I’ve been tremendously lucky to have the opportunity to work with BBC Earth and Pomona Pictures over the past few months, creating a series of animated videos to explain ideas in physics, astronomy, and even a little philosophy. Here they are:
Read more "Science videos!"Here’s some of what I’ve written and coded for New Scientist: Black holes, space brains, hunting for planets around distant suns, why honey is stringy, and more…
Read more "Black Holes, Lifeloggers, and Space Brains"I’ve been out on the East Coast for the last two weeks, and I’m headed back west later today. While I was out here, my friends Yuko and Conrad put me in touch with Rym and Scott, who run GeekNights, and I ended up recording an interview with them. They posted it as a podcast, and you can listen to it here….
Read more "GeekNights Interview"This is a picture taken by a robot over one-and-a-half million kilometers away from the earth — over three times farther away than the moon — of the oldest light in the universe. This is impossibly faint light: it took a full year for the robot to collect enough light to take this picture. And even if it weren’t so faint, we wouldn’t be able to see this light with our eyes because it’s beyond the range of visible light, stretched by the expansion of the universe over the last 14 billion years…
Read more "Postcard from the Edge"Figuring out what happened during the first billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang is rather hard, mostly because there’s no light we can see from that time. In fact, there’s no light that we can see from the first 380,000 years after the Big Bang. For most of that time, light was trapped in a plasma, a dense soup of electrically charged particles a lot like the interior of the Sun….
Read more "What I Do: Part II"Physicists are notorious for oversimplifying things in the name of mathematical modeling. There’s the old joke about spherical cows, radiating milk isotropically, which I’ll spare you here, but the reason we do this is that you can often learn an awful lot about something by simplifying it down to the interesting and easy-to-model parts — which are hopefully the same! The trick is knowing which parts can safely be ignored, but if you do that right, you can get an amazing amount of information about something with a very simple model of it….
Read more "What I Do"