Cosmic Yarns

 More ChatGPT madness.  Here is what it gave me when I asked it to rewrite the Brady Bunch theme song in the style of H.P. Lovecraft: The Br...

 Like many people, I've been playing around with  ChatGPT  this week.  My colleagues in the Physics Department have discovered that it c...

 For those of you who live in Nashville, I will be giving a talk as part of the "Profs and Pints" series (yes, that's academic...

Jim Peebles was awarded half of this year's prize for his foundational contributions to cosmology.  I've known him for 40 years -- h...

David Brin (author of, among others, The Postman, Kiln People, and the Uplift series), will be giving a special colloquium in the Department...

I have a guest blog post about the origins of "Portle" out at the Analog website. You can read it  here .

My short story, "Portle", has just appeared in the July/August issue of  Analog .  I'll have a blog post about the story at th...

Well, does it? I address this question in a  brief article  over at the online Observations section of Scientific American .

Think of the most famous people of the past 100 years:  Einstein, Churchill, Gandhi.  All of them, and hundreds more, are instantly recogniz...

I've just had a couple of items accepted by  Analog .  The first is a nonfiction article that discusses the similarities and differences...

It's pretty easy to measure the radial velocities of distant stars or galaxies. (The "radial" velocity is the motion of an obj...

Time travel is one of the most enduring themes in science fiction, as well as one of the most implausible -- I've discussed the science ...

Where do theoretical physicists get their ideas? That's a hard question to answer. But in the case of my most recent paper, which just a...

Good question.  I gave a public lecture (more specifically, the Lois McGlothlin Donaldson Endowed Lecture in Physics) on this subject at the...

I just finished writing a short story that had to be set, for various reasons, in the early 1980s.  And I could feel my characters' pain...