Human lives generally last for 2 billion to 3 billion seconds; the universe is nearly 14 billion years old. Looking at those two statements on my laptop, I feel slightly giddy. I have a faint whiff of what the first statement means and very little understanding of the second. If you feel the same, here’s […]
Big Bang
Posted inLife + Outdoors
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 […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Universe: Whodunnit?
Cosmology is essentially a whodunnit but, unlike your typical 600-page detective yarn, this story doesn’t unfold clue by clue until the denouement in last few pages. The puzzle — basically, “How the hell can we explain our presence here?” — is more cryptic than ever. For all the thousands of brilliant minds working on the […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Science. It Works, etc.
No stranger to controversy, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) invited it in spades during an appearance at Oxford University in February of 2013. Asked for evidence that scientific theory was valid, he responded, “[Science] works! Planes fly. Cars drive. Computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people. If you base […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Whispers from the Birth of the Universe
Cosmologically speaking, everything changed in May of 1965, when two radio astronomers working for Bell Labs detected a faint whisper of radiation, a fossil relic from the birth of the universe, which pretty much clinched the “Big Bang” theory. The irony is that they weren’t even looking for it, but they won Nobel Prizes anyway. […]