What is dark energy?
Posted by Ethan on May 23, 2013 
“Because dark energy makes up about 70 percent of the content of the universe, it dominates over the matter content. That means dark energy will govern expansion and, ultimately, determine the fate of the universe.” -Eric Linder It’s been a while since we’ve spoken about dark energy, and we were just talking about Einstein’s greatest…
The E-Cat is back, and people are still falling for it!
Posted by Ethan on May 21, 2013 
“Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson Well, I guess it’s that season again. The charlatan who claims to have invented a cold fusion device — the same device whose flaws were exposed here two years ago — has just held an “independent…
Messier Monday: A Hyper-Smooth Globular Cluster, M5
Posted by Ethan on May 20, 2013 
“The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.” -Galileo Galilei Welcome back to another Messier Monday here on Starts With a Bang! With 110 deep-sky objects making it up, the Messier Catalogue is the first comprehensive, accurate catalogue of faint (but not too faint) fixtures in the night sky. Each object…
Weekend Diversion: Against Scientific Racism
Posted by Ethan on May 19, 2013 
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” -Frederick Douglass I thought we were past this, I really did. Having grown up in New York, having lived in eight different states and traveled to 39…
“Einstein’s Greatest Blunder” was REALLY a blunder!
Posted by Ethan on May 17, 2013 
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” -Albert Einstein Back when Einstein first proposed his theory of General Relativity, his revolutionary picture of the Universe was met with a mix of curiosity, awe, and intense skepticism. It isn’t every day that your most cherished of all physical theories — the…
The Rise and Fall of Supersymmetry
Posted by Ethan on May 15, 2013 
“Supposedly she’d died, but here she was again–somewhat changed, but you couldn’t kill her. Not when the truest part of her hadn’t even been born.” -Denis Johnson Over the past 100 years, our picture of the Universe has changed dramatically, on both the largest scales and the smallest. On the large-scales, we’ve gone from a…
Messier Monday: The Cigar Galaxy, M82
Posted by Ethan on May 13, 2013 
“How is it they live for eons in such harmony - the billions of stars - when most men can barely go a minute without declaring war in their mind against someone they know?” -Thomas Aquinas Welcome back to another Messier Monday here on Starts With a Bang! Each Monday, we take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep-sky wonders —…
Weekend Diversion: The Top 10 Forests in the World
Posted by Ethan on May 11, 2013 
“But I’ll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected with everything.” -Alan Watts As we move farther away from the equinox and towards the solstice, my part of the world is seeing not only more daylight, but…
Where does an earthquake’s energy come from?
Posted by Ethan on May 10, 2013 
“As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs.” -Charles Francis Richter You’ve all been around long enough to be familiar with the severe damage that earthquakes can cause, rattling and cracking the…
The Far Future of our Solar System
Posted by Ethan on May 8, 2013 
“No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.” -Alan Watts “They do not see what lies ahead, when Sun has faded and Moon is dead.” -J.R.R. Tolkien One of the most amazing facts about the Universe is that, despite only having spent a few hundred years…
