About an hour into a long interview, the scientist relaxes, stops using words that might look good on a funding application, and starts saying things like: “Here’s a picture of our immediate neighborhood. Here’s the Milky Way, that’s us. Here’s the Andromeda Nebula, that’s our nearest friend. And there are a bunch of little guys […]
This needs no explaining. I’m about to march on Wall Street myself.
A friend I run into regularly says, “Hey, Ann. Do you know that guy from around here who won that Nobel whatever?” He means Adam Riess, and yes, I know Riess. I’ve interviewed him, I say hello, he says hello back. “I have a question for you,” says my friend. “Is your Nobel guy really, […]
Theorists really do think this, that maybe every fundamental particle has a so-far-invisible partner. The partners’ names are just the names of the regular particles only with an “s” in front: squarks, selectrons. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland is kicking up a lot of dust looking for them (and for another putative particle […]
In our centuries-old tradition of interviewing the Persons of LWON who are authors of newly-published books, here is our interview with Jessa about her new book, The Siesta and the Midnight Sun. Q: Your book is about, as you say, “the body clock as a biological universal, a foundation on which cultures lay their own rituals […]
News Flash! Heroes of Richard’s book win Nobel Prize! To see why, go buy The 4% Universe! Photo of supernova: dr.carl
4/20: I write an email to a scientist. I explain that I work in an old building that sits in a sort of pit, partly surrounded by a hill. Midway along the hill is a little terrace on which is a street, and along the street, a sidewalk and a wire fence; and they’re all […]
Bear with me, I want to talk about my grandparents. Hilda was my mother’s mother. Thomas was my father’s father. The difference between my mother’s and my father’s families was enormous. My mother’s family was large and blue-collar — farmers, mechanics, truckers – and not much money or education; not much use for the fine […]
