April 8, 2024

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Dark Energy Could Be Evolving Over Time, Raising Questions About the Nature of the Cosmos (Will Sullivan, April 8, 2024, Smithsonian)

“If this is true, this just turns cosmology upside down,” Dillon Brout, a cosmologist at Boston University who was not involved in the new research, tells Space.com’s Sharmila Kuthunur. A finding like this would be a “paradigm shift in our thinking of what our best understanding of our universe is.”

“If it holds up, this is a very big deal,” Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who led the team that discovered dark energy 25 years ago and did not contribute to the recent findings, says to New Scientist’s Leah Crane.

“It’s exciting,” Sesh Nadathur, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in England who worked on the research, tells Quanta Magazine’s Charlie Wood. “If dark energy is not a cosmological constant, that’s going to be a huge discovery.”

Paradigms always shift.

OLD SCHOOL:

Safety First, Fashion Second as Schoolkids View an Eclipse (Eliza Berman, 1963, LIFE)

If you ever have the chance to view an eclipse, you’d do well to take a tip from the 1963 fifth grade class at the Emerson School in Maywood, Illinois. Wielding cardboard boxes and knives that today would surely get a kid suspended, the students demonstrated for LIFE’s readers how to safely look at an eclipse.

During the solar eclipse of 1960, hundreds of people had suffered permanent eye damage from looking directly at the sun. With help from the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness, Emerson students avoided the same fate by building Sunscopes, pinhole camera-like contraptions that indirectly project an image of the sun. The magazine offered instructions for those wanting to replicate the project at home: