“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 […]
Art
It’s true, some of those science documentaries are pretty condescending. http://abstrusegoose.com/78
Each week, I’m torn between two warring emotions as I bear a large blue box of empty wine bottles and other glass detritus into the back alley. As I set the bin out for pick-up, I feel a certain satisfaction in a civic duty well done, dispatching this jumble of glass to the recyclers. But […]
It’s hard not to feel depressed. As regular visitors to LWON know, British school children recently raided their piggy banks to help the Tullie House Museum buy an absolutely stunning Roman cavalry helmet discovered last spring in northwestern England (see here for the background). Well, the helmet went up on the auction block at Christie’s […]
A few days ago, while idly surfing the net, I stumbled upon a photograph that seemed to come from another world, a place much more surreal and interesting than the one I inhabit. The photo in question showed a traditional fighting shield from highlands of Papua New Guinea. But it wasn’t the shield that caught […]
Abstruse Goose seems preoccupied with life paths and choices. This time instead of math, he’s talking about physics, specifically about a theory that the many worlds which according to quantum uncertainty (thus Schrodinger’s cats) can possibly exist, actually do co-exist side by side, maybe in different universes or something. I don’t know. It’s pretty arcane. […]
Last May, a man armed with a metal detector stumbled on something almost magical in a farmer’s field in the Eden Valley of northwestern England. Buried under the earth were 74 metal fragments, some large, some small, but all clearly part of a Roman helmet. And not just any Roman helmet. When the conservators at […]
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 […]
