Last week, we saw how, starting in the late 1600s, astronomers published almanacs of predictable celestial events, in particular the eclipses of Jupiter’s four bright (“Galilean”) moons, allowing travelers anywhere in the world to compare their local time with almanac time, thus giving them their longitudes. Let’s see how that worked in real life, especially […]
Barry Evans
Posted inLife + Outdoors
A Question of Longitude
For 2,000 years, since the time of Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy, we have defined our position on Earth by two numbers. Latitude tells you how far you are from the equator, measured in degrees, 0 to 90, north and south. Longitude is your angular distance from an imaginary “meridian” line drawn from pole to pole, […]
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Dark Energy:Blunder or Boondoggle?
Albert Einstein told physicist George Gamow that the greatest blunder of his life was his introduction of a “cosmological constant” designated by Λ, the Greek letter lambda. In his 1915 theory of general relativity, Λ, a sort of ubiquitous “anti-gravity,” keeps the universal static, neither expanding nor contracting. But in 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that […]
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Does My BMI Make Me Look Fat?
OMG! My BMI (body mass index) just jumped from under 24, where it’s been for years, to more than 24. It’s only a matter of time before it tops 25, meaning, according to the World Health Organization, I’ll be overweight. Not obese — that doesn’t happen until it reaches 30. What happened? My weight didn’t […]
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Evolution Isn’t Progress!
Last week, I discussed the fallacy of thinking of evolution as a progressive process, that is, simple to complex, “lower” to “higher” animals, culminating, of course, in humans. The theory, “orthogenesis,” (from the Greek “straight origin”) is the opposite of randomness. Orthogenesis presumes that the variation from one generation to the next is directed toward […]
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Black English
“Black English … is a kind of tune-up of the English language. Some of the needless complexities are wiped away, just as happened all along the journey from Proto-Indo-European to English.” — Linguist John McWhorter Thanks to rap music, the internet, countless TV shows and movies, and just living in a mixed society, we’re all […]
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The Donbass Saga
A recent essay on the Clarke Historical Museum’s website about how Eureka came to be electrified attracted a single, terse comment: “Nothing beats the story of the Donbass.” Although the essay didn’t mention the Donbass, old-timers will surely know what’s being referred to. It’s quite a tale. Prior to Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt wanted […]
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How to Win $1 Million
It’s simple. Prove the Goldbach Conjecture: Every even integer greater than two is the sum of two primes. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? Figure it out and you’ll win a cool mil from the Clay Mathematics Institute, and you’ll probably get a Fields Medal — the math equivalent of the Nobel Prize as long as […]
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Mirror Universes
For nearly 100 years, the idea of a “Big Bang” birthing our universe has been the leading cosmological model. In the 1920s, Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann and later Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître derived the notion of an expanding universe based on Einstein’s 1915 General Theory of Relativity. Extrapolating backwards in time, expansion implies an infinitely […]
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Is Science Done For?
Last time, I discussed the possibility that pure science has reached some fundamental limits (“Is Science Done For? Part 1: Pure Science,” Sept. 26). This “end of science” idea was popularized (and employed as a title) by science writer John Horgan in his 1996 book. As I noted, Horgan claimed, “the era of truly profound […]
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Is Science Done For?
A story attributed to the wily Sufi philosopher Nasrudin tells of a man who offended the king and was condemned to die. “Give me but a year, lord, and I will teach your horse to talk,” the man begged. After the king agreed to postpone the sentence for a year, a fellow prisoner asked the […]
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Survey Markers and Olympic Medals
Observant walkers strolling down Ninth Street in Eureka between A and L streets may have wondered about the occasional incongruent circular metal discs anchored into the south sidewalk bearing the words “CALIFORNIA DIVISION OF HIGHWAYS,” “HUM-101” and the date 1971. Incongruent because Ninth is outside Caltrans jurisdiction. In fact, the discs are centerline markers of […]