We have been bombarded lately with doomsday predictions for the end of the world. Y2K came and went with hardly a blip. The so-called Earth-shattering planetary alignment of May passed without a ripple. And, of course, various fundamentalist cults still wait patiently for the long anticipated Rapture.
Cosmology
Photo by Elliott Engelmann on Unsplash
A statue honoring Giordano Bruno in the present day Campo de' Fiori • Photo by Fred Romero (CC BY 2.0)
Bruno would urge us to open our eyes
Giordano Bruno was born in the Kingdom of Naples in 1548, only a few years after the death of Copernicus. At the age of 24 he was ordained a Dominican priest, although his curious and uninhibited mind had already attracted the disapproval of his teachers.
Photo by Łukasz Rawa on Unsplash
Big thoughts in grapefruit packages
Imagine this: A hundred billion galaxies, each galaxy with a trillion stars, each star with a family of planets as various as the planets of our own solar system, some of them perhaps harboring life and intelligence — an entire universe contained within a physical space the size of a grapefruit.
Photo by Vincent Chin on Unsplash
The bestseller we keep rewriting
“When the pulse of the first day carried it to the rim of night, First Woman said to First Man, ‘The people need to know the laws. To help them we must write the laws for all to see’”
Photo by Adrien Olichon from Pexels
The end: clearer but not nearer
Scientists are pretty sure how the universe began. They are less certain how it will end.
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Antiwords for antimatter
“Perhaps we are here only for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate…,” says the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
The Hubble Space Telescope • STS-125/NASA
Hubble serves up another paradox
By now, everyone has heard about the Hubble Space Telescope’s new measure of the age of the universe.
Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
On the first day, there was a big…
The universe began with the Big Sneeze. A creation myth from Egypt of the third millennium B.C. has God bring the world into being with a sneeze. It’s not a bad image for the Creation as currently described by astronomers.
The Coma galaxy cluster • ESA/Hubble (CC BY 4.0)
Does ‘dark matter’ really matter?
The hunt is on. The scent of the prey is in the air. The hunters are working themselves into a frenzy of excitement.
Photo by Kyle Gregory Devaras on Unsplash
Astrophysicist’s apocalyptic ideas are 95% meaningless
Associated Press news report: “Repent, The End of the World May be Nearer Than You Think, Astrophysicist Calculates.”