If you travel fast, several weird things happen. One is that your inner time clock will appear to tick more slowly, as seen by all those who observe you. Your time “dilates.
Last I had kept count, there were fifty-six moons among the planets in the Solar System. Then I woke up one morning to learn that another dozen had been discovered around Saturn. After that incident, I decided to no longer keep track.
Nowadays our mobile phones relay microwaves.
Detecting without seeing was now a scientific reality.
Some species of snakes have small pits on their heads that pick up infrared rays from tasty warm-blooded prey, readily revealed at night against the rapidly cooling surroundings.
If you don’t have avocados, you can’t make guacamole.
My life is what I make of it.
Anyone who can’t afford to depend on serendipity would say you have to identify your target or goal in advance.
The four most common, chemically active elements in the universe – hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen – are the four most common elements of life on Earth, with carbon serving as the foundation of biochemistry. We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.
It took the mind of Albert Einstein, the twentieth century’s most brilliant and influential, to show that we can more accurately describe gravity’s action-at-a-distance as a warp in the fabric of space-time, produced by any combination of matter and energy.
But whenever the War Department supplies the funding, part the curtains and you’ll see the needs of conflict masquerading as the needs of science.
What you might not have come across is the fact that Hubble is basically a photoreconnaissance satellite whose cameras point upward at the heavens rather than downward at Earth.
Children do not yet know that the world doesn’t revolve around them.
These philosophically fun ideas usually satisfy nobody. Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist.
Take America’s Global Positioning System, GPS – two dozen satellites in orbit at about 12,500 miles above Earth, more than fifty times higher than ordinary low-Earth-orbit satellites.
Here in our solar system, a hundred-meter-wide asteroid sails into Earth every millennium or so at speeds upward of fifty thousand miles an hour, generating a destructive impact equal to 2,500 atomic bombs.
As we’ve known from the beginning, dark matter does, indeed, exert gravity, to which ordinary matter responds. But that’s it. After all these years, we haven’t discovered it doing anything else.
The greatest casualty may be our growing inability to find words that precisely communicate our feelings and emotions. Why else the need for that burgeoning catalog of emoticons to supplement our written correspondence? A smiley face. A snarky face. A heart. A thumbs-up.
First, get your facts straight. Then, distort them at your leisure.
Gravity is a marvelous force, but a troubling one.