Blog Entry

THE SCIENCE SHELF NEWSLETTER

News about the Science Shelf archive of book reviews, columns, and comments by Fred Bortz

Issue #29, Back from Hiatus edition, February 2009

From today’s SpaceWeather.com e-mail.

Hallmark has announced a recall of its jumbo snowman snow globes due to the possibility of fire.

If only the designer had read the same newspaper article as a young lady who was working on a report for the laser teaching center at SUNY Stony Brook.

Einstein introduced the Cosmological Constant into his formulation of General Relativity to eliminate the uniform expansion or contraction of the universe that seemed to be inevitable without it. After Hubble’s work revealed an expanding universe, Einstein called the constant his “greatest mistake.”

But in recent years, the discovery of an accelerated expansion of the universe led scientists to postulate the existence of “dark energy.” One candidate for that dark energy is–you guessed it–the Cosmological Constant.

(I discuss this as an open question in my book Physics: Decade by Decade.)

New research now supports that notion, though the evidence is far from conclusive.

It’s been a long year with a presidential election campaign that never seemed to end and a stock market that exploded with volatility, mostly on the down side.

So why are the powers that be adding more than the usual one day to this leap year, and why should you care?

I’m coming up for air during my hiatus with a request to Science Blog readers.

I want to use the quote below from Jacques Yves Cousteau as a featured quotation in a chapter on undersea exploration in a children’s book I’m writing. It’s all over the Internet, but no one cites the place it first appeared.

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

Can anyone here help? If so, you can post it here or find an e-mail link at my website.

Thanks all,
Fred Bortz

I’m about to ramp down my blogging for a while, though I will continue to post new book reviews, including one to come shortly.

If you wonder why, read on.

This is the full 800-word version of a comparative book review that appeared in shorter form on the Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette books page. The two books, Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., Ph.D. and Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, M.D., may literally save lives.

With the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) coming on line tomorrow, 10 September 2008, many physicists are expecting the long-anticipated detection of the Higgs boson to follow soon after.

But what if they don’t find it?

With the “Mommy Wars” once again erupting around Sarah Palin’s nomination for V.P., a piece of valuable insight arises in the scientific realm. Planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel has managed to do world-class science requiring frequent travel while sharing the parenting of three children, ages 7, 9, and 11, with her equally busy husband. For insight into Heidi’s work and how she balances her life, read “A Conversation with Heidi B. Hammel” in the Sept. 2, 2008, issue of the New York Times.

Then take the next step and read…