When hunting down the origins of the solar system, it’s all in the Belt

In 1930, a 23-year-old self-taught astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh saw something move in the sky. Working for Lowell Observatory in Arizona, Tombaugh had spent the last ten months photographing tiny patches of the night sky, taking one picture of each individual location then another of the same location several days later. Using a device called a blink comparator, which could rapidly flip from one photo to the next, Tombaugh spotted an object that seemed to jump between the pictures. On March 13, 1930, Lowell Observatory announced the discovery of the dwarf plant that would later be called Pluto. Full Article »

Do you ever look around your apartment and think, where did all this stuff come from? Maybe some of your clothes or books or tchotchkes are unnecessary, and you could stand to de-clutter. Or, to take the very long view—the universe’s view—not only are your books not necessary, but neither are most of the elements that make up your books, your other possessions, or indeed you yourself. There was a time in the universe’s infancy when these elements didn’t exist, and yet somehow the universe managed to create them all, along with you and everything else you can see. Full Article »

Electrons are hopeless romantics. Strictly adhering to the old adage that opposites attract, the small, negatively charged particles spend their days tirelessly searching for a nice positive charge to settle down with.

Desperate for that happily ever after, they barrel through anything in their path—gas, liquid or solid—if they catch sight of even the faintest positive charge. They recklessly collide with atoms and other particles along the way, giving up energy and getting thrown off course and disoriented. When they finally do bond with that special charge, they emit a puff of energy, a sigh of relief. Full Article »

It’s plastered on coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and t-shirts. There is a thirteen-foot statue of it in central Berlin. People rattle it off when trying to sound impressive. It has become synonymous with genius. It is the most well-known physics equation in the world. I’m talking, of course, about E = mc², Albert Einstein’s most lasting contribution to the popular conception of physics. Full Article »

Many of us will never forget the day that Pluto died as a planet. Formerly the ninth planet in our solar system, Pluto was downgraded in 2006 to a lowly “dwarf planet,” and all of our childhood textbooks were changed forever. Instead of the smallest and most distant planet from the sun, Pluto became just another object in the region beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper (pronounced ky-per) belt. Full Article »

The 25-year-old Werner Heisenberg stood screaming at his mentor Neils Bohr, cutting him down with insults. At one point tears were streaming down his face, frustration building up in every fiber of his body. Heisenberg’s radical idea would not—could not—get through to Bohr. Bohr insisted he was wrong, even demanding he revoke his paper.  But Heisenberg was relentless. No one seemed to grasp the momentous discovery he had just made. Electrons were there, and yet they weren’t. Heisenberg had realized their uncertainty. Full Article »

On a dark, clear night, as we gaze up into the sky, the stars and the moon glow back at us, surrounded by what appears to be a desolate void. It was once believed that space was empty—a static home to the planets, stars and galaxies. But scientists suspect that there is a mysterious, invisible matter more than five times as abundant as ordinary matter—tiny, ghost-like particles existing not only in the far reaches of space, but all around us.

If so, these phantom particles pass effortlessly through our bodies, through the earth, and throughout the universe. They do not reflect light or emit light, and therefore cannot be seen. They can only be understood through the gravitational force they produce. Full Article »

Perhaps you’ve seen James Cameron’s recent blockbuster Space Pocahontas, er Avatar. You sat in a theatre packed with makeshift Buddy Hollies as nude extraterrestrials darted among trees. Floating islands and pterodactyls popped out of the screen in glorious 3D, and then our decendents came to pillage the land with fire and obtain its unobtainium (they should have known better). It was fun, wasn’t it?

For all the fanfare though, three-dimensional cinema is nothing new. The idea of showing each eye a slightly different image to generate the illusion of depth has been around for well over a century, and almost every moviegoer has donned a pair of migraine-inducing red and blue shades at some point. But the technology behind this most recent wave of 3D enthusiasm is new, and I was surprised to learn how it worked. The secret is a novel use of polarization.

Light, such as that emitted by a film’s projector, travels as a wave. As it moves along a straight path, it shakes an electric field back and forth, a bit like a tiny snake slithering its way through space. But unlike actual snakes, which must slither along the ground’s surface, the light wave can shake its electric field up and down, side to side, or at any angle. Most sources emit its light waves randomly, so that the electric fields end up shaking in every direction. This is non-polarized light.

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So much of life is spent trying to figure out who we are. It takes time because identities are about the most fickle quantity in existence. Flour, check. Raisins, check. Character? I’d rather clip a cat’s toenails than try to stuff that into a measuring cup.

Say, for example, you wanted to know who I am. You could ask me—but how many experiences would I have to enumerate before you understood me? Inefficient. And science is all about efficiency (or at least it purports to be when pressured by the hands hoarding the research funding). So instead you decide to plumb the depths of my being by observing me in action: you put me in a room and shoot people at me to watch how I interact with them. Werner Heisenberg would tell you that you’ve already gummed up the experiment.

Heisenberg was one of the great minds of the quantum physics revolution of the twentieth century, a student of the even greater great, Niels Bohr. He found that, simply by observing something, you make the answer you’re seeking more uncertain.

Hogwash, you say, as you settle in with your cappuccino and blueberry muffin to watch me. You have good company: many of Heisenberg’s contemporaries, including Einstein, sniffed their noses at his Uncertainty Principle. The observer matters, sure, but he cannot change reality by observing, they complained.

As you watch me, a person swoops in to where I am standing in the room. We shake hands, crack a joke about the awkward social experiment, apologize for dropping crumbs everywhere as we enjoy the free food. You jot down notes: injects humor into relationships, likes to eat . . .

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