The world of science entered November 6, 1919, as gray as a doughboy and exited it dancing like a flapper. That afternoon, British Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Dyson announced at a special meeting of the Royal Society in London that a recent experiment had validated a new theory of relativity. The occasion provided one of […]
Astronomy
It’s my mom’s birthday today, so I thought I’d revisit this post about a time when she audited an astronomy class. This semester, she’s taking French. Bon anniversaire, maman. I’m not sure exactly where this story begins, but maybe it’s here: Sometime this summer, my mom decided to take an astronomy class. She had taken […]
The TESS telescope is a shiny little thinking metal tube, drinking the light of 20 million stars in our cosmic neighborhood. It launched last year on a voyage to identify planets that look like this one—a miraculous feat, if it succeeds. Among the panoply of planets found so far, there is positively no place like […]
@nattyover: I turn for comfort to “A Dying Universe: The Long Term Fate and Evolution of Astrophysical Objects” https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9701131.pdf @nattyover is Natalie Wolchover, science writer and editor at Quanta. “A Dying Universe” is a paper I love and have loved for years. The paper’s abstract: “We consider,” it says, how planets, stars, galaxies, and the […]
The following are excerpts from a profile of Jim Peebles, who just yesterday won a Nobel Prize. Peebles is a quintessential theorist — “I spent a few days standing near telescopes getting cold,” he said, “and in the end, my attention wandered” — whose opinion of his own theories is finely balanced. The profile is […]
This essay originally ran on September 23, 2011. It’s reappearing here as part of LWON’s “It’s ATACAMA WEEK! (Because we can.)“ Today is the autumnal equinox, the last partial day of summer and the first partial day of autumn—at least in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern, today is the vernal equinox, the last full […]
By now you’ve probably heard about author Naomi Wolf’s fateful radio interview on the BBC. Perhaps you’ve heard the interview itself, though if not, you might want to skip it—especially if you’re a writer who traffics in facts and has ever had to cite one. It’s gruesome listening. Wolf was publicizing her book about the […]
On Wednesday, April 11, if all goes to plan, a small spacecraft from Israel will alight on the surface of the Moon. It will be the first time any probe has done so under a private flag — that is to say, it is not a taxpayer-built spaceship sent by a country in its own […]
