“What can we do about high school physics textbooks?” The question, I admit, stumped me. Not in the way that a question about whether gravity exists in other universes would stump me. That question I wouldn’t be able to answer because there isn’t an answer; the existence of other universes is speculative. This question, however, […]
History/Philosophy
Let’s get this out of the way first: Ancient Alexandria, it’s not. Still, the library of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego, is the closest thing the marine sciences have to a central repository of books, periodicals and documents. And like that original Alexandria, this one is threatened by, […]
(This post is the first in a three-part series. “Talking Universe Blues” will continue over the next two Fridays.) “Does gravity exist in other universes?” The question, I admit, stumped me. Did she—fourth row, on the aisle—mean that gravity might be leaking into our universe from a parallel universe? Unlikely. Her puzzled, perhaps lost, expression didn’t […]
It feels right to offer a tribute to Darwin today–St. Valentine was a martyr too, after all.
The latest alien planets hit the news like fireworks, I write about them a lot, and I’ve always found them boring. I’d been convinced early on by an eminent astronomer who said flatly that finding extra-solar planets wasn’t, as he said, interesting. In the first place, observations were nearly impossible and decades of claims turned […]
The deep legacy of the golden age of rail still marks the continent in persistent, and sometimes surprising ways.
On June 6, 2002, during a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recounted a particularly difficult episode in gathering intelligence during wartime. “Now what is the message there?” he said. “The message is that there are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known […]
One of our favorite science writers has just published a terrific new book, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. So I nabbed author Richard Panek, who just happens to be an LWON blogger, for a Q and A session. Q: Your book’s really provocative. What first drew you […]
