Novelist Amy Tan digs deep into the creative process, journeying through her childhood and family history and into the worlds of physics and chance, looking for hints of where her own creativity comes from. It’s a wild ride with a surprise ending.
Tag Archives: Cosmos
New Mars Photographs
Click the crater.
Brian Greene: The universe on a string
In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to superstring theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe. (This mind-bending theory may soon be put to the test at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.)
What’s in the air?
Good question … what IS in the air?The simple answer is that the air … the Earth’s atmosphere … is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, with a tiny amount of some other gases including water vapor. Then, there’s dirt. I want to talk a little about the oxygen, one of the other gases (carbon dioxide to be exact), the water vapor, and the dirt. Continue reading What’s in the air?
Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?
Several thousand intelligent beings have surrounded two funny looking blue trees. On some planet. Elsewhere. [Image source] Back in the old days, when Carl Sagan was alive and at Harvard, there was an annual (or at least frequent) debate between Sagan and my adviser, Irv DeVore. The debate was about the possibility of intelligent life having evolved on other planets.You already know Sagan’s argument: There are billions and billions of Galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars, so there are billions and billions and billions and billions of stars. Even if the probability of planets forming around a star is low, and of an earth like planet being one of them, and being at the right distance from the star, etc. etc. etc. there are still going to be a very large number of worlds amenable to the origin of life, and some of those, the evolution of complex life, and some of those will give rise to intelligent life, and some of them will ask the same question we are asking now and seek to explore the possibility of life on other planets.Then, I guess we get together in a coffee shop on Alpha Centauri and talk about it. Continue reading Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?
Data, Dogma, and Truth Too Detailed to Matter (most of the time)
There are so many lessons in this story it is hard to know where to start. First, don’t throw away data. Second, scientists do question their own dogma and in fact get rather excited about it. Third, Click and Clack (Car Talk) glossed their answer to a question the other day (sort of) … it turns out that running the heater in your convertible does affect the entire planet. A little.
Continue reading Data, Dogma, and Truth Too Detailed to Matter (most of the time)
Super Laser
QUEST visits the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, where scientists will soon aim the world’s largest laser at a target the size of a pencil eraser. The goal? Nuclear fusion — and, they say, the answer to the world’s clean energy needs.
John Wheeler is Dead
John Wheeler may have been one of the few living individuals who actually worked with Einstein, until his death at the age of 96 two days ago. He is famous for his work on the Unified Field Theory (which did not come to fruition), the Harrison-Wheeler equation which has to do with high-density nuclear matter inside of very dense (neutron) stars, and for coining the term “black hole.”Well, he did not really coin the term. It is said that he was giving a talk on the phenomenon, and during the talk a student called out “black hole” as a suggested name for the phenomenon, and it stuck. Continue reading John Wheeler is Dead
NASA Science Web Site
The Open Source content management system PLONE runs the newly released NASA Science web site.The site has something for everyone (researchers, educators, kids, and “citizen scientists”). The Plone seems to be working quite nicely.Some of it is still a little rough. The Space Calendar link seems to be broken, and the email to the “responsible government official” for the site (who, by the way, is Greg Williams) gets you an email to “noone@nasa.gov” …There appears to be a number of distinctly different ways to navigate on this site, including a main in-your-face graphical orientation to four main topics (Earth, Heliophysics, Planets, Astrophysics) each of which leads to a page with a “Big Questions/FocusAreas/Missions” dynamic side bar menu. (These sub-sub topics, big questions, missions, etc., are re-grouped on thier own pages accessible from the top menue as well)Many of the links seem to lead to fairly specific questions or NASA programs enveloping lists of missions that address those questions or are run by those programs, or to the missions themselves with a sidebar indicating what the “related big questions” are.The site has actually done a pretty good job of assembling, correlating, and cross-indexing the myriad components of NASA.So what about the NASA.gov site? This looks to me like an eventual replacement.
David Hoffman: Catch Sputnik mania!
Filmmaker David Hoffman shares footage from his feature-length documentary Sputnik Mania, which shows how the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 led to both the space race and the arms race — and jump-started science and math education around the world.
When Science Goes Wrong
Simon LeVay, who is the guy who first identified the relationship between sexualy dimorphic hypothalamic nuclei in mammals (in the medial preoptic or anterior areas) and homosexuality in human males, has come out with a new book … When Science Goes Wrong
Experimental brain surgery goes horribly awry; a dam fails catastrophically; a geologist leads an ill-equipped party to its doom in the mouth of an active volcano: these are the amazing and sometimes horrific stories of technical errors and scientific mistakes that LeVay (The Sexual Brain) relates. Some, like the case of the British meteorologist who failed to predict a hurricane that killed 18 people, seem due to arrogance. Others–the loss of a costly spacecraft, a criminal conviction based on inaccurate DNA analysis, multiple deaths after an accidental release of anthrax–are the result of ordinary human error. Some incidents may well have been deliberate, such as a nuclear reactor error that was possibly the result of a love triangle gone bad, or the data falsified by a physicist seeking fame as the discoverer of a new element. LeVay surveys a range of fields, offering several reasons why things go wrong and noting that for every brilliant scientific success, there are a dozen failures. Readers curious about particularly notorious cases will find LeVay’s book both entertaining and thought provoking.
But what I really want to who you is this interview of LeVay by John Stewart, where you will find, among other things, an interesting discussion of the possibility that the Earth will be sucked into a tiny Black Hole this June: Continue reading When Science Goes Wrong
Will the Earth be sucked into a tiny black hole in June?
It is said that scientists involved in the Manhattan Project to engineer and implement the first nuclear bombs seriously considered the possibility that such a bomb could initiate a chain reaction that would destroy the Earth. Now it is being claimed that the production of miniature black holes by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland could do the same. The LHC is scheduled to go on line in June. Continue reading Will the Earth be sucked into a tiny black hole in June?
Planets In the Making
Planets are formed when a disk of dust orbiting a newly minted star condenses into blobs. The beginning and end of this process has been observed, but the intermediate steps have only been modeled. However, a team of astronomers now reports observations of this process in the intermediate stages. The conditions under which this observation is made are unusual, which is apparently the reason that the observation was possible.
Continue reading Planets In the Making
Solar System Doppleganger Located
Astronomers have discovered a planetary system orbiting a distant star which looks much like our own.They found two planets that were close matches for Jupiter and Saturn orbiting a star about half the size of our Sun.Martin Dominik, from St Andrews University in the UK, said the finding suggested systems like our own could be much more common than we thought.
Stephen Hawking: Asking big questions about the universe
In keeping with the theme of TED2008, professor Stephen Hawking asks some Big Questions about our universe — How did the universe begin? How did life begin? Are we alone? — and discusses how we might go about answering them.Stephen Hawking’s scientific investigations have shed light on the origins of the cosmos, the nature of time and the ultimate fate of universe. His bestselling books for a general audience have given an appreciation of physics to millions.
Continue reading Stephen Hawking: Asking big questions about the universe