August 26, 2015
Earlier this week, Stephen Hawking shook up the world when he announced that he had uncovered the solution to the black hole information paradox at a conference in Stockholm. When particles fall into (or create) a black hole, information is encoded on the black hole's surface, but when the black…
August 25, 2015
“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
If you wanted to know how fast you were moving through space, you'd need to measure it all:…
August 24, 2015
“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.” -Victor Hugo
When stars are born of a certain mass -- between about 10 and 40 times the mass of the Sun -- they can evolve into yellow supergiants when they burn through the hydrogen in their cores. As the…
August 23, 2015
“the way to create art is to burn and destroy
ordinary concepts and to substitute them
with new truths that run down from the top of the head
and out of the heart” -Charles Bukowski
When it comes to destructive forces that are also mesmerizing and impossible to look away from, it's hard to compete…
August 22, 2015
"Once you accept that we're all imperfect, it's the most liberating thing in the world. Then you can go around making mistakes and saying the wrong thing and tripping over on the street and all that and not feel worried." -Paloma Faith
Yet it's the imperfections in the Universe that truly enable…
August 21, 2015
“The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.” -Yuval Ne’eman
It's been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang for us, and when we look out at a…
August 20, 2015
“Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.” –Alan Guth
If we trace the evolution of our Universe back in time, we can arrive at a time before there were organic molecules, rocky planets, heavy elements,…
August 19, 2015
“‘Star Trek’ says that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived.” -Gene Roddenberry
Today would have been the 95th birthday of Gene Roddenberry, the mind that brought us the Universe of Star Trek. In…
August 18, 2015
Every time you follow the motion of a spacecraft, moon, planet or other object through the Solar System, you're putting the theory of gravity to the test. On one hand, there's a robust set of predictions for what the behavioral motion of these bodies ought to be, while on the other there's what we…
August 17, 2015
“This method of viewing the heavens seems to throw them into a new kind of light. They are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden, which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different flourishing beds; and one advantage we may reap from it is, that we can, as it were, extend the range…
August 16, 2015
“In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.” -R. Buckminster Fuller
If you want to improve yourself in any area of life, it's going to take hard work to get you there. Have a listen to…
August 15, 2015
“I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I…
August 14, 2015
“First, you should check out my house. It’s, like, kinda lame, but way less lame than, like, your house.” -Lumpy Space Princess, Adventure Time
When you visualize our Universe today, you probably think about the great clumps of matter -- planets, stars, galaxies and clusters -- separated by huge…
August 13, 2015
“Aristotle taught that stars are made of a different matter than the four earthly elements — a quintessence — that also happens to be what the human psyche is made of. Which is why man’s spirit corresponds to the stars. Perhaps that’s not a very scientific view, but I do like the idea that there’s…
August 12, 2015
“Men of genius are often dull and inert in society; as the blazing meteor, when it descends to earth, is only a stone.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
And yet, not all meteors nor all meteor showers are created equal. Some showers are duds, with the meteors being infrequent, inconsistent, short-lived…
August 9, 2015
“Studying whether there’s life on Mars or studying how the universe began, there’s something magical about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. That’s something that is almost part of being human, and I’m certain that will continue.” -Sally Ride
When you travel some hundred-million kilometers…
August 9, 2015
“I’d rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.” -Mohsin Hamid
Life is big and intimidating in a lot of ways, but sometimes it's the small things that make us feel the most vulnerable, powerful, fragile or alive. Have a listen to KT Tunstall as she sings her song,
Miniature…
August 8, 2015
"The specific moral is that within the standard model the [cosmic microwave background] temperature is a key parameter in fixing the thermal and dynamical history of the Universe. The measurement of this parameter made physical cosmology much more definite, and the detection of the radiation made…
August 7, 2015
“All enterprises that are entered into with indiscreet zeal may be pursued with great vigor at first, but are sure to collapse in the end.” -Tacitus
If you want to form a structure like a planet, star or black hole, you need a large amount of mass together in one place. The way to bring that mass…
August 6, 2015
“The radiation left over from the Big Bang is the same as that in your microwave oven but very much less powerful. It would heat your pizza only to -271.3°C, not much good for defrosting the pizza, let alone cooking it.” –Stephen Hawking
Imagine you traveled out into empty space. Away from any and…
August 5, 2015
“We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.” -W. Somerset Maugham
This past Monday (thanks, PJ), I celebrated the completion of my 37th orbit around the Sun. This is something we all have the…
August 4, 2015
When it comes to the definition of "genius," everything is relative, right? When a particularly bright young person performs an amazing feat of intellect or scores incredibly well on a standardized test like an IQ exam or the SAT, we often herald them with excessive praise, calling them "the next…
August 3, 2015
“That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.
Being but men, we walked into the trees.” -Dylan Thomas
Yet when you look at the night sky, it isn't watching the stars that reveals all of the Universe's secrets, nor by looking with what you can…
August 2, 2015
“Your problem is to bridge the gap which exists between where you are now and the goal you intend to reach.” -Earl Nightingale
When you think about the obstacles facing us in the world today, it's easy to look to advances in technology as the panacea. If there are waterways that need crossing, you…
August 1, 2015
“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” -Neil Armstrong
This past week saw a whole lot of interesting things happen, including…
July 31, 2015
“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.” -Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
You've heard it said many times here: the Universe, since the Big Bang, is 13.8 billion years old. But how do we know this to be true?
Image credit: Bock et al. (2006, astro-ph/0604101); modifications by me.
Moreover,…
July 30, 2015
“To be is to be the value of a variable.” –Willard Van Orman Quine
Those constant, fixed points of light in the night sky -- the stars -- turn out not to be so constant if you looked with great precision at them. A star like our Sun varies in brightness, periodically, by about 0.1% over the span of…
July 29, 2015
“A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux… is that the vast majority of mass of the universe seems to be missing.” -William J. Broad
When we look out at the Universe, the…
July 28, 2015
When it comes to dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up the vast majority of the mass in the Universe, there's a whole lot we don't understand or know about it. You might think that there are so many unknowns that are so huge that -- quite reasonably -- perhaps it doesn't exist at all…
July 28, 2015
When you close your eyes and picture a galaxy, what pops into your mind? For most people, it's a beautiful, spiral shape, where a bright central region fans out with arms that wind around and around, over and over, littered with brilliant, glittering stars. And in almost all the pictures you see,…
