"Parade" magazine is a weekly newspaper insert. This week's cover story was caled "The Secrets of Dark Matter", written by Yale Physics professor Meg Urry. The text
I can't tell you how much reading the article filled my heart with joy.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Memo to creationists, nothing for you here.
"Parade" magazine is a weekly newspaper insert. This week's cover story was caled "The Secrets of Dark Matter", written by Yale Physics professor Meg Urry. The text
I can't tell you how much reading the article filled my heart with joy.
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6 comments:
WhiteBoyBob and I have pondered this issue on more than one occasion - we have a very controlled understanding of what we mean when we talk about theories, hypothesis peer review etc, and what exactly a burden of proof is...
...however it can be extremely frustrating when folk use these concepts in discourse without understanding them.
Don't get me wrong - it's not a big love in - we disagree about plenty; WBB has a predeliction for the mathematical and physical whilst I tend toward a biological specialism. But there is a set of ground rules, good practice if you will.
How can we comunicate to people that yes evolution is a theory...
... but not in the way that many might think.
I pretty much concur with what Chris says. Though my areas of interest may lie more in the fields of mathematics, cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics I do have a great interest in evolutionary biology. I am very interested to learn about genetics as well and hope to spend some time on it later this year.
Anyway, dark energy. I totally "get" dark matter and understand what constitutes a significant minority of it (unseen planets, brown dwarfs, free roaming planets, neutron stars, dark clouds of hydrogen, neutrinos and black holes), but as for the majority of it - well that's yet to be worked out. Who knows, maybe the Large Hadron Collider will come to the rescue and help us find the WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) we've been theorising about.
When it comes to Dark Energy we're in a very new area. We know the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate, but why this is happening is still a mystery. Is it Quintessence? Is it the return of the cosmological constant? Who knows; but it sure is an interesting time to be around. One thing we do know is that at this rates the universe will keep expanding forever, burn up all its fuel and die. It'll be an ever-accelerating universe filled with cold, dead star remnants and black holes. Maybe.
I didn't miss your point btw, I was just "tenting" about cosmology.
Hanging out at this place is like foreplay for me.
Okay, I am delighted beyond words that a publication as mainstream and lightweight as "Parade" would tackle a topic like dark energy, attempting to make deeply important scientific theory accessible to the general public (and you are so not a dummy, Sysm, so cut it out). I am mad crazy fascinated by dark energy and will be on the edge of my seat to see the results of the work being done at CERN and to see how the field of physics evolves in my lifetime.
I still have moments when I regret not persuing a major in physics or astronomy instead of math. Space just makes me ache. I suppose there's always grad school...
If this is foreplay goodness knows what the main event is like.
"Oof, you've embigulated my glavin"
::giggles::
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