Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.
A modern example of this stunning knowledge of nature that Einstein has gifted us, comes from 2016, when gravitational waves were discovered by a specially designed observatory tuned for just this purpose.
Until Sir Isaac Newton wrote down the universal law of gravitation, nobody had any reason to presume that the laws of physics at home were the same as everywhere else in the universe. Earth had earthly things going on and the heavens had heavenly things going on.
You can not become a scientist if you require that every question has an answer because its the very questions that have no answer that attract you to a laboratory every single day.
If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the matter, and it’s the gravity we don’t understand.
Helium is widely recognized as an over-the-counter, low-density gas that, when inhaled, temporarily increases the vibrational frequency of your windpipe and larynx, making you sound like Mickey Mouse.
When something glows from being heated, it emits light in all parts of the spectrum, but will always peak somewhere.
These largely empty volumes of space – the far-rural regions of each galaxy – contain too little visible matter to explain the anomalously high orbital speeds of the tracers.
While most branches of science have ascended in this era, the field of astrophysics persistently rises to the top. I think I know why. At one time or another every one of us has looked up at the night sky and wondered: What does it all mean? How does it all work? And, what is my place in the universe?
Geek e-mail sign-off: No trees were killed to send this message, but a large number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.
Celestial happenings, however, don’t limit themselves to what’s convenient for the human retina.
I don’t know how Albert would have felt about this, but an unknown element was discovered in the debris of the first hydrogen bomb test in the Eniwetok atoll in the South Pacific, on November 1, 1952, and was named einsteinium in his honour. I might have named it armageddium instead.
A legacy rises to become culture only when its elements are so common that they no longer attract comment – not because people have lost interest, but because people cannot imagine a world without them.
You could, in principle, perform this stunt if you managed to let forth a powerful and sustained exhaust of flatulence.
How about methane? It too is chemically unstable, and yes, some of it is anthropogenic, but as we’ve seen, methane has nonliving agents as well.
Sir William Herschel was the first person to discover a planet beyond those easily visible to the naked eye, and he was ready to name it after the King – always a safe bet when you are his subject. Had Sir William succeeded, the planet list would read: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and George.
For reasons I have yet to understand, many people don’t like chemicals, which might explain the perennial movement to rid foods of them. Perhaps sesquipedalian chemical names just sound dangerous. But in that case we should blame the chemists, and not the chemicals themselves. Personally, I am quite comfortable with chemicals, anywhere in the universe. My favorite stars, as well as my best friends, are all made of them.
Without the billion-and-one to a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter, all mass in the universe would have self-annihilated, leaving a cosmos made of photons and nothing else – the ultimate let-there-be-light scenario.
Asteroids are craggy chunks of rock. Comets are balls of dirt, ice, and frozen gases. And meteors are, quite simply, whatever falls through and burns up in Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. Asteroids.
And sometimes I forget that powerful people rarely do all they can to help those who cannot help themselves.