It’s a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were f...
It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if Britain is ever to sort itself out, it is going to require a lot of euthanasia.
It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a Fr...
It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe
In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Horn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it was pointed out to him that this wa...
In the early 1800s there arose in England a fashion for inhaling nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, after it was discovered that its use ‘was attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling11’. For the next h...
In Australia and the Americas, says Tim Flannery, the animals probably didn’t know enough to run away.
If you count proper nouns, the word in English with the most varied spellings is air with a remarkable thirty-eight: Aire, ayr, heir, e’er, ere, and so on.
If there is one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy—something we could all do with more of in our lives.
If there is one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy—something we could all do with more of in our lives. So
If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in f...
Human memories are short and inaccurate.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that the electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves.
He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them.
Farther west, Michigan’s seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine—170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived—shrank by 95 percent in just a century.
Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.
Electric jugs for all.
Durham Cathedral, like all great buildings of antiquity, is essentially just a giant pile of rubble held in place by two thin layers of dressed stone. But—and here is the truly remarkable thing—becaus...