Page 4 - Ask Ethan News Today

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot It's been a remarkably exciting week for science, and you've had a lot to say about our new articles at the main Starts With A Bang blog. After all, it isn't every week that we possibly discover the imprint of gravitational waves on the Cosmic Microwave Background!

“We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.” -Jack Gilbert Although you had lots to say, it came almost exclusively on two of our posts, so let's jump right in and see if we can expand what we've been talking about on your Comments of the Week!

"Actually, I wasn't happy or sad. I was medium. And medium is the happiest that I'll ever be." -Axe Cop

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.” -Douglas Adams

"Never waste your time trying to explain who you are to people who are committed to misunderstanding you." -Dream Hampton

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” -Maya Angelou From questions about the smallest scales to the largest, from Earthly phenomena to things we could only conceive of in theory, our Ask Ethan series is your opportunity to have anything you ask considered for a column. This week, though, is a little different than normal.

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Whenever you have infinities in a theory, that’s where the theory fails as a description of nature. And if space was born in the Big Bang, yet is infinite now, we are forced to believe that it’s instantaneously, infinitely big. It seems absurd.” -Janna Levin

“Pluto was part of their mental landscape, the one they had constructed to organize their thinking about the solar system and their own place within it. Pluto seemed like the edge of existence. Ripping Pluto out of that landscape caused what felt like an inconceivably empty hole.” -Mike Brown We had an awfully busy week here on Starts With A Bang, with a number of fun and challenging posts:

Image credit: The Cosmic Perspective / Jeffrey O. Bennett, Megan O. Donahue, Nicholas Schneider and Mark Voit. From Azri -- our original question-asker -- on the topic of how long the Universe has been accelerating: "Just when you mentioned that the universe was almost 7.8 billion years old when started accelerating: I think that calculation is based on a "constant” cosmological constant! what if Dark energy was dynamical !? can one expect more than 8 bill years, lets say almost recently!" I...