February 5, 2015
“The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.” -Aleister Crowley
Our Universe is the way it is for two reasons: the…
February 4, 2015
“The dance between darkness and light will always remain — the stars and the moon will always need the darkness to be seen, the darkness will just not be worth having without the moon and the stars.” -C. JoyBell C.
Yet what do you do when you discover a moon that itself straddles the border between…
February 3, 2015
“Every generation of physicists solves some old puzzles and finds some new ones.” -Dr. Kendrick Smith
A century ago, no one could have envisioned the Universe we have today. From a Universe governed by Newton's and Maxwell's laws, consisting only of the Milky Way and the objects within, who could…
February 3, 2015
When you think of dark matter, you very likely think of a halo of diffuse, unseen mass whose gravitational influence is felt by everything within our galaxy, and every galaxy or cluster out there.
Our Milky Way, like most galaxies, is surrounded by an approximately spherical halo of dark matter.…
February 2, 2015
“The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.” -Galileo Galilei
It is, in fact, almost exactly as Galileo said.
Image credit: ESO / S. Brunier, from the Gigagalaxyzoom project.
Galileo missed a few things, though, including a plethora of unclustered…
February 1, 2015
“If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?” -William Shakespeare
They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, and yet, if your packing it in your lunchbox, how else would you do it? Have a…
January 31, 2015
“Time is the longest distance between two places.” -Tennessee Williams
I'm always stoked to give you weekly recaps at Starts With A Bang, just in case there's anything you missed. We saw some fantastic posts this week, including two amazing contributions from Brian Koberlein and Amanda Yoho! Here's…
January 30, 2015
“Go then, there are other worlds than these.” -Stephen King, The Dark Tower
Ever since quantum mechanics first came along, we've recognized how tenuous our perception of reality is, and how -- in many ways -- what we perceive is just a very small subset of what's going on at the quantum level in…
January 29, 2015
“Even in hindsight, I would not change one whit of the Voyager experience. Dreams and sweat carried it off. But most of all, its legacy makes us all Earth travelers among the stars.” -Charley Kohlhase
It's a taxing enough task to launch something off the surface of the Earth, escaping our planet's…
January 29, 2015
“From an incandescent mass we have originated, and into a frozen mass we shall turn. Merciless is the law of nature, and rapidly and irresistibly we are drawn to our doom.” -Nikola Tesla
Stability: it's the hallmark of the Solar System. The motions of all the planetary bodies are regular and…
January 28, 2015
If you want to map the entire sky -- whether you're looking in the visible, ultraviolet, infrared or microwave, your best bet is to go to space. Only high above the Earth's atmosphere can you map out the entire sky, with your vision unobscured by anything terrestrial.
Image credit: ESA and the…
January 27, 2015
If you want to know where you are on Earth, you use a GPS, you use other terrestrial landmarks to help determine your location, or you use some well-known objects in the sky.
Image credit: still by Fraser Gunn, additions by Ethan Siegel.
This will get you latitude easily, but how about longitude…
January 26, 2015
“I lie on the floor, washed by nothing and hanging on. I cry at night. I am afraid of hearing voices, or a voice. I have come to the edge, of the land. I could get pushed over.” -Margaret Atwood
We had a great run with Messier Monday, followed by a fun mini-series on Mini-Movie Monday, but now it's…
January 25, 2015
“If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He’s everything that I’m not.” -Stephen Hawking
But did you ever stop to imagine that one of those things that Superman would be is the greatest home run hitter of all time? Have a listen to Iron & Wine's song,
Waitin' For A…
January 24, 2015
“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge.” -Eckhart Tolle
It's been an amazing week here at Starts With A Bang, and you've been given plenty to think about. In particular, here's what the past seven…
January 23, 2015
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” -Albert Einstein
And yet, this is a very good reason! We need things to happen in stages: you can't form human beings before you form planets (that would be bad); you can't form stars before you form atoms (also bad); you can'…
January 22, 2015
“That I learned even as a three year-old that I see this world that is really a mess and I learned to say, ‘This is not me. I am not the one that is messed up. It is out there.’” -Story Musgrave
It was 25 years ago this year that the Hubble Space Telescope first opened its eyes on the Universe. It…
January 21, 2015
“Even when Darwin’s teaching first made its appearance, it became clear at once that its scientific, materialist core, its teaching concerning the evolution of living nature, was antagonistic to the idealism that reigned in biology.” -Trofim Lysenko
We love having debates when there's a…
January 20, 2015
“It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!” -George Gamow
But how was it that this happened? Sure, the Universe may have started off with hydrogen and helium alone, but when we look around at the world…
January 19, 2015
“But even when the moon looks like it’s waning…it’s actually never changing shape. Don’t ever forget that.” -Ai Yazawa
You've seen the iconic crescent, quarter, gibbous and full phases for yourself, and probably even an eclipse or two. For millennia, the Moon has fascinated, delighted and mystified…
January 18, 2015
“There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.” -Jorge Luis Borges
Have you ever been so mad at someone that you needed revenge? That you needed to take something delightful and use it for…
January 17, 2015
"You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge." -Eckhart Tolle
We're really hitting our stride for 2015 here at Starts With A Bang, and I'm so pleased you shared this past week with me. If you missed…
January 17, 2015
“The single most powerful element of youth is our inability to know what’s impossible.” -Adam Braun
"I'm going to be a star," says every clump of matter in a molecular cloud, as it prepares to collapse under the tremendous pull of gravitation. But try as they might, only a small fraction of that…
January 14, 2015
“And you may find yourself in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’” -Talking Heads
Well, imagine it's happened: an…
January 14, 2015
“The discrepancy between what was expected and what has been observed has grown over the years, and we’re straining harder and harder to fill the gap.” -Jeremiah Ostriker
If you look at the stars in a galaxy -- and then at all the different wavelengths of light that there are -- you'd think you can…
January 13, 2015
When we talk about dimensions, we're used to thinking of three: something like length, width and depth, or x, y and z. But there's a fourth dimension as well that's of paramount importance for our Universe, otherwise everything would simply be static: time.
Image credit: Fair Use image obtained by…
January 13, 2015
Have you ever thought about what "nothing" truly is? We used to think about it in terms of simply removing all the particles from a given region of space, which is a pretty intuitive definition of nothing. But quantum physics is notorious for defying our intuition.
Public domain image.
When we…
January 12, 2015
“I think if I had to choose, I would rather have gravity instead of zero gravity. It’s fun for a while, but I’d rather live on Earth.” -Kevin A. Ford
By now, you've probably had a lot of opportunities to think about what holds our Universe together: the incredible force of gravitation. Although it'…
January 11, 2015
“He who would search for pearls must dive below.” -John Dryden
Sometimes falling can be a painful thing, as Ween might sing you in their ominous composition,
Falling Out,
but sometimes it can be absolutely wonderful, like when the Hubble space telescope allows you to "fall in" to the closest large…
January 10, 2015
“Do you know where to find marble conference tables? I'm looking to have a conference... not until I get the table though” -@kanyewest on Twitter
If you noticed we had a busier week than normal here at Starts With A Bang, you weren't alone. But there's a good reason: the first week in January marks…
