Death by Black Hole
the persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what’s going on is nonsense rather than sixth sense.
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the quote that opens this chapter, while poignant and poetic, should have instead been: Equipped with our five senses, along with telescopes and microscopes and mass spectrometers and seismographs and magnetometers and particle accelerators and detectors across the electromagnetic spectrum, we explore the universe around us and call the adventure science.
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Link to originalScience expands beyond our direct senses, leaving less and less space for the "supernatural".
Every shooting star is a tiny particle of interplanetary debris moving so fast that it burns up in the air, harmlessly descending to Earth as cosmic dust. Almost the same thing happens to spacecraft that reenter the atmosphere. Since their occupants don’t want to land at their orbital speed of 18,000 miles per hour (about five miles per second), the kinetic energy must go somewhere. It turns into heat on the leading edge of the craft during reentry and is rapidly whisked away by the heat shields. In this way, unlike shooting stars, the astronauts do not descend to Earth as dust.
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What if the Sun were mysteriously plucked from the center of the solar system and Earth spun out of orbit, adrift in space? This event would surely not merit attention in the thermophile press. But in 5 billion years, the Sun will become a red giant as it expands to fill the inner solar system. Meanwhile, Earth’s oceans will boil away and Earth, itself, will vaporize. Now that would be news.
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Aristotle also made other kinds of claims. He said that heavy things fall faster than light things. Who could argue against that? Rocks obviously fall to the ground faster than tree leaves.
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Maybe it’s the need to attract and keep readers. Maybe the public likes to know those rare occasions when scientists are clueless. But how come science writers can’t write an article about the universe unless they describe some of the astrophysicists they interview as being “baffled” by the latest research headlines?
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I would be remiss if I did not include the discovery of neutron stars, which pack the mass of the Sun within a ball that measures barely a dozen miles across. To achieve this density at home, just cram a herd of 50 million elephants into the volume of a thimble.
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Or what if you went to a sumo wrestling match after work and saw the two spherical gentlemen collide, disappear, then spontaneously become two beams of light?
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If those scenes played out daily, then modern physics wouldn’t look so bizarre, knowledge of its foundations would flow naturally from our life experience, and our loved ones probably would never let us go to work.
Back in the early minutes of the universe, though, that stuff happened all the time. To envision it, and understand it, one has no choice but to establish a new form of common sense, an altered intuition about how physical laws apply to extremes of temperature, density, and pressure.
And what comedian configured the region between our legs—an entertainment complex built around a sewage system?
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Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers
If you are that zebra and your innards are dragging in the dust, you still have to escape. Now would not be a particularly clever time to go into shock from extreme pain.
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You sit in your chair not moving a muscle, and simply think a thought, a thought having to do with feeling angry or sad or euphoric or lustful, and suddenly your pancreas secretes some hormone. Your pancreas? How did you manage to do that with your pancreas? You don’t even know where your pancreas is. Your liver is making an enzyme that wasn’t there before, your spleen is text-messaging something to your thymus gland, blood flow in little capillaries in your ankles has just changed. All from thinking a thought.
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It’s Thanksgiving, and you’ve eaten with porcine abandon.