matter
Tag archives for matter
Somethin’ Neat about our Galaxy
Posted by Ethan on March 26, 2008 So last week I was up at Pacific University in Portland, OR for a job interview. As part of a faculty interview, you have to lecture on a topic for undergraduates, but they give you the topic just a couple of days before. My topic was Gauss’ Law, which talks about the relationship between an…
Afraid of the Dark?
Posted by Ethan on March 11, 2008 So I gave a public lecture last (Monday) night called, “Afraid of the Dark: How We Know What We Can’t See” and videotaped it. Now, I’m pretty good at what I’m doing right now (research in theoretical cosmology), but I’m really good at public speaking and teaching, and here is me telling a public audience…
WMAP results: Cosmology from the CMB
Posted by Ethan on March 6, 2008 The cosmic microwave background is the radiation left over from the big bang. It’s very uniform, 2.725 Kelvin everywhere. We’re moving with respect to it, so there’s a doppler shift, and we see that as a dipole moment in the Temperature. When we subtract that out, we see variations on the order of 30 microKelvins!…
Q & A: Where does Matter Come From?
Posted by Ethan on March 4, 2008 I love The Straight Dope. For 35 years, people have written in and asked some of the most difficult-to-answer questions on any topic you can think of; the staffers, writing under the pseudonym Cecil Adams, do their best to get to the bottom of their questions. Well, they also have a message board, and I…
Why we need Dark Matter in the Universe.
Posted by Ethan on February 19, 2008 Last week, Pamela Gay over at Star Stryder pointed me to a press release which claimed that, among other things, perhaps dark matter wasn’t necessary. So I wrote a guest post on her blog explaining why it was. Apparently, some people still aren’t convinced. So I will lay out for you all the reasons I…
