Differences among the PhDs
Methods and results differ among the various sciences. This comes from differences in their subject matter and is not always understood, even by scientists.
Science and social science
Articles Tagged with astronomy
The seasons are complicated
Normal science
Progress that doesn’t go viral
Some recent posts have addressed events in astronomy that have attracted attention from the general public. Our astronomer would like to explain something that you’ll probably never hear about.
Extremes
They need not actually be spectacular
Our astronomer, somewhat reluctantly, talks about the Supermoon
Hard problems and easy ones
What’s difficult is not always clear
Humans have accomplished some pretty amazing things, from putting men on the Moon (with old technology!) to sequencing their own heredity. But stubborn problems that look much easier persist.
The angle of the light
A photographer and appearances
Our photographer draws our attention to how differently the same objects appear in different light. It’s a lesson easily generalized.
If it’s worth doing. . .
Why bother with tentative research?
Our astronomer ponders the state of the science in the middle of the last century, when things were so different and difficult.
It doesn’t look like that
The universe is photoshopped
Our astronomer points out that that pictures of outer space don’t actually show what you’d see if you went there.
The distance to the stars
A matter of small and big numbers
Having mentioned the difficulty of finding the distances to stars last week, our astronomer tries to put some unfamiliar numbers within your grasp.
A plausible assumption
It’s reasonable and makes sense, but it’s wrong
Our astronomer describes how an assumption widely made in his science in past years turned out to be completely erroneous.