Most people have heard of SETI@home, the UC Berkeley-based project that harnesses the power of internet-connected computers to help search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But have you heard of NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, a citizen science project run by Zooniverse? Here’s what they aim to accomplish: Is there a large planet at the fringes of ... More
In 2012, I shared my excitement with you about the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN in my post Higgs Boson: Our Understanding of the Universe Is About to Change. While the Higgs boson is now often described as the particle that “blew up” the universe, a recent article published by New Scientist raises a fascinating question: Believe it or ... More
My Steampunk doppelganger, adventurous space traveler Max Von Sama, is exploring time and space on the SamaAirship. She wants to know more about dark matter, she is looking for potentially habitable exoplanets (hence her destination: Kepler), and wants to find an answer to the Fermi question. She has ambition. Needless to say when I read: That is not dead ... More
Last month I read a very interesting article on Quanta Magazine (an editorially independent online publication launched by the Simons Foundation to enhance public understanding of science -a must read) about Physicist Geoffrey Chew. At 92, he’s now retired and was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Here is what the article says ... More
If you’ve been reading this blog, you already know my keen interest in the Universe, Dark Matter, Quantum Physics, and of course, the Higgs Boson. You may also know my doppelganger, adventurous space traveler Max Von Sama who left for Kepler-186f on board the Sama Airship last April after NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope discovered the first ... More
The Universe: A Partial Inventory By Mario Livio New high-res maps of Earth’s surprisingly inconsistent gravity field By George Dvorsky, io9 Can String Theory predict stuff? By Rob Knoops, Quantum Diaries Particle Personality Disorder: Neutrinos Change Flavors in Chinese Experiment By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Wormholes May Save Physics From Black Hole ... More
The fact that we have matter in the Universe means there have to be laws of physics that aren’t in our Standard Model, and neutrinos are one place they might be. Prof Dave Wark, of the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and Oxford University. Source: BBC More
Matthew R. Francis – Writer of science, blogger of physics and astronomy, director of CosmoAcademy, writes: “Physicists are serial offenders when it comes to cross-disciplinary meddling. Whether it’s a theoretical cosmologist claiming to solve consciousness or a professor smugly claiming all other sciences are “soft”, physicists are too ... More
It started with a bang, and has been expanding ever since. For nearly a century, this has been the standard view of the Universe. Now one cosmologist is proposing a radically different interpretation of events — in which the Universe is not expanding at all. In a paper posted on the arXiv preprint server1, Christof Wetterich, a theoretical physicist at ... More
“There are hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy and upward of 100 billion galaxies in our universe. So the existence of a planet similar to Earth somewhere, is, in my mind a certainty…” Prof. Sara Seager, astrophysicist, planetary scientist at MIT. Full article here. More
