Experimentation without mathematical explanation is blind; mathematical explanation without experimentation is empty.
Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the Eng...
Bundesbahnangestelltenwitwe (a widow of a federal railway employee),
Buffon found himself threatened with excommunication for expressing it. A practical man, he apologized at once for his thoughtless heresy, then cheerfully repeated the assertions throughout his subseq...
Atoms, in short, are very abundant. They are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several sta...
At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners—this is a basic requirement of most British institutions—and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evo...
And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble h...
All that is gone. Nowadays we have nothing but meaningless names. Look at Starbucks and their cup sizes—Venti, Trenta, and Wanko Grande or whatever.
85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of wor...
Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me--and here...
It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a...
We may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because
Very should be made to pay its way in sentences. Too often it is used where it adds nothing to sense (‘It was a very tragic death’), or is inserted in a futile effort to prop up a weak word that would...
There are particles of matter and antimatter popping into existence and popping out again—and that these are pushing the universe outwards at an accelerating rate.
There any evidence that Henry ever uttered the other famous remark attributed to him: I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death. Indeed, there is no evide...
The world hate you? Most of them you will never even meet, and yet they really don’t like you at all. All the people who write software at Microsoft hate you, and so do most of the people who answer p...
The starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American...
The only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I...
The Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung (don’t ask me why).
Stromatolites—a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. The tiny respirations of these organisms over millions of years largely created Earth’s oxygen-rich atmo...