Astronomy & Physics

(I know I'm not doing this any more, but I couldn't resist.) An article in New Scientist reports on musing by two reasonable and respected cosmologists— indeed, ones whom I've met myself— that our discovery of dark energy may have shortened the life of the Universe. To which I can only say "foo". And I say "foo" on two levels. Primarily, on the sensational way in which this is described by New Scientist. But secondarily, on the interpretations of quantum mechanics that respectable cosmologists are promoting. First of all, for a bit of perspective. The actual research paper on which this…

Astronomers have long assumed that supernovae are the source of at least most of the cosmic rays that hit Earth. Woah, slow down... cosmic rays? Right, you hear the term all the time, but do you really know what they are? They are charged particles that rain down on Earth from space. Really! Kinda cool, huh? There are charged particles— mostly protons, or hydrogen nuclei, but with some heavier ions mixed in— smacking into our atmosphere all the time. Some of them have extremely high energies, higher energies than those to which we can accelerate particles in our best particle physics…

Every so often you will come across somebody who has a "killer" list of "problems" with the Big Bang. While there remain unknowns and questions about the Big Bang— just as there do with biological evolution— the basic picture of the Big Bang is rock solid— just like evolution. Nearly two months ago, I received a query from somebody who found my name through the Clergy Letter Project "expert database" regarding one of the websites that lists these objects. I've been through quite a number of life changes in the last 6-8 weeks, and my blogging rate has suffered as a result…

This is mostly just an MLP ("Mindless Link Post"), and it's nearly two weeks late, but there's a post by Julianne over at Cosmic Variance that I think is of crucial importance. People who are outside the field of science very often lose sight of the huge amount of important science that is done, but doesn't produce the "amazingly sexy discovery" news headlines, or, say, the Gruber prize. Also, people working in one field of science often don't appreciate the value of other fields of science when it doesn't obviously overlap theirs... even though, as Julianne points out, all of that other "…

Following the talk I gave in Second Life about the discovery of the accelerating Universe, we held a couple of Q&A sessions. The original plan was to have questions right after the talk, but the Second Life main grid crashed right at that moment. We all got online about half an hour later, and I held one Q&A session for the people who came back. There was another one the next day. Troy McLuhan (his Second Life avatar name) logged the session, and has done the hard work of formatting and lightly editing it for web publication. You can find the transcript of the Q&A session…

I managed to get through my 15-20 minute "talk," and just as I threw it open for questions Second Life had a database problem and everbody in-world had to be logged out.... We got back in 40 minutes or so later, and I answered questions for a while for people who came back. However, if you were at the talk and wanted to ask questions but didn't come back, I'll be doing a follow-up Q&A session tomorrow (Wednesday August 1) at 10AM PDT at the same location. Below, I've got a transcript of the talk I gave. Other than fixing some typos and merging things into paragraphs, I haven't edited…