This has been a bad year for contrarian cosmology. First Geoffrey Burbidge died, at the age of 84, on January 26. And now comes the news that Allan Sandage, also 84, died last Saturday. I’ll let other obituaries explore Sandage’s monumental scientific biography at length and in depth: apprenticing under Edwin Hubble; assuming Hubble’s observing […]
Month: November 2010
Cameras are nifty. They take a slice of the hustle and bustle of real life and dip it in liquid nitrogen, preserving it for eternity (or as long as our hard drives last). But they can’t do everything. Try taking a picture of the moon or the stars or a particularly lovely sunset. If you’re […]
I think this is funny because it explains a problem I’ve had with math all along, which is that math just makes stuff up: makes up number, and space between numbers, and relations between numbers, and I’m not even mentioning zero. Also I know that the horizon problem went something like, the universe shouldn’t have […]
This drop-dead gorgeous picture of the Nile taken from the International Space Station at the end of October prompted some science writers to muse on the enduring importance of the Nile to Egypt. Surrounded by the great darkness of the Eastern and Western deserts, the Nile literally shines like a beacon of light in this image, […]
A book I just read said that while the sun once held a gloriously central place in the lives of men, it has now been sidelined and downgraded by science — which I disagree with, you can’t find a more dedicated sun worshipper than a solar scientist. The book’s complaint is standard English major stuff, […]
About ten years ago I was killing time in the sprawling Barnes & Noble on Union Square in Manhattan. I had pushed my chair away from a little table, crossed my legs, and opened a book on my lap. I don’t remember which book. I can’t even remember whether it was one I’d grabbed off […]
Yesterday I shared a room with 3,000 buzzing tsetse flies – the bugs that carry the sleeping sickness parasite. Tsetse flies live in Africa, but these guys are Yalies. They buzz and breed in racks of mesh cages on the 6th floor of Yale’s School of Public Health. (They also recite some Goethe – it’s […]
The last time anyone proclaimed the end of science — at least, this is what I hear — was just before the arrival of relativity and quantum theory. Abstruse Goose’s brave new islands, quantum gravity and dark energy, are going to require new physics, and new physics is like seeing outside the optical, hearing outside […]
