Thursday 6 August 2015

We had no idea! An appreciation of science’s discoveries

Science Focus

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The recent visit to Pluto by New Horizons has clearly captured a lot of people's attention. It's the first time in many years since we've seen an entirely new world, complete with geology and moons. For anyone younger than 25, it's not happened in their lifetime at all.

For me, however, it's a bit like coming full circle. I hadn't quite entered my teens when the Voyagers flew past Jupiter, and I recall it as being the point where I first really started paying attention to science. The Voyagers revealed the staggering violence of the planet's clouds and found that the planet-sized moons were alive with activity. The Solar System never quite looked the same again and, in a lot of ways, the whole Universe didn't. The Voyagers drove home in a big way how we could not only found out new things, but we could often manage to make sense out of them.

New Horizons got me thinking about all the different ways science has changed what we know about the world in the 35 or so years between the Voyagers reaching Jupiter and the present. So, I put together a completely arbitrary list of some of the discoveries that have happened in the intervening years.

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 » see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/7vWHT5kb21g/
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