“He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
~ Stephen Hawking (1/8/1942 to 3/14/2018), in regards to Albert Einstein (3/14/1879 to 4/18/1955)
I don’t get too much news from inquisitr.com, but this story that shows that 7% of astronaut Scott Kelly’s DNA changed permanently is interesting.
Yesterday a nurse told me about a Human Occupied Vehicle named Alvin. which, among many other things, made twelve voyages to the Titanic. You can read the basics here, and more here at noaa.org.
A quote from the first article: “Currently rated to 4,500m, which gives researchers in-person access to about 2/3 of the ocean floor, the most recent upgrade increased the depth rating of many of the vehicle’s systems, making it just steps away from having a depth rating of 6,500m, or approximately 98% of the seafloor.”
Cool: Tuesday’s earthquake in Alaska affected the levels of water wells in Florida. weather.com has the story.
In case you ever wondered where salt comes from, here’s an article titled, How is salt made?
A high school student won $250,000 for her explanation of relativity, which she titled, Relativity & The Equivalence of Reference Frames. sciencealert.com has the story, and her video.
nbcnews.com has an article about science and tech leaders making predictions for 2018.
When elephants see a human, their brain lights up in the same way a human’s brain lights up when they see a puppy.
“About 1.1 billion years ago, two black holes coalesced. They had danced around each other for billions of years, losing energy and swinging closer, until they could no longer resist each other's embrace. Spiraling in, they merged, and released a quaking shout of gravitational waves that echoed across the cosmos.”
Phil Plait on syfy.com has a nice story about a black-hole merger.
Sizhao Yang has a nice series of tweets about thinking, starting with the one shown in this image.
Another good tweet from Brian Greene: “Special Relativity tells us that nothing can travel through space faster than the speed of light, but this does not constrain the speed at which space itself expands. Galaxies can — and do — move apart at faster than light speed.”
The universe is 13.8 billion years old, and yet we can “see” objects that are now more than 45 billion light-years away. Let that twist up your brain as you drop off to sleep tonight.
~ From physicist Brian Greene on Twitter
“If an alien in a galaxy 65 million light years away is looking at us through a telescope right now, then they are looking at dinosaurs.”
(I don’t know the original source of this quote, but I like it.)
National Geographic has an article titled, Mysterious Particles are Slamming Into the Earth.
Here’s a Popular Science article, Should we try to fix global warming with fake volcanic eruptions?
This is cool, though I don’t know why people are always picking on Pluto. (It may also need an asterisk stating that Saturn needs to be at an angle like that.)
The Washington Post has a good article, “What the new gravitational waves discovery means for the future of astronomy.”
The Milky Way is moving at over half a million miles per hour. (In the time it took me to type that, we sailed about 1,500 miles through the Universe.)
Inside the Milky Way, the Earth revolves around the Sun at 66,600 mph.
The Earth rotates around its axis at about 1,040 mph (depending on your latitude).
And yet, somehow I feel like I’m sitting perfectly still in this chair.
That’s quite an illusion.
On my list to listen to: A TED Radio Hour discussion, Why Does Time Exist?
This is a fun article on Wired: A retiree discovers an elusive math proof, and nobody notices. The mind doesn’t stop working just because you’re retired.
