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Glenn MacDonald is the guy who wrote the amazing, obsessive, beautiful music blog The War Against Silence, now mostly dormant. I admire him for writing tens of thousands of words about Alanis Morissette, whom he, and I, and maybe nobody else, still consider an important cultural figure. He’s also a pretty hardcore data analyst. I’ve [...]
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Those are great questions, Eric! As you surmise, in Einstein's relativity, space and time are not necessarily separate or orthogonal. When we say spacetime is curved, we mean that the entire four-dimensional object is curved, and space and time can mix together. In fact, in special relativity, just moving quickly mixes space and time for a given observer.
The idea that you have to follow the "straightest possible path" through spacetime, which is sometimes down, comes from […]
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In light of the success of the Discover Birds program among Tennessee elementary schools, the Tennessee Ornithological Society (TOS) voted at their annual meeting in Knoxville last weekend to order a second printing of the popular Discover Birds activity book. … Continue reading →
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I’ve earlier written that science is science communication—that is, the act of communicating scientific ideas and findings to ourselves and others is itself a central part of science. My point was to push against a conventional separation between the act of science and the act of communication, the idea that science is done by scientists [...]
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NIMBioS is pleased to introduce Kelsey Bratton, our education & outreach intern who began her work here in January. A junior in mathematics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Bratton is enrolled in the VolsTeach program, which enables students to graduate … Continue reading →
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Thanks to a certain friendly neighborhood mathbabe reader, I’ve created this mathbabe book, which is essentially all of my posts that I ever wrote (I think. Note sure about that.) bundled together mostly by date and stuck in a huge pdf. It comes to 1,243 pages. I did it using leanpub.com, which charges $0.99 per [...]
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Thank you for the reply! Your reply is very helpful. I have a question about the second link. But first, I will try to ask my question again in the form of a complaint.
I don't understand why a floating objects position should be influenced at all by the way time and space elapses and exists around it. I understand the shortest path stuff, but that assumes a final destination.
You said "when I jump out of the airplane, the mass of the Earth bends spacetime so that the […]
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Gregg Easterbrook may not always be on the ball, but I 100% endorse the last section of his recent column (scroll down to “Absurd Specificity Watch”). Earlier in the column, Easterbrook has a plug for Tim Tebow. I’d forgotten about Tim Tebow.
