Paul Davies’s forthcoming book Cosmic Jackpot is subtitled “Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life,” so you know that he’s not going after small questions, here. The book is a lengthy and detailed discussion of what he terms the “Goldilocks Enigma,” and what others refer to as “fine-tuning”– basically, how do you account for… Continue reading Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies
Category: In the News
New Jersey in the Morning’s Like a Lunar Landscape
In that it’s bombarded by meteorites, anyway. The object that crashed into a New Jersey house has been confirmed as a meterorite by, well, looking at it: The family has not yet given permission for physical testing of the meteorite, but from looking at it, Dr. Delaney and other experts were able to tell that… Continue reading New Jersey in the Morning’s Like a Lunar Landscape
Wanted: Rocket Scientists
Via Tobia Buckell, Jeff Bezos is looking for a few good geeks: Blue Origin; Blue Origin wants you! Actually, Blue Origin needs you and wants to hire you … assuming you’re a hard working, technically gifted, team-oriented, experienced aerospace engineer or engineering leader. If you might be interested in joining us, please keep reading. We’re… Continue reading Wanted: Rocket Scientists
Come On In, the Methane’s Fine
The Times has an article announcing the discovery of methane lakes on Titan: The discovery, reported yesterday by an international team of researchers, was made by a radar survey of Titan’s high northern latitudes by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn and its retinue of satellites since July 2004. One of the mission’s… Continue reading Come On In, the Methane’s Fine
Other Earths
Speaking of James Nicoll and space news, he also notes the launch of the COROT satellite, which is designed to look for extrasolar planets. The detection limit for COROT is supposed to be something like twice the mass of the Earth, so there’s some reasonable expectation that it should shed light on planetary systems more… Continue reading Other Earths
Press Release Bursts
One of the fun things about following science news through the Eurekalert press release aggregator is that work done by big collaborations tends to show up multiple times, in slightly different forms. Take, for example, the gamma-ray-burst results being released in Nature this week, which show up no less than five times: one, two, three,… Continue reading Press Release Bursts
News Updates
A couple of quick updates on things posted earlier this week: 1) A New York Times story on the Stardust findings. 2) A somewhat better press release on the single top quark production experiment (from the Fermilab press office, rather than the press office of one of the member institutions.
The Band Is On the Field!
One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they’re being honored. These frequently involve props… Continue reading The Band Is On the Field!
Displacing Artie Shaw
A flurry of press releases hit EurekAlert yesterday (one, two, three), indicating the release of a bunch of data from NASA’s Stardust mission. This is the probe that was sent out to fly through the tail of a comet, and catch tiny dust particles in an aerogel matrix, and return them to Earth for analysis.… Continue reading Displacing Artie Shaw
Single Top Quark, Seeking Antiquark. No Freaks.
The physics story of the moment is probably the detection of single top quarks at Fermilab. Top quarks, like most other exotic particles, are usually produced in particle-antiparticle pairs, with some fraction of the kinetic energy of two colliding particles being converted into the mass of the quark-antiquark pair (see this old post). There’s a… Continue reading Single Top Quark, Seeking Antiquark. No Freaks.