The easy part is the ray’s 500-second speed-of-light jaunt from the Sun to Earth, through the void of interplanetary space. The hard part is the light’s million-year adventure to get from the Sun’s ce...
Part the curtains of society’s racial, ethnic, religious, national, and cultural conflicts, and you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers. Now imagine a world in which everyone,...
Mount Everest is about as tall as a mountain on Earth can grow before the lower rock layers succumb to their own plasticity under the mountain’s weight.
But what if the universe was always there, in a state or condition we have yet to identify—a multiverse, for instance, that continually births universes? Or what if the universe just popped into exist...
Our five senses even interfere with sensible answers to stupid metaphysical questions like, If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? My best answer is, How...
Even the successful 1985 Bret Easton Ellis book (and 1987 film) Less Than Zero, which tracks the falling from grace of wealthy Los Angeles teens, could not be imagined with the logically equivalent ti...
There are no limits when you are surrounded by people who believe in you, or by people whose expectations are not set by the short-sighted attitudes of society, or by people who help to open doors of...
The cosmic perspective opens our minds to extraordinary ideas but does not leave them so open that our brains spill out, making us susceptible to believing anything we’re told. The
Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world’s water supply holds enough molecules to mix 1,500 of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it:...
Perhaps these ancient observatories perennially impress modern people because modern people have no idea how the Sun, Moon, or stars move. We are too busy watching evening television to care what’s go...
I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don’t care abou...