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 […]
Physics
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 […]
I think this is funny because it explains a problem I’ve had with math all along, which is that math just makes stuff up: makes up number, and space between numbers, and relations between numbers, and I’m not even mentioning zero. Also I know that the horizon problem went something like, the universe shouldn’t have […]
About ten years ago I was killing time in the sprawling Barnes & Noble on Union Square in Manhattan. I had pushed my chair away from a little table, crossed my legs, and opened a book on my lap. I don’t remember which book. I can’t even remember whether it was one I’d grabbed off […]
Q: What happened before the Big Bang? Mr. Cosmology: If I told you, God would have to kill you. Q: What is time? Mr. Cosmology: Is 9:30. Q: I just bought a telescope. Do you have any advice for a first-time sky watcher? Mr. Cosmology: What happens in Vega, stays in Vega. Q: How many […]
Metastable: Down the block, along the street, is a steep bank on which trees have taken root and grown, slanting off the bank and over the road, balancing their holds in the ground with increasing height and occasional high winds and of course gravity. One day sooner or later a good rain slightly liquifies the […]
Abstruse Goose seems preoccupied with life paths and choices. This time instead of math, he’s talking about physics, specifically about a theory that the many worlds which according to quantum uncertainty (thus Schrodinger’s cats) can possibly exist, actually do co-exist side by side, maybe in different universes or something. I don’t know. It’s pretty arcane. […]
