Monthly Archives: April 2013

Titan

Posted on April 30, 2013 by

Titan is Saturn’s largest moon. If you go outside some evening now, you’ll be able to see Saturn, looking like a very bright yellow star. If you have a small telescope, you should have little trouble seeing its rings and … Continue reading →

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Tipler

Posted on April 29, 2013 by

Back in 1994 Frank J. Tipler, a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University in New Orleans published a book, The Physics of Immortality, in which he argued that immortality and the resurrection of the dead were consistent with the … Continue reading →

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Time

Posted on April 28, 2013 by

We’re more than ten years past our fears of Y2K and more than ten percent of the twenty-first century is now history. As long as there have been human beings, they have kept track of the time. Through most of … Continue reading →

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The Pace of Writing

Posted on April 27, 2013 by

The United States has the highest worker productivity on the planet. That is, the average American laborer will produce more widgets, or process more paperwork, or cook more burgers, or design more aircraft than their equivalents elsewhere. How does an … Continue reading →

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The Coin

Posted on April 26, 2013 by

Recently I went through a box of loose coins from my coin collection: coins I hadn’t had time to sort or organize up until that moment. One of the coins I chanced upon was a 1913 10 pfennig piece from … Continue reading →

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Tesla Coil

Posted on April 25, 2013 by

When I was growing up I came upon an old 1940 Popular Science magazine (and yes, it was old even when I was growing up). Inside, I read an article that gave detailed instructions on how to build something called … Continue reading →

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Telescopes

Posted on April 24, 2013 by

As a child I had wanted to be an astronomer. Instead, I became an author and a theologian. But I’ve never lost my love of astronomy. My first telescope was made of plastic; it was a reflector and was supposed … Continue reading →

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Storage Space

Posted on April 23, 2013 by

My now old second generation Kindle, the electronic book reader made by Amazon.com, has a about 1.5 gigabytes of space that is available for storing the books that I purchase for it. How many books can I fit into this … Continue reading →

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SETI

Posted on April 22, 2013 by

SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is now more than fifty years old. In 1959, the Cornell physicists Giuseppi Cocconi and Philip Morrison published an article in the journal Nature proposing the idea that it might be possible to use … Continue reading →

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Serendipity

Posted on April 21, 2013 by

In 1945 Nazi Germany was finally defeated. One of the things that had helped bring about its defeat was the successful breaking of what the German’s thought was an unbreakable code. At the end of the First World War a … Continue reading →

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