esiegel | October 29, 2017What better way to say farewell than with a slew of costume pictures from this year's (coming) Halloween?
Happy Halloween 2017!
From Ethan Siegel and Starts With A Bang.
Keep looking to the Universe.
And we'll have a lifetime of wonderful things to still explore.
Goodbye, Scienceblogs, it's been an incredible almost-decade. Hope to see you all in all our other endeavors!
esiegel | October 28, 2017"Delay is the deadliest form of denial." -C. Northcote Parkinson
Every massless particle and wave travels at the speed of light when it moves through a vacuum. Over a distance of 130 million light years, the gamma rays and gravitational waves emitted by merging neutron stars arrived offset by a mere 1.7 seconds, an incredible result! Yet if the light was emitted at the same time as the merger, that 1.7 second delay shouldn’t be there, unless something funny is afoot.
In the final moments of merging, two neutron stars don't merely emit gravitational waves, but a catastrophic explosion that…
esiegel | October 27, 2017“On what can we now place our hopes of solving the many riddles which still exist as to the origin and composition of cosmic rays?” –Victor Francis Hess
It’s often said that advanced in physics aren’t met with “eureka!” but rather with “that’s funny,” but the truth is even stranger sometimes. Rather than the scientific method of: hypothesis, method, experiment, results, conclusion, revise, repeat, etc., many times throughout history, it’s been a series of surprise observations that have often led to our greatest leaps forward. When the speed of light was discovered not to differ when you…
esiegel | October 26, 2017“I am looking at the future with concern, but with good hope.” –Albert Schweitzer
Every so often, the argument comes up that science is expendable. That we’re simply investing too much of our resources — too much public money — into an endeavor with no short-term benefits. Meanwhile, there’s suffering of all kinds, from poverty to disease to war to natural disasters, plaguing humanity all across the country and our world. Yet even while there is suffering in the world, investing in our long-term future is indispensable. This story is nothing new.
To invest in any one thing means to not…
esiegel | October 25, 2017"Dark matter is interesting. Basically, the Universe is heavier than it should be. There's whole swathes of stuff we can't account for." -Talulah Riley
One of the most puzzling facts about the Universe is that 95% of the energy in it, in the forms of dark matter and dark energy, are completely invisible, and have never been directly detected. Perhaps, the story goes, it’s our theory of gravity that’s to blame, rather than needing new components in the Universe. While dark matter and dark energy can explain a whole slew of observations, gravity modifications do a better job of explaining…
esiegel | October 24, 2017"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there." -Richard Feynman
Scientists have long had a reputation for being uptight, serious, and even killjoy personalities. But 50+ years ago, Richard Feynman was forcing everyone who felt that way to challenge their assumptions. With his brash attitude and fun-seeking personality, Feynman seemingly was most at home when he was at his most outrageous.
Feynman at the Myths and Legends Party dressed as “God.” His wife, Gweneth, is dressed as Medusa, with a rock as her date. Image credit: from Christopher Sykes, No…
esiegel | October 23, 2017"To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves." -Federico García Lorca
In an episode filled with Vulcan mindmelds, Klingon treachery, a spectacular nebula, themes of racial purity, and PTSD, you’d think all the ingredients were there for a spectacular episode of Star Trek: Discovery. Instead, describing it as a hot mess would be overly generous; this episode is just a disappointment as far as just about every avenue is concerned. Except for the Captain Lorca / Admiral Cornwell scenes, there’s really nothing to like about where this goes.…
esiegel | October 22, 2017“You endure what is unbearable, and you bear it. That is all.” -Cassandra Clare
Well, the cat's out of the bag. A little over a week ago, Scienceblogs announced to us writers that they no longer had the funds to keep the site operational, and so they would be shutting down. They asked us to keep quiet about this, people didn't and now you know. As of the end of this month, there will be no new articles here on Scienceblogs, and hence, no more comments of the week or synopses, or a chance to interact here. So what can you do? Well, the top thing I'd like you to do is support me on Patreon,…
esiegel | October 21, 2017“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like.” -Thomas S. Kuhn
For all of human history, the biggest questions have fascinated us. Where did the Universe come from? How old is it? And what is its ultimate fate? Once relegated to the realm of theologians, poets, and philosophers, science has brought us closer than ever to the answers. But scientific revolutions have occurred before, in many cases significantly changing the answers to these and other…
esiegel | October 20, 2017"O. Hahn and F. Strassmann have discovered a new type of nuclear reaction, the splitting into two smaller nuclei of the nuclei of uranium and thorium under neutron bombardment. Thus they demonstrated the production of nuclei of barium, lanthanum, strontium, yttrium, and, more recently, of xenon and caesium. It can be shown by simple considerations that this type of nuclear reaction may be described in an essentially classical way like the fission of a liquid drop, and that the fission products must fly apart with kinetic energies of the order of hundred million electron-volts each." -Lise…
esiegel | October 19, 2017"Designing a station with artificial gravity would undoubtedly be a daunting task. Space agencies would have to re-examine many reliable technologies under the light of the new forces these tools would have to endure. Space flight would have to take several steps back before moving forward again." -Andy Weir
Ever wonder, in those science fiction shows, how space travelers always stay “down” on their starship? Irrespective of acceleration, and despite the fact that the astronauts we have in orbit around Earth are weightless, they’re always depicted as having a floor and a ceiling that are well…
esiegel | October 18, 2017"When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength." -Dalai Lama
Orbiting at hundreds of miles above Earth’s atmosphere, you’d think the Hubble Space Telescope would be safe and stable for a long time. But despite our definitions, Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t “end” and space doesn’t “begin” when we get 60 miles (100 kilometers) up. Instead, Earth’s atmosphere continues, albeit tenuously, for incredible distances, until it eventually merges with the solar wind. It’s…
esiegel | October 16, 2017
"This is going to have a bigger impact on science and human understanding, in many ways, than the first discovery of gravitational waves. We're going to be puzzling over the observations we've made with gravitational waves and with light for years to come." -Duncan Brown
Detecting black holes and the gravitational wave signals from them was an incredible feat, but doing the same thing for neutron star mergers is a true game-changer. Instead of fractions of a second, neutron star mergers show up for up to half a minute. Unlike black holes, there’s an electromagnetic counterpart. Because of…
esiegel | October 16, 2017"It’s becoming clear that in a sense the cosmos provides the only laboratory where sufficiently extreme conditions are ever achieved to test new ideas on particle physics. The energies in the Big Bang were far higher than we can ever achieve on Earth. So by looking at evidence for the Big Bang, and by studying things like neutron stars, we are in effect learning something about fundamental physics." -Martin Rees
When the Advanced LIGO detectors turned on in 2015, it shook up the world when they detected their first event: the merger of two quite massive black holes. Since that time, they’ve…
esiegel | October 15, 2017"You are... six years old. You are weak and helpless! You cannot... hurt me!" -Captain Picard, a badass, while being tortured
Star Trek has always been a way for us to look at the best and worst aspects of humanity, often through our confrontations with alien races. Different aspects of our fears, our personalities, and our sense of ethics play out on the stage of futuristic science fiction. Our frailties are exposed, and the crew is challenged to rise to the occasion, and to demonstrate the best of humanity, often in the worst situations. For the first time in five chances, Star Trek:…
esiegel | October 15, 2017“We do not realize what we have on Earth until we leave it.” -Jim Lovell
Well, the Scienceblogs comments are still on the fritz, requiring me to manually un-spam them one-at-a-time, but Starts With A Bang! is still going strong with some fabulous stories based on the best knowledge we have! This next week is poised to be a doozy of a fantastic one, as Treknology is out at last (Amazon is having a sale on it today, and my copies arrive on Wednesday), so next weekend I'll have special instructions for you on how to order autographed copies from me. Also, check out Starts With A Bang on Forbes…
esiegel | October 14, 2017“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” -William Blake
When it comes to the ultimate question of the size of the Universe, we have to look to greater scales than what we can possibly observe. Although we can place constraints on how big the unobservable Universe must be, coming up with a lower limit to its overall size, there’s a bigger question that we don’t yet know the answer to: is it finite in size, or is it truly infinite?
The observable…
esiegel | October 13, 2017"Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow. Science has been greatly successful at explaining natural processes, and this has led not only to increased understanding of the universe but also to major improvements in technology and public health and welfare." -National Academy of Sciences
It’s no secret that peering out into the distant Universe is best done from space, just as looking at our entire world is best done from that same vantage point. For all of human history until the mid-20th century, this was an…
esiegel | October 12, 2017"It’s hard to build models of inflation that don't lead to a multiverse. It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [it] seriously." -Alan Guth
It sounds like an unprovable fantasy: the idea that our Universe is just one of countless others, dotted across an eternally expanding empty space separating them. That’s generally how we picture the Multiverse, with each Universe having its own hot Big Bang distinct from every…
esiegel | October 11, 2017“Right is right even if no one is doing it; wrong is wrong even if everyone is doing it.” -Augustine of Hippo
Science isn't the easiest endeavor you can undertake. Sure, the rewards are tremendous: you can wind up understanding any phenomenon in the Universe as well (or better) than any human has ever understood it before. But on your way there, you're going to have to do some of the most difficult work you've ever done. It isn't just mathematical and scientific work, either, but internal work on your own psyche. You'll need to learn how to be wrong.
From the distant Universe, light has…