The writer Tom Stoppard died on November 29. We’re re-posting this essay (which originally appeared on June 10, 2011) in his honor. The references to dates (e.g., “A few months ago”) remain as in the original post. The 16-year-old student has an idea, but she doesn’t have the maths to support it. She does, however, […]
Astronomy
I thought the latest sound clip from two merging black holes was nice but I’d heard this before and I wasn’t stunned. You can hear them spiraling in toward each other and merging — I can’t hear the ringdown which I assume is the merged entity shuddering. The first time I heard one of these […]
This day, the Fourth of July, is my favorite holiday. I love it for a few reasons. I love the summer, and the warm nights that allow me to stay outside under the stars without hunching over from chill. I love that there are at least two more months of hot weather here in the […]
This coming Monday is the new moon, which means by tonight we are in the soup. There’s nothing to block the stars but clouds…and us. Every month has its dark nadir and we’re pretty much there, stars as bright and numerous as they’ll ever be. That’s the thing about a full night sky, it’s as […]
My phone buzzed just as I was finishing filming with the BBC Sky at Night crew for an episode about Mars, having spent the day immersed in the high-resolution panoramas returned by the Curiosity and Perserverance rovers. A text from a researcher wondered if I’d be around to comment on embargoed research from scientists in […]
This first ran on June 15, 2020 but it is about what happened the previous January. January 2020: things were objectively scary, what with an honest-to-goodness international pandemic and a blind-sided health community. I don’t think things have objectively improved since then, not on the whole, because even though that pandemic wound down, the next […]
Last week, Ann wrote about her moon epiphany and Our Becky’s book (Ann: “Our Moon, you know the one, lead review in the NYTimes Book Review, longlisted for the National Book Award”) about our most glorious satellite. I got to ask Becky about Our Moon in January, and I’m thinking of this conversation again at […]
I was reading Becky’s beautiful book (Our Moon, you know the one, lead review in the NYTimes Book Review, longlisted for the National Book Award) and she was talking about how ancient people figured out amazing things about the moon. And by the way, ancient people figured out amazing things in general, like the circumference […]
