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What does it all mean? How does it all work? And, what is my place in the universe?
Had Earth been much closer to the Sun, the oceans would have evaporated. Had Earth been much farther away, the oceans would have frozen. In either case, life as we know it would not have evolved.
every one of our body’s atoms is traceable to the big bang and to the thermonuclear furnaces within high-mass stars that exploded more than five billion years ago.
about the laws of physics is that they require no law enforcement agencies to maintain them,
In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.
microwaves, which is where we derive the modern moniker “cosmic microwave background,”
If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass?
Earth’s surface gravity, for example, can be explained entirely by the stuff that’s under our feet. If you are overweight on Earth, don’t blame dark matter.
dark matter comets, dark matter planets, dark matter galaxies.
Unlike sound waves, which consist of air vibrations, light waves were found to be self-propagating
Albert Einstein
He was a theorist who perfected the “thought experiment,”
by inventing a situation or model and then working out the consequences of some physical principle.
Einstein had, in effect, built what looks on the outside like a house of cards, with only two or three simple postulates holding up the entire structure.
hydrogen lays claim to more than two-thirds of all the atoms in the human body, and more than ninety percent of all atoms in the cosmos,
Polished aluminum makes a near-perfect reflector of visible light and is the coating of choice for nearly all telescope mirrors today.
Titanium is 1.7 times denser than aluminum,
So, whatever might have been your favorite theory for offing the dinosaurs, a killer asteroid the size of Mount Everest from outer space should be at the top of your list.
The first atomic bomb ever used in warfare had uranium as its active ingredient, and was dropped by the United States, incinerating the Japanese city of
Unstable weapons-grade plutonium was the active ingredient in the atomic bomb that the United States exploded over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, just three days after Hiroshima, bringing a swift end to World War II.
plutonium can be used to power radioisotope thermoelectric generators (sensibly abbreviated as RTGs) for spacecraft that travel to the outer solar system, where the intensity of sunlight has diminished below the level usable by solar panels.
While many objects have peculiar shapes, the list of round things is practically endless and ranges from simple soap bubbles to the entire observable universe.
Using freshman-level calculus you can show that the one and only shape that has the smallest surface area for an enclosed volume is a perfect sphere.
Gravity is the force that serves to collapse matter in all directions, but gravity does not always win—chemical bonds of solid objects are strong.
Herschel inadvertently discovered “infra” red light, a brand-new part of the spectrum found just “below” red, reported in the first of his four papers on the subject.
The world’s largest radio telescope, completed in 2016, is called the Five-hundred-meter Aperture
If aliens ever give us a call, the Chinese will be the first to know.
Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size in the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.
there is no distance where the force of gravity reaches zero.
And smart aliens would surely know that if a planet has liquid water, then the planet’s temperature and atmospheric pressure fall within a well-determined range.
I occasionally forget those things because, however big the world is—in our hearts, our minds, and our outsized digital maps—the universe is even bigger. A depressing thought to some, but a liberating thought to me.
The cosmic perspective is humble. The cosmic perspective is spiritual—even redemptive—but not religious.
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s
a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have.
The cosmic perspective enables us to see beyond our circumstances, allowing us to transcend the primal search for food, shelter, and a mate.
