“The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow of the nearest strip mall depresses me no end.” Sönke Johnson, Ecologist at Duke University Are you appreciating the Milky Way these winter evenings? Beyond your dark-accustomed eyes, you […]
Barry Evans
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Entropy and Order
“You can find many different diagnoses in death certificates, but they’re just details. What really kills us is entropy increase.” — Sabine Hossenfelder, Existential Physics Along with the Big Bang, entropy is probably the most cited and misunderstood concept in popular physics. It usually goes something like this: Everything tends to a state of disorder, […]
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Rocket Science
If you’ve ever watched the launch of a rocket, perhaps a Space Shuttle or one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9s, you’ll have heard the phrase “Max Q.” About a minute after launch — one minute 22 seconds, in the case of Falcon 9 — the announcer will say something like, “The spacecraft is now experiencing its […]
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Humboldt Bay Timeline
Humboldt Bay (Wigi, to the Wiyot people) is actually a lagoon, the largest protected large body of water between San Francisco and Puget Sound. It’s about 14 miles long and varies in width between a few hundred yards and 5 miles, with an area between 11 (low tide) and 24 (high tide) square miles. What […]
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Darwin’s Bulldog
“I was the most popular man in Oxford for full four & twenty hours.” — T.H. Huxley, following his debate with Bishop Wilberforce At 25, Thomas Henry Huxley returned from a four-year stint in the Royal Navy — he was assistant surgeon on a Royal Navy corvette exploring the South Seas from 1846 to 1850 […]
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The Einstein Problem
“It’s a wild ride. It’s completely unlikely and should not be taken as a model for how scientific discovery ever happens. It’s completely ridiculous.” — Craig Kaplan, co-author of the recent paper on aperiodic monotiles Sometimes, from the simplest of beginnings, emerge whole worlds of complexity. Einstein’s general relativity can be expressed in a compact […]
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To Run is Human
“In the ancient Olympics, nobody competed with shoes, you would run barefoot.” — Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist Forget the invention of sex, fire, toolmaking, language, agriculture. The real turning point in the four-billion-year saga from the origin of life on Earth to bacon-flavored dental floss occurred 7 million years ago, a blink of a geological eye. That’s […]
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Vulcan: Missing in Action
Vulcan was the Roman god of fire; he was also ugly. The good news is that he somehow got to marry the goddess Venus, who was something of a catch. The bad news is she was constantly unfaithful. Although sounding like a bit of a loser, Vulcan had the last laugh, giving us our word […]
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Aliens vs. Alien Life
Aliens: Intelligent creatures from a distant star who have traveled to Earth. Alien Life: A necessary precursor to those aliens, simple self-replicating molecules, such as cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). Earth is one of eight planets with an assortment of smaller bodies in thrall to our star, the Sun. The Sun is one of about a third […]
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Drones in Rwanda
“You now see much bigger and wealthier countries like the U.S. using Rwanda as a role model.” A surprising statement given that Rwanda, a landlocked country in the heart of Africa with a land area twice that of Humboldt County, was the scene of a brutal massacre 29 years ago: 1 million dead in 100 […]
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Humboldt’s Lagoons
Of the four lagoons claimed by Humboldt Lagoons State Park, only two would pass muster with any self-respecting dictionary. A lagoon is usually defined as a shallow body of brackish water separated from the ocean by a shoal, having a regular source of fresh water. Big Lagoon and Stone Lagoon (the latter being Chah-pekw O’ […]
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Multi-messenger Astronomy and Gold Rings
Astronomers glean information about distant objects from four types of energetic signals: electromagnetic radiation (such as visible light, radio waves and gamma waves); gravitational waves (subtle “ripples’ in spacetime, first detected in 2015); neutrinos (electrically neutral elementary particles having almost no mass); and cosmic rays (high energy particles, mostly protons, that, like neutrinos, travel at […]