Janna Levin
@JannaLevin
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Astrophysicist. Author. Professor Barnard/Columbia. Labors of Love: Founded Sciences, Pioneer Works. Founding editor-in-chief Broadcast. co-host The Joy of Why.
New York City
Joined March 2013
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Our black hole, Sag A*. 4 million times the mass of the sun yet only 20 times the width and 26,000 light years away at the center of the Milky Way. Nice to see you friend.
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Nothing is Impossible! No really, "nothing" is impossible. According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, if you cannot say for certain a particle is precisely there, you cannot say for certain it is not there. Even the quantum vacuum is not empty.
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Happy 80th Birthday Richard Dawkins! See another side to this iconic scientist as Dawkins reads his hate mail during his most recent conversation
@PioneerWorks_
to tears of laughter and horror. I’ll duck for cover now...We send with love
@RichardDawkins
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Here is our familiar Jupiter. And here is Jupiter in the infrared as seen by
@NASAWebb
. The observation took about 75 seconds.
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Do you think it’s a coincidence that a simplified version of electromagnetism emerges from a compactified (4+1) dimensional universe? Maybe coincidence isn’t the right word. It’s intriguing. But maybe not significant?
One of the strangest coincidences in physics is the fact that Newtonian fluid dynamics in three dimensions is exactly equivalent to a scalar field theory in FOUR dimensions, with a Lorentzian signature metric. I know of no intuitive reason for this to be true, but it is.
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When two black holes merge, the event is gravitationally powerful, but dark. When neutron stars collide, that's something else entirely.
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A black hole event horizon can steal a particle in the pair that fluctuated out of empty space, leaving the other without a partner to neutralize its charges. The exposed particle cannot therefore return to near nothingness and is stuck in reality. Meet Hawking radiation
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Maxwell revealed electricity & magnetism as manifestations of 1 force. A century on, Steven Weinberg, with Glashow & Salam, won the Nobel for proving electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are facets of a single law of physics, inspiring searches for a theory of everything
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Faraday’s Law. Magnetic Fields levitating a lightbulb and turning it on. We use a similar principle to imagine lighting up a black hole and highly magnetized neutron star
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An event horizon is an empty shadow. Event Horizon Telescope looks for hot material thrown around by the black hole to see the shadow in contrast. The more active the black hole, the more dramatic the scene. Simulation from EHT. Tomorrow, the real thing. Woa.
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Isidor Isaac Rabi, Nobel Laureate in physics, relayed the story that his mom wouldn't ask him, "What did you learn in school today?" Instead, she would say, "Did you ask a good question today?"
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Richard Dawkins, like Leon Lederman, manages to offend two groups. (Dawkins reminds us of the bumper sticker "Blasphemy is a victimless crime.") He also seems to be warmly received by those in the middle. Wherever you land, welcome to our conversation:
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By yours truly: "The Drawing That Earned Sir Roger Penrose a Nobel Prize". Picture This is a new column for The Broadcast in which scientists describe the power of drawings.
@pioneerworks_
#BlackHoles
#NobelPrize
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Indeed it is. And our supermassive black holes will merge. Likely our solar system will not be disrupted and will be on some new possibly crazy orbit around the central black hole behemoth. Fun.
Look out! The Andromeda galaxy is on a collision course heading towards the Milky Way at 110 km per second!!
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Sam Harris argues that there is no illusion of free will. The illusion is an illusion. Sam collects his thoughts on the subject in one gorgeous monologue animated by artist
@annapurnakumar
for The Broadcast
@SamHarrisOrg
@PioneerWorks_
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We have never seen a black hole. Black holes are incredibly small for their heft. Dark against a dark backdrop. 4/10 EHT holds a press conference to announce results using global observatories = to a telescope as big as planet Earth. Guess who's going to the National Press Club
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The theory of relativity could have been called the theory of absolutism for its unyielding adherence to the absolute speed of light. That’s the starting principle. The relativism of space&time is the consequence.
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“3 years ago today, the world saw the first photograph of a black hole…a small black dot right in the middle of the giant galaxy M87” - Joe Patterson in Big Apple Sky Calendar. via
@PioneerWorks_
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This beautiful man turned 90. Nobel Laureate Rai Weiss won the prize for the hard earned recording of waves in the shape of spacetime emitted in the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. The most powerful event detected since the Big Bang «
#BlackHoleBlues
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Speaking of pulsars: ‘The Crab Nebula is the remnant of the July 4, 1054 supernova explosion. Virginia Trimble, famous for her quick wit and insightful astrophysics, found that the nebula is rapidly expanding such that it must have originated from a single point around the year
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There is a big announcement from Event Horizon Telescope planned for Thursday about our very own Milky Way galaxy. Have they seen Sag A*, the black hole we orbit that is 4 million times the mass of the sun, 30 times the radius, and 26,000 light years away? Stay tuned
@ehtelescope
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From hopeless but pretty calculations in pen on paper to an actual image of the black hole ray gun. Amazing
@ehtelescope
team! “The Most Intimate Portrait Yet of a Black Hole”
@overbye
@NYTScience
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The radical supposition that the speed of light is a fixed cosmic limit-never slower, never faster, never zero-is a direct consequence of Maxwell's unification of electromagnetism. The speed of light is set by the strength of the electric & magnetic forces. It's a fact of nature
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Our NOVA film, Black Hole Apocalypse, was nominated for an Emmy for the script. Woohoo. Very hard for science shows to break through. Awesome team
@novapbs
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“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” Oscar Wilde
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July 4, 1054. ‘The traditional date for the appearance of the most famous supernova in history…a very bright “guest star” appeared suddenly and was visible across Asia in daylight for 23 days & in the night sky for over a year. It must have been amazing to stargazers
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The smallest black hole conceivable would be about 10 million trillion times heavier than a proton and hundreds of millions of trillions of times smaller. The only limit to the largest black holes imaginable would be the size of the observable universe.
@JannaLevin
@YouTube
@PioneerWorks_
Is there a minimum and/or a maximum size a black hole is or can be?
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The ‘God Particle’ —aka the Higgs particle—was discovered a dozen years ago this month. The sensational name was inadvertently coined by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman, who wanted to title his book “The Goddamn Particle” as an expression of frustration that the elusive Higgs had
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If you are still trying to grasp the big picture story of the recent announcement on supermassive black holes and their gravitational waves, here is a concise video explainer from the
@NANOGrav
+ team. This was shown during the press conference...
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“I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.” – Arthur C. Clarke
The stars in constellations are not actually proximate to each other in the galaxy. The impression of a meaningful pattern is just due to our lack of depth perception. A metaphor for life.
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Be among the first humans to see a black hole. The livestream of the announcement here at 9am: “Exploring Black Holes”
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No better way to spend the eve of the eclipse than with my pals
@neiltyson
@StarTalkRadio
@chucknicecomic
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When asked to attend a 9am meeting, the legendary physicist and professor Sidney Coleman purportedly said, "I can't stay up that late."
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ICYMI
Astrophysicist Janna Levin, PhD, is asked to explain black holes to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert.
@JannaLevin
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Be amazed. Sy's story on The Broadcast reminded me of this incredible video, courtesy Roger Hanlon
@camouGuy
.
@SyTheAuthor
@PioneerWorks_
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Incredible. Exoplanets are detected in many indirect ways, their presence inferred by transient partial eclipses of their suns. But an actual resolved image of another multi-planet solar system…literally otherworldly.
First ever image of another multi-planet solar system captured by ESO Telescope
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This is a mathematical model of the view inside a black hole as the light from the galaxy crushes down on you. Black holes are dark on the outside. But can be bright on the inside.
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It's not Sagittarius A*! It's M87! Sagittarius A* is the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. The image they've shown us is the supermassive black hole in a neighboring galaxy M87, 55 million light years away. Wow people. Wow. A better image to follow...
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The point that you imagined to be the spatial center of a black hole is not a point in space at all but a moment in time. The event horizon exists only in your past. The singularity exists only in your future. There is no turning back
#BlackHoles
#BlackHoleSurvivalGuide
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It’s a gift that the limit of the speed of light allows us to look into the past. If we see light that travelled billions of light-years, we are seeing billions of years into the past. You can only ever see into the past, even if you are looking at the person next to you.
@JannaLevin
I was curious. Light takes X amount of time to travel to earth. If we had a futuristic sci-fi mega telescope that could see millions of light years away, would we be viewing events live or events that have already occurred? Sorry, super random thought lol
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Not zero
Here's the approximate probability of all the air molecules in your room going to the corner at one moment due to random motions
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The Mushroom Hunters: Neil Gaiman's Feminist Poem About Science, Read by Amanda Palmer via
@brainpicker
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Musing about whether or not alien Life would develop eyes. If they do, their light detectors would be tuned to the spectrum of their star. So not likely the same range we see. Now I’m wondering if therefore we’d be invisible to each other.
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There are people who think my name is Jan-11
I don’t understand how I have been on this planet for so long and this is the first time this has ever happened to me
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Wormholes could connect your quantum bits inside the hole to outside. You will perish. But your information would escape, used to reconstruct you. The extermination of your information was a ruse, your own death reversible
#BlackHoles
#BlackHoleSurvivalGuide
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Black holes can be bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. Like Doctor Who’s TARDIS. There could be a whole other universe inside that hole.
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If the Earth was tidally locked to the sun, would you rather live on the dark side that is always night or the bright side that is always day? Only the extravagantly wealthy can afford to live near the terminus with their bedrooms on the dark side & their pools on the bright side
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Watch Tonight’s Partial Lunar Eclipse, the Longest in 580 Years
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Hey Astro friends. Anyone else suspect that this newly observed teeny 3 solar mass black hole is actually a neutron star?
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Kip Thorne just described the gravitational waves from a collision of two black holes as a "storm in the geometry of spacetime." Perfect
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Finally got myself out of the quarantine hole and started doing this again. Sign of sanity or insanity?
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How very dreamy that would be. One day on the subcontinent I hope...
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At Feynman 100 with friend, creative genius, inspired scientist, one of the 2017 recipients of the Nobel Prize, creator of the film Interstellar, and all around Great. Human. Kip Thorne.
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As a brutal atheist, I admire the electro mechanics that has led to thought. And I feel there’s a place, scientifically, to revamp the notion of a soul. Every configuration of neurons is unique and we undeniably know a person when we see one
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Black holes are the darkest phenomena in the universe. They emit no light and reflect no light. Dark against a dark backdrop, they are nearly impossible to see. Ironically, they power the brightest beacons in the universe if clad in debris.
@novapbs
#BlackHoles
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We orbit this supermassive black hole as surely as we orbit the Sun. Behold Sagittarius A*, so named since the black hole appears beyond our line of sight to the constellation Sagittarius. The supermassive black hole is an electromagnetic power station.
Breaking news: the Event Horizon Telescope team unveils strong magnetic fields spiraling at the edge of Milky Way’s central black hole, Sagittarius A*. This new image suggests that strong magnetic fields may be common to all black holes.
#OurBlackHole
#SgrABlackHole
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I’d love to see footage of a flat Earther sailing off the edge.
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In that spirit, I offer this: a galaxy 50 million light-years away where sentient beings may well be living out their own complicated stories of love and loss while capturing images on our Milky Way and wondering if they're alone.
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Such a pleasure to introduce mathematical greats: Sir Roger Penrose and Jim Simons. I adore them both.There was a moment of reverence when they went to take their seats and express mutual respect. Yeah, mercifully, the photographer got photos without me goofing in the background.
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My father wrote a book of stories about his life (for the family only). The inscription to me reads: « Dear Janna, you were the third and the easiest, so we let you grow free…That sure turned out like a miracle. Love you forever, Papa » Lucky me to have such a dad.
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Heavy stars burn fast and hot. Thank them for casting their heavy elements out in the universe so we can come along with all our Carbon and Oxygen and build instruments like
@NASAWebb
coated in gold to look at them
@CNNThisMorning
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“We are all in the gutter. But some of us are looking at the stars. “Oscar Wilde
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Dark Matter particles exist and are observed. Just think neutrinos raining down from the Sun. They are dark, by which I really mean invisible. However, they do not have mass and abundances in the right range to explain THE Dark Matter that amounts to a quarter of the Universe.
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Black holes are dark and silent against a dark and silent space, unless provoked. They can be smaller than cities or as big as solar systems &, when antagonized, will drive magnetic storms more luminous than all the stars in the galaxy combined
#BlackHoles
#BlackHoleSurvivalGuide
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Glance up at Orion now and then, just in case a red supergiant in the shoulder of the constellation, Betelgeuse, explodes. Could be tonight or in 100,000 yrs. The supernova will be visible by day with a brightness comparable to the full moon's
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Thanks to Lia Halloran's paintings and the talented designers
@AAKnopf
, Black Hole Survival Guide is a beautiful little object.
#BlackHoles
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Supermassive black holes merge, banging on the drum of spacetime to ring out gravitational waves in a register too low for
@LIGO
detect. Naturally occurring arrays of pulsars scattered throughout the galaxy wobble slightly as the waves pass, which alters the timing of their
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How is it not obvious to everyone that all of our lives would be better in an equitable society?
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"Congratulations to the Moon today: it’s very difficult to squeeze 2 new moons into a month. In apparent celebration of this rare feat, there will be a partial eclipse of the Sun today. But just barely—the shadow just grazes the Earth over southern Chile and Argentina." - Joe
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You can exploit a black hole to travel to the future, just not your future.
#BlackHoles
#BlackHoleSurvivalGuide
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I am also reminded of Steven Weinberg’s conclusion in his genre-defining book, The First Three Minutes: “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” Yet beautiful to behold all the same.
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Thank you Quanta for inviting me to write about the announcement. And for publishing a better picture of our new hero Messier 87.
What does it mean to an astrophysicist to see the first-ever image of a black hole? What does it mean to humanity? Black hole researcher
@jannalevin
reflects:
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Ironically, the darkest phenomenon in the known universe becomes the brightest beacon. Black Holes throw debris into twisted magnetic fields powering lethal jets millions of light-years across. This clip is from our NOVA film Black Hole Apocalypse. (on Netflix, seriously.)
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Here’s my latest attempt: The faster you move through another observer’s space, the slower you will move through their time….thoughts?
Challenge from
@JannaLevin
: Explain the concept of time dilation to a non-physicist in a snappy, very specific, accurate, and non-run-on sentence.
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An inspiration. Such a pleasure to have shared the same space and time. My heart goes out to those closest to him. "BBC News - Obituary: Stephen Hawking"
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That’s an amazing prediction relative to billion of years. Staying tuned….
NASA predicts the star T Coronae Borealis will explode into a nova anytime between now and September
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Well that’s cool. A bolt of lighting in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Planets are so different—sulfuric acid rains on Venus, gas giants and their hordes of moons. And then there are these sweet reminders of our similarities—ice (if not oceans), volcanos that put ours to shame, and now
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This looks like a sky full of stars but is actually a map of 25,000 supermassive black holes from LOFAR, the largest combined radio telescope in the world--52 stations spread over 9 different countries
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The famous physicist Sydney Coleman, when asked to attend a 9am meeting, replied "I can't stay up that late."
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The potency of humor to manage uncomfortable ideas and situations still amazes me. I feel like I can befriend anyone I can have a laugh with. Nothing funny is anodine. Humor is barbed but also opens me to empathy and compassion. Thank you Darwinian evolution for laughs.
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Every extended object is an entire galaxy. Every jeweled image with rays punching out are in fact foreground stars in our galaxy. A lot happening in this deep field image from
@NASAWebb
👀 Sneak a peek at the deepest & sharpest infrared image of the early universe ever taken — all in a day’s work for the Webb telescope. (Literally, capturing it took less than a day!) This is Webb’s first image released as we begin to
#UnfoldTheUniverse
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Is gravity real? Could time repeat on a loop? Is it a blast hanging with Neil and Chuck?
@neiltyson
@chucknicecomic
@StarTalkRadio
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Thrilled and delighted that Black Hole Survival Guide finds a place in ARTnews. So damn cool. "How an Astrophysicist and a Painter Stared Down Black Holes" via
@artnews
@PioneerWorks_
#BlackHoles
#BlackHoleSurvivalGuide
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The launch of Maria Popova's first book, Figuring, will be live streamed tomorrow night (2/8) 7pm from
@PioneerWorks_
to here: This is the single book event for Figuring. Don't miss it. I mean, that's my suggestion.
@brainpicker
#Figuring
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An endearing quote, at least to my mind, from the physicist Lenny Susskind: "Hawking is an arrogant man, very full of himself, extremely self-centered. Then again, the same is true of half the people I know, including myself." Flawed love feels real.
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There was tremendous anxiety around this stage in deployment as I remember. Woo-hoo! Though there's many stages ahead. Still charms me that both JWST and Hubble, epic engineering endeavors, look like they're covered in kitchen-quality tin foil.
#NASAWebb
’s solar array has successfully deployed, and Webb’s batteries are charging up ⚡
#UnfoldTheUniverse
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My Eye in a 4m mirror 10 m high in a lab that makes the largest mirrors in the world, including for the Giant Magellan Telescope.
@novapbs
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I always love talking to the icon that is the incomparable David Byrne. Here is our conversation on The Mind, Theater, and The Elusive Self
@aspenideas
@DBtodomundo
@aspenideas
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