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9abea30
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"In 2002, having spent more than three years in one residence for the first time in my life, I got called for jury duty. I show up on time, ready to serve. When we get to the voir dire, the lawyer says to me, "I see you're an astrophysicist. What's that?" I answer, "Astrophysics is the laws of physics, applied to the universe--the Big Bang, black holes, that sort of thing." Then he asks, "What do you teach at Princeton?" and I say, "I teach a class on the evaluation of evidence and the relative unreliability of eyewitness testimony." Five minutes later, I'm on the street. A few years later, jury duty again. The judge states that the defendant is charged with possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine. It was found on his body, he was arrested, and he is now on trial. This time, after the Q&A is over, the judge asks us whether there are any questions we'd like to ask the court, and I say, "Yes, Your Honor. Why did you say he was in possession of 1,700 milligrams of cocaine? That equals 1.7 grams. The 'thousand' cancels with the 'milli-' and you get 1.7 grams, which is less than the weight of a dime." Again I'm out on the street."
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universe
science
eyewitness
jury-duty
voir-dire
astrophysics
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Neil deGrasse Tyson |
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5f2815b
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We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out--and we have only just begun.
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science
astrophysics
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Neil deGrasse Tyson |
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b219cef
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People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the universe.
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science
astrophysics
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Neil deGrasse Tyson |
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66b860f
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Professor Napier and his colleague Victor Clube, formerly dean of the Astrophysics Department at Oxford University, go so far as to describe the 'unique complex of debris' within the Taurid stream as 'the greatest collision hazard facing the earth at the present time.' Coordination of their findings with those of Allen West, Jim Kennett, and Richard Firestone, as led both teams--the geophysicists and the astronomers--to conclude that it was very likely objects from the then much younger Taurid meteor stream that hit the earth around 12,800 years ago and caused the onset of the Younger Dryas. These objects, orders of magnitude larger than the one that exploded over Tunguska, contained extraterrestrial platinum, and what the evidence from the Greenland ice cores seems to indicate is an epoch of 21 years in which the earth was hit , with the bombardments increasing annually in intensity until the fourteenth year, when they peaked and then began to decline before ceasing in the twenty-first year.
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astrophysics
bombardments
collision-hazard
geophysics
taurid-stream
epoch
younger-dryas
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Graham Hancock |
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c333b9b
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Proof of the beginning of time probably ranks as the most theologically significant theorem. This great significance arises from the theorem establishing that the universe must be caused by some Entity capable of creating the universe entirely independent of space and time. Such an entity matches the attributes of the God of the Bible but is contradicted by the gods of the eastern (and indeed all other) religions who create within space and time.
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religion
science
god
astrophysics
big-bang
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Hugh Ross |