March 14, 2016
"True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing." -Jean Cocteau
Each time you look at a photograph of the Universe, you aren't just seeing it as it was at a particular moment in time, but also in a particular wavelength (or set of…
March 13, 2016
“[W]hen I was younger, I was afraid of something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter.” -Maurice Sendak
Well, here in the USA we're all still reeling from the loss of an hour for daylight savings time, and in the meantime, I've been…
March 12, 2016
"It is in the theory of perception that we have established our bond, or the lie I should say, for which we kill. We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be or rather to become, in the future. When you are lonely, I…
March 11, 2016
John Oliver: So, roughly speaking, what are the chances that the world is going to be destroyed? One-in-a-million? One-in-a-billion?
Walter Wagner: Well, the best we can say right now is a one-in-two chance.
John: 50-50?
Walter: Yeah, 50-50… It’s a chance, it’s a 50-50 chance.
John: You come back…
March 10, 2016
"If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it." -John Wheeler
Now that LIGO has detected gravitational waves directly, it's time to examine all the different sources that they come from, and what they can teach us about the Universe. While accelerating masses in…
March 10, 2016
"Eight solid light-years of lead...is the thickness of that metal in which you would need to encase yourself if you wanted to keep from being touched by neutrinos." -Michael Chabon
When it comes to dark matter, the most commonly considered candidates are WIMPs, or Weakly-Interacting Massive…
March 8, 2016
"The fundamental choice is not whether humans will have faith, but rather what the objects of their faith will be, and how far and into what dimensions this faith will extend." -Matt Emerson
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Matt Emerson asserts that science is faith-based, since scientists…
March 7, 2016
"This is in a real sense the capstone of the initial missions to explore the planets. Pluto, its moons and this part of the solar system are such mysteries that New Horizons will rewrite all of the textbooks." -Alan Stern
The New Horizons mission surprised everyone last July when it revealed Pluto…
March 6, 2016
“Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.” -Thomas Sowell
It's hard to believe, but it's already almost time for spring! After leaping an extra day to help keep our calendar in synch, March started off…
March 5, 2016
“Youth always tries to fill the void, an old man learns to live with it.” -Mark Z. Danielewski
There are plenty of scientific myths that go around, including many that were generated recently by so-called science communicators that actively harm public knowledge. One of them was a now-famous…
March 4, 2016
“Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding — yet beautiful — Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.” -Buzz Aldrin
Seen from afar, Earth is often…
March 3, 2016
"Our spectroscopic observations reveal the galaxy to be even farther away than we had originally thought, right at the distance limit of what Hubble can observe." -Gabriel Bremmer
One of the holy grails of cosmology is to measure, directly, exactly when the first stars and galaxies formed in our…
March 2, 2016
"If you take everything we know... it only adds up to 5% of the Universe." -Katie Freese
One of the greatest advances of the 20th century was the discovery of the vast nature of the cosmos: that it was filled with billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, and that it extended in all…
March 2, 2016
"From a little spark may burst a flame." -Dante Alighieri
Last week, it was reported that the mystery of fast radio bursts were solved, and that they were due to the merger of a neutron star with another collapsed object, well outside of our galaxy. However, not only was that analysis fundamentally…
March 1, 2016
"When we make college more affordable, we make the American dream more achievable." -Bill Clinton
Over the next four years, the University of Helsinki will see its budget reduced by approximately 100 million Euros, or about 15% of its annual expenditures. As a response, it's reducing its workforce…
February 29, 2016
"Some of them burn slow and long, like red dwarfs. Others -- blue giants -- burn their due so fast they shine across great distances, and are easy to see. As they start to run out of fuel, they burn helium, grow even hotter, and explode in a supernova. Supernovas, they're brighter than the…
February 28, 2016
“A great accomplishment shouldn't be the end of the road, just the starting point for the next leap forward.” -Harvey Mackay
Tomorrow is such a big, rare day that it only comes once every four years (or 4.1237 years, for a little greater precision), yet practically every day offers something new…
February 27, 2016
"The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great 'open frontiers.' These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth - where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe 'here be…
February 26, 2016
"Will you or won't you? Should you or shouldn't you?
Use this day to do something daring, extraordinary and unlike yourself." -Vera Nazarian
The need for a February 29th, once every four years or so, doesn't just give us an extra day this year, but it keeps the calendar from drifting and failing to…
February 25, 2016
"Even if the Fermi detection is a false alarm, future LIGO events should be monitored for accompanying light irrespective of whether they originate from black hole mergers. Nature can always surprise us." -Avi Loeb
Ever since LIGO first announced the direct detection of gravitational waves from two…
February 24, 2016
"Even if I stumble on to the absolute truth of any aspect of the universe, I will not realise my luck and instead will spend my life trying to find flaws in this understanding - such is the role of a scientist." -Brian Schmidt
One of the biggest surprises in our understanding of the Universe came…
February 23, 2016
"Greatness is not in were we stand, but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind, and sometimes against it - but sail we must. And not drift, nor lie at anchor." –Oliver Wendell Holmes
It's long been a dream of humanity to travel interplanetary distances at great speeds…
February 22, 2016
"The wonder is, not that the field of stars of so vast, but that man has measured it." -Anatole France
If you could gather 250 million times as much light as your eye, and improve your resolution by several orders of magnitude, you just might be able to see what the Hubble Space Telescope can. By…
February 21, 2016
"Here's an analogy. The Universe is expanding the way your mind is expanding. It's not expanding into anything; you're just getting less dense." -Katie Mack
Excitement about the Universe in general -- and gravitational waves in particular -- is still peaking here at Starts With A Bang. Did you…
February 20, 2016
“You asked me how to get out of the finite dimensions when I feel like it. I certainly don't use logic when I do it. Logic's the first thing you have to get rid of.” -J.D. Salinger
Now that gravitational waves have been verified to exist, and the first black hole-black hole merger has been…
February 19, 2016
"Mathematicians deal with possible worlds, with an infinite number of logically consistent systems. Observers explore the one particular world we inhabit. Between the two stands the theorist. He studies possible worlds but only those which are compatible with the information furnished by observers…
February 18, 2016
"Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others." -Jonathan Swift
If you want to look out into the Universe, all you need to do is gather the light it gives off. Unless, of course, there's something in the way. For about 20% of the sky, that's exactly the story for our own Milky Way galaxy…
February 17, 2016
“If the imprint is really due to gravitational waves from the big bang, then this is the type of cosmological discovery that comes along perhaps once every fifty years.” -Kip Thorne
Now that LIGO's successfully detected it's first gravitational waves — from two merging black holes — we know that we…
February 16, 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
General relativity makes very specific prediction for what the curvature of space should be at the event horizon of a…
February 16, 2016
“The world communicates subtly. Most people don't hear or see the signs because they're so wrapped up in their day-to-day lives.” -Doug Cooper
If you wanted to see if a planet was inhabited in Star Trek, all you had to do was scan for signs of life. With current technology, that's really hard to do…
