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 […]
The Cosmos
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. […]
“Bern. 1905.” This simple declaration of setting—space; time—comes about a quarter of the way into Einstein on the Beach, the 1976 opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson currently in revival on a world tour. The brief spoken passage is one of the few, if not the only, that is unaccompanied by music. (Actually, the line […]
I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” the other night when I got to thinking about Galileo. “Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles!” cried Ed, in his imitable style, and the camera cut to curtains flying apart with an abandon that matched the song’s first notes, already slamming away. Then Paul stepped to […]
We here at LWON have been all over this and we (ok, I) agree completely with AG: astrobiologists out-compete evolutionary psychologists for getting the most publicity out of the least evidence. Also I just ran across an interesting but illogical argument: if the principles of physics, chemistry, and geology “work beyond our planet,” why not […]
One evening during a recent visit to Santiago, Chile, I went to dinner with two colleagues. Afterward, as I descended the stairs of the Metro to cross Providencia Avenue, I saw a young girl, no more than five years old, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sitting on the ground. She was holding out a shoe […]
__________ This reminds me of that idiot, Walt Whitman, who thought his appreciation of the stars was so superior to the learn’d astronomer’s. The guy needed a pie in the face. But here’s the question: is good poetry (not AG’s) as enlightening, meaningful, or interesting as a walk on Mars — or any kind of […]
Science, so useful to our lives in so many ways, also usefully supplies metaphors from which we may find comfort or edification. An astronomer told me that the galaxy we live in, the Milky Way, was surrounded by a tenuous halo of hot gas. “How can gas stay hot, out there in space?” I asked. […]
