Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Notion that there are more universes separate from ours is one of the most polarising concepts to have emerged from physics in decades. Is it the next phase in our understanding of reality, or nonsense? And why should we care?
Interview with Sara Seager, science advisor to Planetary Resources, billionaire-backed firm which plans to harvest precious metals from asteroids. "The hope is that in addition to mining asteroids we open up a new frontier in space"
Is there a more engaging scientist writing today than Martin Rees? Here he talks us through latest research from the frontiers of cosmology: "What we’ve traditionally called the laws of nature may be no more than parochial bylaws"
Yes it has, says Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist, interviewed here. Religion and philosophy struggle to answer fundamental question of why there is something rather than nothing. But physics can explain that perfectly well
Entertaining read. There's plenty of speculation about how the universe started, but what about how it ends? And what that might mean for us? Let's fast forward a billion years and see what astronomers think the future holds
Book excerpt. "The discovery that the universe is not static, but rather expanding, had profound philosophical and religious significance, because it suggested that our universe had a beginning." Here's how the discovery was made
Excellent interactive feature sets size of our universe and us in perspective. Zoom out from the minute neutrino, right up to the massive Virgo Supercluster. Click on any objects you don't recognise to learn more about them
The sun makes life on earth possible. But it could easily make it impossible too. Here's a scientific look at how solar flares, mass coronal ejections cause geomagnetic storms. And the risks a superstorm poses to our high-tech world
In 1859 a major solar storm, the "Carrington Event", hit Earth. Another came in 1921. What if one struck tomorrow? "If a Carrington Event happened right now it probably wouldn’t be a wake-up alarm—it would be a goodnight call"
Fascinating. Interview with Tim Maudlin, a philosopher at forefront of a whole new field – the philosophy of cosmology. Where science runs out of answers – what is time, what happened before the Big Bang – is where his work starts
Inside the hunt for dark matter, that supposedly binds galaxies together. "Now that we have begun to see something, either astrophysics is wrong, or particle physics is wrong, or our whole understanding of dark matter is wrong"
Profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson, "rock-star scientist". Astrophysicist, TV pundit, author, educator. New generation's Carl Sagan. Struggling to persuade America's politicians that it's still worth funding space exploration
Xanadu Observatory. The Veil Nebula
