1. Have you ever seen a supernova?
    By: Siggi Eggertsson


  2. On Human Nature

    “All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.”

    - Benjamin Franklin



  3. On Context

    “Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.”

    - Carl Sagan (1934-1996)



  4. ISAM

    “The whole idea from the start was just to sort of amplify my movements to the point where really I’m just a small part of what you’re seeing … I might be the source of whatever is going on, but I’m not the visual focus. Because visually, I’m not that interesting to look at.”

    - Amon Tobin



  5. When I was born…

    “Humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.”

    - Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) 



  6. The Kepler Exoplanet Candidates for Life

    Each of us is one of six billion people on a planet circling one of 200 billion or so stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of 100 billion or so galaxies in the observable universe, which many physicists believe is but one of a near-infinity of alternative realities in the multiverse. If the Earth were the size of a grain of sand, then our Milky Way galaxy would be 5,000,000 miles across. There are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. What we see of the cosmos when we look up at the night sky is essentially nothing, just a few thousand stars that lie near us in our corner of a single galaxy.

    - Dr. Christian Jarrett


  7. “We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe”
    - Jimmy Carter (via the Golden Disc aboard Voyager)

    Illustrations by Ulku


  8. On Legacy

    “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.”
    - Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1846-1912) (via Ian Crombie)


  9. Internet Access: A Basic Human Right

    “Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all states” 
    - United Nations Report (“Internet access is a human right.”)


  10. On Future & Efficiency

    “Now I see that I will never find the light unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel, consuming myself.”
    - Bruce Lee

    Paintings by Andreas Nicolas Fischer



  11. On Experience

    “There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
    - Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

    (Source: vimeo.com)


  12. “The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.”
    - Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948, Scottish zoologist)


  13. Good - And - Evil

    “There is only one good, namely knowledge, and only one evil, namely ignorance.”
    – Plato

    Photo Credits: The Boston


  14. On the Number of Possible Dimensions

    “An intriguing feature of string theory is that it involves the prediction of extra dimensions. The number of dimensions is not fixed by any consistency criterion, but flat spacetime solutions do exist in the so-called “critical dimension”. Cosmological solutions exist in a wider variety of dimensionalities, and these different dimensions—more precisely different values of the “effective central charge”, a count of degrees of freedom which reduces to dimensionality in weakly curved regimes—are related by dynamical transitions.

    One such theory is the 11-dimensional M-theory, which requires spacetime to have eleven dimensions, as opposed to the usual three spatial dimensions and the fourth dimension of time. The original string theories from the 1980s describe special cases of M-theory where the eleventh dimension is a very small circle or a line, and if these formulations are considered as fundamental, then string theory requires ten dimensions. But the theory also describes universes like ours, with four observable spacetime dimensions, as well as universes with up to 10 flat space dimensions, and also cases where the position in some of the dimensions is not described by a real number, but by a completely different type of mathematical quantity. So the notion of spacetime dimension is not fixed in string theory: it is best thought of as different in different circumstances.

    Nothing in Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism or Einstein’s theory of relativity makes this kind of prediction; these theories require physicists to insert the number of dimensions “by both hands”, and this number is fixed and independent of potential energy. String theory allows one to relate the number of dimensions to scalar potential energy. Technically, this happens because a gauge anomaly exists for every separate number of predicted dimensions, and the gauge anomaly can be counteracted by including nontrivial potential energy into equations to solve motion. Furthermore, the absence of potential energy in the “critical dimension” explains why flat spacetime solutions are possible.

    This can be better understood by noting that a photon included in a consistent theory (technically, a particle carrying a force related to an unbroken gauge symmetry) must be massless. The mass of the photon which is predicted by string theory depends on the energy of the string mode which represents the photon. This energy includes a contribution from the Casimir effect, namely from quantum fluctuations in the string. The size of this contribution depends on the number of dimensions since for a larger number of dimensions; there are more possible fluctuations in the string position. Therefore, the photon in flat spacetime will be massless—and the theory consistent—only for a particular number of dimensions.

    When the calculation is done, the critical dimensionality is not four as one may expect (three axes of space and one of time). The subset of X is equal to the relation of photon fluctuations in a linear dimension. Flat space string theories are 26-dimensional in the bosonic case, while superstring and M-theories turn out to involve 10 or 11 dimensions for flat solutions. In bosonic string theories, the 26 dimensions come from the Polyakov equation. Starting from any dimension greater than four, it is necessary to consider how these are reduced to four dimensional spacetime.”

    - String Theory, (Wikipedia Entry)


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