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Deities for Atheists, or Atheism for Dummies?

Michael Shermer wrote a book review in Science entitled “Deities for Atheists.”1  The article reviewed George Basalla’s recent book, Civilized Life in the Universe: Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials (Oxford, 2005).  Basalla (historian of science and technology, U of Delaware) contends that SETI is the continuation of an ancient religious quest.  If so, who are the […]

Spiral Galaxies Wind Up Into Blurs In Short Cosmological Time

Cosmic billions of years have received another challenge from the physics of spiral arms in spiral galaxies.

Keeping Icy Moons Warm for Billions of Years

Each spacecraft that has explored the outer solar system has yielded surprises.  It is common knowledge that Voyager scientists were blown away by the first views of active moons they expected to be cold and old.  Recent discoveries have only intensified the surprises.  Richard Kerr wrote recently in Science,1 Why is there geology on Saturn’s […]

Alien Engineering: Is It Intelligent Design?

The SETI Institute finished airing a 2-part series on the History Channel called Alien Engineering (it will be rebroadcast on Feb. 18).  The series, featuring SETI Institute scientists Seth Shostak and Frank Drake, asks the following questions: Prepare for an exercise in imagination.  Suppose that an alien spacecraft crashed in the desert and we humans […]

SETI Tries to Stretch the Habitable Zone

Can life exist outside the circumstellar habitable zone, that ring of life around a star where the temperature is comfy?  “For more than 150 years,” Ker Than wrote for LiveScience, “…this zone has been defined as a narrow disk around a star where temperatures are moderate enough that water on the surface of a planet […]

Keeping Saturn’s Moons Old

The Saturn system has a problem: young moons.  The current consensus on the age of the solar system (4.5 billion years) cannot handle such young objects.  Richard A. Kerr in Science last month described the vexing problem:1 Why is there geology on Saturn’s icy satellites?  Where did these smallish moons get the energy to refresh […]

Big Bang Threatened by Axis of Evil

“We thought we knew all about the Big Bang – but a blip in the cosmic afterglow is threatening our ideas,” reported Marcus Chown in The Independent.  The “Axis of Evil” he speaks of is not North Korea and Iran, but a newly found polarity in the cosmic background radiation that is not explainable by […]

Space Travel Too Hazardous for Humans

Astronomy magazine’s March 2006 issue contains a couple of sobering articles for those who like to dream of humans mastering the universe.  Asking “Will moon dust stop NASA?”, Trudy E. Bell described the dangers of space dust: “it sticks to spacesuits, wreaks havoc on equipment, and may be physically harmful,” she wrote, citing the experiences […]

A Whale of a SETI Tale

Disney’s Fantasia 2000 had an episode that pictured whales gliding through the air as if in outer space.  Lawrence Doyle of the SETI Institute connected whales with space in another way.  His article discussed whale language as a sign of intelligence.  Appealing to information theory and entropy, Doyle discussed how scientists deduce the syntax and […]

ID Film Takes Hollywood

Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard is a top tourist attraction in Tinseltown.  It features dozens of handprints of famous movie and TV stars, from Lucille Ball and Bill Cosby to Mickey Mouse.  This venue of many a blockbuster and glitzy opening night seemed hardly a place for naturalistic cosmology to take a thrashing, but […]

Cosmologists Can’t Escape Conclusion of Design

Geoff Brumfiel of Nature1 decided to investigate the growing fracas over the anthropic principle (see 12/18/2005 entry); i.e., that our universe appears to be more than a coincidence.  In a piece called “Our universe: Outrageous fortune,” he looked at the views of Leonard Susskind and his few critics. For two decades now, theorists in the […]

Choose You This Day: Multiverse or I.D.

If Leonard Susskind is right, cosmologists are escaping the conclusion of intelligent design (ID) by backing into a radically speculative idea: a near infinity of universes.  Susskind, a theoretical physicist from Stanford, just published a book, Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Little, Brown 2005), that explores current cosmological thinking about […]

Planet Out of Bounds

There’s a small planetary object where it shouldn’t be.  New Scientist reported the discovery of a Kuiper Belt object (KBO) with a high inclination of 47° and a nearly circular orbit.  Astronomers can’t figure out how it got there.  It’s too far out to have been flung by Neptune into such a strange orbit.  They […]

It Was the Year of Titan

Of the top 10 astronomy stories for 2005, Astronomy Magazine gave #6 to Cassini’s year at Saturn, and #1 to the Huygens landing on Titan last January 14 (01/14/2005, 01/21/2005).     The official science papers from that event are now in.  In a special online edition, Nature1 published 9 new papers and articles with […]

SETI vs. Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design proponents have often pointed to the similarity between what they are doing and what SETI is doing.  For example, SETI is attempting to detect evidence of intelligence in coded signals from space, and design biologists are detecting evidence of intelligence in the DNA code.  Seth Shostak, Director of the SETI Institute, decided to […]
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