Back in the early Pleistocene, when WC was just a pup, stuff was made of protons, neutrons and electrons, collectively atoms. It didn’t get any smaller than that. Along came Murray Gell-Mann and his crowd of physicists, who developed the Standard Model of physics, creating a whole new bestiary of subatomic particles. There’s dozens of…
The Western Snake River Plain is a desert now. Sagebrush, bitterbrush and rabbitbrush growing on layers of ash and loess, which in turn lie on thousands of feet of basalt, congealed lava. It’s a desert, and a few minutes there in the summer will remove any doubts you might have that it is a desert.…
“When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.” — Attributed to Wener Heisenberg, 1901-1976 Tabby’s Star, technically a distant star in the constellation Cygnus, known officially as KIC 8462852, is the latest astrophysical puzzle to challenge…
The late Senator William Proxmire (D, Wisconsin) used to belittle pure research, handing out “Golden Fleece Awards” to federal-subsidized researchers whose work he thought had no scientific value. Eventually, his name became a verb, meaning to unfairly obstruct scientific research for political gain, as in “the project has been proxmired”. Senator Proxmire was accused of recklessly attacking…
Humankind seems to have invented reasoning, and it has mostly served us well. But reasoning evolved as a skill for plains apes, who included it as a tool for the bigger goal of cooperative living. It’s increasingly clear that reasoning as a tool can be subverted to that larger goal. Three books WC has read recently…
Analogy is a slippery substitute for science. But to understand the dark matter problem we’ll try an analogy. Imagine you have a long string with a weight on the end. Now spin, with the weight pulling on the string as you turn in circles. If you spin fast enough, and the weight is heavy enough,…
The weather sucks, WC is struggling with a head cold and it’s the same old same old among the yard birds. So WC has been doing a lot of reading. Much of it has turned out to be pretty good. Here’s a quick overview of recent, decent stuff. Michael Lewis famously write Moneyball, which somehow got…
