Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s. A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.” They seem to have no larger meaning, […]
Ann
The word, “data” – tables of numbers, incomprehensible graphs — for most of us would make a good sleep aid. For astronomers, though, “data” means a star-sized thing that outshines a galaxy, or a galaxy just being born, or a star that spins in milliseconds. Data for astronomers is a way to survive, a reason […]
Cosmology did it to me again. First it started out by saying that the universe is expanding, but all its mutual gravity pulls against the expansion so the universe is actually slowing down and might just end by being pulled into a cosmic black hole. I thought this sounded a little extreme but it made […]
The last time I wrote about the evolution of language, scientists’ theories sounded like contradictory Just-So stories. Some said language began with gestures, like pointing at the food you want. Others said language began with talking, like “look out!” or “hey you, get over here.” Nobody had much solid evidence: language evolved, after all, without […]
In 2007, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey had just filled a public database with a gazillion galaxies and Kevin Schawinski, a graduate student, needed a sample of the ones called, for their shape, ellipticals. Identifying shape isn’t something computers are much good at, so Kevin looked for his ellipticals, culling out the spirals and irregulars, […]
This is the kind of image editors tell me is not interesting, but editors in this case are as wrong as wrong can be. This is a picture by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory. It’s of the universe clear back, close to its beginning. The Herschel looked in far infrared wavelengths at a […]
Science is not normally in the metaphor business, but occasionally when it crosses the cultural divide between it and the rest of us, it does so via metaphors. Maybe the most common one is black holes. To scientists, black holes are singularities so dense, so gravitationally powerful, that nothing falling into them can return. To […]
