Just Science Week: Cosmology
I signed up for this challenge. This week, beginning tomorrow, I will be writing at least one entry every day on a hard science topic.
The idea is get scientists, science bloggers and writers to provide a week of hard science information, with little attention taken up by addressing pseudo-science issues that dominate our time:
There is also a strong anti-science presence on the internet – global warming denialists, creationists, the anti-vaccination movement – and many science bloggers end up spending a fair amount of time combating the misinformation spread by these groups. This comes at the expense of blogging about actual science, and sometimes it swallows all the content of the blog. Many of us are tired of the attention anti-science advocates manage to receive. We understand the importance of engaging them, and yet feel that the debates where anti-science is the topic of interest sucks much of the oxygen out of the science blogging community, in time and effort, which we could devote to commentary on genuine science.
I’ve decided that I’ll be discussing cosmology because, hands down, the topic I find myself answering questions about the most is the origin and nature of our universe as a whole.
- Why is the sky dark at night? (Olber’s Paradox)
- How big is the universe? And related to this:
- If the universe is estimated to be at least 47 billion light years, how can that be when it’s only 13.5 billion years old?
- What is the universe expanding into?
- What does it mean that the universe is flat?
- Why is the universe expanding?
- What’s the big deal about dark matter? What is dark matter?
- What is the value of the Hubble constant
- What happened before the Big Bang?
- What is a redshift?
These happen to be extremely interesting questions, and they are by no means easy to answer, yet I plan to give it a go all this week. Leave a comment if there is a specific question about cosmology you’d like to see addressed, and by all means, let’s discuss these in the comments.
Technorati Tags: cosmology, dark matter
4 opinions for Just Science Week: Cosmology
Matthijs
Feb 4, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I can’t come up with any easier questions than that, so good luck answering what you already have :)
Rúni Bang Larsen
Feb 4, 2007 at 4:27 pm
Very interesting questions, i can’t wait.
tony
Feb 4, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Thanks guys. Those questions were a sampling, I’m not sure if I’ll do all of them or just some. I’m still going through some possible topics, so we’ll see how it goes.
Thanks for reading!
Arunn
Feb 11, 2007 at 8:35 am
I also participated in the Just science Week challenge (and discussed thermal and fluid sciences at my blog) and stumbled upon this blog through the main list of blogs at Gene Expression.
Heart warming to find an excellent set of posts here, given astronomy is one of my favorites. Good job.
Will keep visiting more often, if it remains this “sciency” (a la sexy)…
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