So I thought it might be interesting, for the length of a book, to consider the ordinary things in life, to notice them for once and treat them as if they were important, too. Looking around my house,...
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
The inhabitants of England in the age of Chaucer commonly used an expression, to be in hide and hair, meaning to be lost or beyond discovery. But then it disappears from the written record for four hu...
Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way – estimates range from a hundred billion or so to pe...
Disassemble the cells of a sponge (by passing them through a sieve, for instance), then dump them into a solution, and they will find their way back together and build themselves into a sponge again....
Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there...
Of all the things I am not very good at, living in the real world is perhaps the most outstanding.
The sciences are sometimes likened to different levels of a tall building: logic in the basement, mathematics on the ground floor, then particle physics, then the rest of physics and chemistry, and so...
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.
New Hampshire is guys in hunting caps and pickup trucks with number plates bearing the feisty slogan ‘Live Free or Die.
When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work,...
That a word or phrase hasn’t been recorded tells us only that it hasn’t been recorded, not that it hasn’t existed. The
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay...
Female academics at King’s in the 1950s were treated with a formalized disdain that
In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London. Only the steady influx of ambitious provincials and Protestant refugees from the Continent kept the population growing...
Some aspects of language acquisition are puzzling: Children almost always learn to say no before yes and in before on, and all children everywhere go through a phase in which they become oddly fascina...
For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history – perhaps most – it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look...
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.
A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.
Cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in
Showing 341 to 360 of 1557 results