Blogs / Bad Astronomy

For quite some time I have been meaning to write up something short, sweet, and pithy, explaining why saying evolution is just a theory is, well, dumb. It’s like saying the Eiffel Tower is just a tower.

But I don’t need to write it up: it’s now been done.

Evolution is not just a theory.

Short, sweet, and pithy. Referenced, too.

Best. Web. Comic. Evah.

"Home on the Strange" is about two fangeeks who turned out to be normal, yet still embrace their inner nerdity. You may understand why this might appeal to me. Plus, the Doctor Who two-parter (excerpted above) is the best thing ever ever ever. I swear the next time an evangelical comes to my door, they’ll get an earful about the man who went all about Gallifrey.

Tip o’ the TARDIS to KLCtheBookworm.

Just a few years back (well, a coupla decades) it wasn’t well understood how planets form. There were theories, sure, and the best one of the lot was that when a cloud of gas and dust collapsed (due to a collision with another cloud, or maybe the wind from a nearby star, or getting slapped around by a supernova blast), it formed a flat disk. The star formed in the center, and the planets formed farther out.

This theory has been validated many times, and astronomers now accept it as true (I’ve written about this here, here, and here, for example). In fact, we’ve gotten pretty good at finding young stars still surrounded by their disks, and Hubble is particularly good at imaging them. The disk is faint, and can generally be seen because it reflects the light from its parent star, but that star can be thousands of times brighter than the disk. Hubble is good at high-contrast objects like that; the camera I worked on for years was awesome at imaging them (I wrote about one particular star/disk combo on my Bitesize pages).

And now, just a few years into this field of science, it’s gotten to the point where we can catalog oddities; objects that make us scratch our heads and say, "What’s going on here?"

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Blog carnivals are collections of the past week’s (or so) best examples of writing in a given topic… and there are three up and running and vying for attention right now!

1. Carnival of Space
2. The Tangled Bank (science)
3. The Skeptics Circle

I have a few blog entries in there, too, but you’ve probably already read ‘em. So go take a look at everyone else!