One third of all the money America spent on furniture was spent on radios.
No less than 99.5 per cent of the world’s habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally—in practical terms completely—off limits to us. It
If you wish to end up as a moderately advanced, thinking society, you need to be at the right end of a very long chain of outcomes involving reasonable periods of stability interspersed with just the...
Head over heels is not just a cliché; it is also, when you think about it, a faintly absurd one. Our heads are usually over our heels.
He also engaged in many charitable works, notably the building of one of the world’s largest orphanages for boys (and boys alone; orphan girls would have to look elsewhere)
Cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in
You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being—a species of organism that is capable of unravelling...
Where the weather is concerned, the Midwest has the worst of both worlds. In the winter the wind is razor sharp. It skims down from the Arctic and slices through you. It howls and swirls and buffets t...
When you feel the sun warm on your back on a summer’s day, it’s really excited atoms you feel. The higher you climb, the fewer molecules there are, and so the fewer collisions between them.
What never fails to astonish at Skara Brae is the sophistication. These were the dwellings of Neolithic people, but the houses had locking doors, a system of drainage and even, it seems, elemental plu...
We live in a world that doesn't altogether seem to want us here.
We have been gulled by the ease of air travel and other forms of communication into thinking that the world is not all that big, but at ground level, where researchers must work, it is actually enormo...
We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote...
Tokyo: When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.
They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie. For breakfast? No, for lunch and dinner. But it’s not a pie at all, it’s a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it. Sounds dreadful.
There is almost no area of British life that isn’t touched with a kind of genius for names.
There is actually a certain value in not finding anything, he said. It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving.
The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only perso...
The universe is an amazingly fickle and eventful place, and our existence within is a wonder.
The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don’t actually know what is in our own solar system. Now,