When did it become okay to be more offended by what someone with no power says than by what someone with power does?
We’re a sleepy nation right now. I want us to be a nation of innovation.
We are born of this universe, we live in this universe, and the universe is in us.
There’s no doubt about it: more varieties of carbon-based molecules exist than all other kinds of molecules combined.
Throughout history, different cultures have produced creation myths that explain our origins as the result of cosmic forces shaping our destiny. These histories have helped us to ward off feelings of insignificance.
If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don’t know.
What we know is that the matter we have come to love in the universe – the stuff of stars, planets, and life – is only a light frosting on the cosmic cake, modest buoys afloat in a vast cosmic ocean of something that looks like nothing.
Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what’s going on in the sky. To us, a simple rock alignment based on cosmic patterns looks like an Einsteinian feat. But a truly mysterious civilization would be one that made no cultural or architectural reference to the sky at all.
Without a doubt, Einstein’s greatest blunder was having declared that lambda was his greatest blunder.
The easy part is the ray’s 500-second speed-of-light jaunt from the Sun to Earth, through the void of interplanetary space. The hard part is the light’s million-year adventure to get from the Sun’s center to its surface.
The most accurate measurements to date reveal dark energy as the most prominent thing in town, currently responsible for 68 percent of all the mass-energy in the universe; dark matter comprises 27 percent, with regular matter comprising a mere 5 percent.
To picture a pulsar, imagine the mass of the Sun packed into a ball the size of Manhattan. If that’s hard to do, then maybe it’s easier if you imagine stuffing about a billion elephants into a Chapstick casing.
You need to live in a nation whose government values the search to understand humanity’s place in the universe.
Dark matter is a mysterious substance that has gravity but does not interact with light in any known way.
The day gets about one second longer every 67,000 years.
No doubt about it, we’re smarter than every other living creature that ever ran, crawled, or slithered on Earth. But how smart is that?
In the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, all the space and all the matter and all the energy of the known universe was contained in a volume less than one-trillionth the size of the period that ends this sentence.
If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight.
It is the knowledge that I’m going to die that creates the focus that I bring to being alive; the urgency of accomplishment; the need to express love; now, not later. If we live forever, why ever even get out of bed in the morning? Cause you always have tomorrow. That’s not the kind of life I want to lead.
What are the chances that this first and only smart species in the history of life on Earth has enough smarts to completely figure out how the universe works? Chimpanzees.