ask Ethan
esiegel | May 9, 2014“Art has a way of confronting us, of reminding us, of engaging us, in what it means to be human, and what it means to be human is to be flawed, is to be contradictory, is to be often weak, and yet despite all of these what we would consider drawbacks, that we’re also quite beautiful. Spin is the opposite.” -Junot Diaz
"Two identical fermions cannot occupy the same state," says the Pauli Exclusion Principle, one of the most fundamental laws of quantum physics that governs our Universe. But if that's truly the case, then how can two hydrogen atoms bind together?
Image credit: New Scientist.…
esiegel | May 2, 2014“The atoms become like a moth, seeking out the region of higher laser intensity.” -Steven Chu
Sure, lasers are fascinating entities. By stimulating the right medium with the right conditions, you can induce the stimulated emission of radiation of the same exact wavelength in the same exact direction over and over again.
Image credit: Q-LINE Laser pointers, via Wikimedia Commons user Netweb01, under a c.c.-by-3.0 license.
But is there a limit to the amount of energy that can be produced by a laser? And if so, what is that limit, and might it be overcome by future technological advances, or…
esiegel | April 25, 2014“If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1.” -David Mitchell
It's the end of the week, so once again it's time for Ask Ethan. You've sent in your questions and suggestions, and have I got a doozy of a question for this week about the simplest element in the Universe: hydrogen.
Image credit: WISE mission, NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA, via http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/pia13443.html.
From the Big Bang to the present day, and far into the future, just how much of the Universe's hydrogen has been (or will be) turned into…
esiegel | April 18, 2014“Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.” -Ludwig Wittgenstein
You know how bad light pollution is for astronomy, and how hard we try to escape it. We search for the darkest skies possible, away from all man-made light sources. We try to get as high above the atmosphere to clear, stable air, we try and avoid the clouds and stay as far away from the Moon as possible.
Image credit: Gemini Observatory.
You might think, "What better way to do that than from an…
esiegel | April 11, 2014“Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.” -Dan Quayle
It wasn't that long ago that I myself was a student, and of course over the past decade-and-a-half I've been very heavily involved in education -- both formally and informally -- at a huge variety of levels. And over time, education methods have not only changed, but they continue to change, not always necessarily for the better.
Image credit: Quality Primary Resources, via http://www.qualityprimaryresources.co.uk/Phonics-Table-help-mat.
Well, this week's Ask Ethan is all about one of the most basic…
esiegel | April 5, 2014“You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 × 10^18 joules of potential energy—enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.” -Bill Bryson
At the end of every week, I entertain a reader-submitted question or suggestion for our Ask Ethan series, and every once in a while I get a question that science simply doesn't have the complete answer to. For this week, it's the question of the matter-antimatter asymmetry…
esiegel | March 28, 2014“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/…
esiegel | March 21, 2014“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 failed…
esiegel | March 14, 2014“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 masses.…
esiegel | March 7, 2014“They do not see what lies ahead, when Sun has faded and Moon is dead.” -J.R.R. Tolkien
Someday, the Sun will expand, engulfing Mercury and Venus, and then some. Will we survive?
It's an exciting week, as our long-running Ask Ethan series debuts over at Medium! You can still send in your questions and suggestions here, and tomorrow I'll respond here with the very first installment of comments of the week. But first, here's something you surely wonder about.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Oona Räisänen (User:Mysid), User:Mrsanitazier.
Our Sun -- giver of life -- will some day take it…
esiegel | February 28, 2014"Man loves company - even if it is only that of a small burning candle." -Georg C. Lichtenberg
It's the end of the week here at Starts With A Bang, and so it's time for still another Ask Ethan! This is -- for those of you wondering -- the final Ask Ethan we'll have here on Scienceblogs; starting next week we'll move the series over to Medium with the rest of the new Starts With A Bang content. But keep on sending in your questions and suggestions, and not only will we continue using this site as a forum for the new posts, but next week we'll begin a new series unique to Scienceblogs, where I'…
esiegel | February 21, 2014"They will see us waving from such great heights
'Come down now,' they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away
'Come down now.' But we'll stay." -The Postal Service
Welcome back to another Ask Ethan! You keep sending in your questions and suggestions, and each week, I'll pick one of my favorites to answer for you and the world. Today's Ask Ethan comes from John, who asks one of the more fanciful and personal questions I've fielded yet, as he wants to know:
If you could jump into the Enterprise, or the Millennium Falcon, or whatever is your favorite faster-than-light starship, what…
esiegel | February 14, 2014"For the wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions." -Lao Tzu
You know the deal: it's the end of the week, so it's time for another Ask Ethan! You've continued to send in your questions-and-suggestions, much to my delight, and I'm pleased to tell you that this week's question comes from Peter Tibbles. Peter asks about obtaining information from beyond where Einstein's theory of relativity allows us to see:
Because of the expansion of the universe there is an event horizon beyond which we can know nothing. There’s been one instance of intelligent life evolved (us);…
esiegel | February 7, 2014"That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come." -Denis Waitley
It's been another spectacular week here in the Universe, and I'm pleased to take on another one of your wonderful questions in yet another Ask Ethan column! (Keep sending in your questions and suggestions if you have them.) This week's question comes from Robert Scott, and it's one of the simplest yet also the most puzzling:
I love looking at the beautiful long-exposure pictures of the Milky Way on the internet. I also love pictures of galaxies. One of my favorites is of Andromeda. I've…
esiegel | January 31, 2014"There are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents, and only one for birthday presents, you know." -Lewis Carroll
It's the end of the week once again, and so it's time for yet another Ask Ethan column! This week, I was asked a wonderful math question by Keith H., who wanted to know:
Among my 1,434 [Facebook] friends, it's nobody's birthday today. Given the 365.25 days in a year, what are the odds of a day like this? Show your work.
Assuming that none of your friends were born prior to March 1, 1900, this is the right starting point.
Image credit: ePrint…
esiegel | January 24, 2014"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." -Robert Frost
Well, here we are, at the end of the week, and you know what that means: another Ask Ethan column! This week, I've been asked about the same thing by many different people, so I'll credit it to Patrick E. and Matt T., who want to know:
I'm curious to hear your take on this: the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics applied to the origin of life.
For those of you who haven't heard, this is what they're talking about.
Image credit: Richard A. Cunha, Thereza A. Soares, Victor H. Rusu, Frederico J.S. Pontes, Eduardo…
esiegel | January 18, 2014"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -Antoine de Saint Exupéry
It's the end of the week here, so it's time for another Ask Ethan column! Today's question comes from longtime reader and fan Jeremy F., who wants to know about the feasibility of the planned Mars One mission. In particular,
I hope 4 people don't just fly to their death, that would be terrible for my chances of getting to Alpha Centauri or Vega before I die.
No kidding. Let's go back to the…
esiegel | January 10, 2014“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” -Douglas Adams
Even though our main blog has moved, I'm so glad that the questions and suggestions have still been pouring in, because it's time for another entry in our Ask Ethan series! Today's question comes from professional physicist Marty Olsson, who asks:
I have been bothered for a long time why the Milky Way looks curved, sort of like…
esiegel | January 3, 2014"The world owes you nothing. It was here first." -Mark Twain
When you think about where all of this came from -- back to the beginning of the Universe -- there's a good chance it makes you a little uncomfortable. For this week's Ask Ethan, our one remaining column here on ScienceBlogs, our reader vvv asks a question that quite possibly many of you have wondered:
Why didn't the universe collapse into a black hole right "at the moment of the big bang?"
And quite honestly, I've wondered a fair bit about this myself. Here's why.
Image credit: Kerry-Ann Lecky Hepburn (Weather and Sky Photography…
esiegel | December 27, 2013"Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." -Dream Hampton
Perhaps no word in the English language generates as much misunderstanding as the word theory. In scientific circles, this word has a very specific meaning that's different from everyday use, and -- as a theoretical astrophysicist myself -- I feel it's my duty to help explain exactly what we mean when we use it. In this week’s Ask Ethan column, I'm pleased to pull out of our question/suggestion box the question of Ripley, who asks:
I often see that because there is no "100…