May 28, 2010
"You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this." -Henry David Thoreau
Maybe for you, Henry. But a century and a half…
May 27, 2010
"Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the Earth." -Ptolemy
When you look up at the stars in the night sky, perhaps the most striking thing that they do is rotate about…
May 24, 2010
"Magic mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?" -the Wicked Queen
For a galaxy, though, it's really not fair to ask which one's the fairest. It's simply too subjective of a question. But size, now that's something we can measure.
So, I ask you -- galaxies of the Universe -- to step…
May 23, 2010
"When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
We definitely need a good song for this weekend,…
May 22, 2010
"The moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun." -William Shakespeare
Let's assume you lived before we walked on the Moon. Before we had ever been to space, hell, even before the invention of the telescope. Why not go all the way back to before we knew the planets went…
May 19, 2010
"I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." -Jack London
Most of you have seen a shooting star before, also known…
May 17, 2010
"From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician." -Sir James Jeans
Last time we met, I posed a mystery to you: why are globular clusters the smallest in the Universe?
And what's more than that, we never find them in…
May 16, 2010
You see that there is no war within you. You're on your own side, and you are your own strength. -Terri Guillemets
Many of you don't know this, but over the last couple of months, my wife and I have been taking night classes in partner acrobatics! Why? Just because it sounded like a fun,…
May 14, 2010
"I may be an old lion, but if someone puts his hand in my mouth, I can still bite it off." -Wilhelm Steinitz
When you look at a typical galaxy, you usually find a disk, a bulge, and a few dots diffusely strewn about the exterior.
Like an old lion, these dots have been around for a very long time:…
May 14, 2010
I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. -Thomas Jefferson
It's the end of the semester at my college as well as at many schools across the world, and I've spent the last week or so grading final exams. And while I was doing it, I noticed something…
May 10, 2010
"Music is perpetual, and only the hearing is intermittent." -Thoreau
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to the circus together. Someday, I vowed, I'll be strong, flexible, and stable enough to do the amazing hand-balancing tricks we saw.
And all the while, the six-year-old girl behind us…
May 8, 2010
"I walked on your face!" -Buzz Aldrin, to the Moon
Do you watch my favorite show on television, 30 Rock? If you saw this last week's episode, you know that Tina Fey's character Liz Lemon got to meet Buzz Aldrin, who... randomly yells at the Moon.
(I'm sure this video will get taken down soon,…
May 7, 2010
"What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?" -Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I don't mean to ask why the Milky Way is a spiral in…
May 5, 2010
It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out. -J.R.R. Tolkien
The night sky is no stranger to most of you. Once the Sun goes down in the west, the sky darkens, turning ever-deeper shades of blue until it approaches…
May 3, 2010
"An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life." -Unknown
Every now and again, people with all sorts of backgrounds -- from some graduate school all the way to having not finished high school -- ask me about…
May 2, 2010
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. -Benjamin Franklin
Every weekend, I try to bring something light to you, but there's a lot of heavy stuff going on in the world right now. So instead of the usual, I'd like to tell you just a little bit about why putting even a…
April 30, 2010
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
One of the great things that the Hubble Space Telescope has given us is a whole slew of images…
April 28, 2010
Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
-Georg Lichtenberg
We've been going through the history of the Universe -- from inflation to the present day -- and you can read parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 here. The last thing that happened was we had a…
April 26, 2010
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit. -Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking is in the news today, big time. Why? He says that intelligent aliens almost certainly exist, and that we should definitely not try to contact them. In fact, he argues, we should…
April 25, 2010
Last night, I had the absolute pleasure to hear Midori, one of the top violinists in the world, play with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra.
(For those of you wondering, she was spectacular.)
What does Midori sound like? Here's her playing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto fifteen years ago with the…
April 23, 2010
Where there is an observatory and a telescope, we expect that any eyes will see new worlds at once. -Henry D. Thoreau
20 years ago tomorrow, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit.
It doesn't look that impressive, and maybe it shouldn't. After all, what is a space telescope? It's a…
April 22, 2010
Note: This article first appeared here on Scienceblogs one year ago today.
There are many ways to celebrate Earth Day, from sustainability efforts to simply appreciating nature.
And while this is a beautiful shot of Forest Park right here in Portland, it doesn't compare -- in my eyes -- to the…
April 21, 2010
[The Big Bang] is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms ... [nor] challenged by an appeal to observation. -Fred Hoyle
Contrary to popular public opinion, the Big Bang is one of the most sound, well-tested and verified scientific models of all time. It's right up there…
April 19, 2010
If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.
-Lee Trevino, golfer who actually has been struck by lightning.
Today's astronomy picture of the day is absolutely gorgeous.
Of course, this is the Icelandic volcano,…
April 18, 2010
Never be limited by other people's limited imaginations...If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won't exist because you'll have already shut it out ... You can hear other people's wisdom, but you've got to re-evaluate the world for yourself.
-Mae Jemison, first African-American woman…
April 16, 2010
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.-John F. Kennedy, 1961
The entire human endeavor of spaceflight is -- without a doubt -- one of the greatest achievements in the history…
April 14, 2010
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within. -Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
Welcome back to The Greatest Story Ever Told, where we're covering the natural history of the…
April 12, 2010
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." -Groucho Marx
"While no one has proved that wormholes exist, that does not for a moment keep the more adventurous of thinkers from trying to figure how they might behave."
-Michael Lemonick, Time magazine…
April 11, 2010
"I created this project for fun. Initially, I had no business goals with it. I created this project recently. I was and still am a teenager myself, that is why I had a certain feeling of what other teenagers would want to see on the Internet. I myself enjoyed talking to friends with Skype using a…
April 9, 2010
"Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt." -Lev Landau
I've been telling you about the Big Bang, the greatest story ever told, and the entire natural history of the Universe. Let's remind you -- historically -- of how our conception of the Universe changed as we learned more about our…
