Alexander Bastidas Fry is an all around raconteur and scientist. A science writer and story teller. On the cusp of receiving a PhD in astronomy from the University of Washington; working to illuminate dark matter in our Universe. He is passionate about communicating science with the aim to turn society's good intentions into actionable ideas that result in demonstratively positive outcomes. A tireless observer of the natural world, and additionally an activate participant. He makes uncommon observations of the world at www.commonobserver.com. Email: [email protected]
by Alexander Bastidas Fry When you are told what someone is against, ask them what they are for. If you against nuclear power, what kind of power are you for? Reasonable answers include coal, natural gas, biomass, wind, solar, hydro, or geothermal. However, not all of these answers are equally genuine given the constraints of…
by Alexander Bastidas Fry When we face difficult questions vague answers can offer a feeling of clarity that binary answers cannot. The laws of nature and the foibles of humans do not always allow strict classification into true and false. Even when such a dichotomy exists how do we find the absolute truth? And what…
by Alexander Bastidas Fry The most commonly used noun in the English language is time. Yet time is nothing more than an idea. It is an intangible concept invoked to make sense of the world such that, ‘everything doesn't happen at once,' as Einstein said. The actual most common thing in the universe is dark…
by Alexander Bastidas Fry Humans have existed for a brief time no matter how you count the eons. Ten thousand years ago there were perhaps some three million humans on earth. Today there are seven billion. It was only in the last century that population growth seemed unbounded, but in reality the average rate of…
by Alexander Bastidas Fry The Earth is on fire, but it was not always this way. Billions of years ago at the time of primordial life's genesis the Earth lacked free oxygen in the atmosphere. The evolutionary rise of blue-green algae in the oceans led to the advent of oxygen. And so today every creature…
by Alexander Bastidas Fry Imagine the closest star beyond the Sun has a planet orbiting it about the size of Earth. Visualize what your sunset would look like on this distant planet. Perhaps there would be two stars at the center of this solar system. Your sunset would be breathtaking. You could even visualize what…
by Alexander Bastidas Fry Imagine that reality is as strange as string theory predicts. String theory calls for ten perhaps eleven space-time dimensions where strings and membranes vibrate to generate the particles and ultimately all emergent phenomena of the natural world. The dynamics of such a universe quickly escapes our ability to describe it with…
by Alexander Bastidas Fry Comets have long been portents of change. They challenge the rote repetition of our skies. An astute observer of the sky will perhaps have recently noticed a new object in the sky, a comet, present for the last few weeks (you would have had to look east just before sunrise near…