Lost in the vastness of space

Tonight I co-gave the opening address at the Templeton Foundation supported Q3 conference on Cosmology and Theology. It was perhaps the most nerve wracking talk I’ve ever given. While I am a Christian, I must admit to being terrified of conservative Christians. I’ve just realized I can’t...

Two Views on Gravity Part 2: Geometry

Sometimes analogies just feel right. For instance, “as hard to find as a needle in a hay stack” is often a good way to describe trying to find a needed quote in a half-remembered book. The mental image and the actual task just fit. In physics, I sometimes feel like the hardest part is finding the...

Do we really need Dark Matter and Dark Energy?

I’m still here, but it’s an exam week, so I bring you another guest blogger, Ethan Siegel, who knows way more about dark matter than I probably ever will (a theorist even!). Enjoy his guest post! This is Ethan from Starts With A Bang! over here at Pamela’s blog, Star Stryder. I was pretty...

Dark Energy is Real

This is apparently the post I wasn’t supposed to publish. I wrote it yesterday, and had it somehow utterly disappear from my HD after a crash. I then was writing it in wordpress and had Firefox crash on it before the first auto save… In a really cool press release that I got yesterday but...

1 Void a 2nd Universe Makes?

Ok, so New Scientist is just not making my brain happy this week. I decided to forage around their website  to see what was there (one of their editors, Maggie McKee, is a friendly soul I worked with at Astronomy and I wanted to see what’s she’s up to now a days). While Maggie has been...

I see you, now you must die

The title is a summary of how a New Scientist article seems to interpret the fate of the universe. Basically, the article states that because we view the universe, we may be causing the collapse of wave functions that would otherwise be happily balanced between not alive and not dead (the...