That vertical axis — the electromagnetic spectrum which is science-talk for light — actually goes from something like 3 x 102 to something like 3 x 1024 (in the same units), which is from radio waves, through microwaves, to infrared, to the visible (that tiny rainbow window there), to the ultraviolet, to xrays, to gamma rays. […]
To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one above: In 4 November, […]
Granted that Abstruse Goose is being a little juvenile — I prefer to think of him not as immature but just young — and certainly Galileo occasionally had non-astronomical thoughts, even if AG is making them up. But the writing and the drawing of Jupiter and its little stars, its “stellae,” Galileo called them, are […]
A general psycho-neuro scenario of anger: It begins outside you, with some sort of trigger – injustice, humiliation, betrayal, dishonor, frustration, negligence, restraint, physical threat. It moves inside, into the pre-human depths of your brain and lights up a bunch of neurons called the amygdala. The amygdala and some of its neural associates analyze the […]
One day on Twitter, certain science bloggers (see below) who began life on the dark side, in the humanities, happily discovered a shared taste for classic mystery writers. We thought we might write a series of posts, all on the same day, about the science in mystery books. Mine is by Josephine Tey, “To Love […]
Our boy, AG, is referring to a joke: a dairy farmer asks a physicist how to estimate milk production. The physicist begins the calculations with, “Assume a spherical cow,” and takes it from there. Physicists are famous for this. They call it simplifying the model. Sometimes they have a problem that’s too complicated to be […]
I was helping an astronomer write a sentence. It was about disentangling the color a supernova has intrinsically, from the reddening in its color caused by cosmic dust. He wrote he wanted to “break the degeneracy” between the colors. Break the degeneracy. I got so excited. I’d always thought degenerates were people who didn’t, for […]
Think about this one for a while and see where it gets you. It just got me confused. Translating AG’s Latin title — Time devours things — doesn’t help. John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then the H bomb, helped clarify the atom, made up the phrase “black […]
