Tag Archives: speed of light

Ideas Live!

Philosophy involves the study of ideas. Yet some (like Stephen Hawking) say philosophy is dead. Others (such as Neil deGrasse Tyson) say philosophy may be alive but its ideas have no use in physics. Both of these exemplars hold the degree of Doctor of Philosophy so they should know. But so do I and I […]

Go Jets Go!

How about those jets! Jets in space are hot in science news these days. They are hot because they are a huge problem. How huge? Try thinking of a billion times a billion miles. Let’s start small. Archerfish find breakfast using water jets. Their jets are longer than their body size. How they shoot their […]

Making Sense of Space   

Making Sense of Space        Last week we looked closer at the crisis in cosmology. Physicists are inventing increasingly implausible models to describe what they observe. Clinging to descriptions, they abandon understanding. Indeed some heavy-hitter physicists propose to abandon physics. For example, American Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg says: Now we may be at a new turning […]

ULAS J1120+0641 : Voice from the Deep

  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 […]

Hitting the Streets of Priština

We are in Priština, the new capital of a new country, war-torn Kosovo. Main street is Bill Klinton―not a typo―Boulevard. His statue’s in the square. He’s their hero; he gave the Kosovans Kosovo. Cars crowd sidewalks, people throng the streets, mingling in a complex dance. The dance is guided by blue signs and fading pavement-paint […]