The universe’s first few minutes are well-understood, or so it seems. A wealth of evidence tells physicists that, after one minute (some 13,780,000,000 years ago), it was very hot and rapidly cooling, very dense and rapidly expanding, a condition known as the Big Bang. Yet most physicists are curiously incurious about how it got to […]
For most people, what they hear or see speaks to the here and now. But for astronomers, a telescope looking at deep space captures a message from the past because it shows a picture that took time to travel at the speed of light. Thus they measure distances in light years – in other […]
“Gravitational waves turn to dust” shouts a headline in The Guardian newspaper. Its news is that last month’s news of a Harvard team’s discovery of gravitational waves from the beginning of time may not reveal such waves at all. That stunning signal could have come from grains of dust in space. It’s no surprise when […]
Motion is smooth, as any eye can see. In 1738, Scottish philosopher David Hume could―with little chance of challenge―say: ‘The infinite divisibility of space implies that of time, as is evident from the nature of motion.’ But physics now knows that, at scales far smaller than an atom, space isn’t smooth and motion must […]
A history by writer Thomas Hoover tells us that the words and actions of Zen masters through the ages all strive to an end: That end is an intuitive realization of a single great insight―that we and the world are one. … Our rational intellect merely obscures this truth, and consequently we must shut it […]
News from the Planck satellite is almost 14 billion years old. It’s coded in cold photons from the Big Flash, let loose about 380,000 years after the universe began and stretched as space expanded while they winged their way. The photons reaching Planck bear the same message as those seen by COBE and WMAP but […]
Last week, headlines said ANTARCTIC GLACIER LOSS IS UNSTOPPABLE. Melting slowly, said the texts. It’s not a new concern. Forty years ago reinsurer Munich Re warned of such hazards. So, why now and what’s this to you? There’s more to this than meets the eye. Those glaciers are part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. […]
Back to the writing of Time One. The book’s narrator is mentoring a hack detective who’s supposed to figure how the universe began like it’s a crime scene. The detective knows from nothing. He says his name is Frank. (The narrator disbelieves him.) The narrator is a beach-bum with a philosophic education. His job is […]
Some see myths as things of the past in our enlightened age. For example, in a recent episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said (speaking of the revolutionary ideas of Thales of Miletus around 600 BCE), “The workings of nature could be explained without recourse to the supernatural.” He got […]