A couple of interesting scientific stories are making the rounds today, and worth a little physics and general science commentary. The first reminds us just how incredibly limited our sensory perceptions are in telling us about the world, by forcing us to imagine how it may look to animals whose perceptions are slightly different. The second reminds us just how little we know about our own planet.
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Looking for Signs of Dark Matter at the Milky Way’s Center
There is going to be some amount of debate regarding dark matter in the next few weeks, so I’ve written an article on one of the best ways to go looking for new signs of dark matter out in space. The reason we are almost entirely convinced that the universe has lots of matter that … Read more
How Einstein Trumped Newton
Sometimes I encounter people whose impression is that what Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity (the one that said no object’s speed can exceed the speed of light in vacuum, etc.) did in “overthrowing” the ideas of the past was somehow like what the Bolsheviks did to the Czars twelve years later– out with the … Read more
What to Watch in the Sky This Week: Beauty in Motion
Why does the sight of the Moon draw our gaze and silence our voices? What is it about the planets, those exceptionally bright points of light that wander among the stars, that we instinctively find so beautiful? Is it perhaps that they make us dream of faraway, unreachable places? Is it that they are beacons … Read more