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CAMPUS NEWS
Back to the Big Bang
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Pick a Card, Any Card
F
eel stressed? Overwhelmed? Unsure of your next move? Grab a card and “calm the chaos.” Nicola Ries Taggart, BS ’97 (public relations), life coach and author of Calm
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WINTER 2021
the Chaos Journal: A Daily Practice for a More Peaceful Life, has created Calm the Chaos Cards, a deck of 65 cards, each featuring an encouraging mantra and a short practice, including exercises for mindfulness and gratitude. “Focus on what you can control, and let go of what you cannot,” reads one card—and on the
back, a suggestion to reexamine a stressful situation and “put your energy toward what you can.” “Life can often feel crazy and chaotic,” says Taggart (nicolataggart.com). “I created these cards to help you integrate more moments of calm into your life.”
©CHRONICLE BOOKS (CARDS)
ext time you are in an argument about the age of the universe, just declare it’s 12.6 billion years old and that University of Oregon physicist Jim Schombert has the equation to back it up. Scientists dating the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe, generally agree it occurred 12 billion to 14.5 billion years ago. But Schombert’s team zeroed in on the debate by studying the rate of the universe’s expansion with mathematics and computational modeling that relied, in part, on measuring the distance from Earth to 50 galaxies—and from that, estimating the distances from Earth to 95 other galaxies. Not everyone is ready to call Schombert’s number definitive, however. NASA, for example, says the universe is 13.77 billion years old. “Our resulting value is on the high side of the different schools of cosmology, signaling that our understanding of the physics of the universe is incomplete,” Schombert says, “with the hope of new physics in the future.”