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"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -Max Planck
It’s been a great week for learning a little more about our Universe, from fundamental particles to scales beyond our observable Universe. Our new articles at the main Starts With A Bang blog got quite a response over here, and I'm happy to share with you the Comments of the Week, and my responses to them! Let's start with last week's Ask Ethan.
Image credit: Albert…
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“While friendship itself has an air of eternity about it, seeming to transcend all natural limits, there is hardly any emotion so utterly at the mercy of time.” -Robert Hugh Benson
If you were headed out into the Universe -- spaceship and sci-fi technology and all -- it simply wouldn't make sense to keep on counting time in Earth-days and Earth-years, would it? When you're no longer bound to our planet, and particularly if you're gone long enough, as our planet changes its orbit, it sure seems silly, doesn't it?
Image credit: American Physical Society, via http://www.physicscentral.com/…
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“The particle and the planet are subject to the same laws and what is learned of one will be known of the other.” -James Smithson
Now that the Higgs has been discovered, the Standard Model is complete. But are there any other new particles?
Image retrieved from Fermilab, modified by me.
If asymptotic safety is right -- and it's looking like the Standard Model might be stable up to energies far beyond the reach of accelerators the size of the entire Earth -- there might not be anything at all accessible to humanity as far as experimental particle physics is concerned. And a Higgs mass…
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“In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.” -Walt Whitman
With the new result out from BICEP2, and even more firm evidence for cosmic inflation in place, many of you must be wondering what this means for the Multiverse.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons users Frédéric MICHEL and Azcolvin429, annotated by me.
From our observable Universe, we can learn an awful lot about the part that's unobservable, but is there anything we can say -- intelligently -- about other Universes that may have been created as a result of cosmic…
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“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” -Benjamin Franklin
It's graduate school acceptance season, and many people out there have big decisions coming up. Some of you will have questions about where to go to graduate school, while some will have questions about whether to go to graduate school.
Image credit: Jorge Cham of PhD Comics.
For those of you in the latter category -- wondering whether you should get your PhD -- this read is for you.
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“We’ll ride the spiral to the end and may just go where no one’s been.” -Tool
A beautifully undisturbed, large spiral can be found right at the heart of the Virgo Cluster. Sure, looking at the heart of the Virgo Cluster on its own, you might totally overlook today's Messier object.
Image credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo of Deep Sky Colors.
But you sure would be missing out if you did! Larger than the Milky Way, with a supermassive black hole more than 20 times the size of our own, a super hot, ionized central region, and speeding through the intergalactic medium at 1,000 km/s -- stripping its…
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"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot
It's been a remarkably exciting week for science, and you've had a lot to say about our new articles at the main Starts With A Bang blog. After all, it isn't every week that we possibly discover the imprint of gravitational waves on the Cosmic Microwave Background!
Images credit: Seljak & Zaldarriaga (L), Wayne Hu (R), via http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/~yuki/CMBpol/CMBpol.htm.
Let's dive right in -- and respond -- to your comments…
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“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.” -Anais Nin
You know the expression that you should believe half of what you see and none of what you hear, don't you? After all, illusions are prevalent everywhere we look (or listen), and perhaps Thievery Corporation got it right in their song,
The Supreme Illusion.
But what do you do when what you see and what you hear confound one another?
Image credit: Esther Wiersinga-Post (edits by me), via http…
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“The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.” -C.P. Snow, on Einstein’s 1905 work
In 1887, two scientists set out to measure how the speed of light changed with the Earth’s motion. What they didn’t find wound up changing the world.
Image credit: Albert Abraham Michelson, 1881.
Today's Ask Ethan is all about the most famous…
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“All our sweetest hours fly the fastest.” -Virgil
The speed of light in a vacuum is the limit for massless particles, but massive ones are limited even further! Have you ever wondered about that?
Image credit: ICEPP via https://www.icepp.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/history/lep-e.html (L); LEP / CERN, via http://www.madrimasd.org/ (R).
We can get particles in accelerators up to 99.9999999988% the speed of light, and the Universe makes ones that are even faster! But despite all of this, there's a limit, and that limit is more restrictive than the speed of light in a vacuum!
Image credit…
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“I don’t think at this point we have any way of knowing where the laws of physics came from. We could hope that when we really understand the laws of physics that they will describe how the Universe came into existence.” -Alan Guth
So, since Monday's big story -- about the BICEP2 collaboration announcing the discovery of the signature of gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background -- I realized that there are simply too many misconceptions and misunderstandings out there about cosmic inflation, the Big Bang, and how the whole story comes together.
Image credit: Bock et…
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“A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?” -Khalil Gibran
When you think about globular clusters, you normally think about great collections of hundreds of thousands of stars located in the halo of our galaxy, spherically distributed.
Image credit: user Antilhue from Chile, via Astrosurf, at http://www.astrosurf.com/antilhue/m68.htm.
So what do you do if you discover a loose, faint collection of a couple hundred…
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“Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really a theory of a bang at all. It is really only a theory of the aftermath of a bang.” -Alan Guth
So, you've heard the big news by now, no doubt? Primordial B-modes have been detected in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background!
Images credit: Seljak & Zaldarriaga (L), Wayne Hu (R), via http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/~yuki/CMBpol/CMBpol.htm.
But how robust is this? Will it hold up under scrutiny? And is it statistically significant enough to call a "discovery" just yet?
And finally, whether it does or it doesn't, what does it…
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“[M]y goal is to always come from a place of love… but sometimes you just have to break it down for a motherfucker.” -RuPaul
We've all had to face the dilemma, when we can't easily afford something, whether to forego it, or whether to obtain it through means that don't compensate the original content creator. There's a great Donna Summer song that I think applies here:
She Works Hard For The Money.
When I was a kid, we'd tape songs off the radio or movies off the TV, when I was in college, we'd download bootlegs off the internet, and now pirating music, movies and television is…
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"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." -Soren Kierkegaard
After all is said-and-done this week, and after all the new posts over at the main Starts With A Bang on Medium, you've had a chance to have your say here on our forum! And Kierkegaard would likely change his tune if everyone he came across left comments like yours.
Image credit: Mark Garlick / HELAS.
From the end of the Sun's life to the light elements, let's take a look at your best comments this week!
From Ted Lawry concerning Ask Ethan #27: Will the Earth and…
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“What makes us love… is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.” -Daniel Tammet
Is the largest object in our galaxy — our central black hole — poised to devour a massive gas cloud?
Image credit: ESO/MPE/M. Schartmann/L. Calçada.
As far as supermassive black holes go, the one at the center of our galaxy is definitely on the boring end. While many galaxies have black holes with tens or hundreds of millions of times the mass of our Sun, and a few even reach into the billions, ours sits humbly at a mere four million solar…
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“So here we have π squared, which an engineer would call ‘10.’” -Frank King
This March 14th, stump your friends with these amazing facts about the world’s favorite transcendental number!
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons users TechnoGuyRob and InverseHypercube.
I've written about Pi Day twice before here on Scienceblogs, but for this year's festivities, I've assembled a collection of my favorite facts about everyone's favorite irrational but indispensible number, from history to pure mathematics to birthdays to astronomy!
Image credit: Emil Ivanov, via http://www.emilivanov.com/CCD%20Images…
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“We cannot conceive of matter being formed of nothing, since things require a seed to start from… Therefore there is not anything which returns to nothing, but all things return dissolved into their elements.” -William Shakespeare
Every element found on Earth was made in either the Big Bang or the cores of stars… except these three.
Image credit: Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D., via http://chemistry.about.com/od/periodictableelements/a/printperiodic.htm
When you look at the periodic table of the elements, you're likely familiar with the fact that everything found on Earth is made up of some…
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“The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.” -Carl Sagan
I haven't been shy about sharing my hopes for the new Cosmos series, which aired its first episode earlier this week.
Image credit: Fox Studios / Cosmos.
Personally, I thought it was good, even though it wasn't the series I would have chosen. Although that isn't really the point of Cosmos, is it? You see, there's a story being told here -- a story that's the one thing unifying us all in the Universe -- a story of our shared history. And for the first time in a generation, that story…
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“[L]ife is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” -Virginia Woolf
One of the only members of the Virgo Cluster… that isn’t located in Virgo!
When it comes to wonders of the night sky, you might think that if you've seen one galaxy, you've seen them all. But much like our own Milky Way, each one has its own history, its own present, and its own future. To each of its hundred billion stars and all their planets, it's the most important galaxy in the Universe.
Image credit: © 2006 — 2012 by Siegfried Kohlert, via http://www.…