During our brief stay on planet Earth, we owe ourselves and our descendants the opportunity to explore - in part because it's fun to do. But there's a far nobler reason. The day our knowledge of the c...
Where ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination
Yes, not only humans but also every other organism in the cosmos, as well as the planets or moons on which they thrive, would not exist but for the wreckage of spent stars. So you’re made of detritus....
When Newton breached this philosophical barrier by rendering all motion comprehensible and predictable, some theologians criticized him for leaving nothing for the Creator to do.
We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.
Time to get cosmic. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on any beach, more stars than seconds have passed since Earth formed, more stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all...
There’s no doubt about it: more varieties of carbon-based molecules exist than all other kinds of molecules combined.
The most accurate measurements to date reveal dark energy as the most prominent thing in town, currently responsible for 68 percent of all the mass-energy in the universe; dark matter comprises 27 per...
The four most common chemically active elements in the universe—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen—are the four most common elements of life on Earth. We are not simply in the universe. The univer...
The cosmic perspective shows Earth to be a mote. But it’s a precious mote and, for the moment, it’s the only home we have.
Suppose a hole were dug from one side of Earth, through the center, and out the other side. What would happen to a man if he jumped into the hole? When he got to the middle of the Earth would he keep...
Some morning while your eating breakfast and you need something new to think about, though, you might want to ponder the fact that you see your kids across the table not as they are but as they once w...
Nonetheless, they remind us that ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist.
Let's grant that the stars are scattered through space, hither and yon. But how hither, and how yon? To the unaided eye the brightest stars are more than a hundred times brighter than the dimmest. So...
In modern times, if the sole measure of what’s out there flows from your five senses then a precarious life awaits you.
Earth’s Moon is about 1/ 400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/ 400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon c...
But who gets to think that way? Who gets to celebrate this cosmic view of life? Not the migrant farm worker. Not the sweatshop workers. Certainly not the homeless person rummaging through the trash fo...
And behold the greatest mystery of them all: an unopened can of diet Pepsi floats in water while an unopened can of regular Pepsi sinks.
An artist coworker of mine once asked whether alien life forms from Europa would be called Europeans. The absence of any other plausible answer forced me to say yes.)
Without a doubt, Einstein’s greatest blunder was having declared that lambda was his greatest blunder.