When I was a child, it was cool to be a scientist.
The mind reels when we realize that, according to this interpretation of quantum mechanics, all possible worlds coexist with us. Although wormholes might be necessary to reach such alternate worlds, t...
Animals cannot speak and understand English
The fruit fly has roughly 150,000 neurons in the brain.
Olaf Stapledon’s classic work of science fiction, Star Maker:
Consciousness determines existence.
To resolve the discrepancy between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function...
Riemann found that in four spatial dimensions, one needs a collection of ten numbers at each point to describe its properties.
Why doesn’t the universe spin?
The string is extremely tiny, at the Planck length of 10 ^-33 cm, a billion billion times smaller than a proton, so all subatomic particles appear pointlike.)If we were to pluck this string, the vibra...
Train wreck
It from bit. It’s an unorthodox theory, which starts with the assumption that information is at the root of all existence. When we look at the moon, a galaxy, or an atom, their essence, he claims, is...
How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. —NIELS BOHR
Originally, the burden of proof was on physicists to prove that time travel was possible. Now the burden of proof is on physicists to prove there must be a law forbidding time travel.
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg likens this multiple universe theory to radio. All around you, there are hundreds of different radio waves being broadcast from distant stations. At any given instant, y...
Hollywood movies, however, have brainwashed us into thinking that we can defeat the alien invaders if they are a few decades or centuries ahead of us in technology. Hollywood assumes that we can win b...
By the time a society attains Type II status thousands of years into the future, it becomes immortal. Nothing known to science can destroy a Type II civilization. Since it will have long mastered the...
Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. We'll have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. We'll have that, too. Pegasus was a fly...
For any reasonable value of Omega at the beginning of time, Einstein’s equations show that it should almost be zero today. For Omega to be so close to 1 so many billions of years after the big bang wo...
Was the strangest man in all of mathematics, probably in the entire history of science. He has been compared to a bursting supernova, illuminating the darkest, most profound corners of mathematics, be...