I'm reading Contact by Carl Sagan right now and my heart kept fluttering as I read this article.
I'm unqualified to comment on anything in this article, but this is really cool, and I didn't know Wired produced science journalism (or a highly technical Q/A) like this.
Carl Sagan is mentioned in the article. He was quite a treasure. He came by our dorm once for conversation and dinner. The conversation was about whether life could be based on silicon rather than oxygen. I.e. living rocks! Very fun.
An amazing song and science mash-up featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye. I've listened to this ten times on my iPod today.
There are a few other tracks, but this is my favorite.
I totally back the scientists and wish I could understand it better but I always like to have a chuckle that the crazy sounding parts are just the scientists making up stuff
That's indeed fantastic. It also gave me perspective on something: the reasons there are so many interactions is because of the number of collisions: a water molecule will collide 10^14 times in a second. Mind-boggling stuff.
I can't tell whether you're referencing a movie or talking about some interesting fringe science. If the latter, do you have any recommendations of papers I should check out?
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