March 7, 2015
“It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.” -Albert Einstein
On the one hand, we have matter -- things with mass -- in the Universe, ranging all the way from…
March 5, 2015
“Science enhances the moral value of life, because it furthers a love of truth and reverence — love of truth displaying itself in the constant endeavor to arrive at a more exact knowledge of the world of mind and matter around us, and reverence, because every advance in knowledge brings us face to…
March 4, 2015
“Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.” -Boris Pasternak
When it comes to theoretical physics, you might realize the entire point is to set up a framework to predict what phenomena are going to occur in the Universe. So if you rewind the clock back to very early times, set up the…
March 3, 2015
“Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.” -St. Augustine
When you look up at the sky, all the twinkling lights -- the stars -- appear to be fixed.
Image credit…
March 2, 2015
“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.” -Albert Camus
There's nothing quite like the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Some 200-400 billion stars are located there, including our own…
March 1, 2015
“An ancestor of mine maintained that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” -Mr. Spock, Star Trek
Sometimes the truth is hard to handle on its own, so we resort to fiction to make it a little easier to swallow. Have a listen to Summer Fiction’s…
February 28, 2015
"True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Every week holds an amazing look at the Universe in a unique way here at Starts With A Bang, and this week saw not only a series of new posts from me, but two contributed ones,…
February 27, 2015
“A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.” -Tennessee Williams
The depiction of dying in space -- by exposure to its terrifying vacuum -- is incredibly varied, from freezing to swelling and bulging to simply exploding.
Image credit: Mike Tyson…
February 26, 2015
“The moon was like this awesome, romantic, mysterious thing, hanging up there in the sky where you could never reach it, no matter how much you wanted to. But you’re right. Once you’re actually here, it’s just a big, dull rock.” -Futurama
Oh, but the big dull rocks are fascinating in their own…
February 25, 2015
“End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.” -J.R.R. Tolkien
No matter how well we care for our bodies, they eventually wear down, give out, and we…
February 24, 2015
No one science can stand wholly on its own. For inquiry about the Universe to give a correct, complete picture, it requires that we bring in a whole slew of evidence, often from tangentially related fields.
Image credit: Professor Kenneth R. Lang, Tufts University.
The interplay between three…
February 24, 2015
One of the great, catastrophic truths of the Universe is that everything has an expiration date. And this includes every single point of light in the entire sky.
Image credit: Rogelio Bernal Andreo of Deep Sky Colors, via http://deepskycolors.com/astro/JPEG/RBA_Orion_HeadToToes.jpg.
The most…
February 23, 2015
“These spots have never been observed by anyone before me; and from my observations of them, often repeated, I have been led to the opinion which I have expressed, namely, that I feel sure that the surface of the Moon is not perfectly smooth, free from inequalities and exactly spherical… but that,…
February 22, 2015
“The only frozen heart around here is yours.” -Anna, to Hans, from Frozen
When something's difficult, it's easy to lose sight of what's beautiful. Have a listen to Eilen Jewell's haunting and memorable song,
Fourth Degree.
Next, before you curse the bitter cold yet again, particularly those of you…
February 21, 2015
“In this land of ours, there are many great pits. But none more bottomless than the bottomless pit. Which, as you can see here, is bottomless.” -Grunkle Stan, Gravity Falls
After another week of fun-filled stories about the Universe here at Starts With A Bang, it's time to take a look back at…
February 20, 2015
“It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.” -Albert Einstein
In physics, we're always on that quest for the next frontier: the next order of magnitude higher…
February 19, 2015
“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.” -Edna St. Vincent Millay
It's the ultimate dream of many children with time on their hands and their first leisurely attempt at digging: to go clear through…
February 18, 2015
“What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.” -Theodore Roethke
In math, if you prove a theorem, that theorem is as good as gold. But in physics, a theorem may or may not be 100% valid.
Image credit: Steven Weinberg for Cern Courier, via http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/…
February 17, 2015
“For my confirmation, I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.” -Wernher von Braun
A telescope is only as good, mind you, as the amount of time you spend looking through it. And for most people,…
February 16, 2015
“In the year 1456 … a Comet was seen passing Retrograde between the Earth and the sun… Hence I dare venture to foretell, that it will return again in the year 1758.” -Edmond Halley
When ESA's Rosetta mission "caught" its target, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August, 2014, one of its main…
February 15, 2015
“I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.” -Fran Lebowitz
It's a thought that's occurred to almost everyone at some point or another: what each of us would do if we happened to hit the lottery Jackpot. Have a listen to Camper Van…
February 14, 2015
“Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.” -Joan Jett
We've reached the end of yet another week here at Starts With A Bang, which means it's time to take a look back at everything…
February 13, 2015
“We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.” -Dejan Stojanovic
When we look back to greater and greater distances in the Universe, we're looking back to earlier and earlier times as well. At some point, we can see…
February 12, 2015
“According to the special theory of relativity nothing can travel faster than light, so that if light cannot escape, nothing else can either. The result would be a black hole: a region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape to infinity.” -Stephen Hawking
The idea of a black hole, of…
February 10, 2015
“These theories were based on the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.” -Fred Hoyle
It's making headlines everywhere we go: the recent paper stating that quantum equations prove that there is no Big Bang.
Image credit:…
February 10, 2015
When you think of thermodynamics, and how energy, temperature, heat and entropy are all related in a system full of particles so numerous you could never hope to count them all in a thousand lifetimes, there are only a few names that stand out as titans in the field.
Paul Ehrenfest, Courtesy of…
February 9, 2015
“Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who’s sorry for a gnat or girl?” -Elizabeth Barrett…
February 7, 2015
“When I look at the moon I do not see a hostile, empty world. I see the radiant body where man has taken his first steps into a frontier that will never end.” -David Scott, Commander, Apollo 15
The Moon is perhaps the oldest sight known to humans and our animal ancestors here on Earth, with its…
February 7, 2015
“And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.” -Bruce Catton
At the end of each week here at Starts With A Bang, it's important to take a look back at all we'…
February 6, 2015
“Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.” -Hermann Minkowski
When you think of waves, chances are you think of some type of pressure wave moving through a medium, like sound…
