I hate trooping off in a gang. Scientists working with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN believe they have confirmed the existence of what others have called the “God particle.” Everyone exclaims “Higgs boson!” But I cry out “neutral B-meson” to that. I understand that for physicists, this discovery completes and substantiates the “Standard Model,” by which they currently […]
Nothing Doing
. Cosmologist Laurence Kruass’s latest book is A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Originally intended to contain a foreword by Christopher Hitchens, the book makes bold to tackle through physics a question to which religion has historically provided the comforting answer and over which contemporary philosophy long ago dismissively threw […]
How We Lived on It (41) – A Universe Not Made for Us
. This is the first part of what is so far a 16-part tribute series to Carl Sagan produced on YouTube by Callum Sutherland. You can find the series Facebook page here. Related articles Carl Sagan On The Final Shuttle Launch (buzzfeed.com) Space Shuttle’s Legacy: A Carl Sagan Remix (brainpickings.org) Seth MacFarlane Producing New Take […]
More Updike
Apropos Kerouac’s Sal Paradise feeling like “a speck on the surface of the sad red earth,” the following from John Updike on the influence of science on our sense of our place in the universe: The non-scientist’s relation to modern science is basically craven: we look to its discoveries and technology to save us from […]
Once More with Feeling, or the Eternal Return
According to Abhay Ashtekar, Director of the Institute of Gravitational Physics and Geometry at the Pennsylvania State University, the Big Bang theory of cosmology will need to be replaced by the Big Bounce. Loop quantum cosmology (LQC) is a derivative of loop quantum gravity (LQG), which successfully combines Einstein’s General Theory of Relavitity based theory […]