A few weeks back my son asked me to explain the redshift, and I discovered I could not! Having started with the usual comparison to the Doppler effect in the sound waves of a train or siren, it suddenly occurred to me there was no correspondent to the collection of air molecules the sound wave […]

Since my last post there has been much investigation of other people’s thinking along these lines, including even some math background. I realized that my attempt to start with zero dimensional points was leading to the anathema of infinities that have plagued quantum mechanics for a long time. The universe is apparently 13.7 billion years […]

The last attempt at this discussion started with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle already in play. But that presupposes too much. Instead, I’d like to take a common saying of my teenage son as a starting point: “Dad, I’m bored.” Now I think he is asking for coaching about how to discover more interesting things, which […]

In the pool last night, one of my friends made a comment about reversing entropy.  Which led me to tell him about the article I had just read about Stephen Hawking’s recent efforts. Hawking made a bet with Kip Thorne, if you recall, against John Preskill of CalTech that information could not leak out of […]