Greetings, Dear Readers.
Now, I understand given this is talkingscience.org, so there is an argument to be made that this blog post could be deemed “inappropriate” or “off topic.”  However,  recent events in the circus that is the American political world have injected me with what can only be described as an adrenaline rush equivalent of ridiculousness. So, given the thousands of universities that now offer political science as a major as my justification, as well as the fact that the Democrats are pro-science, I will now analyze for you the …

The perception in society is that today’s teenagers are more able than ever to take on the pressures of daily life and be successful, and for most of us, that seems to be the case. But what happens when this façade is lifted? A new study showed that five times as many high school and college students suffer from anxiety and other mental health issues as people of the same age did during the Great Depression. Five times! Five universities participated in the study, analyzing Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) …

Before continuing with the cosmic microwave background, I want to take a minute to talk about something slightly different, the learning and teaching of science. This week at Yale, we had Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman to visit, and he gave two great talks on research people have done on how students actually learn science. Professor Wieman has been applying scientific methods to scientific learning for some time now, and among other things, he writes a blog about it.
One of the more interesting conclusions is that the standard lecture format of …

The last post on thermal equilibrium was rather long and involved, so I will try and recap in briefer terms. The early universe was very hot, so that everything was in thermal equilibrium. In particular, because reactions were constantly taking place, the universe was strongly “ionized” or charged. Therefore, photons were constantly scattering off the charged particles.
Eventually the universe began expanding and cooling.* As it did so, the ions and free electrons “recombined” (during the time romantically referred to as the era or epoch of recombination) to form neutral atoms, …

In the 1940s and 50s, a few scientists (George Gamow, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman among others) predicted the continued existence of the photons that last scattered in the very early universe. Theoretically, those photons had continued to travel through the universe, cooling as the universe expanded. The early theorists tried to predict what the temperature of these photons would now be (with varying degrees of success). These photons should be all over the place and hence providing a constant “background” to any antenna on earth. In addition, they should …