Browsing: Lens_matter

The shiny silver cloaks athletes now don to keep warm on the sidelines are actually aluminized mylar, which NASA’s Echo I, the agency’s first communications satellite, sported.NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Getting us into space is NASA’s raison d’etre. But the agency’s innovations don’t always stay inside NASA. They have a tendency to affect fields like […]

Using physics to describe social phenomena can work—if it’s the right physics.

The main elements of the Big Bang model are “easily listed,” says Jim Peebles, the Albert Einstein Professor Emeritus of Science at Princeton. The model holds that the large-scale structure of the cosmos is expanding faster and faster and that, on average, the universe looks close to the same no matter where you look. […]

The universe’s greatest sinkholes have no trouble swallowing anything—except themselves.

If all the matter in the universe suddenly disappeared, would space still exist? Isaac Newton thought so. Space, he imagined, was something like Star Trek’s holodeck, a 3-dimensional virtual-reality grid onto which simulated people and places and things are projected. As Newton put it in the early pages of his Principia: “Absolute space, of […]

Eight foundational images from the archives of the Carnegie Observatories.

One of the criteria that make a Scotch a Scotch is that it’s made with Scottish water. That means that a clever connoisseur should be able to tell whether her drink is authentic by tracing the source of its H2O molecules. But how? After it’s collected and filtered of impurities, water is water, right? […]

The Dragonfly telescope is pushing the boundaries of small-scale observational astronomy.

A Nobel laureate maps his path to discovery.

Does space exist without objects, or is it made by them?