Cassandra, for Richard: How do we know the laws of physics are universal? Why can’t there be a far-off galaxy where our laws of physics don’t apply? (Is that a really stupid question?) Richard, for Cassandra: We don’t. There can. (It’s not.) Such was Cassie’s contribution to LWON’s first anniversary post last May. As part of […]
The Cosmos
You may have seen the extensive (and entertaining) press reaction days ago to a recent press release that cited Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow taking liberties in his paper on the chirality of α-methyl amino acids. Breslow mentioned “advanced versions of dinosaurs,” who may live “elsewhere in the universe.” Gasp! The kicker? “We would be better off […]
“Since there is an infinite number of alternative universes, there must be one in which there isn’t an infinite number of alternative universes. Perhaps this is it.” No, that speculation didn’t come from the “Ask Mr. Cosmology” mailbag. It’s from a reader of New Scientist, courtesy of LWON’s own Sally, who is an editor at […]
There are poems about science. There are poems about scientists. But I know of only two poems about women scientists — about women doing science, that is — and both were written by the same person: the brilliant, defiant, influential poet Adrienne Rich, who died last week at the age of 82. From “Power“: Today […]
This is the universe at present. You’re seeing not the light but the dark — you knew that most of the universe’s matter is dark, right? — and its motions. Not until the far right end are you seeing the light. Go ahead and clickety click all over this; zoom it in and out, drag it around. […]
By the late 1800s, astronomy had moved on from simple human observation to the collection of images of the sky on photographic plates — pieces of glass coated with light-sensitive silver salts. At the time they were made, these plates could be analyzed only through tedious, labor-intensive work. A person had to scan and measure and compare […]
Granted that Abstruse Goose is being a little juvenile — I prefer to think of him not as immature but just young — and certainly Galileo occasionally had non-astronomical thoughts, even if AG is making them up. But the writing and the drawing of Jupiter and its little stars, its “stellae,” Galileo called them, are […]
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was, in a way, a foregone conclusion. The 1998 discovery by two teams of scientists that the expansion of the universe is accelerating—under the influence of something that scientists have shruggingly come to call dark energy, which later studies have revealed to comprise 72.8 percent of the universe—was one […]