The Earth’s fate is sealed, sad to say. In all likelihood, it’ll be destroyed in roughly six billion years by the death throes of the Sun. But what about the end of the universe? That’s the question I answer in my newest feature article for the BBC…
Read more "Don’t Panic!"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"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"