InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
Beginning September 30th, join us for a grand conversation on Faith across the Multiverse: Parables from Modern Science with author, Andy Walsh. Yes, that’s the weekly ESN science blogger! Since Andy’s part of our network, I thought I’d ask him a few quick questions:
[Read more…] about Faith Across The Multiverse Book Club Event
This reflection on the themes of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom avoids spoilers, but as always feel free to wait until you’ve seen the movie if you want to know nothing about it when watching.
It is widely reported that an asteroid strike 65 million years ago caused dinosaurs to go extinct, although a variety of hypotheses including widespread volcanic eruptions remain plausible as alternatives. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, there is no doubt that a single volcano could wipe out the small cluster of de-extinct dinosaurs inhabiting the ruins of two abandoned theme parks. And so congress calls on rockstar “chaotician,” dinosaur survivor and one-man Greek chorus Jeff Goldblum for expert testimony on whether to mount a rescue effort. What they get is a doom-laden sermon delivered as only Goldblum can, through which the film waves at a number of weighty, real-world topics before getting down to the real business of widescreen therapod pyrotechnics.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Ashes to Ashes, But What of Synthetic Dinosaurs?
This reflection on the themes of Solo: A Star Wars Story tries to avoid spoilers, but as always feel free to wait until you’ve seen the movie if you want to know nothing about it when watching.
“Fast ship? You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?” “It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.” With those lines, Han Solo and ultimately George Lucas stirred up a controversy still brewing 40 years later. Han’s boast sounds impressive, but when you find out a parsec is a unit of distance, not time, you wonder how it’s meant to prove the speediness of the legendary ship. Hands have been waved at explanations, but now with Solo we get as much of an in-galaxy justification as we can likely expect. A trivial point to be sure, but the deep dives into astrophysics inspired by that dialogue represent about as much science as Star Wars is interested in. To be sure, all of the films feature technology far beyond our current capabilities, but mostly they are part of the setting rather than the theme.
[Read more…] about Science in Review: Just Gotta Get Right Outta Here
It’s not exactly science news, but this item on the role of fiction in engaging the scientific imagination really caught the eye of this science fiction fan. I’m familiar with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Flatland, both of which encode interesting mathematics questions as narrative, but I had no idea scientific fairy tales were a whole genre. The one with the various chemical elements embodied as fairies sounds particularly fascinating. Knowing how much my daughter and her friends love fairies, perhaps it’s time for that one to make a comeback. [Read more…] about Science Corner: Entertaining Lies and Real Truth
Last week, we looked at this article on the quest for validation of a multiverse hypothesis. If each universe in the multiverse is physically distinct, they might interact with each other. Those interactions could leave telltale patterns in the cosmic background radiation. (Cosmic background radiation is an energy signal from the early days of the universe; it’s basically our universe’s very first baby photo.) Find those patterns — circular impressions, like you get when two bubbles bump into each other — and you might just have evidence of universes beyond our own.
Now, whenever the multiverse comes up, one of the obvious questions is how to reconcile the assertion that the only reality is what we can hear, see, or touch with the idea that most of reality, by the definition of the multiverse, can never be directly experienced. Or to put it another way, the only evidence we might hope to have of a multiverse is indirect, via influence on the world we can observe — which raises some interesting comparisons. But I’ll leave that particular metaphysical conversation for another place and time. What interested me most about this item was that I had read it before. Not in another scientific publication, mind you, but in that august periodical known as New Avengers from Marvel Comics. [Read more…] about Science in Review: Avengers Annihilate!