esiegel | September 24, 2015“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” -Leonardo Da Vinci
There's an attitude that's very, very common in America: the notion of the rugged individualist. Part of that ethos is the idea that, "if I use my brain to its fullest extent, I can figure out any problem as well as any expert." It's the idea that logic, reason, and the power of your own mind to solve literally anything.
Image credit: Science Photo Library/Corbis.
But one of the most important lessons that science teaches us is that…
esiegel | September 23, 2015“In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.” -Carl Sagan
So, Ben Carson made a speech in 2011 that's making the rounds, for some pretty scary reasons. I'm particularly concerned with what he has…
esiegel | September 22, 2015“Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding — yet beautiful — Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.” -Buzz Aldrin
If you look at Earth from space, you'll find that we're a blue planet. You might chalk that up to the fact that our sky is blue, the sky is the outermost layer of our planet, and hence the planet appears blue. But then why do the continents and clouds appear to be such different colors, and why is the "blue" of the ocean such a…
esiegel | September 21, 2015“From our home on the Earth, we look out into the distances are strive to imagine the sort of world into which we are born.. But with increasing distance our knowledge fades, and fades rapidly, until at the last dim horizon we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be suppressed.” -Edwin Hubble
The deeper we look out into the Universe, the farther back in time we look. Our largest, deepest surveys have shown us not only galaxies in the very…
esiegel | September 20, 2015“It is worthwhile, too, to warn the teacher that undue severity in correcting faults is liable at times to discourage a pupil’s mind from effort.” -Quintilian
We live in a society where we often draw this dichotomy between "our side," which is always right, and "their side," which is against us and, of course, always wrong. Yet we have more in common than you might think, and that's something we can find so long as -- as Tower of Power sings -- we're
Willing To Learn.
Yet that requires we approach problems with not only an open mind, but people with an open heart.
Image credit: screenshot…
esiegel | September 19, 2015“Making a wrong decision is understandable. Refusing to search continually for learning is not." -Phil Crosby
From searching for ET to galaxies beyond what Hubble can see, as well as two great guest posts, it's been an incredible week here at Starts With A Bang. Best of all, you've had plenty to say about it all, and so now's our chance to continue the conversation. Here's what you might have missed:
Are we looking for ET all wrong? (for Ask Ethan),
Draw your own circuits (for our Weekend Diversion),
The glory of Saturn's rings (for Mostly Mute Monday),
Maxwell's unification revolution (a…
esiegel | September 18, 2015“To me there has never been a higher source of earthly honor or distinction than that connected with advances in science.” -Isaac Newton
If Newton truly meant that sentiment, perhaps he would have been happy to find out that his theory of gravitation -- which stood unchallenged for over 200 years -- was superseded a century ago by Einstein's general relativity. Not only did Einstein's theory reproduce all the successful predictions of Newtonian gravity, but where the predictions differed, Einstein's agreed with observations where Newton's did not.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user…
esiegel | September 17, 2015“The great oak of Astronomy has been felled, and we are lost without its shadow.” –Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, on the passing of Jan Oort
In our Solar System, we have the inner, rocky worlds, an asteroid belt, the gas giants and then the Kuiper belt. Out beyond that, in theory, we have the Oort cloud, where a few of the longest-period comets come from.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user fir0002, from http://flagstaffotos.com.au/.
Due to its tremendous distance -- the Kuiper belt ends at just 50 A.U. -- we weren't able to find Oort cloud objects in situ for all of the 20th century. But…
esiegel | September 17, 2015“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” -Carl Sagan
And yet, we're not alone, in that the Universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars in it, to keep us company. Thanks to the power of the world's most advanced telescopes like Hubble, we've been able…
esiegel | September 16, 2015100 years ago, Einstein put forth his General Theory of Relativity, and 99 years ago, Karl Schwarzschild came up with the mathematical solution describing a black hole, a solution we now know is not only physically valid, but one that has many examples all across the Universe.
Image credit: NASA / Dana Berry / Skyworks Digital.
Yet when you consider quantum physics, the matter gets complicated: while you ought to be able to run the laws of physics the same forwards and backwards, a black hole seems to wind up in an irreversibly different state, in the end, from what you started with. That'…
esiegel | September 15, 2015When we think of our origin story -- the origin of everything in the Universe -- many of us think of, "let there be light!" This is true whether you consider the Big Bang origins of our Universe or the biblical stories we've told for thousands of years, yet few of us pause to consider what the phenomenon of light actually is.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Lookang.
We take for granted, today, that it's an electromagnetic wave, yet this was only determined by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865: exactly 150 years ago. A few decades later, the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission took place…
esiegel | September 14, 2015“This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” -W.G. Sebald
From their discovery in the 1600s, Saturn's rings have been a source of wonder and puzzlement to skywatchers everywhere. The only ring system visible through most telescopes from Earth, Saturn's main rings at more than 70,000 km long, yet no more than 1 km in thickness.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
Once thought to have only…
esiegel | September 13, 2015“Drawing is not only a way to come up with pictures: drawing is a way to educate your eye to understand visual information, organizing it into a more hierarchical way, a more economical way. When you see something, if you draw often and frequently, you examine a room very differently.” -Vik Muniz
If you've ever wired something up yourself and successfully hit that switch for the first time, you know what that sense of magic feels like. Have a listen to Forest City Lovers as they sing about that same feeling in a different context,
Light You Up,
while you consider how maddening circuit…
esiegel | September 12, 2015"I am quite surprised that it happened during my lifetime. It is nice to be right about something sometimes." -Peter Higgs
The LHC at CERN proved its value, for sure, but there are lots of other opinions floating around. On this and all topics at Starts With A Bang, you're free to have your say! Here's the ground we've covered, in case you missed anything:
What if we grew a fourth spatial dimension? (for Ask Ethan),
Obsession, for cats? (for our Weekend Diversion),
A runaway blue giant (for Mostly Mute Monday),
"Why do I have to learn this?", (a back-to-school special),
Will the LHC be the…
esiegel | September 11, 2015“[W]hat Fermi immediately realized was that the aliens have had more than enough time to pepper the Galaxy with their presence. But looking around, he didn’t see any clear indication that they’re out and about. This prompted Fermi to ask what was (to him) an obvious question: ‘where is everybody?’” -Seth Shostak
When you consider that there are definitely millions of planets in the habitable zones of their stars within our Milky Way galaxy alone, the possibility that there's intelligent life on at least one of them, right now, is tantalizing. But we're in our technological infancy, relatively…
esiegel | September 10, 2015“A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux … is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.” –William J. Broad
When Fritz Zwicky first calculated what the mass of a galaxy cluster needed to be to keep its galaxies moving at the observed speeds and compared it with the masses due to the starlight he saw, there was a huge discrepancy. The amount of gravity in the Universe, when compared to the amount of visible matter, didn't match.
Image…
esiegel | September 10, 2015“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” -Lord Kelvin
When Kelvin said that over 100 years ago, he was talking about how Newtonian gravity and Maxwell's electromagnetism seemed to account for all the known phenomena in the Universe. Of course, nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity and more made that prediction look silly in hindsight.
Image credit: E. Siegel.
But in the 21st century, the physics of the Standard Model describes our Universe so well that there truly may be nothing else new to find not only…
esiegel | September 9, 2015“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful.” -Henri Poincare
It's the start of another school year, and that means literally tens of millions of students returning to school. While there are a few of them genuinely looking forward to each and every one of the challenges that the upcoming year has to offer, the vast majority are excited about a handful of subjects at most, with a great many actually dreading the upcoming year.
Image credit: jamtoons, via iStockPhoto and Getty Images, at http…
esiegel | September 7, 2015“The thing is, when you see your old friends, you come face to face with yourself. I run into someone I’ve known for 40 or 50 years, and they’re old. And I suddenly realize I’m old. It comes as an enormous shock to me. ” -Polly Bergen
It isn't just humans that age rapidly, but stars as well. For the hottest, brightest stars, the aging process occurs the most quickly, as the most massive stars live only a few million years at most before going supernova. Such is the fate of the giant O-class star, ζ Ophiuchi, located just 370 light years away.
Image credit: E. Siegel, created with the free…
esiegel | September 6, 2015“The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning.” -John Vaillant
I can't fault you if you've given up entirely on the perfume/cologne industry. Despite was might be marketed as a way to induce an "obsession" among your love interest, reality often falls flat. Have a listen to Suede sing about the idea in their song,
Obsessions,
while you consider that an interesting behavior that was quite unintended has been seen.
Image credit:…