Seems the World goes batshit crazy, every few decades. Just long enough to forget the last time the World went batshit crazy.
In particular, a quantity known as the fine-structure constant, which controls the basic fingerprinting for every element, must have remained unchanged for billions of years. Of.
No, it’s not Pluto. Get over it.
Stephen Hawking the reputation of being the smartest person alive. Most of us agree.
On canvas with paint In the Artist’s school It’s red that is hot And blue that is cool. But in science we show As the heat gets higher That a star will glow red Like the coals of a fire. Raise the heat some more And what is in sight? It’s no longer red It has turned bright white. Yet the hottest of all, Merlin says unto you, Is neither white nor red When the star has turned blue.
Earth’s oceans will boil away about a billion years.
The Speed of Light: It’s Not Just a Good Idea It’s the Law. Unlike.
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?
What our phrenological exam says is that we understand how the universe behaved, but that most of the universe is made of stuff about which we are clueless. Our profound areas of ignorance notwithstanding, today, as never before, cosmology has an anchor, because the CMB reveals the portal through which we all walked. It’s a point where interesting physics happened, and where we learned about the universe before and after its light was set free.
What if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify – a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into existence from nothing? Or what if everything we know and love were just a computer simulation rendered for entertainment by a super-intelligent alien species?
We are all the sum of that which has happened in our lives. If you are successful, it would be wrong to think that you’d be more successful if something had been easier.
Distant galaxies now visible in the night sky will ultimately disappear beyond an unreachable horizon, receding from us faster than the speed of light.
No experiment ever conducted has ever revealed an object of any form reaching the speed of light.
Within the chemically rich liquid oceans, by a mechanism yet to be discovered, organic molecules transitioned to self-replicating life. Dominant in this primordial soup were simple anaerobic bacteria – life that thrives in oxygen-empty environments but excretes chemically potent oxygen as one of its by-products.
If the universe is anything, it should be fun.
Spheres are indeed fertile theoretical tools that help us gain insight into all manner of astrophysical problems. But one should not be a sphere-zealot. I am reminded of the half-serious joke about how to increase milk production on a farm: An expert in animal husbandry might say, “Consider the role of the cow’s diet... ” An engineer might say, “Consider the design of the milking machines... ” But it’s the astrophysicist who says, “Consider a spherical cow...
So dark matter is our frenemy. We have no clue what it is. It’s kind of annoying. But we desperately need it in our calculations to arrive at an accurate description of the universe. Scientists are generally uncomfortable whenever we must base our calculations on concepts we don’t understand, but we’ll do it if we have to. And dark matter is not our first rodeo.
Even if you’re bad at math, you’re probably much better at it than the smartest chimpanzee, whose genetic identity varies in only trifling ways from ours.
Latest estimates, extrapolating from the current catalogs, suggests as many as forty billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way alone. Those are the planets our descendants might want to visit someday, by choice, if not by necessity.
Our star, and most stars, are made mostly of hydrogen, which is the number one element in the universe: 90% of all atomic nuclei are hydrogen, about 8% are helium, and the remaining 2% comprise all the other elements in the periodic table. All.