This post first ran on June 12, 2018. The need to think about predation and empathy — equal but opposite responses to vulnerability — is alive and kicking. But the online magazine referred to at the end is dead. Early last week on Twitter, some National Security Agency posters showed up, reminding NSA employees to […]
@nattyover: I turn for comfort to “A Dying Universe: The Long Term Fate and Evolution of Astrophysical Objects” https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9701131.pdf @nattyover is Natalie Wolchover, science writer and editor at Quanta. “A Dying Universe” is a paper I love and have loved for years. The paper’s abstract: “We consider,” it says, how planets, stars, galaxies, and the […]
The following are excerpts from a profile of Jim Peebles, who just yesterday won a Nobel Prize. Peebles is a quintessential theorist — “I spent a few days standing near telescopes getting cold,” he said, “and in the end, my attention wandered” — whose opinion of his own theories is finely balanced. The profile is […]
Update: this movie, Particle Fever, ended up winning a ton of awards, being shown at a ton of film festivals including Telluride, being reviewed in a ton of surprised and delighted publications including the New York Times, and generally ending up exactly the way you’d want it to. This post ran October 18, 2012, before […]
Ann: The first thing I have to say is, that is a glorious title. Was it yours? I ask because with every book I’ve written, the title was a matter of intense negotiations which I usually lost, and I wonder how you got away with such elegance and relevance both. Chris: It was my editor’s […]
I haven’t heard the foxes for a good year now. The woods is still there but the owners sold it to a buyer who promised to cut down only the middle of it, you know how buyers promise things. No trees have been cut down yet but a lot of people have been tramping through […]
I’ve been making candied orange peel regularly for some time now and I say this fearlessly: I have nailed it. The second secret (the first is, never trust sugar chemistry), which I sensed only dimly when I first wrote this, back on May 15, 2014, is that the orange peels have to be thick and […]
From olden days of secrets, lies, conspiracies, Russians spies, bad things going on in a good world, and increasing numbers of people FOIA-ing the hell out of things, I bring you the case of a science historian going about his business of looking behind walls and under rocks and finding a story called Dead Atom […]