For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When you light the blue touchpaper on Guy Fawkes night, the force goes downwards and the rocket goes upwards. But gravity tugs rockets, apples...
If nothing had ever existed, that might have been true because it was the simplest way for reality to be. And if reality is maximal, because all possible local worlds exist, this may be true because it...
It belongs to the millennial mood to want to sum things up and see where we have gotten and point in the direction that further progress lies. Cognitive science has not been spared this impulse,...
The universe is widely expected to collapse eventually, but might first dilate by a factor of one followed by a million zeroes. Its expansion is possible even if it has always been infinitely large. Infinitely...
Einstein’s life story is almost as well known as his science. He was born in 1879 into a middle-class Jewish family in southern Germany, and went to school in Munich, where he is supposed...
During the second half of the 18th century, the great enterprise of sorting out the biological world was at its most dynamic and magnificent. Empire-builders were sending home animals, indeed...
She was exhibited as Miss Crachami, the Sicilian Fairy, or Sicilian Dwarf. Not much is known about her; what there is comes from a pamphlet written to accompany the original exhibition, three reports in...
What happened to Rosa Travers, after she’d been skinned (carbolic acid and phenol), had her nose snipped, received paraffin injections in her breasts and was irradiated to remove...
In October 1991 various meteorological phenomena combined to generate a ferocious storm off Canada’s Maritime Provinces and the north-east coast of the United States – a...
Aheroic story: Andrew Wiles, a Cambridge mathematician living in the United States, emerges after seven years of self-incarceration and paranoid secrecy from his Princeton attic, clutching two...
What is ‘earth’s biggest book store’? It’s American like every other biggest thing. But, nonsensically, a court case, settled on 21 October concluded that two...
Plunging in free-fall, a parachutist just out of an aeroplane sees the Earth spread out before him with the steadiness of a map. As his eyes resolve the detail, however, at about 600 metres, the...
On 21 August 1986, Hadari, a peasant farmer in the highlands of the Cameroon, was woken by a rumbling sound. Startled, he observed vapours pour from the edge of the nearby volcanic Lake Nyos, to...
Ernst Mayr is one of the century’s pre-eminent Darwinian evolutionists, who, in the past two decades, has published a magisterial history of biology and many seminal philosophical essays....
The lengths to which people have gone to eradicate snakes are remarkable. A century ago, for example, a prolonged campaign was mounted against timber rattlesnakes in the north-eastern United...
Three and a half hours into the auction at the Westbury Hotel in London earlier this year, Jason Chapman is smoking Old Holborn rolled in liquorice paper. In the inside left pocket of his blazer...
What John Horgan means by his teasing title, inspired evidently by Francis Fukuyama’s view of history, is not that scientists will run out of work worthy of all that trouble and expense,...
The Martiniquan poet and ideologue of négritude, Aimé Césaire, celebrated the sons and daughters of Africa as Ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole...