Our Planet Seen From Saturn, Captured By The Cassini Spacecraft

A single-celled organism dying

Two Weeks in the Life of a Sunspot

On July 5, 2017, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory watched AR26665, an active region – an area of intense and complex magnetic fields – rotate into view on the sun. The satellite continued to track the region as it grew and eventually rotated across the sun and out of view on July 17.

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Enceladus and Saturn

Image credit: Gordan Ugarkovic

Retrograde motion of Mars in the night sky of the Earth.

Image Credit: Tunc Tezel

As I get older I’m finding that a lot of the “intellectuals” I used to admire are actually just condescending and pretentious. And also realizing how much more important it is to be present, considerate, and empathetic because nobody really knows what they’re talking about and anyone who claims to know everything about anything is feeding you bs.

“Math is language like English, just less commonly spoken”

— Seismology professor

The 2MASS Redshift Survey - The single most comprehensive survey of the universe… and everything that’s in it.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in  the Natural Sciences

Scholars have often expressed astonishment for how well mathematics works to describe our physical world. In 1960, Eugene Wigner published an article with the title above commenting that

…the mathematical formulation of the physicist’s often crude experience leads, in an uncanny number of cases, to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena.

Here are some others’ thoughts:

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.

— Albert Einstein

Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

— Bertrand Russell

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?

— Albert Einstein

Our physical world doesn’t have just some mathematical properties, it has only mathematical properties.

— Max Tegmark

Physicists may have fallen prey to a false dichotomy between mathematics and physics. It’s common for theoretical physicists to speak of mathematics providing a quantitative language for describing physical reality… But maybe… math is more than just a description of reality. Maybe math is reality.

— Brian Greene

More info at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences