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 […]
Ann
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 […]
Metastable: Down the block, along the street, is a steep bank on which trees have taken root and grown, slanting off the bank and over the road, balancing their holds in the ground with increasing height and occasional high winds and of course gravity. One day sooner or later a good rain slightly liquifies the […]
May we take a moment of your time to introduce Cassandra Willyard? She explained once that the reason she needed to ride around in police cars was to write about why Baltimore was HIV heaven, a logic that’s not immediately obvious. Click on About for more about Cassandra, and then go find her website to […]
(“People of Last Word on Nothing” doesn’t sound as exciting as People of LWON.) We are pleased and proud to introduce Virginia Hughes. One of her early stories was about why Hagia Sophia doesn’t fall down in earthquakes, which was impressive because not just anyone can get you interested in the structural loads of cathedrals. […]
ZapperZ is a physics blogger who worries about people believing that humans and dinosaurs co-existed, that ghosts are real and evolution isn’t; and in short, that the public knowledge of and interest in science is thin as a dime. He met a scientist, a woman, who said the only way to explain science to politicians […]
I drove up to an auction in the Pennsylvania hayfields, parked in the field to the left because the lot to the right was reserved for buggies and horses. Maybe five auctions were going on in different parts of the fairground and everywhere were Amish in black and dark jewel-colored clothes, Mennonites in black and […]
