Rumi Nations

Think of the spectacular imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. I continue to marvel at all the wonders of the universe this single scientific instrument has revealed. And I think of the tiny number of humans who work at the Space Telescope Science Institute who’re responsible for this. A few hundreds of men and women whose work reveals to all seven billion of us humans on this planet the true splendors of the universe far surpassing anything contained in any mythological tales. The world owes a great deal to the Hubble Space Telescope … for opening our eyes, for expanding our horizons, for showing and proving again and again that the zaniest predictions of theoretical astrophysics are commonplace occurrences out there in the cosmos. And Hubble has also revealed phenomena that have left the theorists stunned before they started to contemplate about it and could barely believe that such stuff was really happening.

The Tevatron is going to close. The Superconducting Supercollider never came to fruition. Remember the scare when the LHC began running — all that talk about how black holes might get created at the LHC that might accidentally devour the planet. It’s commonplace to hear all and sundry pontificating about the benefits and harms of science to society. Religious people somehow feel automatically qualified to interpret god’s intentions and talk casually about the universe. Scientists however are a different species. They like to be humble and polite and mostly profess ignorance about much of the world and indeed, much of the broad tapestry of science. This is quite admirable of course and in tune with the spirit of science. But this creates a vacuum. And that vacuum is more often than not filled by opportunistic egomaniacs. It’s in this context that one must look at the lives of a few exceptional scientists. A few names stand out easily: Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Steven...

The nature of science has always been to hold nature up to examination and ask again and again why it is the way it is, as Steven Weinberg put it. And as the sphere of our understanding of the working of nature grows ever wider, we understand deeper and deeper truths. And so, for a while now, we have known that there are four fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear interactions. Theoretical advances have remained somewhat static since then with string theorists trying to develop some sort of a quantum understanding of gravity even as scientists excitedly await the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson at the LHC. It's heartening at this juncture to hear of someone throwing a heavy stone into this somewhat quiet pond and creating ripples: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13gravity.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=gravity&st=cse To be able to explain the laws of Newton as the effect of something deeper would be one of tho...

Dennis Overbye has written an intriguing article in the New York Times about some researchers who are giving a very interesting reasoning about why the Large Hadron Collider is going through so many birth pangs. The scientists think that the Higgs boson which they think they will find at the kind of energies that the LHC will be able to generate is trying to prevent its own creation. In what is certainly a pretty interesting thought, the scientists think that this is a case of the future trying to make sure that that future does not occur. This is certainly interesting, if possible, as it shows that the idea of time travel is fundamentally not impossible.