Theory
emjohnson | January 11, 2010Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4
In Quentin Skinner's celebrated history The Foundations of Modern Political Thought he writes that:
If the history of political theory were to be written essentially as a history of ideologies, one outcome might be a clearer understanding of the links between political theory and practice.
In Part II of this series I highlighted how a common objection to the political theory of social Darwinism is that it was a misapplication of Darwin's science to already existing ideas. A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the…
esiegel | May 14, 2008When I think of molecules, I think of Conan O'Brien doing his skit where he plays Moleculo...
the molecular man! I don't think of astronomy, and I certainly don't think of the leftover radiation from the big bang (known as the cosmic microwave background)! But somebody over at the European Southern Observatory put these two together and made an incredibly tasty science sandwich.
See, we can measure the cosmic microwave background today, because we have photons (particles of light) coming at us in all directions at all locations, with a temperature of 2.725 Kelvin. Theoretical cosmology…
esiegel | April 30, 2008But I didn't want one! Stop your whining, Earthlings. We have a serious question to answer, courtesy of Tamara:
What’s the moon like below its surface, moving into the interior? And what’s the current thought on its formation?
Well, we do know a lot about the Moon's insides the same way we know about the Earth's; just like the Earth has earthquakes, the Moon has moonquakes. These tell us about the Moon's interior. From back when we landed on the Moon, we planted the Apollo seismic experiments and saw 28 moonquakes. From these, we learned that the Moon has a crust about 60 km deep, a deep…
esiegel | April 23, 2008Since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. - C. M. Burns
There's no need to stop at the Sun, though. Since yesterday was Earth day, I thought it was only appropriate to spend today telling you how not only to destroy the Earth, but to effectively destroy the entire Universe. To tell you this story, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, to just before the big bang.
The big bang was when the Universe was hot, dense, full of energy, and expanding very quickly. The Universe was also spatially flat and the same temperature everywhere, and full of both matter and…
esiegel | April 18, 2008Bret Underwood, a friend of mine from my time in Madison, WI, saw my post on String Theory, and took issue with my statement that it wasn't testable. I'm still standing behind what I said, but let's address what Bret has to say.
I donât understand your argument above for why string theory is untestable. In fact, it seems to me you just outlined the best possible case for string theory! What you said above is that if I have a string theory construction of a phenomenon (say, the Standard Model or Inflation), which uses a set of parameters X, and makes some predictions, then I can find another…
esiegel | April 17, 2008What is the future of this website? I'm going to be creating videos for the web about the Universe. I'll be answering questions ranging from what the Universe is like today to how it got to be that way. I'm going to address every step that we know of, from the Big Bang up to the present day.
And I'm going to do it naturally, by telling the story as the Universe tells it directly to us. I call this project Genesis. Check out the teaser trailer below, and tell your friends, because this is coming in January.
esiegel | April 14, 2008Over the past few months, I have been asked a number of questions about String Theory and the Universe, including from readers Benhead and Mastery Mistery. But now Jamie, whom I'm going to marry later this year, has been asking me about it, and so it's time to write something about the scientific topic of String Theory. (Send in your questions now, because I'll answer them all this week if there's enough interest.) Let's start with this pair of questions:
String theory has been around for over 20 years, and so far, there is not one shred of experimental or observational evidence in support of…