astrophysics

Chances Are

For those who like to parse a poem, you may have noticed both gods and God appear in the first three stanzas. The reference in the first stanza to Einstein comes from the famous response he received from Niels Bohr for his often repeated adage expressing his distaste for quantum mechanical theory that God doesn’t […]

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Breaking Symmetry

Our universe has things in it because chance quantum fluctuations enable. Nothing is what violates Nature’s laws — something is apparently more stable. Supersymmetry was asking for it. It was just too perfect to be withstood, and once it took the predictable hit it lit up the entire neighborhood, and, in that Big Bang, the […]

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Cosmic Prediction

Betelgeuse is the armpit of Orion, literally.  That is to say that it’s name translates to just that, and it is located in what astronomers politely refer to today as Orion’s shoulder. Already the second brightest star in Orion (after Rigel) and the ninth brightest star we can see, it may soon (any day, in […]

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Astronautical Joys

Life in interstellar space will have its perks. ASTRONAUTICAL JOYS One day the horizon won’t seem so vast, when we step off the planet of our birth. In space, we’ll look ahead into the past to find a future never seen on Earth. The farther out we look the further back we see to the […]

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Lighten Up

Dark Energy is the other component that constitutes the universe. It seems to be a product of space itself, and over great distances can act to reverse the effects of gravity, driving objects away from each other. No one knows what Dark Energy is, but based on it’s effects upon distant galaxies, and its even […]

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