From why they stay frozen in the middle to how the crisping sleeve works! “Is your Hot Pocket cold in the middle?”“It’s frozen. But it can be served boiling lava hot.”“Will […]
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You searched for: Physical Constants
Is there an origin to time itself, and if so, what did it look like? “In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry […]
The only way out is to modify the laws of gravity, and new constraints rule those modifications out. “The discrepancy between what was expected and what has been observed has […]
“And so is the type of great men that shaped European history a very particular figure: half warrior, half statesman…” –Richard Wilhelm, 1922. MOST scholars believe themselves to be a […]
In 1887, two scientists set out to measure how the speed of light changed with the Earth’s motion. What they *didn’t* find wound up changing the world. “The conclusions, the bizarre […]
How the most powerful telescope ever built will owe its successes and discoveries to scientists who’ll never get the glory. “The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without […]
Plus a bonus: perhaps the single most important achievement to all of humanity. “What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that men set foot on the Moon, […]
Do changes in a gravitational field propagate instantaneously, at the speed of light, or at a different speed altogether? “The only problem with the speed of light, is it gets […]
If we knew all we do about math and physics, but had never seen the heavens, what would we conclude? “Both the solutions must be rejected, and as these are […]
How our best physical understanding of the early stages of the Universe — that set up the hot Big Bang — inevitably leads us to conclude that there’s a lot more than what’s merely […]
“How do you do that?” young Charlie Parker would ask older musicians. “Would you please do that again?” Those who know jazz, or who only know of jazz greats such […]
Many characteristics of the sociopathic personality—charm, ambition and impatience, an ability to attack problems with cold-hearted logic (not letting emotions get in the way)—are useful to society.
Who you are a lot of the time is a reflection of what other people have told you.
The negative consequences of conducting relationships at arm’s length, round-the-clock, and simultaneously, and only with those who reinforce one’s worldview.
This past weekend the 2013 CrossFit games ended, once again crowning Rich Froning as the fittest man on Earth. CrossFit is a combination of high intensity workouts that combine power […]
“What we’re seeing here, this guy is the Leonardo da Vinci—the Albert Einstein—of tennis.”
“Poe is one of the writers who make us who we are,” wrote E. L. Doctorow. So how is it that Poe’s countrymen could be so hostile to the man? As it turns out, there was villainy at work.
Vivian Maier took about 150,000 pictures during her lifetime, but never showed a single one to another living soul. When she died in April 2009, Vivian was remembered as a […]
It seems to me that our communication will begin in terms of mathematics and physics.
This is the basis of what we call creativity: not a deus ex machina scrawling on a tabula rasa, but the mind’s constant search for interesting new ways of grouping the data we’re constantly taking in.
The top rung of Patanjali’s eight-limbed Ashtanga ladder, Samadhi, has been defined in numerous ways. Usually associated with the last step before enlightenment, it is translated as ‘ecstasy,’ and has […]
If your smartphone is glued to your hand, then, we believe you are already a kind of Cyborg.
As we learn about things more deeply and more deeply, we will discover that in fact, there’s all kinds of peripheral work to be done that we couldn’t have even imagined looking forward.
While Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley busy themselves making every aspect of our lives more efficient (except, perhaps, for the process of discovering these new technologies, learning them, and integrating […]
If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time you’ll probably be familiar with the name Sokal from the Sokal affair, the scandal in 1996 in which physicist […]
James Webb will grant a peerless gaze at the universe the likes of which we’ve never seen.
Once you know what the laws of nature are, another kind of question unfolds itself which is why are those the laws and not other laws.
What a revealing real-time lesson we are living through right now in how humans respond to risk. More than a million people in Boston and several large surrounding cities […]
The facts aren’t in, but here’s what we know: The internationally renowned athlete, Oscar Pistorius, was part of a violent shooting at his home, resulting in the death of his […]
Our attitude toward the pathologizing may be more destructive than the pathologizing itself.—James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology Trauma affects all of us. Types of trauma—physical, emotional, violent, intrusive, social, or the […]