From Rachel Kaufman, National Geographic News (September 29, 2011): The planet Mercury is dotted with holes that appear to be unlike any other landform yet seen in the solar system, new pictures show. And just think, that little fryball is the last place you’d expect the unexpected, too …
Space: rocks floating around in the dark. Who cares? Canadian blogger Five Feet of Fury offers her blunt opinion, which may be more widespread than many science nerds suppose: After the novelty wore off, NASA spent decades getting borderline bitchy about how nobody else cared about their launches and missions anymore. But they had turned into Marge Simpson in that one where she keeps wearing the Chanel suit to everything. When nobody else is looking, nobody over the age of 12 gives much of a crap about real life space travel. They care more about imaginary space travel; who gets asked for his autograph more often: the second man on the moon (whoever that was) or Leonard Nimoy? Proof that Read More ›
In “Dark matter found at last? WIMPS in space might hold the crucial clue, experiment finds” (Mail Online, September 19, 2011) , Rob Waugh reports, Scientists working on the Cryogenic Rare Event Search with Superconducting Thermometers (CRESST) experiment may have recorded evidence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) – a crucial step towards solving the mystery of “dark matter”, a material thought to make up the huge majority of the matter in the universe, but which is extremely difficult to detect. The experiment is run from under the Gran Sasso massif in Italy. WIMPs are bodies which are the most popular current theory to account for “dark matter” – so-called because they are thought to react with normal matter, but Read More ›
Here is my first GoAnimate clip:
The real battle in cosmology today is the war on rationality and orderliness. From physicist Bruce Gordon, “Balloons on a string,” The Nature of Nature (ISI Books, 2011) p. 585: The mindless multiverse “solution” to the problem of fine-tuning is, quite literally, a metaphysical non-starter. What the absence of efficient material causality in fundamental physics and cosmology reveals instead is the limit of scientific explanations and the need for a deeper metaphysical understanding of the world’s rationality and orderliness. That explanation has always been, and will forever be, Mind over matter. When the logical and metaphysical necessity of an efficient cause, the demonstrable absence of a material one, and the realized implication of a universe both contingent and finite in Read More ›
In “Antimatter surplus is not dark matter’s smoking gun” (New Scientist, September 6, 2011), Stuart Clark explains, Antimatter enthusiasts will love it; dark matter hunters not so much. NASA’s FERMI satellite has confirmed a previous hint that there is more antimatter than expected coming from space. The bad news is that the result almost certainly rules out dark matter as the source. Bad, dude. Antimatter is matter with the charges reversed – positrons (+), instead of electrons (-), for example. It is present today in small numbers. Dark matter is a theoretical concept: Matter that emits no light signal, hence the name. It may very well exist, but so far no such particle has been captured. Dark-matter theorists had been Read More ›