Muse: The magazine of science, culture, and smart laughs for kids and children November/December 2015

We Interrupt This Program I was watching Sherlock when I was interrupted by the Muse magazine in my hands. When I flipped the pages, it was more than a lemon chiffon to the face. It was a full-blow blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream on the side. I can’t believe the old muses are gone! It is like my heart was torn in two. The new muses aren’t bad, don’t get me wrong, but the old muses are irreplaceable. Like how I am conflicted about calling myself a Whovian, Sherlockian, or Wholockian, I can relate to this. I want to like both the old and the new, but routine had kept me chained to tradition. In the spirit of Rosh Hashanah, the…

Goodbye to All You Muses I am writing to ask if you have a job available. I am the muse of Pie-Making and Painting, and I would simply love it if I could work for Kokopelli (wherever you are now). I can make any flavor of pie (except maybe mud) and I can paint practically anything. The girl I live with (Bella) says to say goodbye to all you muses and congratulations to the new comic characters. I am not going to threaten you to put this in print because I am a peaceful muse (and I can’t throw pie straight). —BRAGDALL, NORSE MUSE OF PIE-MAKING AND PAINTING / The Far North of Iowa, The USA, The Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way, The Universe P.S. I wish I…

BURPOLOGY Winning the Battle with Gassy Cattle Believe it or not, belching cows are helping to warm the planet. Now scientists are testing an ingredient that might help them (and us) with their gas problem. Cows use four stomachs to digest their food. In the first stomach, called the rumen, microbes break down tough plant material. These microbes also produce gas, including methane, which the cows let out by burping. Besides being embarrassing for the cows, this is a problem because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Methane in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat even more securely than carbon dioxide does, contributing to global warming. When researchers added a new chemical to the food of some dairy cows, the cows burped about 30 percent less methane gas. That could…

Max Tegmark is a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and author of the book Our Mathematical Universe. He argues that our universe is just one bubble in a sea of parallel universes, known as the “multiverse.” He is also a big fan of Einstein’s work. Q When did you first understand Einstein’s theories about space and time? A My dad told me fun stuff about relativity when I was a kid. Then I had a course in college on special relativity [a theory Einstein published in 1905]. But I only really understood it when I took a graduate course at Berkeley. Q What was that moment like? A I was like, oh my goodness! I’m actually able to understand this! I wasn’t expecting that. I’d always kind…

The multiverse includes all possible outcomes for reality. That means there are infinite copies of you, all of whom have made slightly different decisions in their lives, alongside infinite universes where you don’t exist at all. You’ll never meet your copies, though, because they’re either way too far away, or in a different branch of reality. Here’s how Max Tegmark explains four “levels” of parallel universes. Level I: Infinite Galaxies, Earths, and Copies of You If space is infinite and uniform, then there must be other realms very, very far away, beyond the point from where light has had time to reach us, where all possible outcomes of galaxies, stars, and life exist. But the laws of physics are the same in all of these worlds. Level II: Infinite Big…

Ever since we learned about Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the world seems stranger, more unfamiliar. You might see two events happen in one order, while to someone else they occur in the reverse order, and you’re both right. Your clock might run faster than someone else’s, even though they’re both accurate. Objects can change size, shape, and even color as they move much faster or slower. What does it mean to live in this puzzling relativistic universe? Over the past hundred years, artists have painted and constructed many answers to this question. SPACE, TIME, AND CHEESE In 1931, Salvador Dali painted one of his most famous works—“The Persistence of Memory.” Many scholars believe that Einstein’s theory of relativity inspired the painting. Dali himself described “Persistence” as a Camembert (a…