They are beyond each other’s cosmic horizon.
When you realize that quantum mechanics underlies all physical processes, from the fusing of atoms in the sun to the neural firings that constitutes the stuff of thought, the far-reaching implications...
There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide, the text began. I winced. Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories, it continued, comes af...
Experience informs intuition. But it does more than that: Experience sets the frame within which we analyze and interpret what we perceive. You would no doubt expect, for instance, that the wild child...
Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?
As Feynman once wrote, [Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is—absurd.
Since the familiar particles and the objects they compose—stars, planets, people, etc.—amount to less than 5 percent of the mass of the universe, such a disruption would not affect the vast majority o...
If there is a lot of matter, gravity will cause space to curve back on itself, yielding the spherical shape. If there is little matter, space is free to flare outward in the Pringles shape. And if the...
But Einstein refused to be mathematics’ pawn. He bucked the equations in favor of his intuition about how the cosmos should be, his deep-seated belief that the universe was eternal and, on the largest...
Sometimes attaining the deepest familiarity with a question is our best substitute for actually having the answer.
Just as we envision all of space as really being out there, as really existing,