January 3, 2012
"Change, like sunshine, can be a friend or a foe, a blessing or a curse, a dawn or a dusk." -William Arthur Ward
Few things are as essential to our world as we know it as the primary source of our light, heat, and all the life that flourishes on Earth as the Sun itself.
Image credit: NASA / ESA /…
January 1, 2012
"The senses deceive from time to time, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those who have deceived us even once." -Rene Descartes
Happy New Year, everyone! While many of you are still awestruck at the image of the Universe compressed into a single year, it's time to move forward to the next…
December 30, 2011
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. -Carl Sagan
If the story of our entire Universe's history, from the last stages of inflation and the Big Bang up to the present day, were to be…
December 28, 2011
"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." -Dr. Seuss
2011 has been an amazing year over here. After more than two hundred new posts this year here on Starts With A Bang, where we covered everything from the science of tiny snowflakes to the earliest, farthest and most spectacular…
December 26, 2011
"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
What would you do if you woke up…
December 24, 2011
(This post first appeared on December 23, 2009, but has been reproduced, edited, and improved for 2011.)
089:32:50 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston. [No answer.]
089:33:38 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston.
089:34:16 Lovell: Houston, Apollo 8, over.
089:34:19 Mattingly: Hello, Apollo 8. Loud and clear.
089:…
December 23, 2011
"Just as I did some 25 years ago, my graduate student is right now using one of the NOAO telescopes, learning how to do observational astronomy... Closing down one of these observatories in the next few years would likely lead to long term problems with producing adequately prepared astronomers in…
December 22, 2011
"A farmer travelling with his load
Picked up a horseshoe on the road,
And nailed if fast to his barn door,
That luck might down upon him pour;
That every blessing known in life
Might crown his homestead and his wife,
And never any kind of harm
Descend upon his growing farm." -James Thomas Fields…
December 20, 2011
"Continue to surprise those who would put you in a neat demographic. Be insistently curious." -Gordon Gee
Twenty years ago, our Solar System was the only one we knew of that we were certain had planets orbiting around a main-sequence star.
Image credit: retrieved from Universe-Review.ca.
Perhaps…
December 18, 2011
"None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me! " -Rorschach, from Watchmen
One of the best graphic novels I've ever read is Watchmen, created by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins. (Decent movie, too.) One of the things that struck me most…
December 17, 2011
"Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help." -May Sarton
It's unbelievable how much more amazing the world becomes in slow-motion. You've probably seen some high speed cameras that shoot at astounding frame rates, such…
December 14, 2011
"I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them." -Johann Heinrich Lambert
One of the greatest discoveries of the 20th Century was that many…
December 13, 2011
"There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a 'hottest part' implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool." -Richard Davisson
The Large…
December 11, 2011
"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." -Georgia O'Keeffe
There are secret dreams, hopes, and fears that live inside the heads of all of us. And it's one of the highest forms of art to release those internal visions in ways…
December 9, 2011
"Life is not a miracle. It is a natural phenomenon, and can be expected to appear whenever there is a planet whose conditions duplicate those of the Earth."
-Harold Urey
One of the most exciting investigations going on right now in space is NASA's Kepler Mission, which is on the hunt for planets…
December 7, 2011
"Alas! must it ever be so?
Do we stand in our own light, wherever we go,
And fight our own shadows forever?" -Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Ever since it was conjectured that the speed of light was the ultimate speed limit of the Universe, we have tried -- with the most powerful of our tools -- to push as…
December 5, 2011
"Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy." -Carl Sagan
(This post is coauthored by Dr. Peter Thieberger, Senior…
December 4, 2011
"Welcome, new comers. The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you people! And now you're gonna hear about it!" -Frank Costanza, Seinfeld
With the winter solstice and the end of the year approaching, the short days, long nights, and the annual…
December 2, 2011
"I have long held an opinion... that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible, as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their…
December 1, 2011
"Years of science fiction have produced a mindset that it is human destiny to expand from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars, to the stars." -Barney Oliver
Just five days ago, the newest rover sent to Mars, Curiosity, was successfully launched aboard an Atlas V rocket.
Image credit: NASA / Bill White,…
November 28, 2011
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." -William Shakespeare
In January of 2006, the Hubble Space Telescope -- equipped with the greatest telescope camera ever designed -- took this detailed picture of globular cluster NGC 1846.
Image credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA…
November 27, 2011
"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat." -Albert…
November 25, 2011
"Between cold fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. ...because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for…
November 23, 2011
"Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving." -Henry Ford
Here in the United States, it's American Thanksgiving, our annual harvest festival. Traditionally, it's the one day out of the year where we spend it with the people most important to us, and…
November 21, 2011
"Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul." -Victor Hugo
Everyone knows the Earth revolves around…
November 20, 2011
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain
Although I spend the majority of my time here writing…
November 18, 2011
Q: "Why don't physicists shield themselves from neutrinos?"
A: "Because they never see them coming." #neutrinojokes
Over the past two months, we've talked more about neutrinos than ever before thanks to an extraordinary claim that neutrinos have been observed to move faster-than-light!
And as you…
November 16, 2011
"She eyes me like a pisces when I am weak
I've been locked inside your Heart Shaped box for weeks
I've been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap
I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black" -Nirvana, Heart-Shaped Box
By looking at the right combinations of wavelengths of light, one can…
November 15, 2011
"If there is anything that a man can do well, I say let him do it. Give him a chance." -Abraham Lincoln
It was nearly four years ago that I started blogging back at my old site, branching out from the hardcore research of physical cosmology and the teaching of physics and astronomy, and into what I…
November 14, 2011
"We don't understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -Carlos Frenck
When we look out into the distant Universe, we're also looking back into the Universe's past. The farther away an object is, the longer it's taken its light to travel from it to our…
