Today at HuffPost: Intelligent Design is dead
I’ve a new piece up today at the Huffington Post. It is the reworking of an essay I wrote a few years ago about Johannes Kepler and Intelligent Design. Here’s a teaser: Kepler reminds us that religious people do not need to shrink from science and its naturalistic methods, because they more than others have [...]
The end of the world is coming. We object
Anonymous, Day of the Last Judgment, late 19th century. From what I can remember of the Islam classes I took, the Last Judgment is a very big deal for Muslims, just as it is for Christians. In this jaunty scene, Mohammed sits on the camel in the upper right. Per tradition, his face is blanked [...]
Twinkle, twinkle, little nonradially-pulsating delta Cepheid
Radial equations from the analysis of convection within pulsating variable stars. You should see the nonradial equations. Stars are pretty, sure. But when you stop to think about them, they get all complicated and stuff. Image source: Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series A friend of mine told me a story recently, and it made me laugh: [...]
Where, not why: Annie Dillard and Hubble’s threatened successor
One of Hubble’s many triumphs: NGC 5257/8 (Arp 240) is an astonishing galaxy pair, composed of spiral galaxies of similar mass and size, NGC 5257 and NGC 5258. The galaxies are visibly interacting with each other via a bridge of dim stars connecting the two galaxies, almost like two dancers holding hands while performing a [...]
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Operation Weekend Entertainment: Contact‘s opening sequence and other universal tours
Last Sunday I did a kind of “Welcome to the Universe” presentation for the Sunday school class I’m teaching. It was a lot of fun. It made me think of all the efforts people have made throughout the years to show graphically how our planet and solar system and galaxy fit into the Real Big [...]
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Art Sunday: NGC 474 and the coming galactic set-to
NGC 474. Credit: P.-A. Duc (CEA, CFHT), Atlas 3D Collaboration. Image source: Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). All the individual points of light are stars within our own Milky Way galaxy and are in the extreme foreground. The two galaxies are 10,000 times further away than the stars. There are some other galaxies in [...]
Farewell to an era
STS-135 lands during the predawn hour yesterday morning at Kennedy Space Center. Despite the problems with the shuttle program, its demise makes me a bit wistful. Image source: NASA Well, that’s it for the Space Shuttle. The first one launched in 1981, when I was 13. Now I’m 43, and no one can say where [...]
