Quasars, Black Holes, Tim Russert and the Universe
I took a class in college called "Quasars, Black Holes and the Universe." It was one of those mind-bending classes that essentially equated to 60 minutes of mental calisthenics three times a week. You would walk out of the class, shake your head clear and grab a beer as fast as you could. (Cheap beer. The only kind you could afford.) You couldn't possibly understand the enormity of the universe and your head throbbed from the impossibility of this all being figured out by mere mortals. The post-class beer always helped. Dr. Harry Shipman was our tour guide to this Universe. A corpulent fuzzy-bearded man with a ridiculous lust for life. Think Ben and Jerry with a PHD in Thermal Physics. Quasars, we would find out, were super-active galactic nuclei that surrounded the black hole of a specific galaxy. Black holes sucked. And the Universe part, I sort of got, but it seemed too infinite to grasp. I was thinking about this class recently. Specifically, I struggled to rememb...