An astrophysicist's tribute to Stephen Hawking

"His passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake. But it's not empty. Think of it as a kind of vacuum energy permeating the fabric of spacetime that defies measure. Stephen Hawking, RIP 1942-2018." ~~ Neil deGrasse Tyson on Twitter

Quote for the day, for the scientists among us

From an article on Ernest Rutherford:

"That same year, he was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Science Scholarship, enabling him to go to Trinity College at the University of Cambridge as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory under J.J. Thomson. There, he briefly held the world record for the distance over which wireless waves were detected. During the investigation of radioactivity, he coined the terms alpha, beta and gamma rays. In 1897, Rutherford was awarded his B.A. Research Degree and the Coutts-Trotter Studentship of Trinity College.

"When the Macdonald Chair of Physics at McGill University in Montreal became vacant in 1898, Rutherford left for Canada to take up the post. There, he did the work that gained him the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, demonstrating that radioactivity was the spontaneous disintegration of atoms. This is ironic given his famous remark, 'In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.'"

Article found at AtomicArchive.com.

How homeschoolers do things: science at home

Check out the blog At Home Science for some very keen experiments and book ideas. Many of the recent posts are drawn from studies in one of Paul Fleisher's Secrets of the Universe volumes.

(Thanks to the Ambleside Online list member who pointed this blog out!)