August 12, 2016
"A lot of legends, a lot of people, have come before me. But this is my time." -Usain Bolt
The Olympics is an incredible time for athletes in all sports, and a time to celebrate the fastest, strongest, most agile, and all the other superlative achievements the human body is capable of. Yet for…
August 11, 2016
“Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'what kind of tea?” -Neil Gaiman
Enjoying the Perseid meteor shower this year, as perhaps you do every August? As you look up, the great cosmic show might have a lot more to offer than mere streaks of light, due to…
August 10, 2016
"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return." -Leonardo da Vinci
The Universe is an awfully big place, but how certain are we that we couldn’t travel in a straight line for a very long time and…
August 9, 2016
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” -Richard Feynman
Like many suggestive signals in the past, the 750 GeV bump in the diphoton channel has turned out to be a mere phantasm: an unlikely statistical fluctuation that simply disappeared as…
August 8, 2016
"Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening." -Oliver Wendell Holmes
When isolated stars like our Sun reach the end of their lives, they're expected to blow off their outer layers in a…
August 7, 2016
"...even if we don't understand each other, that's not a reason to reject each other. There are two sides to any argument. Is there one point of view that has all the answers? Give it some thought." -Alder, from Pokémon
It’s been a fantastic week here at Starts With A Bang, with stories ranging…
August 6, 2016
"They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic." -Steven Wright
Look out at a nearby object in our Universe, and you'll find that the amount of time you look back (in years) is pretty much exactly equal to the object's distance (in light years). But look far away, and these…
August 5, 2016
"I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much." -Newt Gingrich
When an issue comes up, and it can be decided based on facts -- on data, on evidence, on things you can measure and quantify -- is it ever okay to decide that issue based on your feelings rather…
August 4, 2016
"My dad took me out to see a meteor shower when I was a little kid, and it was scary for me because he woke me up in the middle of the night. My heart was beating; I didn't know what he wanted to do. He wouldn't tell me, and he put me in the car and we went off, and I saw all these people lying on…
August 3, 2016
"Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself." -Carl Jung
If you divide the matter we know into progressively smaller and smaller components, you’d find that atomic nuclei, made of protons and neutrons, compose…
August 2, 2016
"This suggests a lack of Cepheids in the inner 2.5 kpc region of the Galactic disc except the [Nuclear Stellar Disc]." -N. Matsunaga et al.
If you want to find where all the young stars in a galaxy are, you look for the densest regions of gas and dust: the locations where new stars and star forming…
August 1, 2016
"He ate and drank the precious Words,
his Spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
nor that his frame was Dust." -Emily Dickinson
When we look at spiral galaxies, we think of grand arms, star-forming regions and dust lanes lining our perspective. But unlike face-on galaxies, where…
July 31, 2016
“Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.” -Mattie Stepanek
It's been a fantastic week here at Starts With A Bang, where we've covered even more ground than normal! First off, for those of you not following me on SoundCloud, we've got a new science podcast out, on…
July 30, 2016
"The world you see, nature's greatest and most glorious creation, and the human mind which gazes and wonders at it, and is the most splendid part of it, these are our own everlasting possessions and will remain with us as long as we ourselves remain." -Seneca
Asking where in space the Big Bang…
July 29, 2016
“Energy is liberated matter, matter is energy waiting to happen.” –Bill Bryson
When it comes to the Universe, you might think that energy really is only limited by rarity: get enough particles accelerated by enough supermassive, super-energetic sources, and it’s only a matter of time (and flux)…
July 28, 2016
"Another very good test some readers may want to look up... is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by the presence of virtual particles." -Gordon Kane
If you ask what the zero-point energy of space itself is, you can sum up all of the quantum…
July 27, 2016
"Human beings are strong because we have the ability to change ourselves." Saitama, One Punch Man
The idea of stopping a meteor headed towards our planet with nothing but a superpowered human being sounds like a physical impossibility. But if you had a powerful enough, strong enough, fast enough…
July 26, 2016
"Dimension regulated the general scale of the work, so that the parts may all tell and be effective." -Vitruvius
In a four-dimensional Universe (3 space and 1 time), it’s easy to get lost. If you take a random walk, the chances of you coming back to your original starting point in a finite number…
July 25, 2016
“He who would search for pearls must dive below.” -John Dryden
If you want to know what types of stars are found all throughout a galaxy, looking at our own simply won't do: too much of it is obscured by the plane and our position within it. But there's an even more impressive galaxy -- Andromeda…
July 24, 2016
“Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.” -Mattie Stepanek
After another tremendous week here at Starts With A Bang, including one where I recorded a new podcast (look for it later this week on SoundCloud), it's time to take a look back and review all that we've…
July 23, 2016
"We detect motion along this axis, but right now our data cannot state as strongly as we'd like whether the clusters are coming or going." -Alexander Kashlinsky
When dark energy was discovered, and the expansion of the Universe was shown to be accelerating, there was concurrently another puzzle…
July 22, 2016
“‘Star Trek’ says that it has not all happened, it has not all been discovered, that tomorrow can be as challenging and adventurous as any time man has ever lived.” –Gene Roddenberry
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek, our first science fiction adventure that promised a…
July 20, 2016
"For me the best answer is not in words but in measurements." -Elena Aprile
If you want to find dark matter directly, your best hope is to gather a tremendous number of nucleons for it to interact with, wait an incredibly long period of time, and devise a device surrounding it capable of…
July 20, 2016
“I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.” -Michael Collins
Less than a decade after the first human was launched into space, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins journeyed from the Earth to the Moon. For the first time, human beings descended down…
July 19, 2016
"This suggests a robust biological response. These analyses support the interpretation that the Viking LR experiment did detect extant microbial life on Mars." -Bianciardi, Miller, Straat and Levin
On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander touched down onto the Martian surface, followed just a few…
July 18, 2016
"...innumerable stars, thousands of double and multiple systems, clusters in one blaze with their tens of thousands of stars, and the nebulae amazing us by the strangeness of their forms and the incomprehensibility of their nature, till at last, from the limit of our senses, even these thin and…
July 17, 2016
“We called the new quark the “charmed quark” because we were pleased, and fascinated by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world. “Charm” also means a “a magical device to avert evil,” and in 1970 it was realized that the old three quark theory ran into very serious problems.” -Sheldon…
July 16, 2016
“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our…
July 15, 2016
“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” -Marcus Aurelius
Let there be light! You’d think that would be enough: that you form stars in the Universe, you see those stars in the Universe, and that tells you about what’s out there. If only it were that simple…
July 14, 2016
"Go, then. There are other worlds than these." -Stephen King
We think of the Universe as all there ever is, was or will be. But, in fact, there's a limit to the most distant galaxies, stars, matter and radiation we can see. The hot Big Bang occurred a finite amount of time ago, and hence the amount…
