Although Penzias and Wilson had not been looking for cosmic background radiation, didn’t know what it was when they had found it, and hadn’t described or interpreted its character in any paper, they r...
3.5 billion years ago, when the Moon was much closer, volcanic eruptions commonplace (because of the thinness of the crust), meteor impacts routine and the air thick with acidic vapours. Remarkably, i...
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...
His house at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the first flush toilets in England),
Последните думи на генерал Седжуик били: Казвам ти, човече, не биха могли да уцелят и бизон от такова разс....
«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...
When authorities learned that Eugene O’Neill’s play All God’s Chillun proposed to show black and white children playing together as if that were normal, the district attorney for Manhattan sent the po...
Well over a million years ago, some new, comparatively modern, upright beings left Africa and boldly spread out across much of the globe.
We can’t see even into the Oort cloud, so we don’t actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.1 About
Was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included
Was a book by Arthur Raistrick called Quakers in Science and Industry and I glanced through it for a few minutes, then carried it to a nearby chair and sat reading for about half an hour, so unexpecte...
Untimely death is a common but really quite inane expression. When ever was a death timely?
Ugsome,
Transits of Venus, as they are known, are an irregular occurrence. They come in pairs eight years apart, but then are absent for a century or more,
To nonlocals
Three minutes, 98 per cent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe.
There. I had thought we would have
The mightiest and most extensive mountain range on Earth was—mostly—under water.
That if you looked deep enough into space you should find some cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
Tend to think in terms of words and not letters, so it is molecules they count, and these are numerous to say the least. At sea level, at a temperature of 0 degrees Celsius, one cubic centimetre of ai...