What makes most scientists most excited is the same thing that—if they’ve heard about it—makes many non-scientists wonder if scientists are nuts: Way more than half of “the stuff the universe is made of” is still a mystery to scientists. Which may strike you as a crazy thing to realize, and a crazy thing to say. […]
This New Scientist article by Leah Crane is a plot-device-generator gift for science fiction writers. It begins: “Travel far enough in the universe and you could end up back where you began. Measurements from the Planck space observatory have shown that the universe might be shaped like a sphere rather than a flat sheet, which […]
There are many alternate histories of the universe. Here are two. A Briefer History of the Universe Eric Schulman’s 60-second-long History of the Universe began as a print piece (“A History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less,” in the Jan/Feb 1997 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research), had its first public performance as […]
There are many ways to look at the span of sizes of things in the universe. Here are three. The cryptically named xurb1a made this video called “The Universe in 4 minutes“: Some years ago, Charles and Ray Eames made this video called “Powers of Ten“: Between way back then and now, Eric Schulman wrote […]