If you board an aircraft built according to science – with principles that have survived numerous attempts to prove them wrong – you have a far better chance of reaching your destination than you do in an aircraft constructed by the rules of Vedic astrology.
The world has persisted many a long year, having once been set going in the appropriate motions. From these everything else follows.
And the cosmos ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper.
It’s like asking what is south of the South Pole.
Decade by decade: estimates of Pluto’s size got smaller and smaller.
Earth has also tidally locked the Moon, leaving it with identical periods of rotation on its axis and revolution around Earth. Wherever and whenever this happens, the locked moon shows only one face to its host planet.
We simply organized the information differently – that’s all we did. And the New York Times was making a federal case out of it.
The day our knowledge of the cosmos ceases to expand, we risk regressing to the childish view that the universe figuratively and literally revolves around us. In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations would be prone to act on their “low contracted prejudices.” And that would be the last gasp of human enlightenment – until the rise of a visionary new culture that could once again embrace, rather than fear, the cosmic perspective.
The universe today is 13.8 billion years old. By 22 billion years, the Sun will have finished its main-sequence lifetime and will have become a white dwarf. The Andromeda galaxy will have crashed into the Milky Way.
What happened before all this? What happened before the beginning? Astrophysicists have no idea. Or, rather, our most creative ideas have little or no grounding in experimental science. In response, some religious people assert, with a tinge of righteousness, that something must have started it all: a force greater than all others, a source from which everything issues. A prime mover. In the mind of such a person, that something is, of course, God.
My favorite parody of this gesture was a skit on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, shortly after the Voyager launch, in which they showed a written reply from the aliens who recovered the spacecraft. The note simply requested, “Send more Chuck Berry.
For ordinary household gravity, Newton’s law works just fine. It got us to the Moon and returned us safely to Earth in 1969. For black holes and the large-scale structure of the universe, we need general relativity.
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. What we do know, and what we can assert without further hesitation, is that the universe had a beginning.
To the scientist, the universality of physical laws makes the cosmos a marvelously simple place.
Here’s the story of how Pluto lost its planetary status and was demoted to an ice ball in the outer solar system. It’s also about my role in this at the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History.
Science is not just about seeing, it’s about measuring, preferably with something that’s not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain.
I claim no special knowledge of when the end of science will come, or where the end might be found, or whether an end exists at all. What I do know is that our species is dumber than we normally admit to ourselves.
These waves, predicted by Einstein, are ripples moving at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time, and are generated by severe gravitational disturbances, such as the collision of two black holes.
The closest anybody has come is to presume dark energy is a quantum effect – where the vacuum of space, instead of being empty, actually seethes with particles and their antimatter counterparts. They pop in and out of existence in pairs, and don’t last long enough to be measured.
On the equator, where centrifugal forces are greatest, a 150-pound person will be a slender 149 pounds 14 ounces.