How much time would you need to count to a million at the “One Mississippi” rate of one number per second? At some point in my writing life I figured I should contemplate that question if I were ever to appreciate the kinds of numbers that astronomy uses. Knowing that our galaxy contains more than […]
The Cosmos
You understand this, right? that the radio-wave part of the electromagnetic spectrum travels, like all light, at one fixed speed. And since those same radio waves carry television programs, the programs broadcast earliest have traveled farthest. It’s not complicated but it is appalling: poor Arcturus, stuck with Happy Days. ________ Abstruse Goose took a little break and […]
I have an assignment from a magazine to write a profile of a woman astronomer. I am delighted about this: the magazine is excellent, the editors are superb, and the woman astronomer is impressive. I did notice that the assignment came just before the magazine announced publicly it needs to redress its problem with a […]
For the holiday season we here at LWON are giving ourselves the gift of confronting our fears. We are choosing our own most daunting science-related subjects and writing about why they scare us. My father wasn’t a physicist, but he could work wonders with gravity. He’d be showing me how to change a flat, or fix […]
The death of Neil Armstrong in August prompted no end of tributes invoking heroism, patriotism, vision, courage, valor, and all sorts of other abstractions. Understandably so. Armstrong’s giant leap was in fact the first baby step in one species’ attempt to leave home. Less in the news, though, was a more concrete matter: hard science. The […]
This picture is a still shot from a movie, and the little parade of galaxies marching diagonally across it is a section of one filament in a vast network of galaxies. Before I get to the point, let us pause a moment and reflect: these are fucking galaxies. They’re all Milky Ways of 10 billion solar […]
AG’s hypermeta mouseover thing says something about being in company but forever alone, and really, no disrespect to anyone having this feeling because it’s surely occasionally universal, but it’s also self-pitying nonsense and just not the case. Think about it for a minute: let’s say AG got tired of party chitchat and happened to notice […]
In August, I took my almost-four-year-old daughter to the dinosaur galleries in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The ceilings were lower and the clientele was shorter than I remembered from my own childhood, but the essentials were the same: the bones, the horns, the talons, and best of all, the enormous teeth. […]