Which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every actio...
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...
«La sua mente e la sua mano andavano di pari passo» scrissero [John Eminges e Henri Condell] nell'introduzione all'in-folio, «e ciò che pensava lo esprimeva con una tale facilità che nelle sue carte n...
Three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.
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.
That if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
Report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world’s plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of
More students of English in China than there are people in the United States.
Mass and energy have an equivalence. They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen. Since c2 (the speed of light times itself) is a truly enormou...
Growth. Often used contrarily by economists and those who write about them: ‘It now looks as if growth will remain stagnant until spring’ (Observer); ‘… with the economy moving into a negative growth...
Exception proves the rule, the. A widely misunderstood expression. As a moment’s thought should confirm, it isn’t possible for an exception to confirm a rule – but then that isn’t the sense that was o...
Disturb, perturb. They can often be used interchangeably, but generally the first is better applied to physical agitation, the second to mental agitation.
Coloured temperature image of the first photons ever created, representing the most ancient light in the universe, which are detectable on Earth as a faint, steady background noise or—more familiarly...
A little change in the Earth’s dynamics can have repercussions beyond our imagining.
With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them
When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically...
What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is...
Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. To begin with, for you to be here no...
Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman? and others of similarly inventive cast.
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...