July 24, 2004
Apology
I hope to more regularly update this site, loyal readers.
Cosma Shalizi's Notebooks
Dr. Shalizi's blog is on hiatus but you can still get your fix here. The most consistently interesting and erudite science writing available on the web.
May 23, 2004
Life, the Universe, and Everything
Robert Wright, the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny, has an ambitious web project called Meaning of Life with video archives of interviews he's carried out with scientists, humanists, and mystics holding forth on consciousness, free will, meditation, and the like. Think Bill Moyers meets the Third Culture meets Beliefnet. Worth a look, but very uneven in quality.
May 21, 2004
Whimsical Demiurge
Science writer Jim Holt has a nice piece in Slate suggesting that our Universe could have been created on a whim by a not-especially-powerful being in another Universe. Holt interviews Stanford cosmologist Andrei Linde, who holds that "the only thing you needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred-thousandth of a gram of matter."
A New Scenario for Solar System Formation
Science Daily has a fascinating piece on a recently-proposed scenario for the creation of the solar system. The idea is that the Sun's birth depended on the earlier birth of a much larger and brighter (but shorter-lived) star, whose radiation created a shockwave that compressed the surrounding gas. This compression favored the gravitational collapse of some of the compressed gas into Sun-like stars and orbiting accretion disks that would later form planets, asteroids, and comets. Eventually the firstborn star would go supernova, exposing the young Solar System to violent radiation but also fertilizing it with heavy elements that are only produced in stars. The evolution of life on Earth may have depended on the presence of these elements.
