To worry is to be. To be is to worry.
I don’t often delve into aerospace issues here—particularly not the space portion of the word, although I do breath air regularly while writing. What’s more, if I weren’t too lazy to check, it’s possible that I’d find that I’ve never referred to that subject in this blog other than perhaps in passing. But I am [...]
I don’t normally do book reviews, but, for the benefit of my loyal reader (you know who you are), I feel the need to recommend a book here. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (second edition, 2003, W.W. Norton & Company, New York) by Brian Greene, a professor [...]
I’ve always found physics to be an exceptionally challenging subject. In fact, I’m usually baffled within the first two words out of a physicist’s mouth, and that’s just when they’re telling me what they had for dinner last night. If they start talking about their scientific interests I quickly start ruing my failure to carry [...]
Much to my bafflement, many people are indifferent to science or, worse, look down on it. I’ve never been able to understand that attitude. Science has immensely improved our lives in many practical ways. But beyond the utilitarian benefits, despite dramatically increasing our knowledge of hard facts in all of its fields, science has still [...]
I don’t know what brought this to mind (my brain is a weird and wonder-deficient place), but I recall reading a while back that scientists think that it will eventually be possible to recreate the extinct woolly mammoth, which began dying out about 10,000 years ago and went extinct about 3,700 years ago.1 The theory [...]
NASA has photographic evidence that mud might have flowed very recently on Mars. And when I say very recently, I’m not talking about a geological timescale. It might have happened just a few years ago. If this is true, it is almost certainly also true that there is mud on Mars today. NASA scientists compared [...]
Astronomers recently announced that a NASA satellite had captured the image of a gamma ray burst 13.1 billion light years away. The burst likely occurred as a result of the explosion of a very large star and it might have given rise to a black hole. Think about that. By definition, a light year is [...]
I’m in favor of governments spending large sums of money on manned and unmanned space exploration. A lot of people ask me how I can hold this view when there are so many problems right here on Earth that could be ameliorated, or possibly even solved, with the judicious application of funds that are not [...]