Mar 26, 2018 What is light? When you’re in a boat, you see waves of water lap against the hull. If you could tie a flag to a molecule of water, you could see that molecule move up and down. When you’re at a concert, you hear waves of sound…
Feb 15, 2018 Have you ever seen a carpenter try to cut a 2×4 with a hammer? Probably not. Carpenters usually carry a saw as well as a hammer in their toolboxes, and they know to use the proper tool for the task at hand. If they didn’t have…
Feb 14, 2018 Newton, Einstein, Darwin and the other early explorers of science discovered the “New World” of fundamental laws of reality, and the scientists who have come after them are mere colonists. Continuing this line of thought, John Horgan writes in THE END OF SCIENCE that the latecomers…
Jan 24, 2018 Scientific theories-or, for that matter, theories of any kind-are “if-then” statements. If a theory is true, then certain events can be observed. If Relativity is true, then starlight passing near the sun will be bent twice as much as Newton’s theory predicts. If evolution is true,…
Jan 11, 2018 We peer at the universe through keyholes. We sense half a dozen colors, variations of rough and smooth, flavors that are sometimes familiar, a few octaves of pressure oscillations in air. What are we missing? The colors of microwaves and x-rays, the sounds of electric currents,…
Nov 28, 2017 When Einstein introduced the theory of relativity in 1905, astronomers thought the universe consisted of only the Milky Way. What we think of today as galaxies were thought of then as tiny clouds within the Milky Way. It was 20 years later that Hubble showed they…
Oct 25, 2017 A slide rule hangs on the wall of my office, a dual-base vector hyperbolic log-log slide rule. Editor’s Note: Due to Northern California wildfires, the Picture of the Day will be on a temporary leave of absence. In the interim, please enjoy these articles from the…
Oct 5, 2017 Changing your beliefs feels like dying. Whether it’s religion, politics, or science, letting go of the complex of ideas that provides an orderly explanation for your life and your experiences seems like falling into chaos and oblivion. It seems suicidal even to loosen your grip on…
Sep 13, 2017 Before the space age, astronomers looked up at the night sky and saw points and patches of light. With the aid of telescopes they could see more points and patches, and with the aid of spectroscopes they could discover what the points and patches were made of…
Aug 22, 2017 Currently accepted theories have evolved a long way toward catastrophics from their ancestry in uniformism. Assumptions of actualism and gradualism-that present-day processes acting over long times could explain the changing morphology of rocks and species-have been displaced. Impacts from space have broken the continuously gradual action…
