Orts #956
If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely; if we didn’t think of spring in winter, or search winter to find some new emotion of its own to make up for the absent ones, half of the keyboard of life would be missing. We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no black keys.
-- Adam Gopnik, in one of his talks in the CBC's 2011 Massey Lectures series
Cherry blossoms, pretty and frothy as schoolgirls’ giggles, are the face the country [Japan] likes to present to the world, all pink and white eroticism; but it’s the reddening of the maple leaves under a blaze of ceramic-blue skies that is the place’s secret heart. We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty.
-- Pico Iyer, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells
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Can a star be older than the universe?
or, the Ripples in the Fabric of Space and Time Created by Pairs of Dead Stars
“A higher value for the Hubble Constant indicates a shorter age for the universe. A constant of 67.74 km per second per megaparsec would lead to an age of 13.8 billion years, whereas one of 73, or even as high as 77 as some studies have shown, would indicate a universe age no greater than 12.7 billion years.”
the bottom line:
“New research into gravitational waves could help to resolve the paradox . . . . To do this, scientists would look at the ripples in the fabric of space and time created by pairs of dead stars, rather than relying on the cosmic microwave background or the monitoring of nearby objects such as Cepheid variables and supernovae to measure the Hubble Constant .”