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My students and I have really been enjoying Sean’s Cosmology Course. Today’s lecture tied in the idea of a smooth, expanding universe with general relativity.
This lecture has been my favorite so far, there were a few moments in there where I not only learned some new things, but that sometimes I’ve been trying to […]
Sean Carroll’s Cosmology Course from The Teaching Company
As many of you know, I’m homeschooling my son is 8th grade science this year and so far we’ve been having lots of fun discussing science topics and this week we’re beginning to do some projects.
Lately there has been a split among the students about where they want […]
Yesterday in my homeschool science class, we had a discussion of how dark energy is thought to drive the expansion of the universe.
“If you had a bottle one cubic centimeter in volume and sucked out everything in it: every atom, molecule, dark matter particle… everything… how much energy do you think would remain in the […]
In a little over a year, on July 31st, 2008, the European Space Agency will launch Planck, a mission “designed to image the anisotropies of the Cosmic Background Radiation Field over the whole sky, with unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution.”
This mission will improve upon the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) data set, which mapped the […]
GalaxyZoo.org
Once upon a time, astronomy was done by some lone astronomer, sitting at an eyepiece or at a light table in front of hundreds of photographic plates looking for patterns, movement, or classifying and cataloguing things.
Usually, one person (or an astronomer employing dozens of women at 25 cents per hour) would sift through the enormous […]
I was thumbing through the March issue of Physics Today when I saw a little blurb advertising this:
Cosmic Journey: A History of Scientific Cosmology
This site gives a very thorough account of the history of how we’ve viewed the cosmos. There’s a section on the Greek World view, the ideas of Copernicus, Isaac Newton […]
Maybe I’m just in a mood, but I get a little irritated every time I hear someone talk about the anthropic principle.
The basic idea is that for intelligent life to be in the universe AT ALL, the physical laws of the universe must be consistent for allowing that life.
Put another way:
Our very existence as carbon-based […]
I’ve been a good boy all week. I’ve kept my skewed perspective all to myself and not imposed it on anyone since I was being mr-serious-astronomer-guy spewing forth astronomical information for the nobly named Just Science Week.
The thing is, I didn’t want to distract you. I wanted you to learn this stuff, […]
Here is my sixth post for Just Science Week.
It is one of the biggest successes of cosmology that astronomers are now confident about what makes up the entire universe. It is made of:
5% ordinary matter (atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons). Known as baryonic matter.
25% dark matter. Unseen particles that hang around galaxies and clusters of […]
This is my fifth post for Just Science Week.
There was a time, not long ago, when cosmologists were fighting over whether the Big Bang was the correct model for the universe, or something else like the steady state theory, or perhaps some variation on an oscillating universe.
The fighting stemmed from the fact that we just […]
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