Who'd a Thunk it?

Einstein did. That's who.

For years, I taught Hamlet, itself a sublime human achievement, in which Hamlet opines, "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!"

I thought of that speech (without Hamlet's cynicism) this morning when I read that the LIGO team had heard what the New York Times called "a cosmic chirp [that] vindicates Einstein."

  

Elsewhere in today's paper, Lawrence M. Krauss wrote, "Too often people ask, what's the use of science like this, if it doesn't produced faster cars or better toasters. But people rarely ask the same question about a Picasso painting or a Mozart symphony. Such pinnacles of human creativity change our perspective of our place in the universe. Science, like art, music and literature, has the capacity to amaze and excite, dazzle and bewilder. I would argue that it is that aspect of science -- it cultural contribution, its humanity -- that is perhaps its most important feature."

Count me among those who doesn't ask the use. Science is amazing, and this "music" is dazzling.

Unexpected Death: One Known, Many Unknown

"If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be." -- Hamlet, V:ii:207-211.

Space Music

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (William Shakespeare's Hamlet)

Indeed.

Space sings.

Who knew?

Not I.

And on a gray cold wet day, listening provides heavenly comfort.

Senior Prank

The McGehee Class of 1996 reduced me to uncontrollable laughter with their clever senior prank. When I opened my classroom door one May morning, I found this vignette.
Ophelia never looked so good, especially drowned in a polluted Thoreauvian pond.

I thanked those girls then and I thank those women now.