Abstruse Goose: Tempus Edax Rerum

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 […]

The Guys Talk

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 […]

Is That Guy Really, Really Smart?

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, […]

Abstruse Goose: Partners

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 […]

On Culture and Biological Clocks

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!

News Flash!  Heroes of Richard’s book win Nobel Prize!  To see why, go buy The 4% Universe!   Photo of supernova: dr.carl    

Groundwater and Gravity

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 […]