Ironically, the serious study of the impossible has frequently opened up rich and entirely unexpected domains of science. For example, over the centuries the frustrating and futile search for a perpet...
Indeed, Isaac Newton himself, who introduced the concept of immutable laws which guided the planets and stars without divine intervention, believed that the elegance of these laws pointed to the exist...
In our society, wisdom is hard to come by. As Isaac Asimov once said, The saddest aspect of society right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. Unlike information,...
In 1994 another bombshell was dropped. Edward Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and Paul Townsend of Cambridge University speculated that all five string theories were in fact the sam...
If we are right, big bangs are taking place even as you read this sentence.
I once wrote a biography of Albert Einstein, called Einstein’s Cosmos, and had to delve into the minute details of his private life. I had known that Einstein’s youngest son was afflicted with schizop...
Hinton spent most of his adult years trying to visualize higher spatial dimensions. He had no interest in finding a physical interpretation for the fourth dimension. Einstein saw, however, that the fo...
Gossiping is essential for survival because the complex mechanics of social interactions are constantly changing, so we have to make sense of this ever-shifting social terrain. This is Level II consci...
Goddard murió en 1945 y no vivió lo suficiente para ver la disculpa escrita por la dirección del The New York Times después de que el Apolo llegara a la Luna en 1969: «Ha quedado definitivamente demos...
Given that humanity must one day flee the solar system to the nearby stars to survive, or perish, the question is: how will we get there? The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is over 4 light-years...
For example, you might have a sever sunburn as a child. Many decades later, you might develop skin cancer at that same site. This means it probably took that long for the other mutation to occur and f...
Finally, in 1905, he found the answer. His name was Albert Einstein, and his theory was called special relativity. He discovered that you cannot outrace a lightbeam, because the speed of light is the...
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Even if the electrons are separated by many light-years, you instantly know the spin of the second electron as soon as you measure the spin of the first electron. In fact, you know this faster than th...
Entire cities could sprout instantly in the desert, with skyscrapers made entirely of force fields.
El futuro es un tren de mercancías En resumen, somos nosotros quienes hemos de crear el futuro. No hay nada escrito en una piedra. Como Shakespeare escribió en Julio César: «El fallo, querido Bruto, n...
El agua, a su vez, se puede descomponer en oxígeno e hidrógeno (que son los principales elementos del combustible para cohetes). Esto podría convertir la Luna en una gasolinera cósmica.
Each of the genes of the human body is spelled out explicitly in this dictionary, but what each does is still largely a mystery.
Cuando le enseñaron a la esposa de Einstein el colosal observatorio y le dijeron que el telescopio estaba determinando la forma definitiva del universo, ésta respondió sin inmutarse: «Mi marido lo hac...
Cuando estamos sentados en una silla, creemos que la tocamos, pero en realidad estamos suspendidos sobre ella, flotando a menos de un nanometro sobre el asiento,