Because so much of what it looks at is very far away and happened a long time ago, there are a lot of times when people wonder why anyone spends money on astronomy.
For nerds like me, the far away stuff is itself reason enough, but this month's issue of Astronomy magazine has a story about some of the benefits that have come from the study of space. The online teaser mentions one: Because Stephen Hawking thought about miniature black holes in 1974, scientists in the mid-90s developed something called the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) chip. The FFT chip enabled the creation of wi-fi.
There are others, in case you happen to be one of those folks who don't think that astronomy is cool just because it finds things like quasars.
No comments:
Post a Comment