Man, do you believe this guy? Super-brain Stephen Hawking doesn't just understand the cosmos, he's bloody gone and tagged it!
He's not a physicist ... he's a god!
NASA scientists have released this image showing the famous professor's initials clearly etched into the cosmic microwave background (or CMB) — the leftover wash of energy from the big bang itself.
The tongue-in-cheek image does have a serious point: you can find anything if you look hard enough.
Cosmologists have been getting excited about strange findings in the CMB, such as large cold spots or odd alignments of hot and cold regions. Current science can't explain these things, so maybe they suggest all sorts of weird and wonderful physics ...
... or, as the NASA bods suggest, since Hawking's initials are there too, maybe we shouldn't be surprised if the CMB throws up some other random surprises. Chill out, everyone.
OK, if there's one thing that was going to get me back into blogging here in the 11th Dimension, it's this: from Wired, photographer Nikki Graziano combining her bent for maths with her love of photography.
There's something beautifully geeky and geekily beautiful about drawing out mathematical functions in the shapes around us in this world. I enjoy imagining her view of the world, wire frames wrapping every surface, seeking familiar curves amongst the chaos of nature.
OK, so maybe this isn't going to garner anyone a Nobel (though it might be worthy of an igNobel award ...).
From the NYT website: two physicists suggest that the Large Hadron Collider — the worlds largest and most expensive science experiment — may be having technical problems because of some sneaky time-travelling by the very subject of its investigations: the Higgs Particle.
The LHC is looking for the Higgs, a hypothetical fundamental particle of the universe whose job in physics is to provide other particles with their mass. No one has ever seen a Higgs, and its discovery would keep particle physicists in a state of frothing excitement for years to come.
The giant machine has had a series of expensive technical glitches since the boffins at CERN hit the on-switch last year. They hope to fire it up again soon.
Now, these two physicists — legit researchers, thank you, from the esteemed Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen ad the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto — published a collection of papers suggesting that the Higgs particle is ... somehow ... adversely influencing the operation of the Collider from the future to conceal its identity.
Madness? Possibly. A joke? Perhaps. But, you know, is it *possible*? Hey, anything's possible in the world of the quantum. Read the rest at the New York Times website ...
Thanks again to the fabulous folks at wired.com — a story about some very strange cloud formations and the physics behind them.
I saw clouds like the ones above in Boulder, Colorado, some years ago. Seemed to me at the time that the world was about to end. Locally at least. When the bottom started to drop out of the clouds and reach for the ground like some great bulbous hand of God, I figured it was time to make for higher ground.
For those of us who haven't had enough of the Amazing Dust Storm Of 09, here's the view from NASA's Terra satellite. Amazing stuff.
Here in Sydney, the wind is still rattling roofs, and we had a brief return to apocalyptic-red skies on Saturday morning, but nothing like last Wednesday.
What can I say about this shot from the Isaac Newton Telescope: awesome.
Awesome in the true, original meaning of the word — not, as Eddie Izzard pointed out, awesome like a hotdog.
Here's that $100 space balloon time-lapse video from the YouTubes — enjoy!
For just a hundred bucks, some helium and a beer cooler, you too can take fantastic images from the edge of space.
Three science students in the USA put a digital camera, with software to make it take a picture every five seconds, into a padded styrofoam beer cooler, attached it to a helium-filled weather balloon ... and launched it to the upper atmosphere, 28 km above the earth's surface.
They included a phone with built-in GPS, so after the balloon popped and the gear plummeted back to the ground, they could trace its location and recover the camera.
They even have a YouTube video of the flight: a time-lapse joining each of several thousand photos from launch to landing.
You just *know* this will be followed by a thousand re-enactments ... but these lads got there first, and have made ultra-low-cost space photography history. Nice work, guys.
