A version of this essay originally appeared June 15, 2012, as part of this site’s Father’s Day series. In the final paragraph I’ve updated one temporal reference (“two weeks ago yesterday” to “May 31, 2012”) and added one recent personal development. “My father,” I would say, “is older than the universe.” The line has always […]
How could it happen? Was it the wrath of God or the malice of Poland? Was the crew drunk or was the Vasa wrongly built? The town was alive with rumours. I’ll bet it was. On August 10, 1628, the warship Vasa—the pride of Sweden, the talk of Stockholm—set sail on its maiden voyage. It didn’t […]
Time again to reach into the “Ask Mr. Cosmology” mailbag and see what readers want to know about . . . The Wonders of the Universe! Q: Does the word “creation” imply a Creator? Mr. Cosmology: No, thank God. Q: What does Mr. Cosmology think of the theorists who argue for the anthropic principle? Mr. Cosmology: They’re […]
I was having an email exchange with a longtime friend a few months ago, and we got to talking about our long-ago youth—specifically, the workplace where we met, when we were both in our teens. As is often the case in these late-evening conversations, the discussion turned to the subject of who else among us […]
This essay originally appeared on LWON in 2012 as part of a series on the seven deadly sins. Since then, sociopathy hasn’t gone away, so we’re reposting it here. I wuz robbed. A few months ago a scientific discovery that I had covered in depth in my most recent book became the subject of a […]
This essay originally ran in 2011. Back then, the Hubble Space Telescope was the exemplar of non-Earth astronomical observation. Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December 2021. This anecdote, however, might be timeless. In 1984, David Soderblom was a new hire at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and one day […]
This sampling of doggerel originally appeared in 2015. It was one of a series of such samplings from the journals of Bad Science Poet. Just remember: “It’s not the science that’s bad—it’s the poetry!”™ ODE TO AN ANTARCTIC FRIEND Penguin, oh penguin, you’re so black and white. Your colors remind me of both day and night. […]
The cell phone rang at 9:21 p.m. on a weekday. I almost didn’t answer. Unfamiliar number. Late in the evening. Probably an automated voice expressing urgency about the viability of my automobile insurance—never mind that I don’t own a car. But then: Why not? You never know. So I answered. And I heard the magic […]