The subtitle of the show is “Art and Magic,” but the word that haunted me when I visited “Houdini,” an exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Art in New York City, was science. The magic was certainly there. The handcuffs that couldn’t hold him. The straitjacket that couldn’t contain him. The thrilling films of Houdini […]
History/Philosophy
One of the campuses where I teach is haunted. Everybody says so. They hear noises in the night. They encounter cold spots. They come to work in the morning and find a seemingly immovable file cabinet in the middle of a hallway. My role, you might not be surprised to hear, is that of resident […]
This has been a bad year for contrarian cosmology. First Geoffrey Burbidge died, at the age of 84, on January 26. And now comes the news that Allan Sandage, also 84, died last Saturday. I’ll let other obituaries explore Sandage’s monumental scientific biography at length and in depth: apprenticing under Edwin Hubble; assuming Hubble’s observing […]
About ten years ago I was killing time in the sprawling Barnes & Noble on Union Square in Manhattan. I had pushed my chair away from a little table, crossed my legs, and opened a book on my lap. I don’t remember which book. I can’t even remember whether it was one I’d grabbed off […]
If you listen, you can hear them talking. Sometimes the conversation is loud and clear. In On the Heavens, Aristotle argues that the Earth has no motions. It neither orbits the Sun nor turns on an axis. Just under two thousand years later, Galileo upbraids him. In Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he […]
