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, […]
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 […]
Galaxy Zoo — the citizen science project with hundreds of thousands of citizens classifying galaxies, catching supernovae, mapping the moon, finding solar storms, and so on far into the night – has sprouted a new project called Old Weather. The reason old weather is more interesting than, say, old socks, is that yesterday’s weather is […]
Scattered around the periphery of our galaxy, the Milky Way, are upwards of 150 odd creatures called globular clusters. They’re little agglomerations of stars that are bound by gravity into a sphere and that inside it, are buzzing around like flies. They’re odd because 1) most stars come in singles or pairs, and globulars have […]
The coordinate grid was laid against the sky to fix the stars and for centuries it seemed to work as planned. Recently, slowly, almost asymptotically, the grid begins to move with respect to itself — abrading, degrading — and therefore deteriorates. In fact, Declination -14 now sags along its whole length so that Declination +14 […]
May we present the newest of the people of LWON, Richard Panek? Richard thinks that the history of the telescope is a history of mankind’s view of itself; that Einstein and Freud introduced us to the possibility of things both important and invisible; that our knowledge of the universe is constrained by the cosmological Dark […]
“The universe is what it is, and we’re trying to find out what it is,” John Huchra told me. “The explorers of the new world weren’t trying to prove theories, they were looking at what was out there.” Huchra was an observational astronomer, as opposed to a theorist. Theorists say that, given physics, the universe […]
It’s true, some of those science documentaries are pretty condescending. http://abstrusegoose.com/78
