Articles from April 2020

Image of fuzzy kitten

The universe is not always warm and fuzzy • Photo by Kote Puerto on Unsplash

Warm and fuzzy

  • By Chet Raymo
  • In Evolution
  • Posted on

    • Reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists in Cal­i­for­nia have mount­ed yet anoth­er attack on the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion in the schools. At issue is a pro­posed statewide text­book guide­line that asserts “Like grav­i­ta­tion and elec­tric­i­ty, evo­lu­tion is a fact and a theory.”

    Image of Voyager spacecraft

    Artists view of a Voyager spacecraft in outer space • NASA/JPL (Public Domain)

    Image of woman in forest

    Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

    Love and physics

  • By Chet Raymo
  • In Cosmology
  • Posted on

    • It was an epic encounter. Shirley MacLaine, tal­ent­ed actress-turned-New Age guru, pur­vey­or of inner bliss through the chan­nel­ing of cos­mic ener­gy, meets Stephen Hawk­ing, bril­liant the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cist and math­e­mati­cian, whose body is total­ly dis­abled by motor neu­ron disease.

    Image of an Irish bog

    Peat cut from an Irish bog • Gary Miotla (CC BY 3.0)

    Buried in the bog

  • By Chet Raymo
  • In Archaeology
  • Posted on

    • DINGLE, Ire­land — They say it was one of the dri­est Irish sum­mers in years, but on the Ker­ry hill­side where I’ve been stay­ing there’s water aplen­ty. It tum­bles from the clouds. It hangs in the air. It seeps out of the ground. It glis­tens as dew. Around here it rains 250 days a year and the ground is nev­er dry. Per­fect con­di­tions for a peat bog.

    Map of underwater topography

    The underwater topography of the world's oceans (Public Domain)

    Image of electric field lines next to painting of Christ

    Maxwell's electromagnetic fields and Blake's “Vision of Christ”

    A common soil

  • By Chet Raymo
  • In Physics
  • Posted on

    • After the pub­li­ca­tion in 1959 of C. P. Snow’s The Two Cul­tures, it became fash­ion­able to look for ways in which sci­ence and the human­i­ties are inter­re­lat­ed. Usu­al­ly this took the form of, ah, say, root­ing out ref­er­ences to Renais­sance astron­o­my in the poems of John Donne or to the Sec­ond Law of Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics in the nov­els of Thomas Pynchon.

    Close up image of housefly

    Musca domestica • USDA (Public Domain)

    Image of dictionary volumes

    The Oxford English Dictionary • Photo by Dan (CC BY 2.0)

    Image of pterosaur

    Artist's reconstruction of a pterosaur • Matt Van Rooijen (CC BY 2.5)

    Image of the full moon

    Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash