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Rocket Science in my Pocket
by Shane L. Larson When I was growing up, the end-all toy of toys was a Remco utility belt. In accordance with my secret personas and the innermost inscrutable desires of my soul, I had two: a Batman...
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Humanhenge — Marking Time in the Modern World
by Shane L. Larson The other morning, when she was trying to decide what to wear for the day, my daughter said to me, “Is it cold outside?” Then, without missing a beat, she says “Never mind,” and...
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Gravity does the talking
by Shane L. Larson Obi-wan Kenobi, in perhaps one of the most famous utterances in cinematic history, claimed that the Force “is an energy field, created by all living things. It surrounds us, it...
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The Far Side of the Sky
by Shane L. Larson I grew up in the Rocky Mountains and the American West, from Colorado to Oregon to Montana. Since the earliest days of my youth, I’ve been an explorer of sorts. When I was growing...
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A Window Looking Home
by Shane L. Larson For the past week, I have been trundling westward across America, from my home in Illinois to the forests of my youth, high in the mountains of Oregon. Tomorrow, I’ll arrive at...
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Improbable, Awesome Pictures
by Shane L. Larson A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, was grousing about last month’s enormously successful “Wave at Saturn” campaign. “WTF? It’s not like Cassini will see any of us in the...
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A Rant Among Friends
by Shane L. Larson <rant> When you grow up and get a job, there is inevitably a Saturday night when you are talking on the phone with your mom, or enjoying a glass of Chianti with your date, and...
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The Man I Called Doc
by Shane L. Larson I think the Universe is trying to tell me something. I was looking through one of my old papers, working on a new paper with a graduate student I know, and a random mouse-click in a...
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The Perilous Journey of Comet ISON
by Shane L. Larson In the vast dark past Pluto, the fringes of the solar system are a deep freeze filled with a trillion fragments of ice and rock, the left-over detritus from the formation of the Sun...
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Scientific Selfies
by Shane L. Larson One of the great pleasures of my life is going to scientific conferences. I love sitting through talks, listening to my colleagues weave tales of things I’ve never thought about...
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Cosmos 0: It’s Time to Get Going Again
by Shane L. Larson At midnight on a December night in 2001, I waited breathlessly in a darkened theatre in Los Angeles, surrounded by my friends from Caltech, for the world premiere of Peter Jackson’s...
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Cosmos 1: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
by Shane L. Larson The surface of the Earth is the shore of the Cosmic Ocean. What a poetic and evocative turn of phrase. Lying in the grass of my backyard under the cathedral of night, the diaphanous...
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Cosmos 2: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue
by Shane L. Larson Humanity is simultaneously blessed and cursed with one of the most ingenious creations of Nature: our imaginations. Our brains have developed not just to run our bodies, and not...
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Cosmos 3: Harmony of the Worlds
by Shane L. Larson People often ask me why I became a physicist. I often respond with stories about my great mentors (some of whom I’ve written about, like Doc or David Griffiths). But more often than...
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Cosmos 4: Heaven and Hell
by Shane L. Larson I am writing this on the 45th anniversary of one of the most iconic photographs of the Space Age. As Bill Anders, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell rounded the far side of the Moon, after...
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Cosmos 5: Blues for a Red Planet
by Shane L. Larson More than any other world in the solar system, Mars has captured the imagination of the human race (except maybe for Pluto, but it’s not a planet, right?). Mars has dominated our...
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Cosmos 6: Travellers’ Tales
by Shane L. Larson Sitting at the gate at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, staring at the thousands of other people around me, I am struck by how remarkably connected the modern world is. I’m...
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Cosmos 7: The Backbone of Night
by Shane L. Larson Science is a powerful method to know the world. Without science, the Cosmos would be an impenetrable mystery to us; we would live our lives without the benefit of knowing how to make...
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Cosmos 8: Journeys in Space and Time
by Shane L. Larson When I was a kid, I wanted to be one of four things when I grew up: an astronaut, Captain Kirk, Carl Sagan, or Indiana Jones. Now that I am (almost) grown up, it seems my chances of...
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Cosmos 9: The Lives of the Stars
by Shane L. Larson A distant memory is anchored in my mind of a warm fall afternoon shortly after I started college. I was sitting in a musty old university classroom, in a battered wood and steel desk...
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