Video reblogged from crooked indifference with 8,035 notes
The Most Astounding Fact by Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked by a reader of TIME magazine, “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?” This is his answer.
It seems that physicists, or anyone scientifically minded at that, tend to be amazed by precisely these very same things, just putting it into their own words. Not always, but eventually, maybe. Carl Sagan himself noted, similar to Tyson saying that the universe is within us just as much as we are inhabitants within it, that we are made of “star stuff,” and that we are a way for the universe to observe and contemplate itself. Leaving aside my lack of a proper transition to this sentence, Richard Feynman had noted, when it comes down to it, that we are each a small collection of continuous actions and reactions of atoms obeying very simple rules. Of course, that so many happen upon such realizations doesn’t make it any less true, or any less fascinating to consider.
Source: youtube.com
Video reblogged from The Daily What with 897 notes
Words Of Wisdom of the Day: Inspired by the acclaimed “Sagan Series,” Evan Schurr pieced together powerful statements made by world-renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson that serve as an alarming wake up call to a nation that has stopped dreaming and underfunded tomorrow.
[reddit.]
This is fantastic. I’d really like to look into Neil deGrasse Tyson’s writings.
And working for NASA may or may not be a dream of mine in the future.
Source: thedailywhat
Video with 7 notes
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
The video here’s an interview with physicist Richard Feynman. Those who could find it familiar might recognize parts of the audio from The Feynman Series. Don’t think it’s 50 minutes of science babble - if anything, he does his best to keep that to a mentally digestible minimum. I can’t tell you there’s something you’ll take away from it, but I hope that if you do, maybe it’ll just be a bit more curiosity, a hunger for understanding how things work. So if you’ve got 50 free minutes to watch, or maybe to listen, check it out.
Photoset reblogged from FYEAH, CHEMISTRY! with 1,124 notes
cwnl:
Science Ink: A Taxonomy of Tattoos Inspired by Science
As a proud owner of a science tattoo, these articles always make me cheese.
A few years ago—by accident, really—Carl Zimmer became the de facto curator of science-based body art. The author of The Loom blog over at DISCOVER as well as numerous books, Zimmer asked his readers about their tattoos, and whether any of them had inked themselves up in science-inspired motifs. The response was greater than he imagined.
Those responses, which often arrived in Zimmer’s inbox in the form of images, have now been compiled into a book published earlier this month, . In it, the science obsessed—or at least those enthusiastic enough to etch their favorite equations, diagrams, schematics, and formulas directly onto their dermises—show off their needlework in a coffee table-worthy collection of pics, arranged by Zimmer into categories centered on major scientific disciplines: math, chemistry, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, astronomy, and a dedicated chapter on DNA.
From those pages we’ve pulled a few of our favorite works—from Darwin’s finches to a Dali-like double helix to a front-to-back neural net—and collected them here. Click through the link above to see some of our favorite science-derived ink from the collection.
Be sure to check out the book, which you can read more on here.
While I’m on the fence about getting a tattoo or not, I would love to get something like one of these - something relevant, something meaningful.
Source: popsci.com
Video with 2 notes
Both Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman were fantastic, amazing, and inspiring people while they were around. Still are, even though they’ve both passed. I really recommend watching these. Not sure at all what will become of me, but there’s a future engineer, scientist, artist, or someone hiding in the works out there who might need some inspiration, curiosity, or awe to get them started, or keep them motivated. Whether or not it’s me who shows this to them doesn’t matter, but that they hear these words is important. Loving that these people created these videos to broadcast their words for the sake of that very purpose, and I should hope that someone hears them.
Click through the above video to continue watching the rest of the Sagan Series, and start with the Feynman Series here.
Quote reblogged from making groan readers cry since '91 with 22 notes
A tachyon gets kicked out of a bar. The bartender says “we don’t serve your type!”. A tachyon walks into a bar.
Source: coldmountainway
Photo with 1 note
the best summary of some of my current interests: zombies, odd-yet-awesome influental physicists and astrologists, and the growth of science alongside humanity.
it’s random, i’m aware of that.
with cosmos, i’ve still yet to finish it. i can only take all that detail and history that carl sagan provides if i read it when i’ve got much more free time. on the other hand, “surely you’re joking mr. feynman!” is a book filled with anecdotes from a friend’s recorded conversations with the physicist. as far as i’ve been gotten, it’s kinda like the stories you’d expect to hear from talking to an old friendly neighbor or an interesting uncle. it ranges from amusing and odd things, like how he stole a door from his frat house in MIT and his interest in playing bongos, to the serious, such as his involvement in the manhattan project(next to that, at this time, his wife died of tuberculosis). it’s a fascinating book that gives a fantastic glimpse into his mind and his life.
science aside, i finished world war z in 4 days, which i think is oddly quick. it’s definitely getting me excited for walking dead. in any case, it’s an amazing epistolary novel that takes romero’s use of the zombie epidemic as social commentary and brings it to an international and hellish level with a collection of intensely gripping stories, studying the effects of how this hypothetical disease can affect so many over the span of years. i’m currently listening to an audiobook version of world war z on youtube (you can listen to part 1 here). the author himself takes the part of the interviewer, and an ensemble of people playing the individuals he interviews. i highy recommend the book and audio book both for any zombie fan.
“black holes? in my LHC?”
just like everyone else who heard about it, i was a bit unnerved on the day they were starting up the large hadron collider, with the proposition of worldwide death hanging in the air. i was disappointed that the possibility existed that my senior year would be cut short, my last year of high school unfulfilled. the detail that was especially striking was that it would create a black hole that would swallow up everyone and everything on earth. that kind of death would’ve sucked.
ba-doom-ksh.
anyways, after about a year afterwards, i ended up watching some videos/documentaries and reading some books about various topics by physicists, told to the general public in an easy-to-chew form. next to gaining the ability to understand a few more science jokes (e.g. “never drink and derive.”, “schrödinger’s cat walked into a bar…maybe.”), i suddenly realized how stupid it was to think that the black holes that the LHC makes could kill us all. given how we understand black holes form, it’s pretty much common sense.
as i’m assuming you probably know, super-massive suns at the end of their lives collapse into black holes, unable to hold themselves together because of their immense gravity, and there’s not enough of anything left to burn. what’s left behind is its gravity, sucking in anything, the kind that many had assumed is happening at the LHC. basically, the particles being collided at the LHC have far from enough mass to create a dangerous black hole. it’s a few pieces of atoms colliding together near the speed of light. next to that, the possibility of it happening is slim, and in the chance that it does, it would evaporate in the tiniest fraction of a second. if it has happened already, we haven’t noticed.
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