science Archives - Page 8 of 10

Venetian Dreams

The popular press has, in recent years, written much about the planet Mars, but very little about Venus. This is to be expected since Mars is the planet of greatest focus for the major space programs of the world. Four planetary rovers have traversed various portions of the Martian surface,1 orbital spacecraft have mapped the…

I Have an Idea

I have an idea. It is an idea that could be developed into something great in the hands of an Elon Musk, Rod Canion, or Richard Branson. A great entrepreneur would take an idea like mine and pursue it until it became a great technological boon; or until the idea was found to be completely…

JPL Computers

Image courtesy: NASA/JPL-Caltech; JPL photo number P-163.1 The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a facility in Los Angeles County, California that can trace its history to the early 1940s. At that time, rocket motors were a new development and the lab was an arm of the American military. A little known fact about the early…

The Power and Limits of Science

Two quotes caught my attention this week. One was by a prominent atheist; the other by a prominent Christian. In The Limits of Science, Nobel Prize winner (and atheist) Sir Peter Medawar, writes: Science is a great and glorious enterprise – the most successful, I argue, that human beings have ever engaged in. To reproach…

Gravity and Skiing

Nobel Prize Laureate Peter Higgs in Stockholm, December 2013 I “went down a rabbit hole” in Wikipedia today. I wanted to better understand gravity. On the face of the matter, it seems like a simple enough question: “What is gravity and how is it mediated?” I went cross-country skiing on Saturday and felt its effects;…

Diversity

The incredible diversity of life on this planet will never cease to amaze. A recent article in Science News shows bees and other insects up close and in full colour. The research lab that took these photos provides a service to help identify the various species of bees. “There are nearly 20,000 known species of…

Interstellar 2014

Once again Christopher Nolan (writer and director) and Jonathan Nolan (writer) have succeeded in changing our perceptions with the visually stunning, Interstellar (2014). If you have not seen the movie, you may want to see it before you continue to read this blog which contains elements of the plot (in other words: spoiler alert). From…

Sleep in Heavenly Peace

“Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie. Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.” Earlier this week, the Rosetta spacecraft reached the end of a ten year journey and delivered the Philae lander to the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. After a bouncy landing in the open planes,…

Follow-Up to Gravity

“I have no reason to believe that the human intellect is able to weave a system of physics out of its own resources without experimental labour. Whenever the attempt has been made it has resulted in an unnatural and self-contradictory mass of rubbish.”James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)

Gravity

I admit that my “nerd quotient”1 may be higher than the average found in the general population and so this post may go beyond concepts you have thought about or wish to think about. (I have at least saved you from reading the formulas that I considered writing into this blog.) Yet, even those who…