Have you ever read the story of the discovery of Neptune? It truly is a triumph of science and mathematics, and part of the reason it is my favourite planet (a hard choice to make). The story goes like this: It all starts with the discovery of Uranus in 1781 by William Herschel. This was the first ever discovery of a planet, as the Earth and the five visible planets have been known of since the dawn of history. Thanks to Isaac Newton working out the laws of gravitation and the mechanics of the solar system, mathematicians could easily calculate the properties...
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...
Neutron stars are the most extreme objects in the universe that have been proven to exist. Black holes are very likely, but we’re still not 100% sure about them. A black hole is like a giant squid in the ocean. We’re pretty sure they exist, but nobody has caught one. The neutron star on the other hand is like a blue whale, everybody knows they exist, and they are massive, rare, and beautiful. Of course, once we know something exists, the next logical step is to figure out how it behaves, to characterize and generalize it, and to identify where it’s...
Black holes form when a massive star runs out of fuel. Gravity causes the core to collapse down to an object so dense that light itself can not escape. In the Milky Way galaxy, there are expected to be over 100 Million black holes, though of course we can’t see them. The one we can see is the supermassive black hole Sag A*, lying deep within the core of the galaxy. But how did Sag A* form? Was it from the merger of many smaller black holes? Or is there some other process forming the most enigmatic objects in the...
Data is fascinating. And what’s even more fascinating is that the laws of nature produce predictable patterns in data. For example, if you toss a coin 100 times and measure how many times heads comes up, you’ll get a number between zero and 100. If you repeat that experiment again and again and again, you’ll get different values each time, but usually the number will be around 50, and 50 will come up more than any other value if you repeat the experiment enough times. If you plot this data, with the # of heads in 100 coin tosses on...
Whether you’re looking for an excuse to eat dessert or just love mathematics, March 14th is a good day for geeks, nerds, and the rest of the world too. The third month and the fourteenth day, 3.14, is known as Pi day, after the simplest and most ubiquitous constant in nature (no disrespect to c, e, g, or h). Defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference and it’s diameter, Pi is an irrational number, meaning there is no end to its digits. Most people know 3.14159, but some people have memorized hundreds more digits. Mathematicians armed with supercomputers have calculated Pi to...
Are equations beautiful? Does a mathematician see the machine code of the universe in the complex language they use? Does a Chemist see the flow of matter? Does a Biologist see the evolution of life? Does a physicist see the probabilistic nature of electrons? Many scientists would affirm their view that the equations that dictate their respective fields are artistic, in addition to logical. So if equations can be beautiful, what is the most beautiful equation? Naturally, the most beautiful equation should be simple. It should be somewhat intuitive, yet surprising in it’s result. It should explain something fundamental about the universe,...
No, he isn’t a zombie. He’s a long dead scientific pioneer. He discovered Saturn’s moon of Titan and was the first to suggest that Saturn’s odd ‘blob’ shape could be explained by rings around the planet. He was a pioneer of optics and developed a telescope with two lenses, more powerful than Galileos. He also characterized the motion of an ideal mathematical pendulum (with a massless cord and a length longer than its swing), and invented the pendulum clock as a method of keeping time. He had a few other contributions to astronomy, including the observation of individual stars in...
