Word: interstellar
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Dense, dark and dusty hodgepodges of galactic gas and dust where, quite literally, there is nothing to see were examined by means of the invisible radiation they emit. Radio and infrared techniques now enable us to "listen" to huge interstellar clouds slowly contracting to form stars. Thus, we are now learning a great deal about the embryonic stages of stars, a subject about which the oldest science--astronomy--had been experimentally ignorant until the dawn of the 1970s...
...same radio techniques produced repeatedly surprising discoveries of rather complex molecules in the murky recesses of interstellar space. Now totaling more than 50 in number, many of these modecules are complex enough to be of some interest to biochemists. Theorists remain mystified about the severely non-terrestrial conditions that give rise to such a pharmaceutical array of chemicals, yet it does not seem inconceivable that they could be mere fragments of even larger molecules thus far undiscovered. If so, then the most startling revelation of all may be that what was once though to be a galactic wasteland is really...
Like an insidious alien spore spreading outward into the unsuspecting countryside from a crashed alien spaceship, it infested the land. Letters flooded in. Clubs sprang up. "Fanzines"--mimeographed, dittoed, hand cranked publications filled with anything remotely Trek-inspired followed. Then came conventions: panels, huckster-rooms filled with interstellar trinkets and Federation paraphernalia, speeches by the high priests of Trekdom, trivia quizzes and singalongs and most important, the inevitable all-night parties, frequently featuring "Blog," a rare nectar imported to Holiday Inns and Sheratons across Nielsen-land by the viciously mercantilistic spice barons of Aldebaron IV. And whenever the fans...
...LAST SECTION of Disturbing the Universe unveils Dyson's far-reaching ideas for the future. "I am obsessed with the future," he writes, and then offers the imaginative products of this obsession: clades and clones, interstellar colonizations and "thought experiments." There is even a little theoretical physics. But this is the weakest part of the book. It is more science fiction than science...
Analyzing x-ray photographs of exploding galaxies, looking for double quasars, searching for organic molecules in the far reaches of interstellar space--that's the fun part of what goes on at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics...