Cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in
Yugoslavian hotel: The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.
Years ago, when my wife and I were dating, she took me on a day trip to the seaside at Brighton. It was my first exposure to the British at play in a marine environment. It was a fairly warm day--I re...
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,...
When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. Oh, that's not necessary, he replied . It's so se...
When a prominent Puritan named (all too appropriately, it would seem) John Stubbs criticized the queen’s mooted marriage to a French Catholic, the Duke of Alençon, his right hand was cut off.*
When I awoke it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was all of my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, a...
When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it’s time to watch your step.
What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous.
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 are the only creature that can harm at a distance.
WHEN I was brand new to Britain and everything was still a mystery to me, I went with an English friend to Brighton for the day, and there I saw my first seaside pier. The idea of constructing a runwa...
Unluckier still was Guillaume Le Gentil, whose experiences are wonderfully summarized by Timothy Ferris in Coming of Age in the Milky Way . Le Gentil set off from France a year ahead of time to observ...
Today’s mathematics is intimately bound up with two key areas of human knowledge and activity: the natural world, and the society in which we live.
To tell you the truth, I'm amazed we've come this far, he said, and I agreed. We had hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had grounds to be proud. We we...
To my mind, the only possible pet is a cow. Cows love you. They are harmless, they look nice, they don’t need a box to crap in, they keep the grass down, and they are so trusting and stupid that you c...
Though banned in most of the developed world, millions of pounds of destructive CFCs, often made by Western companies, are still legally sold in the third world each year.
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 universe was vaster—vastly vaster—than anyone had ever supposed.