••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Thursday, December 15, 2005

cosmos regained


picked up a first edition of carl sagan's cosmos—one of the best books to get nonscientists familiar with today's key science issues—for half a buck at a library sale.

the bottom edge of the dust jacket's a little torn in back, and the back cover's a bit warped as if the book stood leaning sideways for a long time—it was donated, not a library copy, and folk just don't read their hardcover books—but otherwise the 25-year-old volume looks like new, tho it does have a very slight musty odor.

also, astronomers have collected an awful lot of data since it was published, and cosmology appears to be undergoing a major shift: apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, which led to the idea of dark energy.

but it's still a great primer, sagan covers a lot of ground and doesn't limit himself to astrophysics, and i never had a chance to read it all the way thru before, since i had to check it out of the library.

1 comment:

  1. Actually it's the universe itself that has the slight musty odor. We now know that the Big Bang was ignited by black powder and the smell is left over from that.

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