Image of the Earth from space

A nearly perfect sphere • NASA/Apollo 17 (Public Domain)

Escaping the human scale

When I was a child I owned a pic­ture book that told the sto­ry of Christo­pher Colum­bus. Sev­er­al of the illus­tra­tions are still clear in my mem­o­ry. One showed Span­ish car­avels, with pen­nants fly­ing, sail­ing off the edge of a flat Earth into the mouth of a wait­ing mon­ster. This sup­pos­ed­ly illus­trat­ed the pre­vail­ing view of the shape of the Earth at the time of Columbus.

Image of Indian-pipe

Indian-pipe • Photo by Will Brown (CC BY 2.0)

Image of Civil War battlefield

The aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, 1862 • Alexander Gardner

No badge of courage in ‘star wars’

In Stephen Crane’s Amer­i­can clas­sic, The Red Badge of Courage, young Hen­ry Flem­ing goes off to war fired by dreams of hero­ic sweep and grandeur. “He had read of march­es, sieges, con­flicts, and had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for him large pic­tures extrav­a­gant in col­or, lurid with breath­less deeds.” In the war to pre­serve the Union he would min­gle in one of the great affairs of the earth. He longs, yes longs, for the sym­bol­ic wound, the blood-red badge of courage.

Image of cow

Photo by Ryan Song on Unsplash

Image of Aran Islands landscape

Inis Mór, Aran Islands, Ireland • Photo by Sonse (CC BY 2.0)

Image of the milky way at night

Photo by Paige Weber on Unsplash

For so many, the starry night is gone

Labor Day — tra­di­tion­al­ly the end of sum­mer vaca­tion. We are back from the moun­tains, the seashore, or sail­ing boats at sea, places where the sky is still inky dark and free of urban haze. Places where we had a chance to see the night sky as our grand­par­ents saw it, in the days before elec­tric lights and indus­tri­al pol­lu­tion oblit­er­at­ed the stars.

Image of mating beetles

Is this really necessary? • Photo by Romi Yusardi on Unsplash

Image of bootprint on surface of the moon

Humanity's mark on the moon • NASA / Buzz Aldrin (Public Domain)

Image of recreated labyrinthodonts

Recreations of Carboniferous labyrinthodonts • Photo by Tom Page (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Image of ripples on water

Photo by Sergiu Bacioiu (CC BY 2.0)

The men who paved the way for the theory of relativity

Ask the man in the street what is the great­est sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and he will as like­ly as not reply, “the the­o­ry of rel­a­tiv­i­ty.” Many sci­en­tists will agree. Rel­a­tiv­i­ty under­lies our present under­stand­ing of atoms and stars. It is the basis for our ideas about the ori­gin and evo­lu­tion of the uni­verse. It is the very warp of the fab­ric of physics, the threads on which all else is woven.