Bill’s Blogs

The Aleph — By Dr. John C. (“Jack”) Adler, as told to Bill DeSmedt  Last time, we looked at the anatomy of a black hole, what little there is of it (just mass, spin, and charge, remember?). More particularly, we looked at its core singularity, and at how an event...

Beyond the Black Horizon By Dr. John C. (“Jack”) Adler, as told to Bill DeSmedt When we left off last time, we’d just got done scrunching several suns’ worth of mass down into a black hole. Now it’s time to take a look inside, at what’s called a “singularity.” Calling...

A Black Hole Primer By Dr. John C. ("Jack") Adler, as told to Bill DeSmedt Last time, you’ll recall, we were saying that maybe the key to the Tunguska riddle lies in the nature of primordial black holes, like the one the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis claims slammed into the...

Jackson & Ryan Bite the Dust! When we left off last time, the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis that the Tunguska impactor was a subatomic-sized primordial black hole was being buffeted from all sides. Now, it’s important to remember that the international physics community...

Trouble Wasn’t Long in Coming! Last time, you’ll recall, we were taking a look at a theory thought up by a couple of good old boys named Al Jackson and Mike Ryan — a theory as to how the 1908 Tunguska Event might have been caused by the earth colliding with a tiny...

... Name of Jackson and Ryan As I was saying, Al Jackson never forgot Willy Ley’s Tunguska tales, and thirteen years later he shared them with a fellow U Texas grad student, Mike Ryan. So it was only natural that, when Al came across Stephen Hawking’s first paper on...

Two Good Ol’ Boys ... Got a special treat cued up for you today, folks: the inside story of how what we’re calling the Jackson-Ryan Hypothesis came to be — as told (in part) by the men themselves: Albert A. Jackson IV and Michael P. Ryan Jr.! * * * It was summer of...

Cosmologically Incorrect? By Dr. John C. (“Jack”) Adler, as told to Bill DeSmedt We left off last time with the pronouncement of that Grand Old Man of Tunguska Studies, Academician Nikolai Vasil’ev still ringing in our ears [Vasil’ev 1992] — to wit: Since a final...

Star Wars — By Dr. John C. (“Jack”) Adler, as told to Bill DeSmedt When we left off last time, Tunguska research had just taken a giant step forward with help from a science-fiction story — Aleksandr Kazantsev's 1946 "Explosion" ("Vzryv!"). Once it was corroborated in...