January 10, 2015
“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” -Kurt Vonnegut
The Universe is expanding and cooling, with all but a few of the closest galaxies receding from our view. In fact, the farther away an…
January 8, 2015
“Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you.” -Dream Hampton
As any scientist knows, it's true that no scientific theory, no matter how well-tested, how validated, or how universally applicable it is, can ever be 100% proven.
Image…
January 7, 2015
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” -James A. Baldwin
We've come a long way since we first started watching the night skies. Even just a century ago, we thought our Universe was governed by Newtonian gravity and consisted only of our Milky Way and the stars inside.…
January 7, 2015
“I’m sure the universe is full of intelligent life. It’s just been too intelligent to come here.” -Arthur C. Clarke
For the past three years, Kepler has been looking at 150,000 stars, searching for planetary transits.
Image credit: NASA.
The science haul has been huge, but mostly larger planets…
January 6, 2015
“With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things.” -William Wordsworth
You've seen the amazing photos of spiral galaxies, with the vast, sweeping arms, the massive, central bulges and the great underdense regions in between the arms. As you…
January 5, 2015
“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” -Charles Dickens
Just... go. I can't even do it justice in a synopsis, or with 600 pixel image widths.
This…
January 5, 2015
“This Administration has never really faced up to where we are going in space… As a result, NASA is both drifting and lobbying for bigger things — without being able to focus realistically on what it should be doing.”
-White House staff assistant Clay Thomas Whitehead, February 1971
What should we…
January 5, 2015
“A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.” -Niels Bohr
There's a wonderful story that the Universe tells us about itself: the story of where everything in it came from, and how it came to be this way. From the perspective of a human being, there's possibly no component of that as…
January 4, 2015
“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.” -Oscar Wilde
While the AAS meeting is about to start, I couldn't resist sharing a song and a wonderful project with you this weekend. Have a listen to a song that talks about what it means to care…
January 3, 2015
“Where are you going now, my love?
Where will you be tomorrow?
Will you bring me happiness?
Will you bring me sorrow?” -Stephen Stills / Crosby, Stills & Nash
We've made it! It's the first Comments of the Week of the new year here at Starts With A Bang, and we're doing our best to start it off…
January 2, 2015
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” -Jack Kerouac
But how do you say goodbye to a…
January 1, 2015
“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
Yes, it's true, with 2015 upon us, the new year holds a number of wonderful new things. Not only for us, but for the Universe as well!
Image credit: Stuart Rickard of After Ice, viahttp://blog.after-ice.com…
December 30, 2014
“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” -Winston Churchill
There was a piece that ran over this weekend in the Wall Street Journal, claiming that the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life is actually evidence…
December 29, 2014
“The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.” -Ralph W. Sockman
After millennia looking up at the Milky Way overhead, it's only recently that we discovered our galaxy had a spiral-like structure, and that the other spirals and ellipticals in the night sky are galaxies…
December 28, 2014
“I believe that we are here for each other, not against each other. Everything comes from an understanding that you are a gift in my life — whoever you are, whatever our differences.” -John Denver
So why not lead by example? If you think there's too much carbon in the atmosphere (because there is…
December 27, 2014
“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” -John Steinbeck
Here we are: the final Comments of the Week of 2014 here at Starts With A Bang, a…
December 26, 2014
“Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.” -Wayne Dyer
We all can think back to that moment that happened where we knew our lives would be forever different, right? To that one moment in our past where we suddenly knew what it was that we wanted to be,…
December 24, 2014
“Bethany: Is your house on fire, Clark?
Clark: No, Aunt Bethany, those are the Christmas lights.” -National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
With Christmas upon us, what would you ask for from the Universe? It can't bring you tangible presents, perhaps, but it can bring you the greatest cosmic sights…
December 23, 2014
“It is always the simple that produces the marvelous.” -Amelia Barr
All things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the best. At least, that's how Occam's razor is most commonly phrased these days. Yet, when it comes to the headlines -- whether it's a "discovery" of dark matter or "…
December 23, 2014
We don't normally think about it in our day-to-day work, but as scientists, our equations, our models, our observations, our experiments and our instruments are more than just our tools for approaching our work. In a very real way, they're our connection to the Universe itself.
Image source: http…
December 22, 2014
“When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.” -Kalpana Chawla
Two weeks ago, we released the first video in our web series: Genesis, the story of where all this comes from.
The video was on Organic…
December 21, 2014
“Astronomers are greatly disappointed when, having traveled halfway around the world to see an eclipse, clouds prevent a sight of it; and yet a sense of relief accompanies the disappointment.” -Simon Newcomb
For most of us, news of a total solar eclipse -- even though they happen (on average) once…
December 20, 2014
"I'm a man! I'm forty!" -Mike Gundy
'Twas the weekend before Christmas at Starts With A Bang, and the comments you left ranged from "hooray" to "dang!" There's much that you like and a bit you abhor, but some things require explaining some more. This past week saw seven posts, crafted with care:…
December 19, 2014
“We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposed to rob us of their companionship.” -James Harvey Robinson
The Universe seems to be full of contradictions. On one hand, everywhere we look -- in all…
December 18, 2014
“In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.” -Albert Camus
This Sunday marks the Winter Solstice: the darkest, longest evening of the year for all the Earth's northern hemisphere denizens.
Image credit: Ken Tape, of the Winter Solstice at Fairbanks, Alaska…
December 17, 2014
They say that a cat has nine lives, mostly because of their uncanny ability to find themselves in -- and escape from -- frequently perilous situations. Perhaps, of all the animals that he could have chosen, that's why Schrödinger made his famous thought experiment about the most diminutive of…
December 17, 2014
We all have our own interpretation of what "the scientific method" is, but there's always at least one thing that they all have in common: the ultimate arbiter of whether a theory or idea is valid depends on the evidence that comes back from physically observable phenomena.
Image credit: abstruse…
December 16, 2014
“To begin, begin.” -William Wordsworth
Is the Big Bang the greatest scientific achievement of the 20th century? I -- along with many others -- would argue that it is. It's something that even young children are curious about!
Image credit: David Burstein, of http://www.davidburstein.net/2012/10/07…
December 15, 2014
“Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” -Carl Sagan
34 years ago, Carl Sagan became the first person to…
December 14, 2014
“If there are things you don’t like in the world you grew up in, make your own life different.” -Dave Thomas
That's great advice, and is the same advice that the iconic Grandmaster Flash not only pushed in his legendary song,
The Message,
but also lived. The music style he helped developed had a…
