Apollo to the Moon: We Were Explorers
In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing in July, two major players from the Apollo days of the 1960s and 70s appeared in Austin at…
Copenhagen: A Wild Improbability
This play about physics is, to use words uttered within the play itself, “a wild improbability.” Written by Michael Frayn, Copenhagen premiered in London in 1998. The Broadway opening in…
THE GATES OF HELL: First Black Hole Image
“We’re looking at a region that we’ve never looked at before — a region we cannot imagine being there. It feels like looking at the gates of Hell, at the…
Finding Another Habitable Planet
“The problem is monstrously hard.” That’s Dr. Scott Gaudi, speaking of the search for an Earth-like planet orbiting another star. “There is a whole host of information we need to…
Extremely Large Telescope: A Progress Report
At 39 metres in diameter, the mirror of Europe’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will be the largest in the world. Scientists plan to begin serious observations with it around 2025,…
Astronomy in the 2030s
No one can predict what discoveries will be made in the 2030s, but we can say with some certainty what space-based telescopes will be used to make those discoveries. That…
We Are Not Alone: Nobel laureate in Austin
“Most modern scientists think we’re not alone,” said Dr. John Mather, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006. He was referring to intelligent life elsewhere in the universe,…
Gravity Waves Now Part of Pop Culture: Kip Thorne
Last year he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for one of the greatest discoveries in human history. Even though it took more than a century between the time Einstein…
Why Don’t I Have a Nobel Prize?
In his role as Vice President for Research at the University of Texas, Dr. Daniel Jaffe has developed instruments used to expand our knowledge of the universe. Why, he asks,…
The Showman of Astronomy
In every generation there is a populariser of science. The first that drew big crowds on a regular basis was Sir Humphrey Davy, whose lectures in London two centuries ago…