| main | ongoing | archive | private |
- To me, the biggest mystery of them all is why so many fortune-telling psychics choose to work the phones on TV hotlines instead of becoming insanely wealthy trading futures contracts on Wall Street. And here’s a news headline none of us has seen, “Psychic Wins the Lottery.”
- Our five senses even interfere with sensible answers to stupid metaphysical questions like, “If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” My best answer is, “How do you know it fell?” But that just gets people angry. So I offer a senseless analogy, “Q: If you can’t smell the carbon monoxide, then how do you know it’s there? A: You drop dead.”
- And without violating momentum laws, you cannot spontaneously levitate and hover above the ground, whether or not you are seated in the lotus position. Although, in principle, you could perform this stunt if you managed to let loose a powerful and sustained exhaust of flatulence.
- Knowledge of physical laws can, in some cases, give you the confidence to confront surly people. A few years ago I was having a hot-cocoa nightcap at a dessert shop in Pasadena, California. I had ordered it with whipped cream, of course. When it arrived at the table, I saw no trace of the stuff. After I told the waiter that my cocoa was plain, he asserted I couldn’t see the whipped cream because it sank to the bottom. Since whipped cream has a very low density and floats on all liquids that humans consume, I offered the waiter two possible explanations: either somebody forgot to add the whipped cream to my hot cocoa or the universal laws of physics were different in his restaurant. Unconvinced, he brought over a dollop of whipped cream to test for himself. After bobbing once or twice in my cup, the whipped cream sat up straight and afloat.
- What are the lessons to be learned from this journey of the mind? That humans are emotionally fragile, perennially gullible, hopelessly ignorant masters of an insignificantly small speck in the cosmos. Have a nice day.
- Wander inside the Roche limit, and you’ll get torn apart; your disassembled bits and pieces will then scatter into their own orbits and eventually spread out into a broad, flat, circular ring.
- On Venus you could cook a 16-inch pepperoni pizza in seven seconds, just by holding it out to the air.
- By the way, were we to find life-forms on Venus, we would probably call them Venutians, just as people from Mars would be Martians. But according to rules of Latin genitives, to be “of Venus” ought to make you a Venereal. Unfortunately, medical doctors reached that word before astronomers did. Can’t blame them, I suppose. Venereal disease long predates astronomy, which itself stands as only the second oldest profession.
- Some morning while you’re eating breakfast and you need something new to think about, though, you might want to ponder the fact that you see your kids across the table not as they are but as they once were, about three nanoseconds ago. Doesn’t sound like much, but stick the kids in the nearby Andromeda galaxy, and by the time you see them spoon their Cheerios they will have aged more than 2 million years.
- Shit man, that first sentence.
- The bad news is that all available data suggest that the two of us are on a collision course. As we plunge ever deeper into each other’s gravitational embrace, we will become a twisted wreck of strewn stars and colliding gas clouds. Just wait about 6 or 7 billion years.
- How is that bad news? I wish i was alive to see that spectacle.
- But other types of densities exist, such as the resistance of somebody’s brain to the imparting of common sense
- Ah always grateful for neil's jokes
- Unlike any other known planet, the average density of Saturn is less than that of water. In other words, a scoop of Saturn would float in your bathtub. Knowing this, I have always wanted for my bathtub entertainment a rubber Saturn instead of a rubber ducky.
- And behold the greatest mystery of them all: an unopened can of diet Pepsi floats in water while an unopened can of regular Pepsi sinks.
- It’s one thing to know that every now and again, high-mass stars explode. Photographs can show you this. But x-ray and visible-light spectra of these dying stars reveal a cache of heavy elements that enrich the galaxy and are directly traceable to the constituent elements of life on Earth. Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us.
- a star’s color follows directly from its surface temperature: Cool stars are red. Tepid stars are white. Hot stars are blue. Very hot stars are still blue. How about very, very hot places, like the 15-million-degree center of the Sun? Blue.
- (That’s why microwave ovens work: a bath of microwaves, at just the right energy, vibrates the water molecules in your food. Friction among those dancing particles generates heat, cooking the food rapidly from within.)
- That’s why UV is bad for you, too: it’s always best to avoid things that decompose the molecules of your flesh.
- But in 5 billion years, the Sun will become a red giant as it expands to fill the inner solar system. Meanwhile, Earth’s oceans will boil away and Earth, itself, will vaporize.
- I’m glad that, in the end, the humans win. We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon) to disarm its protective force field. I don’t know about you, but I have trouble just uploading files to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems are different. There is only one solution. The entire defense system for the alien mothership must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer’s system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus. Thank you for indulging me. I had to get all that off my chest.
- After 50 years of television, there’s no other conclusion the aliens could draw, but that most humans are neurotic, death-hungry, dysfunctional idiots.
- And here’s one for your calendar: On Friday the 13th of April, 2029, an asteroid large enough to fill the Rose Bowl as though it were an egg cup, will fly so close to Earth that it will dip below the altitude of our communication satellites. We did not name this asteroid Bambi. Instead, it’s named Apophis, after the Egyptian god of darkness and death. If the trajectory of Apophis at close approach passes within a narrow range of altitudes called the “keyhole,” the precise influence of Earth’s gravity on its orbit will guarantee that seven years later in 2036, on its next time around, the asteroid will hit Earth directly, slamming in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. The tsunami it creates will wipe out the entire west coast of North America, bury Hawaii, and devastate all the land masses of the Pacific Rim. If Apophis misses the keyhole in 2029, then, of course, we have nothing to worry about in 2036.
- What hardly anybody talks about are end-of-world scenarios that do, in fact, jeopardize our temperate planet in its stable orbit around the Sun. I offer these prognostications not because humans are likely to live long enough to observe them, but because the tools of astrophysics enable me to calculate them. Three that come to mind are the death of the Sun, the impending collision between our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy, and the death of the universe, about which the community of astrophysicists has recently achieved consensus. Computer models of stellar evolution are akin to actuarial tables. They indicate a healthy 10-billion-year life expectancy for our Sun. At an estimated age of 5 billion years, the Sun will enjoy another 5 billion years of relatively stable energy output. By then, if we have not figured out a way to leave Earth, we will be around when the Sun exhausts its fuel supply. At that time, we will bear witness to a remarkable yet deadly episode in a star’s life. The Sun owes its stability to the controlled fusion of hydrogen into helium in its 15-million-degree core. The gravity that wants to collapse the star is held in balance by the outward gas pressure that the fusion sustains. While more than 90 percent of the Sun’s atoms are hydrogen, the ones that matter reside in the Sun’s core. When the core exhausts its hydrogen, all that will be left there is a ball of helium atoms that require an even higher temperature than does hydrogen to fuse into heavier elements. With its central engine temporarily shut off, the Sun will go out of balance. Gravity wins, the inner regions of the star collapse, and the central temperature rises through 100 million degrees, triggering the fusion of helium into carbon. Along the way, the Sun’s luminosity grows astronomically, which forces its outer layers to expand to bulbous proportions, engulfing the orbits of Mercury and Venus. Eventually, the Sun will swell to occupy the entire sky as its expansion subsumes the orbit of Earth. Earth’s surface temperature will rise until it matches the 3,000-degree rarefied outer layers of the expanded Sun. Our oceans will come to a rolling boil as they evaporate entirely into interplanetary space. Meanwhile, our heated atmosphere will evaporate as Earth becomes a red-hot, charred ember orbiting deep within the Sun’s gaseous outer layers. These layers will impede the orbit, forcing Earth to trace a rapid death spiral down toward the Sun’s core. As Earth descends, sinking nearer and nearer to the center, the Sun’s rapidly rising temperature simply vaporizes all traces of our planet. Shortly thereafter, the Sun will cease all nuclear fusion; lose its tenuous, gaseous envelope containing Earth’s scattered atoms; and expose its dead central core.
- Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources, or more affectionately, “quasars.”
- So never wish a full Moon upon an astronomer who is headed off to a big telescope.
- personages
- Few things are more annoying to avid moviegoers than being accompanied to a film by hyperliterate friends who can’t resist making comments about why the book was better. These people babble on about how the characters in the novel were more fully developed or how the original story line was more deeply conceived. In my opinion, they should just stay home and leave the rest of us to enjoy the film. For me, it’s purely a matter of economics: to see a movie is cheaper and faster than to buy and read the book on which it was based.
dec 20 2017 ∞
dec 20 2017 +
dec 20 2017 +