Science > Written History > Fortune Telling

One of the reasons I love science is that it actually does allow us to look into the past and future, beyond our existence in the present.  Written history gives us a perspective of a person who was around before any human currently living on Earth, and allows us to piece together the history of our culture.  This is very important, so no disrespect to historians and their work.  Much disrespect to fortune telling though.  It’s a waste of energy involving a person who fishes for information for a living.  But let’s talk about Science. Since we just passed Canada...

The Expanse of Time – Galaxies, Evolution, Lifetimes

Have you ever seen those amazing composite images that people will post, showing the same picture every day or every year for a long period of time.  We see how children age, how people transform their bodies, and how their day to day experiences, though seemingly small, add up to incredible changes as the years go by.  I personally love time-lapse photography, representing a long period of time in a shorter instance.  For me the beauty is showing those changes that are subtle in human experience and communicating them in a way that shows how significant they are when we...

The Beginnings of Galaxy Clusters: Proto-Clusters Finally Seen!

The deeper we peer through the cosmos, the more we are looking into the distant past.  Light from other galaxies takes millions of years to reach us, and so when that light has finally arrived at Earth, it is millions of years old, a snapshot in time of the distant galaxy.  The furthest we can see is so far back in the history of the universe, that galaxies haven’t even formed yet.  As we look at the large-scale structure of the Universe, we see it filled with a cosmic web of galaxy clusters, containing tens of thousands of galaxies each....