"or did a sea / Of fire envelop once this silent snow? / None can reply,--all seems eternal now."

[larryhammer]

Steven Weinberg gives a decent summary of the last sixty years of cosmology and particle physics, and what we still don't know. (via)

The current oldest known face. (via)

janni has released an ebook of Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer (formerly known as Secret of the Three Treasures).

---L.

Subject quote from "Mont Blanc," P.B. Shelley.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

At the risk of suggesting that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that picture reminded me of this rather amazing picture of a human face developing in the womb (http://youtu.be/wFY_KPFS3LA).

[larryhammer]

The relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny is complex, and noticing the resemblance plays into that.

Neat clip, that.

---L.

[(Anonymous)]

"Radiation is said to have a certain temperature if its energy per volume at each wavelength is the same as for the radiation in a cave whose walls are kept at that temperature."

Am I misunderstanding or do scientists literally calibrate their measures of radiation's temperature based on "a cave"? Is the cave at least standardized? (Is this a mog-ur thing?) --Matt

[larryhammer]

Not a cave but a cavity -- more specifically, an idealized rather than real object, known as a "black body." The derivation of how to describe this is what got Max Planck his Nobel.

---L.