James Schombert News Today

John Oliver: So, roughly speaking, what are the chances that the world is going to be destroyed? One-in-a-million? One-in-a-billion?Walter Wagner: Well, the best we can say right now is a one-in-two chance.John: 50-50?Walter: Yeah, 50-50... It's a chance, it's a 50-50 chance.John: You come back to this 50-50 thing, what is it Walter?

"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" -Stephen Hawking After a long search spanning more than my entire lifetime (so far), the Higgs boson has finally been discovered at both detectors -- CMS and ATLAS -- at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

“Everything comes at the right time, but if the right time is too late to be patient, go earlier before it becomes too late.” -Michael Bassey Johnson

“Time is the longest distance between two places.” -Tennessee Williams I'm always stoked to give you weekly recaps at Starts With A Bang, just in case there's anything you missed. We saw some fantastic posts this week, including two amazing contributions from Brian Koberlein and Amanda Yoho! Here's what we saw:

Farnsworth: "There is it. The edge of the Universe!" Fry: "Far out. So there's an infinite number of parallel Universes?" Farnsworth: "No, just the two." Fry: "Oh, well, I'm sure that's enough." Bender: "I'm sick of parallel Bender lording his cowboy hat over me!" -Futurama Our existence here in this Universe is something that we know is rare, special, beautiful, and full of wonder.

"The world owes you nothing. It was here first." -Mark Twain When you think about where all of this came from -- back to the beginning of the Universe -- there's a good chance it makes you a little uncomfortable. For this week's Ask Ethan, our one remaining column here on ScienceBlogs, our reader vvv asks a question that quite possibly many of you have wondered: Why didn't the universe collapse into a black hole right "at the moment of the big bang?"

"And what I wanted to do was, I wanted to explore problems and areas where we didn't have answers. In fact, where we didn't even know the right questions to ask." -Donald Johanson You can learn an awful lot about the Universe by asking it different questions than you asked about it previously. If all you ever used were your own senses, there would be an awful lot to learn, but you would be severely limited.

"Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul." -Victor Hugo Everyone knows the Earth revolves around the Sun, which takes a year, and the Moon revolves around the Earth, which takes just under a month. So why, then, don't we have 12 solar eclipses and 12 lunar eclipses a year?

"They credited us with the birth of that sort of heavy metal thing. Well, if that's the case, there should be an immediate abortion." -Ginger Baker As hard as it may be to believe, take a look outside. I don't mean a glance, I mean to take a real look. At all the things there are to see -- the rocks, trees, mountains, skies, clouds, Sun, water, and everything alive -- all of it.

"These neutrino observations are so exciting and significant that I think we're about to see the birth of an entirely new branch of astronomy: neutrino astronomy." -John Bahcall You've been around here long enough to know about the Big Bang. The vast majority of galaxies are speeding away from us, but more than that, the farther away they are from us, the faster they appear to be receding.