Guest Thinkers — October 6, 2011

ALMA Telescope Shows First Pictures of Deep Space

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

The world’s most expensive and complex ground-based telescope Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has just offered its unique views of deep space, including images of two galaxies colliding, here:

A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Starts With A Bang

How to make peace with the weirdness of quantum mechanics

Our classical intuition is no good in a quantum Universe. To make sense of it, we need to learn, and apply, an entirely novel set of rules.

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Thinking

Mechanized minds: AI’s hidden impact on human thought

While we’re busy wondering whether machines will ever become conscious, we rarely stop to ask: What happens to us?

Starts With A Bang

Ask Ethan: How do scientists color the Universe?

When we see pictures from Hubble or JWST, they show the Universe in a series of brilliant colors. But what do those colors really tell us?

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High Culture

5 beloved fantasy novels based on real history

Many beloved fantasy adventures take place in worlds that bear a striking resemblance to our own.

Starts With A Bang

Meet the first star system to “solve” the 3-body problem

Due to chaos, it was long thought that planets couldn’t stably orbit systems containing three stars. GW Orionis is the first counterexample.

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Guest Thinkers

Beyond Columbus the Hero, the Slave Driver, or the Bumbling Idiot

In his new book, 1493, Charles Mann gives us a rich, nuanced account of how the Columbian Exchange continues to reunite the continents and globalize the world.