The way soft white wheat burns to death in the sun, orhow dried cherry skins unfurlwhen sucked by the coolmint of spring rain, I wish for youto bloom and let go, a faint whiffof sea air flapping on the clothesline George Cassidy Payne is a poet from Rochester, NY. His work has been included in such […]
astronomy
A Perfect Stillness
There is a perfectstillness to these stories. The first instance of a gravitational wave. Anyways, is there anevent that has a bigger explosion of gravitationalwaves than two black holescolliding?Can three or more black holescollide at once? Would that be the sound of God,a ripple in Time – a wave of gravitythat only humans can hear?The sound of God is a […]
Postcard from Raymond: Pale Blue Dot
I love nothing more than having my assumptions demolished. I enjoy being put in my place. This is not some masochistic desire to be debased or humiliated. Rather, I find it liberating to see how small we really are in the cosmos, via images of space and all kinds of beginner-friendly astronomical analyses. It was […]
Postcard from Raymond: How interconnected do you feel?
This image is a simulation of the “cosmic web,” a network of the scaffolding holding together the structure of the universe. This structure constitutes galaxies, dark matter, the gas that coalesces into stars, and “filaments”: regions of galaxy clusters woven together through what resembles slender, cobweb-like threads. This image from UC Riverside highlights how these […]
Postcard from Raymond: The View from Afar
Artist Pablo Carlos Budassi has put together a stunning “logarithmic scale conception” of the observable Universe, with the Solar System at the centre. Thanks to discoveries by physicists, mathematicians, and many others in the 20th century, we know that time and space are interrelated, and that the universe is expanding every second, with galaxies, stars, […]