iTalkApple a collection of things I like

We learned that our universe is not static, that space is expanding, that that expansion is speeding up and that there might be other universes—all by carefully examining faint pinpoints of starlight coming to us from distant galaxies. But because the expansion is speeding up, in the very far future, those galaxies will rush away so far and so fast that we won’t be able to see them—not because of technological limitations, but because of the laws of physics. The light those galaxies emit, even traveling at the fastest speed—the speed of light—will not be able to overcome the ever-widening gulf between us.

So astronomers in the far future looking out into deep space will see nothing but an endless stretch of static, inky, black, stillness. And they will conclude that the universe is static and unchanging and populated by a single, central oasis of matter that we inhabit —a picture of the cosmos that we definitively know to be wrong! Now maybe those future astronomers will have records handed down from an earlier era like ours, attesting to an expanding cosmos teeming with galaxies. But would those future astronomers believe such ancient knowledge, or would they believe in the black, static, empty universe that their own state of the art observations reveal?

I suspect the latter…which means that we are living through a remarkably privileged era, when certain deep truths about the cosmos are still within reach of the human spirit of exploration. It appears that it may not always be that way because today’s astronomers, by turning powerful telescopes to the sky have captured a handful of starkly informative photons, a kind of cosmic telegram, billions of years in transit, and the message echoing across the ages is clear: sometimes, nature guards her secrets with the unbreakable grip of physical law. Sometimes, the true nature of reality beckons from just beyond the horizon.

Brian Greene

http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_greene_why_is_our_universe_fine_tuned_for_life.html

You should care about space, not because space is cool, which it is. You should care about space because advances in the space frontier reset what it is for a nation to dream again.

And when you dream about a future that you can enable with science and technology, then an innovation culture takes root in your nation. And when you are part of an innovation culture, what you innovate becomes tomorrow’s economy.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekc3uRPlILU

You people who have survived childhood don’t remember any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy ax there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn’t hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess.