I recently saw a banner headline on a social media site (which shall remain nameless) that said: “Mars Terraforming Not Possible.” This instantly annoyed me. I am familiar with the science, and happen to know that terraforming Mars is within the realm of future science. So, I followed the link and found an article titled: …
Category Archives: biology
BOOK REVIEW OF PLANK’S LAW
I must admit that I was first drawn to this title because I’m a physicist and I inadvertently read the title as Planck’s Law, the law of physics involving blackbody radiation. I was curious to see how somebody could make fiction out of this physics principle. Of course, the title is actually Plank’s Law, and …
Signatures of Life on Distant Planets
The science of discovering planets around distant stars has made great leaps in recent years, thousands have been found. Of course, what we’re all waiting for is the discovery of life on any such planet, especially intelligent life. In order to find signs of life from a telescope, there would have to be something about …
Ishiguro Wins Nobel!
One of my all time favorite novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. This could not be more well deserved. While there is much that can, and will, be said about his work in the coming days, what really stands out for me is the one foray he made into science fiction, his …
Why I don’t Deserve to Live Beyond Today
Cancer took my mother too soon. One can look at the disease and speculate why it took her when it did, but such reasoning brings no comfort. The essential unfairness of the situation still torments me. Though many years have passed since the day she died, I still can’t get over the feeling that something …
Where are all the aliens?
An article in Science presents research showing that the building blocks of life are more prevalent than previously thought. It says a lot of other things too, but this is what I get out of it. This makes me wonder more than ever about the Fermi Paradox, which states that reasonable assumptions lead to the …
Is the Brain Multi-dimensional?
Neuroscientists have discovered that the brain contains multi-dimensional geometric structures, up to 11 dimensions. The scientists are talking about algebraic topology, and how it describes neurons connecting into ‘cliques’, and that the description requires higher-dimensional geometric objects. This is a mathematical concept, and they are not claiming to have measured higher dimensional space-time objects (after all, …
Culling the Human Race
This article talks about how a very small mutation allowed the H7N9 flu virus to jump from birds to humans, and it disturbs me for two reasons. The first is how minor the change was that allowed this to happen. The second is how long after the fact the science is catching up to this virus. What if …
Physics and Art 