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The Last Word On Nothing | Guest Post: That Eternal Question

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One evening during a recent visit to Santiago, Chile, I went to dinner with two colleagues. Afterward, as I descended the stairs of the Metro to cross Providencia Avenue, I saw a young girl, no more than five years old, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sitting on the ground. She was holding out a shoe for a few monedas. It was dirty pink, a once beautiful Disney Cinderella slipper studded with sparkles and flashing lights. Just ten minutes earlier I had been talking with my friends about a discovery we had made, one that had been recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physics last year. Now looking back at me was a little girl who had been crushed by poverty. I had traveled to Santiago from my home in Texas for a weeklong celebration of Chilean astronomy’s essential role in the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. My dinner companions that evening were Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, with whom I had founded one of the teams that, in 1998, discovered the 75 percent of the unive

One evening during a recent visit to Santiago, Chile, I went to dinner with two colleagues. Afterward, as I descended the stairs of the Metro to cross Providencia Avenue, I saw a young girl, no more than five years old, wrapped in a dirty blanket, sitting on the ground. She was holding out a shoe for a few monedas. It was dirty pink, a once beautiful Disney Cinderella slipper studded with sparkles and flashing lights. Just ten minutes earlier I had been talking with my friends about a discovery we had made, one that had been recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physics last year. Now looking bac

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