This story first ran January 17, 2019. It’s about a quark. Any resemblance to the author is purely coincidental. In fact, any perceived real-world parallels reflect more on the reader’s personal issues than the writer’s, don’t you think? You know what, stop judging me. It’s been a rough couple billion years. I don’t know why, […]
Physics
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 […]
Ann: After you’ve gone to the immense trouble of writing a book, having to sell it seems a bit much. My own personal best was always with the radio interviewers who began with, “So what’s the name of your book again?” So Richard, what’s the name of your book again? Oh, right, Gravity. What’s it […]
It’s been a rough couple billion years. I don’t know why, I just haven’t been feeling the same way as I did in the billions of years after the Big Bang. Back then, being a quark meant something – it had weight you know? Muons and leptons took you seriously, electrons wanted to get together […]
A little while ago, I was talking casually to an old arms-controller. “What have you been up to?” I said. “Talking to the Russians,” he said. The Russians he would have been talking to were probably nuclear policy experts or nuclear weapons scientists and they probably would have been talking about ways of controlling international […]
David Grinspoon is a comparative planetologist and an astrobiologist. He’s also a big book nerd, and his love for both fiction and nonfiction are proudly on display in his own book, Earth In Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future. The book was recently featured in an ongoing series on “Resistance Reading” selected by authors and published […]
I’ve been talking to Richard Garwin recently and thought I’d run this again. The original had an update, not included here, that read: This post originally said the document on the computer screen is classified, and though it once was, it certainly no longer is. No one who knows Garwin would think he’d allow the […]
For the past two years, I have been following the voyage of OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft headed to an asteroid called Bennu. Bennu is important for at least four reasons: Local space history may recorded in its rocks, which are about as old as the formation of the solar system. It is carbon-rich and scientists think […]
