The latest alien planets hit the news like fireworks, I write about them a lot, and I’ve always found them boring. I’d been convinced early on by an eminent astronomer who said flatly that finding extra-solar planets wasn’t, as he said, interesting. In the first place, observations were nearly impossible and decades of claims turned […]
I read a nice essay saying that scientists make their advice to politicians too simple. What scientists over-simplify, said the essay’s author, is their uncertainties. I thought the author might be right: surely politicians don’t believe flat statements like, say, “climate change is making the world warmer and we’re all going to die.” Not that […]
Some atoms, like the ones on the skin of your hand, are happy to give up their electrons. And the electrons congregate in some mysterious way, as AG says, into a band of brothers. The band is relentlessly negative, so when you get near enough to something positive, like a dryer or a doorknob, the […]
What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is. His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes? Dyson is hard to describe: he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say. He’s spent his […]
This picture is what the sky really looks like. Click on it. It’s the biggest digital color picture of the sky, the part called the Northern Galactic Cap, and it’s taken years to produce; it’s a trillion pixels, a terapixel and — says the press release from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey — to see […]
The older I get, the more people I know who have lost what they could not afford to lose. I’ll repeat: lost means gone, unrecoverable, not coming back; and what these people lost, they still need and want. The problem is nearly universal and has no obvious solution, or rather, the solution is idiosyncratic and […]
We’re sorry, but Thomas Hayden, the New Person of LWON, will be unable to post today as promised. Instead we present for your delight and edification, Heather. Tom will be back as soon as possible and in the meantime, we send him our best wishes for recovery. Credit: Jehan Georges Vibert
Please meet Thomas Hayden, a new Person of LWON. And let’s get this out of the way early: he is not and never has been married to any movie star whatever. He writes about ecology, energy, environment, and evolution and though he’s entirely a peaceable, friendly fellow, he writes a lot about war. And sex. […]
