esiegel | February 8, 2012"It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!" -George Gamow
Let's pretend that, for all of our history on Earth, we had never once bothered to look up with any instruments beyond what our own eyes could offer. Imagine that all the technology we'd have would be the same -- telescopes, electronics, GPS, etc. -- as would our fundamental scientific knowledge -- Einstein's General Relativity, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, etc. -- but we had just never bothered to turn our attentions toward the…
esiegel | February 7, 2012"If people decide they're going to deny the facts of history and the facts of science and technology, there's not much you can do with them. For most of them, I just feel sorry that we failed in their education." -Harrison Schmitt
Last year, I asked a simple question with no easy answer: Whom Do You Trust For Your Science, Health, and Education? Because unless you yourself are the expert in a given field, it's often very, very difficult to tell what's trustworthy from what's not.
Images credit: Dr. Roy Spencer (top) and American Meteorological Society (bottom).
This is especially true when…
esiegel | February 5, 2012"There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man."
-Winston Churchill
There are a number of weird, bizarre, and highly entertaining things out there, and one of the greatest values of the internet is how it allows its users to -- with enough searching and a bit of luck -- uncover things they never would've found before. Each week, I'm proud to expose you to a song and/or an artist you may not have heard of before, and this week I bring you Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, and his song,
Horses.Of all the songs I could have chosen, that's the one, because I came…
esiegel | February 3, 2012"More days to come / New places to go
I've got to leave / It's time for a show
Here I am / Rock you like a hurricane!" -The Scorpions
It isn't just Earth, of course, where these great cyclonic storms occur, whipping across the planet and wreaking havoc as they rage above the surface. Most famous, perhaps, is Jupiter, whose great red spot has existed for as long as we've been able to see at the necessary resolution.
But one doesn't often think of Saturn when it comes to devastating storms.
Image credit: Earth-based telescope, retrieved from SolarSystemQuick.com.
Saturn, quite famously, is a…
esiegel | February 1, 2012"The Earth's atmosphere is an imperfect window on the universe... atmospheric turbulence blurs the images of celestial objects, even when they are viewed through the most powerful ground-based telescopes." -John Bahcall
There's no doubt that the Hubble Space Telescope has given us some of the most spectacular, high resolution views of the Universe. From the most distant galaxies ever seen to stars here in our own galactic backyard, the Hubble Space Telescope has simply dwarfed anything we've been able to do from Earth's surface.
Image credit: Bill Drelling.
This is the globular cluster NGC…
esiegel | January 30, 2012"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms." -Stephen Jay Gould
Those of you who follow me on either google+, facebook or twitter know that I sometimes post interesting articles about science from around the world, including this very good article about myths about outer space, from the often-entertaining cracked.com. So, as you can imagine, I was (at first) very excited when I saw this article…
esiegel | January 28, 2012"You cannot hope to build a better world without improving individuals. We all must work for our own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity." -Marie Curie
Most of us remember the importance of being charitable on a few rare occasions throughout the year, most commonly around the year's end. But what about the rest of the year? Obviously, we don't have an unlimited amount of resources, so for most of us, it's not a viable option to do as Magnolia Electric Company suggests, and
Give Something Else Away Every Day.But what if I told you there was a way…
esiegel | January 26, 2012"The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment." -Johannes Kepler
So said the man who, in 1604, discovered the supernova that was the last to be seen, visually, within our own galaxy. Although it's likely that two others occurred subsequently, they were not visible to human eyes, and only with powerful telescopes were their remnants discovered.
But earlier this week, the first supernova of the year was discovered, in a galaxy 25 million light years away,…
esiegel | January 24, 2012"Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history... illumined by the intermittent flare of the event." -Fernand Braudel
The spectacular event of the day, however, isn't something that started on Earth. Rather, 93 million miles away, it was our Sun, early yesterday morning (about 38 hours ago as I write this), that had a brief... shall we say...…
esiegel | January 22, 2012"I want more muscles! I go to the gym three or four times a week with a personal trainer. I can afford that now. I can't put on weight though, no matter how much I eat." -Christopher Parker
Many of us struggle in all sorts of aspects of our lives: to balance work and leisure, friends and family, responsibility and fun. For nearly all of us, something eventually goes awry, and when it does, we suddenly can't meet all our commitments at once. Regardless of where you come from or what you like, this is a problem we all have to face at some time or another. For this week, I'd like to introduce…
esiegel | January 20, 2012"When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes." -Tycho Brahe
When we look out at galaxies throughout the Universe, we find that every so often -- about once per century -- a bright star flares up so brightly that it can, for a brief amount of time, outshine the entire rest of the galaxy!
Image credit: SN 1994D, High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASA.
What's going on, of course, is not that a star is brightening, but that the very atoms composing…
esiegel | January 18, 2012"We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known Universe." -Edwin Hubble
While large parts of the internet are blacked out today, in protest of SOPA and PIPA, I could think of no better way to highlight the importance of free exchange of information on the internet than by showcasing one of the most interesting, varied and intricate objects in the entire galaxy: Messier 16, better known…
esiegel | January 16, 2012
"This is to show the world that I can paint like Titian: [See drawing, above.] Only technical details are missing." -Wolfgang Pauli
First theorized by Pauli all the way back in 1930, neutrinos are some of the most mysterious and puzzling particles ever discovered in nature. For starters, they weren't even first detected until 1956 (by Reines and Cowan), 26 years after they were predicted to exist! Coming in three flavors -- electron, muon and tau -- and in both particle and anti-particle type, these neutrinos have the smallest but non-zero masses of any particle ever discovered.
Image…
esiegel | January 15, 2012"There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard." -Jean Cocteau
Some traditions are older than we even know. Older than our great-grandparents, older than our countries, older even than the oldest songs and music we know of, which comes to you today courtesy of Planxty, the story of the 1580 defeat of the British at Glenmalure,
Follow Me Up To Carlow.Even older than that is the tradition of facial hair. As far as I can tell, facial hair fell out of favor during World War I, when chemical warfare made it necessary to…
esiegel | January 12, 2012"Nothing leads the scientist so astray as a premature truth." -Jean Rostand
One of the most awesome events, literally, that happens in this Universe is when stars -- giant nuclear furnaces like our Sun -- die in the most energetic way possible: a supernova.
Video credit: Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (Ors Hunor Detre, Oliver Krause), via YouTube.
Every star that ever lived gets two chances to end their lives in this most spectacular of fashions. The hottest, bluest, most massive stars that are born burn through their nuclear fuel incredibly rapidly, accumulating a core of heavy metals…
esiegel | January 11, 2012"I soon became convinced... that all the theorizing would be empty brain exercise and therefore a waste of time unless one first ascertained what the population of the Universe really consists of." -Fritz Zwicky
Making the entire Universe isn't easy. Even with 13.7 billion years of time, general relativity and all the known particles in the Universe, we still can't reproduce all the observations we see today.
Image credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope LenS team.
What does it take to get galaxies to form and cluster together the way they do in the Universe?
The large-scale structure in the…
esiegel | January 9, 2012"If you go through a lot of hammers each month, I don't think it necessarily means you're a hard worker. It may just mean that you have a lot to learn about proper hammer maintenance." -Jack Handey
The most common type of question I get asked by people genuinely wanting to know more about the Universe goes something like, "Hey, I saw such-and-such-a-story about some fanciful-sounding-theory, and that could be the explanation for this-weird-thing-that-we-see. What do you think about that?"
Well, here's the thing.
Image credit: Contemporary Physics Education Project.
We've got a set of laws…
esiegel | January 8, 2012"I don't run away from a challenge because I am afraid. Instead, I run toward it because the only way to escape fear is to trample it beneath your feet."
-Nadia Comaneci
Whether it's a new task, a new subject, a new place or a new person, life is full of wonderful new experiences, if you've got the courage to go out and pursue them. One way to do that, as Thao with the Get Down Stay Down would tell you, is to
Travel.But there are some places I always thought travel -- for everyone -- would be impossible. And one of those places is, well, this.
This (and all images) credit: Lana Sator, 2011…
esiegel | January 6, 2012"Every year I teach dozens of students at the University of Birmingham. Most of the students on the gender and sexuality courses are women. I guess this is because the boys don't think that gender applies to them: that it's a subject for girls."
-Louise Brown
You know the stereotype, perpetrated throughout the United States (and well beyond) for generations: girls aren't as good at math as boys are. For a long time, people pointed towards the long list of (almost exclusively male) mathematicians and scientists as support for this idea.
Image credit: Image Source/Getty Images, retrieved from…
esiegel | January 4, 2012"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 oppressed." -Edwin Hubble
Given the relative peace of our night skies, combined with the vast distances from our Solar System to the nearest star, we don't often think about the cosmic catastrophes that took place in our past. But these catastrophes are the very things that gave rise to our Solar System in the first place!
Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (…