The James Webb Space Telescope and other cool astronomy stuff!

Incidentally, WASP-43 has been formally given the name Gnomon by the IAU, and b has been named Astrolábos.

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Which is why it’s such a big deal to the standard model. The other three forces (electromagnetic, weak, and strong) have a carrier particle (photon, W boson, and gluon, respectively), quantizing a minimum value. It’s even been shown that at high enough energies electromagnetism and the weak force merge into a single force, imaginatively named the “electroweak” force.

But what if space and time aren’t fundamental constructs, making the emergence of gravity that much stranger?

At present, though, all we really know for certain is that gravity exhibits demonstrably wavelike behavior, obeys the light speed limit, and interacts equally with matter and antimatter (the latter falls down, too, not up).

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→ This article
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→ my head

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Basically, it all works like this:

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I thought it worked like this

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One of those elephants is eventually going to go on a sit-down strike, you wait and see!

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Once, I wrote a oneshot crossover with Discworld and NCIS. I suppose it could work. :smiley:

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Happy Excuse Me GIF

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That is an appropriate reaction. :smiley:

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I really must get around to reading the Discworld novels one of these days…

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City Watch involved, I suppose?

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I think I read 5 of them and should have taken more of a break between them, got a bit burned out and couldn’t decide which one to read next so haven’t gotten back into them.

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If you don’t want to read them, the BBC did some terrific radio adaptations and they’re all at the Internet Archive.

I would still read them though.

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Nope. DEATH. Albert plays a small role, but mostly it’s DEATH.

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I got about 20 pages into the first Discworld novel.

It can’t be that I don’t like Pratchett, beause I love Good Omens. But that Discworld book just didn’t grab me at all.

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You might try some of the TV series / miniseries:

Hogfather – (7.5/10) What better Christmas tale is there? (3 hours in 2 parts)
Going Postal – (7.6/10) Con artist is sentenced to running the post office. (3 hours in 2 parts)
The Colour of Magic – (6.9/10) “A cowardly wizard is roped into a life of adventure.” I don’t recall seeing this one, yet. (3 hours in 2 parts)
The Watch – (5.5/10) Rote police procedural within a slightly broader arc. (8 episodes)

FYI: The 2-minute intro to Hogfather, which describes the great A’Tuin (Discworld’s turtle depicted above).

(That keeps it relevant to “other cool astronomy stuff”, right?) :grin:

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The nice thing about Discworld novels is that they’re only marginally related to each other in general, they just all take place in the same world. So you can definitely, for example, read Guards! Guards! and skip The Colour of Magic.

Also, The Colour of Magic is probably my least-favorite Discworld novel and, even though it’s the first, I would say it isn’t the best way to start because he hadn’t really perfected his craft yet.

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When discussing Pratchett when I read Good Omens last year, @awatts posted a “where to start” thing for the various arcs here…

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I adore the Hogfather Miniseries, finally got it on a Blu-Ray that would play in the USA only a year or 2 ago. So that was the first book I read and it got me into the others.

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The DEATH books are my absolute favorite, followed by Rincewind, although I do agree that The Color of Magic is not nearly as good as later books. DEATH isn’t nearly a fleshed-out a character (rimshot) as he is later.

But cool astronomy stuff!

New ideas about how Venus turned out as Earth’s evil twin!

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