In preparation for the 2014 USA Science and Engineering Festival (Washington, DC), I wrote a post on five amazing science ideas for the Huffington Post. It looks nicer on their site, but here’s the text below: Five Science Thoughts to Blow Your Mind Jeffrey Bennett I’m very excited to be presenting at the 2014 […]
A lot of people have been asking me about the discovery announced this week about cosmic inflation. As I mentioned in my recent news post, you can find many good articles about it, and one of my favorites is this one from Phil Plait. Still, I realized that most people need a little more explanation […]
This post originally appeared on the Columbia University Press Blog. Black holes don’t suck. It’s a point I’ve emphasized to students for decades, and I even considered it as a possible title for my book at one point. So why, then, do so many people assume that a spaceship passing near a black hole would […]
I was recently asked to answer a series of questions about What is Relativity?, so I’ve posted the Q&A set below. For additional information about the book, please see book web page. 1. Your book is titled “What is Relativity?” Ok, then, so what is it? Nearly everyone has heard of Einstein’s theory of relativity, […]
Astronaut Alvin Drew, who co-founded the Story Time From Space program with Patricia Tribe, was interviewed about the origins of the program for the NASA TV show “Space Station Live.” Here’s the video.
Note: The release below was pre-launch. The Orbital 1 mission carrying the books launched successfully on January 9, and the books will be read by the astronauts some time in the next few months. For updates on the program status, please “like” the Story Time From Space page on Facebook. And to read about Max’s […]
For those of you who use (or may be interested in using) my college textbooks, we have recently completed new editions of four of my books: The Cosmic Perspective, 7th Edition: This is the full version of the introductory astronomy textbook that I write with Megan Donahue, Nick Schneider, and Mark Voit, designed primarily for […]
Note: An illustrated version of this article, with a list of additional teaching resources, was published as the Fall 2013 issue of The Universe in the Classroom (PDF). Gravity plays a starring role in the new movie of the same title, but it’s not the role that most people think. Before I explain, let me […]
I was recently asked to answer a series of questions about Math for Life, so I’ve posted the Q&A set below. For additional information about the book, please see the Math for Life web site. 1. How is “math for life” different than the math we learned in school? A: There’s math involved in virtually […]
Originally posted at Earth Protect. “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” — H.G. Wells, The Outline of History, 1920 There may be no better illustration of the sentiment in the H.G. Wells quotation than that which we find in the issue of climate change, aka global warming. The evidence […]
