Science

Get Lit: Weird Science – American Writers Museum – Nov. 10, 2026

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I hadn’t been to one of the Museum’s monthly happy hours in over a year but Weird Science seemed like a good excuse to go.

Unfortunately they didn’t have a poster from the movie of the same name, although one of the questions in the trivia contest did reference it. My ragamuffin team, composed of four total strangers, got that one right on its way to a second place finish in a jam-packed room. My contribution was to nod in agreement a few times and more frequently say, I have no idea, never heard of it.

I did better at the jeopardy-like exhibit featuring five categories, all related to robots, where I was surprisingly good at guessing answers correctly, even though none of them were Robby the Robot.

I skipped the specialty cocktail unappetizingly called The Goo and the place where you could create your own binary-code bracelet, whatever that meant, but gave in to the quantum entanglement demonstration, though it involved a Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering person sitting back-to-back with me, as opposed to being on the other side of the universe, so not as impressive as it might otherwise be.

On Second Thought

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In 1965 the Doomsday Clock (not to be confused with the Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove) was set at 12 minutes to midnight by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which seemed precarious when you considered that the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old, give or take a few million years – something to do with the Lambda CDM (not a music storage device) and the Hubble constant, a measure of cosmic expansion.

That same year Hedgehoppers Anonymous released a song entitled It’s Good News Week, which, of course, it wasn’t, though everything’s relative, a theory that eventually led to the Hubble constant.

Today, the Doomsday Clock was set at 89 seconds (less time than it takes for me to whip up some instant oatmeal) to midnight — the closest to that hour it has ever been. We should be so proud.

According to a Bulletin spokesman: “We set the clock closer to midnight [only by one second from where it was] because we do not see sufficient, positive progress on the global challenges we face, including nuclear risk, climate change, biological threats and advances in disruptive technologies.” This is much the same as they said last year, when they did not move the clock. I wonder what changed.

Since there are 31,556,952,000,000,000 (that’s 31.55 quadrillion for those of you wondering) seconds in a billion years, that one second seems rather infinitesimal, particularly when you compare it to the five hundred twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes that helped Rent win the Tony for best original score in 1996.

Take a second and think about it.

Solar Eclipse – April 8, 2024

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It was August 21, 2017 when I saw my last partial solar eclipse, which, thanks to the cloud cover that day, turned out to be the most boring four minutes of my life, not counting a short blind date I went out on in college.

I saw a total eclipse in the movie A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. That one at least had Bing Crosby.

I also should mention that I saw a total lunar eclipse some time after midnight on December 30, 1982. I was by myself on a beach in California and mostly it was just dark, so if I needed an alibi for some reason, I was out of luck.

This time, instead of trucking down to the Adler Planetarium as I did last time for an experience that reminded me of the people in Independence Day gathered on a Los Angeles skyscraper rooftop to welcome the extraterrestrials right before, oops, the carnage began, I decided to head for the park across the street for today’s cloudless 94% experience.

It was a good-sized crowd, many of whom appeared to be enjoying any excuse not to be at work. I was prepared to avoid looking at the sun, but someone shared their Eclipse Shades, so I partook.

As anticipated, there was a diminution of bird chatter for a few minutes at the height of the event, along with a chill breeze that felt like the draft in a haunted castle when Count Dracula enters, which made sense given the somewhat darkened skies.

Lego Earth Day – February 22, 2023

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In placing the final tile, I beat the April 22nd anniversary of Earth Day by two months, though, interestingly enough, if you go to the extensive website at earthday.org you can’t find that date mentioned anywhere, which I guess is their way of saying that every day is Earth Day.

And, by the way, I constructed the whole thing, including the globe and stand, despite numerous 21st century distractions, in less than the proverbial six days, when there was no streaming internet, just saying.

Noting that great power comes with great responsibility, I am taking special care in regard to my creation, lest it meet the same fateful path as its biblical inspiration. So, in an effort to reduce the possibility of Lego global warming, my first act is to light it only with LED bulbs.

Second, because a new study, published recently in Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, shows that global atmospheric dust has a slight overall cooling effect on the planet, I’ve stopped dusting and vacuuming.

Third, I am cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions in my home, which means not only restricting use of gas appliances, but also only exhaling once a day. Due to all the dust accumulating since invoking the rule above, this isn’t a problem, as I now only chance inhaling once a day also.

If all else fails, I’ve placed my earth in close proximity to possible escape vehicles.

A Scientist (Dr. Mika Tosca) Walks into a Bar – The Hideout – September 14, 2021

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Professor and climate scientist, Dr. Mika Tosca, walked into the bar (well, really the outdoor patio of the bar) and kept talking as long as it took her to redeem the three drink tickets evidently provided to her by the establishment for her appearance. And they say teachers are underpaid.

A self-described rambler, Tosca, touched upon jet streams, jet travel, polar vortexes, hurricanes, wildfires, the ozone layer, particulates in the troposphere, and the Impossible Whopper, while noting that she prefers the term global warming to climate change because it sounds scarier.

Though Tosca, who works at the School of the Art Institute, optimistically explained how artists can generate a new vision of the future that can inspire change in the face of our present-day challenges, she also threw in the word apocalypse about a dozen times.

And, unfortunately, she didn’t offer any grand solutions, consistent with her suggestion that scientists aren’t very creative. But she did let us know where, online, we could see thermal camera videos of people farting.

A Scientist Walks into a Bar – The Hideout – July 13, 2021

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March 10, 2020 was the last time I walked into the bar at The Hideout to hear a scientist. That time the room was jammed and I was attending events at one venue or another a few times a week. This time I sat outside, with a smattering of others, had to show proof of vaccination, and none of those other venues have reopened yet.

So I was excited to hear someone talk about meteorites. You take when you can get.

Maria Valdes has a PhD in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry, which I didn’t even know existed, and is the Robert A. Pritzker Curator for Meteoritics and Polar Studies at the Filed Museum. We have so much in common. Her earliest ambition was to be a dentist. I have a dentist. As a child, she went to DNA camp. I never went to camp, but I have DNA. Her specialty is calcium isotopes. I drink milk.

She’s going on a trip to Antarctica to search for micrometeorites, because, although they’re all around us, about 5,200 metric tons of them falling to the Earth every year (she says some would probably fall out of your hair if you shook your head), they’re easier to find where they stand out against the ice and snow.

She has held in her hands, to show to bored museum donors, a part of the Black Beauty meteorite, original weight 319.8 grams, found in 2011 in the Sahara Desert, and, as of 2018, having a sales price of $10,000 per gram. I think I’ll go shake my head and see what falls out.

Intermission

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I’m taking a break this afternoon from constructing the grand piano in order to watch a live broadcast by NASA of the Perseverance Mars Rover landing. I’m a little skeptical about this event. After all, the there hasn’t been a mail delivery to my building in almost a week.

If they can’t get through a little snow and find my building, why should I believe that this supposed vehicle (probably just a LEGO in someone’s back yard) can travel 204 days at 12,500 miles per hour through space, avoiding whatever dangers may await them there (including, but not limited to an alien probe searching for humpback whales on earth), jettison unnecessary parts as it approaches Mars, deploy a 70-foot, 100-pound, supersonic parachute, compare onboard maps to photos of the surface in order to look for a safe landing spot (where are those self-driving cars they’ve been promising us?), ignite retrorockets, land on a dime, and then use that dime to call home to let everyone knows it’s okay, before starting to look for a 7-Eleven.