October 10, 2012
"It's Dr. Evil, I didn't spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called "mister," thank you very much." -Dr. Evil, from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Graduate school is hard work, and Ph.D. programs in Physics and Astronomy are some of the most demanding and competitive ones out…
October 8, 2012
"When I was having that alphabet soup, I never thought that it would pay off." -Vanna White
Ever want an A-to-Z illustrated alphabet of astrophysics? Turns out that -- other than writing your own via Galaxy Zoo -- it doesn't yet exist. So I thought it would be delightful to make one for you...…
October 7, 2012
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." -Carl Jung
During the daytime, light is plentiful and abundant, and the majority of our waking lives are optimized for that. But more and more of us are active late into the dark…
October 5, 2012
"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
Earlier today, a video (from last month) was released where one of the members of the US House of Representative -- a member who sits on the…
October 4, 2012
“One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.” -Joan of Arc
Regardless of what intrinsic differences any person or group of people have from another, everyone deserves to be…
October 1, 2012
"Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed." -Samuel Johnson
But the stars, as opposed to humans, are born shining, with hundreds (or more) of brothers and sisters, shine ever more brightly over their lifetimes, and die in spectacular fashion. As far as we can tell, here's…
September 30, 2012
“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.” -Rudyard Kipling
You might not believe it, but when I was a kid, I hated writing. Absolutely hated it. And it wasn't because I didn't have anything to write, or because I didn't enjoy communicating my thoughts, or because…
September 28, 2012
"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell
One of the bravest things that was ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope was to find a patch of sky with absolutely nothing in it -- no bright stars, no…
September 26, 2012
"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The great nebular structures stretching across our galaxy are evidence of the birth and deaths of stars, or so I -- an…
September 25, 2012
"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." -Albert Einstein
"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." -William Arthur Ward
On one side of the room, the interviewer's palms…
September 24, 2012
"The self-same atoms which, chaotically dispersed, made the nebula, now, jammed and temporarily caught in peculiar positions, form our brains; and the 'evolution' of brains, if understood, would be simply the account of how the atoms came to be so caught and jammed." -William James
Up in the…
September 23, 2012
"In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility." -Eleanor Roosevelt
I've always been a big fan of personal freedom, which includes the freedom to speak your mind, say what you think,…
September 21, 2012
"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
As regular readers here will know, earlier this month I went to Glacier National Park, meeting up with an old…
September 19, 2012
"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…
September 18, 2012
"Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not." -Galileo Galilei
All of science is rooted in the idea that natural phenomena can be explained naturally, and that if we want to know how anything in the…
September 15, 2012
"What a shot by Happy Gilmore! <aside> Who the hell is Happy Gilmore?" -Announcer, from Happy Gilmore
As I prepare to write this, it occurs to me that some of you may not have seen the greatest* movie of all time, Happy Gilmore. The movie begins with a montage of Happy's disastrous and…
September 14, 2012
"I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like to be taught." -Winston Churchill
My very first time leading a classroom -- on my own -- was back in June of 2000. I was 21 years old, fresh out of college, and was teaching science in a middle school classroom. And I asked what I thought …
September 12, 2012
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes; everybody knows." -Leonard Cohen
As you know,…
September 10, 2012
"Not even light can escape such hollowing, this huge mass in a small space. Even the Milky Way with its open arms is said to have a black hole at its heart." -Susan B.A. Somers-Willett
Our Milky Way is home to us all. With its hundreds of billions of stars, massive spiral arms, dust lanes, and…
August 31, 2012
"The time will not be taken from the sum of your life. Instead of shortening it, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal. Nevermore will time seem short or long, and cares will never again fall heavily on you, but gently and kindly as gifts from heaven." -John Muir, on Glacier…
August 30, 2012
"I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to…
August 28, 2012
“At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed.” -Edwin Hubble
While new discoveries are made about the Universe, a…
August 27, 2012
"You must learn to talk clearly. The jargon of scientific terminology which rolls off your tongues is mental garbage." -Martin H. Fischer
I've always thought that the Universe is absolutely amazing; that everything from the tiniest indivisible particles all the way up to the largest structures and…
August 25, 2012
"Geologists have a saying: rocks remember." -Neil Armstrong
Looming up above us, hundreds of thousands of miles away, is the largest moon in the inner solar system: our Moon.
Image credit: © 2004 by Ulli and Christian 'Pete' Lotzmann.
One of the greatest achievements in the history of our planet…
August 23, 2012
"It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see." -Winston Churchill
We've come a long way in this Universe. Over the past 13.7 billion years, we've formed the light elements out of a sea of protons and neutrons, cooled and expanded to form neutral atoms for the…
August 21, 2012
"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -Isaac Asimov
One of the most spectacular and successful ideas of the 20th Century was Einstein's General Relativity, or the idea that matter and energy determines the curvature of spacetime, and the…
August 19, 2012
“If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.” -Dwight Eisenhower
One of the greatest feelings is the freedom to travel, whether by your own power or a mechanical motor, far faster than your own legs can…
August 17, 2012
"We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -Carlos Frenk
The Universe has been around for a long time: nearly 14 billion years, to the best of our knowledge. When it was very young, there were absolutely zero stars in it, while today, there…
August 16, 2012
"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning." -Albert Einstein
The Mars Curiosity Rover and the Mars Science Laboratory mission are so important that writing about the landing, going on the news, and writing about it again simply wasn't…
August 14, 2012
"The colors of a rainbow so pretty in the sky.
Are also on the faces of people going by." -Louis Armstrong
It's no secret that white light is the light that we see when all the colors shine together and are seen at once. This has been known for over 400 years, when Isaac Newton demonstrated that…
