I read a nice essay saying that scientists make their advice to politicians too simple. What scientists over-simplify, said the essay’s author, is their uncertainties. I thought the author might be right: surely politicians don’t believe flat statements like, say, “climate change is making the world warmer and we’re all going to die.” Not that […]
Physics
Some atoms, like the ones on the skin of your hand, are happy to give up their electrons. And the electrons congregate in some mysterious way, as AG says, into a band of brothers. The band is relentlessly negative, so when you get near enough to something positive, like a dryer or a doorknob, the […]
What an odd-looking person this Freeman Dyson is. His nose is long, his ears stick out, his smile is tentatively friendly, but what to make of those eyes? Dyson is hard to describe: he’s not like anyone you’ve met before and whatever he says is not what you’ll expect him to say. He’s spent his […]
On June 6, 2002, during a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recounted a particularly difficult episode in gathering intelligence during wartime. “Now what is the message there?” he said. “The message is that there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known […]
One of our favorite science writers has just published a terrific new book, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. So I nabbed author Richard Panek, who just happens to be an LWON blogger, for a Q and A session. Q: Your book’s really provocative. What first drew you […]
One of the campuses where I teach is haunted. Everybody says so. They hear noises in the night. They encounter cold spots. They come to work in the morning and find a seemingly immovable file cabinet in the middle of a hallway. My role, you might not be surprised to hear, is that of resident […]
Abstruse Goose added a mysterious little tag that says something like, “Now, how many pop culture references can you find?” None for me, not one, geezer that I apparently am. But I did get the astronomy/physics references. The stardust one: maybe you already know this but most every element — the lithium in our batteries, […]
This has been a bad year for contrarian cosmology. First Geoffrey Burbidge died, at the age of 84, on January 26. And now comes the news that Allan Sandage, also 84, died last Saturday. I’ll let other obituaries explore Sandage’s monumental scientific biography at length and in depth: apprenticing under Edwin Hubble; assuming Hubble’s observing […]