OSIRIS-REx, the very ambitious effort to obtain a sample from an asteroid in space, is a success to this point. The manmade satellite is in orbit around the small asteroid 101955 Bennu. It’s a triumph of celestial navigation and technology. There were serious critics of the OSIRIS-REx’s mission, who asked “What was the point, what…
At the start of WC’s legal career women and children were still property of men in many states. Women have made great progress in erasing that historic detritus. Kids, not so much. And no where is it more evident than in the childhood vaccine debates. If a parent mistreats his or her children, the state…
The anti-vaxxers, parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, whether for religious principles, the anti-science belief that vaccinations cause autism or sheer orneriness, create terrible risks that childhood diseases will resurge, and that neonates and babies, too young to be vaccinated, will catch child-killing diseases. You can watch it happening in eastern Washington right now,…
The puzzle of dark matter is one of the great conundrums of astrophysics. Part of the puzzle is that it cannot be seen – “dark” in astronomy means invisible. So far, it cannot be detected. It can only be inferred. When you see concentric ripples in a quiet pond, you infer someone threw a rock…
The centennial of the end of World War I was observed with all due ceremony, even if President Trump embarrassed himself and the United States by his churlish behavior. World War I killed perhaps 16 million people, counting both soldiers and civilians. A nearly unimaginable number. But it wasn’t even the worst disaster of 1918.…
In 1961, WC’s sixth grade teacher, the late Jerry Norum, told his students that “LASERs” were going to be the “next big thing.” He was right, of course; lasers are ubiquitous now, scanning groceries, transmitting data, playing music, performing surgery and serving hundreds of other tasks. They were, indeed, the “next big thing.”1 Is graphene…
Richard Feynman in 1970 described turbulence as the most important unsolved problem of classical physics. Sir Horace Lamb (in a speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1932) said that “when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is quantum electrodynamics, and the…
