For the next two weeks, I am on the move, traveling to various observatories in the American south and southwest, as part of the research for my book-in-progress Back Roads, Dark Skies: A Cosmological Journey. This morning, I will be visiting the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) near Livingston, Louisiana, before heading west to other observatories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. My full itinerary is over at Galileo’s Pendulum:

Being a travel book, though, I am also seeking a new way to see through travel and exploration. Cosmology is a very familiar field to me, but often the person closest to a subject is the worst to try to explain it to a lay audience. By going to particle physics labs and astronomical observatories, I am learning to see my own discipline in a new way, in hopes that it will help me bring it to my readers. As you can tell, this book is different from most cosmology books (A Brief History of Time is perhaps the best example), where the focus is on highly speculative ideas and Big Theories. While theory will always inform the research I discuss—and, being a theorist myself, I can’t help but discuss theory—the primary emphasis of Back Roads, Dark Skies is on experiment and observation. Without these things, theory is nothing but the ramblings of creative people, unconnected to reality. [Read more…]

While the scientific part of the agenda begins today, I haven’t been idly driving without keeping an eye out for interesting things. To wit: yesterday, I saw a wild alligator and one of the engines from the Saturn V rockets, which were used to launch the Apollo missions and the Skylab space station.