“There are more atoms in your eye than there are stars in all the galaxies of the known universe.” We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about galaxies and stars and planets and not so much time at the smaller scales of the universe. This quote, relating galaxies to atoms...
Light and dark have always been powerful metaphors for the truth and its counterpart, ignorance. Plato saw light as representing the ultimate truths and the reality we saw nothing more than obfuscating shadows.
But what if light were actually just a tool, like language...
The cosmos as revealed by science is stranger than we ever could have imagined. “Seeing is not believing,” we are told from the episode's outset. Even the stars are not what they appear to be.
“Light and time and space and gravity conspire to create realities which lie...
We all enter this world with a baby’s big, bright, eyes, knowing nothing about the cosmos. “We’ve had to figure it all out for ourselves,” Tyson tells us. The baby metaphor becomes all too real as he picks up one wrapped in a blanket, rocking it as he stands under...
Campfires are where we tell stories: ghost stories, myths, tall tales, fables, and jokes. In the second episodes of Cosmos, Neil DeGrasse Tyson starts us off with a shaggy dog story, literally. “There was a time, not long ago, before dogs,” he says. “They didn’t exist....
The first episode of Cosmos – A Spacetime Odyssey starts exactly where it should.
This voyage through space and time, a tour of what we know about the universe and how we came to know it, starts here on Earth — the white cliffs of Dover in England to be specific — where...
After several years with just a trickle of blog output, I'm relaunching my personal blog. The old one, "The Culture Chemist," can still be found at it's old location, but I'm ditching the name.
It's the same idea though, thoughts and stories about s...
