Three Laws To Live By
Photo credits: Seth Shostak, SETI Institute As I get older I’ve been thinking more about Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws – Wikipedia renders them this way: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Sure, ACC was a science fiction writer, but he also held patents on geosynchronous satellite systems for...
Sharing Astronomy with Children
When you're in love you want to tell the world. I've been in love with science, so it seems to most natural thing in the world to tell people about it.” - Carl Sagan ...And what more can you ask from an audience than unfaltering enthusiasm and endless curiosity. Take a child out late at night to see a real dark-night sky, and it's an adventure that will stay with them forever. Image Credit: (Chris Cook: http://www.cookphoto.com/contact.html ) Between 4 and 10 years ( http://www.unawe.org/about/audience/ ) is the perfect time for children to get in touch with science for the...
A New World Order for Science
How we do science is changing. I came up with that opening sentence when I was first asked to do this blog several weeks ago. The next sentences have changed over and over, as my focus has changed from how technologies are changing science, to how the funding crisis is changing science, to how citizen science is changing science. … Over and over I changed my theme, until I found myself 24 hours past my deadline, with a bouncing Skype icon reminding me I needed to do this, and an empty page sitting in front of me. Unsure what to...
(Professional) astronomy without borders
ALMA Antennas on the Chajnantor Plateau; Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), O. Dessibourg Science is a very international endeavour, and always has been. The life stories of famous historical scientific figures are full of long periods spent studying in various different countries, or of copious written correspondence with other scientists around the world (often both). Science today is no different, and astronomy is arguably a more international endeavour than many other sciences - telescopes require good conditions in order to produce the detailed images of the universe we are so accustomed to seeing in the media and, usually, those optimal locations are...
Dark Matter: We Are The 4.9%
Astronomy has traditionally focused on bright celestial objects in our night sky. If you’re lucky with the weather and own a modest telescope, you can observe the bright band of stars that form the disk of the Milky Way. You’ll pick out elegant galaxies, nebulae and binary stars. You’ll also be able to track the planets of the Solar System. But on gazing deep into the sparkling cosmological bounty, it’s worth remembering that all the stuff you can see (and everything on our planet that we can experience) is actually only a tiny fraction of the matter in the known...
