The older people that one admires seem to be fearless. They go right out into the world. It's astounding. Maybe they can't see or they can't hear, but they walk out into the street and take life as it comes. They're models of courage, in a strange way." -James Hillman
The scientific enterprise has…
April 7, 2016
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them." -Galileo Galilei
Galileo is most famous for his astronomical discoveries, including the moons of Jupiter, the existence of sunspots and the phases of Venus. These discoveries were a strong challenge to…
April 6, 2016
"I'm here for several reason, Mr. Pepin, first of all for aid. When something tragic happens in our skies, we do our utmost to extend sympathy. But sympathy without action,that's an empty emotion. Mainly I'm here for the purposes of reentry."
"I don't understand."
"Adjustment," Harold said, "to…
April 4, 2016
"This job is a great scientific adventure. But it's also a great human adventure. Mankind has made giant steps forward. However, what we know is really very, very little compared to what we still have to know." -Fabiola Gianotti
On Earth, star trails inevitably appear in any long-exposure image…
April 4, 2016
"When I was in high school, I was certain that being an astronaut was my goal. It was a very important time -- Sally Ride was making her first flight into space and she had a real impact on me. Those 'firsts' kind of stick in your head and really become inspirations for you." Karen Nyberg,…
April 3, 2016
"All the evidence, experimental and even a little theoretical, seems to indicate that it is the energy content which is involved in gravitation, and therefore, since matter and antimatter both represent positive energies, gravitation makes no distinction." -Richard Feynman
It was a big last week at…
April 2, 2016
"You've got to learn to let go." -Matt Kowalski, Gravity
Objects in motion remain in constant motion unless acted upon by an outside force. That's Newton's 1st law of motion, and that's why you'd expect an orbiting satellite and two astronauts orbiting with it to have absolutely no relative forces…
April 1, 2016
“The slow philosophy is not about doing everything in tortoise mode. It’s less about the speed and more about investing the right amount of time and attention in the problem so you solve it.” -Carl Honore
Einstein's theories of special and general relativity tell us that there's no Universal,…
March 31, 2016
"TW Hydrae is quite special. It is the nearest known protoplanetary disc to Earth and it may closely resemble the Solar System when it was only 10 million years old." -David Wilner
For hundreds of years since the realization that Earth and the other planets orbited the Sun, humanity had only…
March 30, 2016
“When a star goes supernova, the explosion emits enough light to overshadow an entire solar system, even a galaxy. Such explosions can set off the creation of new stars. In its own way, it was not unlike being born.” -Todd Nelson
In 1604, Kepler's supernova went off, the last Milky Way supernova…
March 29, 2016
"Nobility, without virtue, is a fine setting without a gem." -Jane Porter
Since ancient times, gems were believed to bestow various traits and good fortunes upon those two whom they were gifted. In more recent times, we've associated gems with the time of the year someone was born, assigning each…
March 28, 2016
"Every single time you make a merger, somebody is losing his identity. And saying something different is just rubbish." -Carlos Ghosn
A galaxy cluster is the largest individual bound structure in the Universe, containing anywhere from dozens to thousands of times the mass of our Milky Way. Yet as…
March 27, 2016
“Public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation - not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats. The implications for the planet are grim.” -Michael E. Mann
What a couple of weeks it's been, both at Starts With A…
March 26, 2016
"When a person starts to talk about their dreams, it's as if something bubbles up from within. Their eyes brighten, their face glows, and you can feel the excitement in their words." -John C. Maxwell
One of the most remarkable features of a great number of giant, active galaxies are the presence of…
March 25, 2016
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” -Winston Churchill
When we look out at the Universe on the largest scales, from large-scale structure to the fluctuations in the CMB to lensed clusters of galaxies and to giant…
March 24, 2016
“For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).” -Bill Bryson
The Sun makes up 99.8% the mass of our Solar System, yet stars account for only about 10-20% of the matter that protons, neutrons and electrons make up. Protons,…
March 23, 2016
"Although impact processes dominate the surface geology on Ceres, we have identified specific color variations on the surface indicating material alterations that are due to a complex interaction of the impact process and the subsurface composition." -Ralf Jaumann, Dawn scientist
NASA's Dawn…
March 22, 2016
"I'm a fan of supersymmetry, largely because it seems to be the only route by which gravity can be brought into the scheme. It's probably not even enough, but it's a way forward to get gravity involved. If you have supersymmetry, then there are more of these particles. That would be my favourite…
March 21, 2016
"The night has a thousand eyes, and the day but one;
Yet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun." -Francis William Bourdillon
When we look for the brightest, bluest, most massive individual stars, we're restricted to looking nearby, since it's impossible to resolve individual stars…
March 18, 2016
"Quintessence is a dynamic, time-evolving, and spatially dependent form of energy with negative pressure sufficient to drive the accelerating expansion [...] Whereas the cosmological constant is a very specific form of energy." -Robert Caldwell, inventor of the Big Rip scenario
Our Universe began…
March 17, 2016
“The truth is you can be orphaned again and again and again. The truth is, you will be. And the secret is, this will hurt less and less each time until you can't feel a thing. Trust me on this.” -Chuck Palahniuk
The planets we know of -- in our own Solar System and beyond -- all have something in…
March 16, 2016
"...as a scientist I was trained you always have to show the negative data, the data that disagrees with you, and then make the case that your case is stronger." -Richard Muller
Global temperatures have been on the rise not just for decades, but for as long as we've been measuring temperatures…
March 15, 2016
“In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.” -Terry Pratchett
Quantum mechanics has been described as the spookiest of all the sciences,…
