In your spaceship, far from any star, can you tell if you are moving? Do you even know what moving means? Physicists thought about this long before we made our way into near-Earth space. And they tangled it up with a concept called the æther. The word aether was once widely understood. Winston Churchill uses […]
Understanding physics can be satisfying. Understanding physics some physicists don’t understand brings super-satisfaction. Many think they can’t understand physics. Seems to me that often it is physicists they can’t understand. I think anybody who can figure how to travel to another country can, with no more effort, understand a lot of physics. With two provisos: […]
In previous posts I’ve quoted leading physicists as saying fundamental physics is in trouble. But why should you care how well (or how badly) physics goes? Here’s short answer #1: It supports a lot of paychecks. How this works may not be obvious so let me illustrate. In the late 1600s Isaac Newton kicked off […]
News from the Planck satellite is almost 14 billion years old. It’s coded in cold photons from the Big Flash, let loose about 380,000 years after the universe began and stretched as space expanded while they winged their way. The photons reaching Planck bear the same message as those seen by COBE and WMAP but […]
Some see myths as things of the past in our enlightened age. For example, in a recent episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said (speaking of the revolutionary ideas of Thales of Miletus around 600 BCE), “The workings of nature could be explained without recourse to the supernatural.” He got […]
We are in Priština, the new capital of a new country, war-torn Kosovo. Main street is Bill Klinton―not a typo―Boulevard. His statue’s in the square. He’s their hero; he gave the Kosovans Kosovo. Cars crowd sidewalks, people throng the streets, mingling in a complex dance. The dance is guided by blue signs and fading pavement-paint […]