December 9, 2016
"We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person." -W. Somerset Maugham
After 13.8 billion years have gone by, you might not think that a year makes much of a difference. A year to the Universe is like 0.2…
December 8, 2016
"It is worthy of notice that in Table VI the brighter variables have the longer periods. It is also noticeable that those having the longest periods appear to be as regular in their variations as those which pass through their changes in a day or two." -Henrietta Leavitt
The past year has held a…
December 7, 2016
"We are inside this plasma,
and plasma is inside everything. It is incandescent
in the sun, and I am curious to know if you
are able to stop orbiting yourself around it even for a second." -Marieta Maglas
The phenomenon of solar flares has been understood qualitatively but not quantitatively for a…
December 6, 2016
"The bedrock nature of space and time and the unification of cosmos and quantum are surely among science's great 'open frontiers.' These are parts of the intellectual map where we're still groping for the truth - where, in the fashion of ancient cartographers, we must still inscribe 'here be…
December 5, 2016
"I'll never, ever be full. I'll always be hungry. Obviously, I'm not talking about food." -Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson
Only a very small percentage of galaxies have active supermassive black holes. While the black holes themselves are common, they only rarely feed, gaining a huge influx of matter to…
December 4, 2016
“A thing may be of deeper impossibility than another, in the sense that you can be more deeply underwater–but whether you are five feet or five fathoms from the surface you are still all wet.” -Brian McGreevy
It's been a spectacular week of investigating the Universe and our knowledge about it here…
December 3, 2016
"I think there are a number of experiments that are thinking about how you could look in different frequency bands, and get a glimpse of the primordial gravitational wave background. I think that would be really revolutionary, because that would be your first glimpse at the very first instant of…
December 2, 2016
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” -Lord Kelvin
The particle physics ‘nightmare scenario’ was that the LHC at CERN would achieve its desired energies and collision rates, that it would find a single Higgs boson between…
December 1, 2016
"When a scientist says something, his colleagues must ask themselves only whether it is true. When a politician says something, his colleagues must first of all ask, 'Why does he say it?'" -Leo Szilard
There are claims flying around all the time that science is corrupt, politicized, and that the…
November 30, 2016
"...axions are potentially detectable through their weak coupling to electromagnetism..." -Aaron Chou
We know, from hundreds of years of experience with the laws of physics, that momentum is strictly conserved, and therefore a reactionless drive is impossible. What's not impossible is an engine…
November 29, 2016
"Most of these experiments required the reduction of the cosmic ray muon flux in order to be successful, and the group necessarily became expert in the operation of deep underground laboratories." -Frederick Reines
High-energy particles from space, generated from stars, white dwarfs, neutron stars…
November 28, 2016
"Science doesn't always go forwards. It's a bit like doing a Rubik's cube. You sometimes have to make more of a mess with a Rubik's cube before you can get it to go right." -Jocelyn Bell-Burnell
Observations that surprise us, of a phenomenon we weren’t expecting and don’t have an explanation for,…
November 27, 2016
“A thing may be of deeper impossibility than another, in the sense that you can be more deeply underwater--but whether you are five feet or five fathoms from the surface you are still all wet.” -Brian McGreevy
With everything going on in the world, it's always a wonderful reminder that here at …
November 26, 2016
"It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time." -Simone de Beauvoir
If you want to describe your location here on…
November 25, 2016
"I just think too many nice things have happened in string theory for it to be all wrong. Humans do not understand it very well, but I just don't believe there is a big cosmic conspiracy that created this incredible thing that has nothing to do with the real world." -Edward Witten
You don't have to…
November 24, 2016
"If a fellow isn't thankful for what he's got, he isn't likely to be thankful for what he's going to get." -Frank A. Clark
There’s a lot to be thankful for, and some of those things are truly universal. The world we share, the Sun we orbit, the galaxy we reside in and the Universe itself plus the…
November 23, 2016
"The law of the conservation of momentum is the basis of the static thrust equation, the law of the conservation of energy is the basis of the dynamic thrust equation. Provided these two fundamental laws of physics are satisfied, there is no reason why the forces inside the resonator should sum to…
November 22, 2016
Just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. The misfit becomes the average. The Pluto-like objects are more typical in our solar system than the nearby planets we first knew.” -Alan Stern
The Pluto story just gets better and better. Although the flyby of July…
November 21, 2016
"The new ALMA images show the disk in unprecedented detail, revealing a series of concentric dusty bright rings and dark gaps, including intriguing features that suggest a planet with an Earth-like orbit is forming there." -Sean Andrews
It takes a lot of work to make a solar system from the raw…
November 20, 2016
“The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.” -Louis Pasteur
Time keeps barreling forward for all of us, but I'm so pleased that Starts With A Bang! …
November 19, 2016
“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” -Albert Einstein
If you create an entangled pair of particles, and stretch them apart as far as you want, the entanglement remains. If you make a measurement of…
November 18, 2016
"We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute." -Marina Abramovic
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…
November 17, 2016
"We only have one planet that serves as an example and in science it's not good to derive information from a sample size of one." -David Grinspoon
Although there will never be a shortage of doubters, the scientific evidence is overwhelming that humans have impacted the planet, particularly over the…
November 16, 2016
“If you want your boomerang to come back, first you've got to throw it.” -Steven Hall
If you take all the matter out of the Universe, all you’d have left to warm you would be the radiation from the Big Bang’s leftover glow: the cosmic microwave background. At just 2.7º C above absolute zero, there’…
November 15, 2016
"Whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof." -Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
We all have our biases, even if we ourselves are scientists. Yet if we want to make quality decisions about the…
November 14, 2016
"From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'" -Edgar Mitchell, Apollo astronaut
The full Moon of November 14th may be special for…
November 13, 2016
"For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity." -Jean Dubuffet
It's been a week unlike any other I've seen since I started Starts With A Bang! all those years ago. There are a lot of people looking for a lot of explanations -- some…
November 12, 2016
"The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter." -C. V. Raman
As far as humans have figured out, there are four fundamental forces in the Universe: the three of the Standard Model (electromagnetism, the weak and…
November 11, 2016
"For most people, we often marvel at the beauty of a sunrise or the magnificence of a full moon, but it is impossible to fathom the magnitude of the universe that surrounds us." -Richard H. Baker
This coming Monday, November 14th, 2016, a full Moon will occur extremely close -- within 90 minutes…
November 10, 2016
"The evidence at present available points strongly to the conclusion that the spirals are individual galaxies, or island universes, comparable with our own galaxy in dimension and in number of component units." -Heber Curtis, 1920
In many different areas of life, we settle disagreements by popular…
