So earlier this week you may have seen my tweets or on the news about NASA’s launch of the Ares I-X test vehicle. I thought it would be great to have a look at the event now some of the telemetry is being processed.

An artist's concept of the future Ares I launch pad

I was hoping that NASA would come up with an HD video of the launch, but it seems we’ll have to wait a few more days for those. In the mean time, the Boston Globe has done one of its “Big Picture” features on the launch. The features are always excellent and this one is particularly good.

There’s only one thing that fascinates me more than big numbers (we’re talking 10^10^10^10^2.08 years big here) and that’s space. And they only just beat really big science theories to it.

So you can probably imagine how happy I was when while reading about some pretty big numbers on Wikipedia, I discovered a concept called the Boltzmann Brain.

This concept is of course named after Ludwig Boltzmann, the Austrian physicist, and I thought I’d share a little bit about the idea with you. I found the combination of physics, probability, and philosophy incredibly interesting.