It’s my mom’s birthday today, so I thought I’d revisit this post about a time when she audited an astronomy class. This semester, she’s taking French. Bon anniversaire, maman. I’m not sure exactly where this story begins, but maybe it’s here: Sometime this summer, my mom decided to take an astronomy class. She had taken […]
Alex Filippenko
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 […]