Let’s Explore!
Hi! I’m Signore Galilei, and I write books, create educational videos online, and participated in the Inkhaven blogging residency.
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Latest posts:
“There Will Come Soft Rains”: Bradbury’s miniature apocalypse
Today is August 4th, 2026. Today is the original setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” from The Martian Chronicles.1 Bradbury himself once described this story as best representing the essence of his work,2 and I know of no story more appropriate for today. It’s also only about 2,000 words, if…
How to put 170 atoms in an atom
You might already know that atoms are mostly empty space. Physical size behaves a bit weirdly at the atomic scale, but essentially the radius of an atom’s nucleus is tens of thousands of times smaller than the radius of an electron’s orbital. That’s the same ratio as a single grain of sand1 to a football…
The most official water costs $120,000 a gallon
We all learned in science class that water freezes at 0 °C or 32 °F at atmospheric pressure. But what water, exactly? Even after you distill out all the dissolved salts and minerals to get pure H2O, not all H2O is created equal – and for the most precise temperature measurements, the differences really matter. Here’s…