This article from LiveScience shows what incredible things can be accomplished when scientists search hard to find even a bit of surviving soft tissue in a T-rex femur: An adolescent female Tyrannosaurus rex died 68 million years ago, but its bones still contain intact soft tissue, including the oldest preserved…
At Dangerous Intersection, we have often encountered definitional issues when we’ve cnsidered whether someone believes in “God.” During a recent vigorous exchange several of us invoked the “Einstein” version of God. Although I had read a few quotes of Einstein regarding his beliefs, I had not comprehensively read Einstein’s own words describing his “God.”
The April 16, 2007 edition of Time Magazine features a new biography about Albert Einstein (Einstein, by Walter Isaacson). For that reason, I jumped at the chance to read this Time article, which focused on what Einstein actually meant when he said he believed in “God.” The bottom line?
[Einstein] settled into a deism based on what he called the’ spirit manifest in the laws of the universe’ and a sincere belief in a ‘God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.
Einstein was born to two parents who were Jewish “by cultural designation and kindred instinct, [though] they had little interest in the religion itself.” Young Albert ended up attending a large Catholic school in his neighborhood. While there, he “developed a passionate zeal for Judaism.” At the age of 12, however, he gave this up, concluding that “much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. From that time on, he articulated (through many essays and interviews) a “deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one.”
At a dinner party in Berlin, one of the guests publicly expressed amazement that …
Take a look at this beautiful movie image of Saturn taken by NASA:
This nighttime movie of the depths of the north pole of Saturn taken by the visual infrared mapping spectrometer onboard NASA’s Cassini Orbiter reveals a dynamic, active planet lurking underneath the ubiquitous cover of upper-level hazes. The defining feature of Saturn’s north polar regions–the six-sided hexagon feature–is clearly visible in the image.
“Who built that hexagon on top of Saturn?” one might ask. No one built it. It’s a self-organized pattern. And the area of the hexagon is large enough to fit four earths.
This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.
But this striking pattern is merely one of the huge numbers of beautiful self-organized patterns one can find in our universe. In Dynamic Patterns: the Self Organization of Brain and Behavior (1997), J. A. Scott Kelso describes the mysterious-seeming emergence of such dynamic patterns:
…Patterns in general emerge in a self-organized fashion, without any agent-like entity ordering the elements, telling them when and where to go . . . [S]ystems that are pumped
Information Reliability. This is a pet peeve of mine. Stephen Jay Gould was a stickler for finding out where ideas "that everybody knows" came from, and often finding the original source to be dubious. I am writing today because of a recent Mallard Fillmore cartoon proclaiming that "new reports give…
I photographed this older orangutan yesterday at the St. Louis Zoo. He had moved slowly to this spot about 50 feet away from the glass, where he paused for several minutes and stared back at the humans who were staring at him. I was pondering whether this photo needed a caption, but…