Archive for the ‘Science & technology’ Category
Carl Sagan on the pale blue dot that is the planet Earth
June 10th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of […]
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How three remarkable women of whom you have never heard produced our modern classification of the stars
May 5th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Edward Charles Pickering (1846-1919) was an American astrophysicist who worked to capture the spectra of multiple stars simultaneously, supported by the so-called Harvard Computers or “Pickering’s Harem”, a team of women researchers under Pickering’s mentorship, to catalog the spectra. This team included Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941), who developed the stellar classification system, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921), who […]
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Who was the first man to assess accurately the age of the Earth? Who was the leading campaigner against lead in petrol?
April 28th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Actually it was the same guy: the brilliant American geochemist Clair Patterson (1922-1995). Patterson’s estimate in 1953 of the age of the Earth was 4.550 billion years (give or take 70 million years). This number still stands although the margin of error is now down to about 20 million years. Patterson was the most prominent scientist […]
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SD or HD? – that is the question
April 6th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
We’ve had a High Definition-ready television set for a while but so far we have been content to view Standard Definition television. This weekend though we upgraded our Sky subscription to take some HD channels and we acquired a Sky+ HD box. Don’t you just love new technology? Many thanks to Vee’s nephew Martin for […]
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How BIG is the solar system?
March 27th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
The short answer is: it is larger than you thought – and even astronomers are having to recalibrate their estimates. The solar system consists of the four inner planets (including our own), the asteroid belt, the four outer planets (or five if you count Pluto), and then the Kuiper Belt and probably the Oort Cloud. But […]
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How all life on Earth was almost wiped out – five times
March 24th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Thos weekend, I watched episode 2 of the fascinating new American television series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”. This episode concentrated on evolution and referred to the five great extinctions when substantial proportions of life on the planet were made extinct. The best known one – the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction – wiped out the dinosaurs, but the […]
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Understanding our universe (1): a review of “Deep Time”
March 21st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I’ve always been fascinated by cosmology. How did the universe begin and develop? Where is it going? Where do we fit into the picture? “Deep Time” is one of the shorter and most accessible books that I have read about these questions and you can check out my review here.
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Understanding our universe (2): detection of primordial gravitational waves
March 21st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I don’t fully understand it, but I’m excited by the news this week that scientists have for the first time found convincing evidence for the existence of primordial gravitational waves – described as the first tremors of the Big Bang that created our universe and ultimately us. As one newspaper put it: “The minuscule ripples in […]
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Who was Giordano Bruno and what did he believe?
March 17th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
This weekend, I watched the first episode in the new television series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”. The programme mentioned an Italian called Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) who believed that the sun was merely one of many stars. I confess that I had never heard of Bruno. There has been some controversy over the selection and representation of […]
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The power of the placebo
February 27th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I have long been fascinated by the placebo effect – the positive impact of a non-active substance or procedure which seems to mimic the effect of a drug or treatment. This evening, I got round to watching a television programme on the subject that I recorded 10 days ago. The BBC2 Horizon programme is called […]
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