The unsavory afterlife of his 1975 story clearly has not soured his journalistic fervor. “I’ve been able to write for a lot of different audiences, physicists, engineers and the general public,” Gwynne said. “I’ve been willing to accept that some of that is misused and misinterpreted.” His April 28, 1975 piece has been used by Forbes as evidence of what the magazine called “The Fiction of Climate Science.” It has been set to music on a YouTube video. It has popped up in a slew of finger-wagging blogs and websites dedicated to everything from climate denial to one puzzling circuit of logic entitled “Impeach Obama, McCain and Boehner Today.”
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In 2012, Alexander and colleagues concluded in the journalSciencethat the bulk of Earth’s water arrived via bodies similar to a class of meteorites known as CI carbonaceous chondrites. Researchers think that these meteorites, which were knocked off asteroids that formed beyond Jupiter, are among the oldest objects in the solar system. Along with Earth, a couple of dwarf planets and several moons have shown evidence of water, in one form or another.
NASA’s first look at a sample from asteroid Bennu reveals life’s building blocks
There are both reductionist and holistic approaches to Earth sciences. The formal discipline of Earth sciences may include the study of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere, as well as the solid earth. Typically Earth scientists will use tools from physics, chemistry, biology, geography, chronology and mathematics to build a quantitative understanding of how the Earth system works, and how it evolved to its current state. Different parts of the process of science may be carried out by different people at different times. Positivist social scientists use methods resembling those of the natural sciences as tools for understanding society, and so define science in its stricter modern sense. Interpretivist social scientists, by contrast, may use social critique or symbolic interpretation rather than constructing empirically falsifiable theories.
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This article originally appeared at The Daily Climate, the climate change news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a non-profit media company. He remains the North American correspondent for Physics World, based in England, from which perspective he views the “weird and wonderful” American relationship with science.
Unlike other branches, the formal sciences are not concerned with the validity of theories based on observations in the real world , but rather with the properties of formal systems based on definitions and rules. Hence there is disagreement on whether the formal sciences actually constitute as a science.
Interestingly, astrophysicists armed with powerful telescopes possess a unique form of time travel. As they peer into the vast expanse of the cosmos, they gaze into the past universe. Light from all galaxies and stars takes time to travel, and these beams of light carry information from the distant past. When astrophysicists observe a star or a galaxy through a telescope, they are not seeing it as it is in the present, but as it existed when the light began its journey to Earth millions to billions of years ago. People have yet to build spaceships that can move at speeds anywhere near as fast as light, but astronauts who visit the International Space Station orbit around the Earth at speeds close to 17,500 mph. Astronaut Scott Kelly has spent 520 days at the International Space Station, and as a result has aged a little more slowly than his twin brother – and fellow astronaut – Mark Kelly. Now, because Scott was traveling so much faster than Mark and for so many days, he is 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds younger.
