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Link:
My Love Affair with Space on Time.com

The show streams live every Thursday on TWiT at 4pm Pacific/7pm Eastern. For other time zones, do the math! You can also watch or download it later.

For first-time visitors: in addition to my science-flavored stand up comedy, I also make science videos for Time Magazine’s website. That link will send you to my vids on Time.com, or you can click the VIDEO tab above and see them on this site. Quite a variety of topics in science and science fiction. I am also a contributor to Neil de Grasse Tyson‘s radio show StarTalk Radio.

Follow me on Twitter: @sciencecomedian
Subscribe to my YouTube videos: youtube.com/sciencecomedian

“Let There Be Light!” – my first show will be about light and weird science facts. My guest is Greg Gbur, an associate professor of Physics and Optical Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, specializing in research on theoretical classical optics. Since August of 2007 he has blogged as “Dr. SkySkull” at Skulls in the Stars, where he covers optics, the history of physics, historical weird fiction, and the interconnection of these subjects. Greg also co-founded the history of science blog carnival The Giant’s Shoulders. He has over 60 peer-reviewed publications and is the author of the upcoming textbook, “Mathematical Methods for Optical Physics and Engineering”.

- Follow Greg on Twitter: @drskyskull
- Skulls in the Stars blog
- Go directly to the Weird Science Facts category on Greg’s blog
- Greg’s recent invisibility article on Scientific American
- Read his very in-depth post The Saga of the Scientific Swindler! (1884-1891)

When the show is available, I will post the video here and perhaps some additional notes and links. Please follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and get on my Email list.

Next week my guest will be science writer extraordinaire Carl Zimmer!

Thanks for stopping by!

One of those Thinkers is Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and current CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.

Jon Favreau – director of the Iron Man movies – wrote the entry on Musk, having used him as a model for the billionaire Tony Stark character.  David Clair and I made a new video about him:

Here’s the new video on Time’s site.

For a more in-depth piece, check out our previous piece about SpaceX and private enterprise in space:

Space: The Private Frontier

Time Magazine has released its list of the 50 Best Inventions of 2009.  It’s worth checking out – tons of interesting stuff.

Topping the list is NASA’s Ares Rocket. Yay!  And the Herschel Space Observatory is also on it, which happens to be the subject of our latest video for Time.com.

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission but, like so many space ventures today, it’s an international collaboration.  NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed two of the three instruments with which it will study the far-infrared and submillimeter wavelengths – analyzing some of the coldest objects in space, hoping to shed light on star formation.  And, cooled by liquid helium to just a fraction above absolute zero, Herschel’s instruments are themselves some of the coldest objects in space – at least for the next three years, til the helium runs out.

We visited JPL and CalTech to speak to Paul Goldsmith, the NASA Herschel Mission scientist.

For more information about Herschel:

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Herschel Mission Home Page

Herschel at CalTech

ESA Science & Technology: Herschel

Herschel Science Centre

Herschel on Wikipedia

In April, 2008, Hawking came to Washington, D.C., to honor NASA on their 50th birthday. He presented a new speech entitled, “Why We Should Go Into Space.” That’s the jumping off point for the video. We wrote it. My friend Craig Duff produced it. Tara created some cool graphics, including the exploding Earth animation, and that ridiculous driver’s license for Homo sapiens.

As if to add an exclamation point to its message, between the time the video was finished and the time it was uploaded, a mile-wide hunk of rock and/or ice slammed into Jupiter. Check out the coverage by Bad Astronomer Phil Plait.

As I said in the Time piece (pun intended), “If that had happened here, you probably wouldn’t be watching online video right now.”