This might sound like a philosophical question, but I intend it more like a scientific question. We’ve discussed this somewhat before, like in our post about the universe’s habitable zone, but I want to focus in a little closer on what life really is, on what makes one thing alive and one thing not alive, how we might go about defining the difference, and whether what we call life deserves the distinction we have hitherto applied.
Not-so-standard Model
While this is being hailed as the first potentially significant failure of the Standard Model, the Standard Model has really been struggling for years with a variety of problems
Solar Flares and Aquatic Suction Cups
I couldn't decide between two articles this week, so I decided to just post two. First up, a research paper I came across in Science Advances that studies how suction cups adhere underwater.
Space Debris Economics
Why should a private company make a business out of space debris removal? Alternatively, can space debris removal be made into a viable business model? This is one of those complicated questions that I recently saw reduced to a gross oversimplification in a news article. There were a lot of issues with the article, and I don’t want to dwell on it, but I think the biggest problem was its underlying, unstated assumption that the only viable business case for space debris removal as a commercial service was if the government was the customer, or regulated private space industry into becoming customers. The underlying argument of the article, therefore, is that there is no viable business model based on space debris removal.
Communicating Uncertainty
In a few months, when my review for Bernoulli's Fallacy goes live, we'll have a lot more to talk about when it comes to uncertainty, probability, and statistics. In the meantime, I wanted to share an article with you from the journal Science Advances, entitled "Earning the Public's Trust."
Conservation and Cycles
In any closed system, quantities must be conserved. Thermodynamics inform us that energy is conserved. Linear and angular momentum are both conserved, whether we’re looking at billiard balls in a Newtonian paradigm, or photons in a quantum system. Special relativity expands conservation even further to the equivalence between matter and energy. In a closed system, where nothing can escape, quantities are inevitably conserved.
A Few Thoughts on the US 5G Standoff
In case you haven't been following the barrage of news articles that don't actually have very much to say, here is the situation underlying this post.
The James Webb Space Telescope – A Christmas Present
This has been decades in the making, and I have been watching the observatory be delayed again, and again, and again for years now, so it was remarkable when it finally launched.
Smug Science
I think science as a discipline could benefit from a more practical approach. This doesn’t so much refer to some of the really abstract and intangible research happening in fields like quantum physics as it does to something that I see more and more presented in lieu of actual experiments: computer models. In just the past few weeks, I’ve read everything from government reports, to news articles, to peer-reviewed scientific papers that leverage as their evidence not practical experiments or real datasets, but computer models and statistical simulations. There was even one that proudly proclaimed that it was based on interpolated data – in other words, data that is only inferred to exist between known data points.
The Nuclear Option
Whether or not it has anything to do with a certain fourteen year old and his garage-built fusion reactor, I’ve been long fascinated by nuclear energy, but not unlike space, it suffers from a massive communication problem. If you asked someone to name a job harder than the proverbial “rocket science,” you very well might be answered with “nuclear physics.” Like I try to explain concepts from astronautical engineering in ways that are approachable to the typical reader, I intend to use this post to explain nuclear energy in similarly approachable terms.
IGC Publishing 