September 15, 2018: O: Offset (the first thing that can exist, that has a chance of existence, because it is the first relational boundary) The definition of offset is the amount a system is out of alignment. To a research scientist the word offset means that a system under study is a disturbed field. So, …

September 14, 2018 N: Novas, Supernovas and Nebulas: The Life and Death of Stars (Where do all the radioactive elements come from?)  Novas On December 14, 2013, Australian amateur astronomer John Leach was looking through his telescope in the Constellation Centaurus when he saw what he thought was a new star come into being. Actually …

April 13, 2018 M: Minimum (No sunspots on the sun and its effect on the weather) A minimum I’ll discuss here is a minimum in the sunspot cycle. All stars are somewhat variable. And so is our sun. It heats up and cools on an average of every eleven years. Since astronomy students used to …

September 12, 2018   L: Lens  A lens can be glass that is formed and polished in such a way that the light entering it is diffracted, so that what is observed appears to expand or contract. Object details can be filled in because the bigger the diameter of the lens, the more light collected from the source.  …

September 11, 2018 K: Kepler First we’ll look at Johannes Kepler, most of his work done in the early sixteen hundreds, and then we’ll look at the men who influenced him. Kepler was born into a world where astronomy and astrology hadn’t yet divided into science and the paranormal, respectively. Look up in the night …

September 10, 2018 J: Jupiter and Panspermia (Where did all our chromosomes come from?)  One of the factors of the Drake Equation that can suggest how ubiquitous life is in our universe is the chance of a solar system including Earth-like planets. We see that M class stars that are smaller and generate less energy than …

April 9, 2018 I: Incoming (Filtering out the possibilities). How in a nonhuman-centered way can we look at the formative process of our universe that brought us into being? To answer the above question and define what I mean by Incoming, I need to revisit certain ideas gleaned from my two-dimensional expanding droplet experiment. The …

April 8, 2018 H: Human-Centered Thinking (How it makes all our hard-won solutions incredible fails).  We know what human thought is—because that’s what us humans do—we think. We know what thought itself is, or, at least, I think we do. Most of us believe that other mammals think in a somewhat rudimentary way. We know that all living …