The subject line in the e-mail was, “Congratulations, I think….” The message itself said, “Just read about Dark Matter finally outing itself.” “Huh?” I wrote back. “Haven’t you heard??? Dark Matter has been telescopically (is that a word?) observed!” The message came from a graduate student of mine during holiday break this past December. He […]
History/Philosophy
“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” – George S. Patton Early American warfare has always seemed — to me, at least — rather quaint. Men in uniforms line up in a grassy meadow. They march toward one another. They fire, reload, […]
(This post is the third in a three-part series. The first and second appeared the past two Fridays.) “What can we as scientists do to better communicate science to the general public?” This question didn’t stump me, but, I admit, the answer did elude me at first. I started talking about how writers are dependent on […]
“What can we do about high school physics textbooks?” The question, I admit, stumped me. Not in the way that a question about whether gravity exists in other universes would stump me. That question I wouldn’t be able to answer because there isn’t an answer; the existence of other universes is speculative. This question, however, […]
Let’s get this out of the way first: Ancient Alexandria, it’s not. Still, the library of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego, is the closest thing the marine sciences have to a central repository of books, periodicals and documents. And like that original Alexandria, this one is threatened by, […]
(This post is the first in a three-part series. “Talking Universe Blues” will continue over the next two Fridays.) “Does gravity exist in other universes?” The question, I admit, stumped me. Did she—fourth row, on the aisle—mean that gravity might be leaking into our universe from a parallel universe? Unlikely. Her puzzled, perhaps lost, expression didn’t […]
It feels right to offer a tribute to Darwin today–St. Valentine was a martyr too, after all.
The latest alien planets hit the news like fireworks, I write about them a lot, and I’ve always found them boring. I’d been convinced early on by an eminent astronomer who said flatly that finding extra-solar planets wasn’t, as he said, interesting. In the first place, observations were nearly impossible and decades of claims turned […]