“I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.”
– Paul Dirac to Robert Oppenheimer
“You forgot that science has evolved from poetry, and failed to see that a change of times might beneficently reunite the two as friends, at a higher level and to mutual advantage.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
UNIQUE PARAMETERS There is only one answer to creation. Though we don’t nearly understand it yet, there’s but one elegant variation emerging from initial values set that even allows molecules to be, much less achieve complexity of life, or suns to burn their planets distantly with not too much but with the needed strife. […]
Read more "Unique Parameters"STICK THEORY If God wanted us to know everything the universe would have stopped expanding, or, at least, its speed should be lessening, allowing us to gain understanding. If we are limited to speed of light, while God stretches the fabric far faster, then, as long as we’re here, try as we might, […]
Read more "Stick Theory"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 […]
Read more "Chances Are"Unusual for a Shakespearean sonnet, perhaps, Special Relativity is summed up here in iambic pentameter. Press play to hear this read by the author.
Read more "Special Relativity"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 […]
Read more "Breaking Symmetry"Happy 40th Anniversary to Voyagers 1 & 2! Almost out of the solar system, traveling faster than anything else man has ever built, soon (in an astronomical sense) you will announce our presence to the rest of the intelligent universe (if it exists). You are our first spacecraft unable to ask, “Are we there yet?” […]
Read more "Topping The Star Charts"Ask a geologist about rocks, and she (or he) might tell you about sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous, then describe their differences based upon how they were formed. The fact is that everything heavier than air was formed in the same way — in the interior of mega-stars, fated to explode. We may be considered stardust, but we […]
Read more "Rock Garden"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 […]
Read more "Cosmic Prediction"Though they’ll claim science is observation,
that’s often tweaked to fit the equation.
BARD OF MARS 