Time matters to us all. We are defined by time. Mostly we don’t think about it. But it’s easier to think about than you might expect. Time became important in the 15th century. It came to be synonymous with clocks. Accurate chronometers would help sailors figure where they were at sea. Many made bold voyages—or […]
These days―thanks to the mash-up of Leonard Hofstadter, Sheldon Cooper, David Saltzberg, Ed Robertson and the Barenaked Ladies―most everyone has heard of the Big Bang theory. And most everyone knows it ‘all started with the Big Bang!’ Most everyone is wrong. Wikipedia has it precisely right. It says: The Big Bang theory is the prevailing […]
Understanding physics can be satisfying. Understanding physics some physicists don’t understand brings super-satisfaction. Many think they can’t understand physics. Seems to me that often it is physicists they can’t understand. I think anybody who can figure how to travel to another country can, with no more effort, understand a lot of physics. With two provisos: […]
In previous posts I’ve quoted leading physicists as saying fundamental physics is in trouble. But why should you care how well (or how badly) physics goes? Here’s short answer #1: It supports a lot of paychecks. How this works may not be obvious so let me illustrate. In the late 1600s Isaac Newton kicked off […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I’m taking time out from Pristina. Exotic hadrons are the rage this week. Suddenly a cipher, Z(4430), seems to be sexy. What’s exotic? Well, not-exotic, plain-vanilla hadrons are particles of matter. They include baryons―the protons and neutrons that are stable in nuclei of atoms that we see, and unstable particles called mesons that fly unseen […]