April 6, 2017
"Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright?" -Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
The dream of humanity has long been to identify an inhabited world beyond Earth, to know…
April 5, 2017
"Hey, if our eyes could access the infrared part of the light spectrum, the sky would be green and trees would be red. Some animals see in completely different ways, so who knows what colors look like to them. Nothing is really how we perceive it." -Wendy Mass
If you take a look at the James Webb…
April 4, 2017
"Aha! That satellite was scuttled on Enceladus, Saturn's main dump moon!" -Professor Farnsworth, Futurama
When you think about life beyond Earth, you likely think of it occurring on a somewhat Earth-like planet. A rocky world, with either a past or present liquid ocean atop the surface, seems ideal…
April 3, 2017
“Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road.” -Dag Hammarskjold
One of relativity’s oddest predictions is the existence of black holes, objects so dense and massive that nothing, not event light can…
April 2, 2017
"You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand." -Woodrow Wilson
It's been another…
April 1, 2017
"The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality." -Wolfgang Pauli
On the surface, it shouldn’t appear…
March 31, 2017
"You can spend too much time wondering which of identical twins is the more alike." -Robert Brault
When we think of the idea of “Earth’s twin,” we inevitably think of a planet like ours orbiting a star like ours at the same distance and speed. Most planets are not rocky and Earth-sized; most stars…
March 30, 2017
"I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses." -Johannes Kepler
There are a lot of myths we have in our society about how the greatest of all scientific advances happened. We think about a lone genius, working outside the constraints of…
March 29, 2017
"If something doesn’t reach you on a personal level, let it go. It’s hard enough dealing with everything that does." -Judi Culbertson
There are two types of electric charge: positive and negative. Like charges repel; opposite charges attract. In gravitation, though, there’s only one kind of…
March 28, 2017
"I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me. I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity, have you looked outside Atlanta lately and seen all these buildings? You mean to tell me that China is under us? China is under us? It’s not. The…
March 27, 2017
"Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten." -Neil Gaiman
Wherever we look in the night sky, we don't just observe the background sources of light shining our way, but also the effects of…
March 26, 2017
"What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash." -Lauren Myracle
It's been an interesting week unlike any other. Sure, we've had our usual slew of daily, fascinating articles…
March 25, 2017
"It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things." -Theodore Roosevelt
Energy is a fundamental property of nature, and yet it’s also one of the most purely understood phenomena from a conceptual point of view. Some objects have…
March 24, 2017
"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." -Carl Jung
13.8 billion years ago, the Universe as we know it came into existence. Today, the part we can observe is 46…
March 23, 2017
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” -Carl Sagan
The President of the United States just released his proposed budget for the next fiscal year, and there are some big losers in the scientific world. The EPA…
March 22, 2017
“Without these supernova explosions, there are no mist-covered swamps, computer chips, trilobites, Mozart or the tears of a little girl. Without exploding stars, perhaps there could be a heaven, but there is certainly no Earth.” -Clifford A. Pickover
One of the most sobering cosmic truths is that…
March 21, 2017
"Dark matter or invisible element?
You decide." -Toba Beta
The dark matter wars rage on and on, with both sides -- those in favor of modifying gravity and those in favor of adding an additional mass component to the Universe -- claiming victories for their own side and defeat for the other. But one…
March 20, 2017
"With the Hubble telescope and all the other things that are out there, I believe something would have come through. Today, I really believe we are unique." -Mark Goddard
Want to identify where stars are forming (or about to form) in the Universe? We’ve got no problem using visible light, which…
March 19, 2017
"Science and religion are both the same thing. They're there; they're life. If it's not science, it's not a fact." -Chuck Berry
We always take pride in what we put out into the world here at Starts With A Bang, and I like to think that all of you take that same pride in everything you do. Before we…
March 18, 2017
"I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." -Neil Armstrong
The full Moon is undoubtedly bright. As viewed from the Earth’s surface, it’s the second brightest object of all, after the Sun, and is more than 1,…
March 17, 2017
“We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won’t need to tell anybody it does. Lighthouses don’t fire cannons to call attention to their shining- they just shine.” -Dwight L. Moody
The farther away in space we look, the farther back in time we’re seeing. Light arriving from a star ten…
March 16, 2017
"Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you think of crystals, you likely think of an interlocked, repeating lattice of atoms or molecules. That’s exactly what a…
March 15, 2017
"Greenhouse gases are the second most important factor for climate, after the Sun." -Syukuro Manabe
In 1967, a groundbreaking paper in climate science was published, detailing the inputs and feedbacks for the first accurate climate model. You don’t have to look far to find contentions that climate…
March 14, 2017
"As an analogy one can imagine an intelligent amoeba with a good memory. As time progresses the amoeba is constantly splitting, each time the resulting amoebas having the same memories as the parent. Our amoeba hence does not have a life line, but a life tree." -Hugh Everett
We only have the one…
March 13, 2017
"On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise." -Paul Ricoeur
When it comes to the largest bound cosmic structures, it doesn’t get any bigger than galaxy clusters. Unless, that it, you consider…
March 12, 2017
“When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” -Khalil Gibran
Another…
March 11, 2017
"The Universe is expanding the way your mind is expanding. It's not expanding into anything; you're just getting less dense." -Katie Mack
It's a thing of scientific beauty that we've not only been able to determine that the Universe is expanding, but that we've been able to measure the rate of…
March 10, 2017
“He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.” -Leonardo Da Vinci
For centuries, Newton’s theoretical predictions were as unassailable as physics got. His ideas about mechanics, gravitation and optics passed…
March 8, 2017
"Laws of nature mixed with evolutionary/historical contingencies allow for a range of diversity... [t]hat diversity, within the laws of nature, when I step back a bit from the desk or the computer, still surprises me to no end." -Adrian Lenardic
When it comes to the habitability of a planet, there…
March 8, 2017
"One should not need a teleportation device to decide whether a newly discovered object is a planet." -Jean-Luc Margot
It was a harsh lesson in astronomy for all of us in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union released their official definition of a planet. While the innermost eight…
