Words of Wisdom — March 18, 2014

Tesla on the Universe

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“Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.” – Nikola Tesla

The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

Two men in suits stand in front of a graphic collage featuring technical drawings and a building with solar panels, overlaid with the text "The Nightcrawler," evoking innovation that stands the test of stellar age.

Business

The end of extraction and the rise of abundance

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Timeline of the universe from the Big Bang, as described in cosmology, showing inflation, formation of atoms, stars, galaxies, and expansion to the present day over 13.8 billion years.

Starts With A Bang

How to understand the Universe’s the most important equation

If you want to understand the Universe, cosmologically, you just can’t do it without the Friedmann equation. With it, the cosmos is yours.

An illustration shows a cosmic ray entering Earth’s atmosphere, creating a cascade of secondary particles—some of the highest energy particles astronomers study—detected by an array of sensors on the ground.

Starts With A Bang

Astronomers close in on the source of the highest energy particles

On Earth, our particle accelerators can reach tera-electron-volt (TeV) energies. Particles from space are thousands of times as energetic.

A silhouette of a person stands facing a wireframe digital figure on a purple patterned background.

The Future

What happens the day after humanity creates AGI?

“We are racing towards a new era in which we outsource cognitive abilities that are central to our identity as thinking beings,” writes computer scientist Louis Rosenberg.

An artist's impression of a cluster of stars.

Starts With A Bang

Ask Ethan: What are the “first stars” in the Universe?

If the Universe is 13.8 billion years old today, but different ages the farther we look back, what does it mean for a star to be the first?

Up Next

It’s time to fight back against those who advocate THEIR values, and do US harm.

By 2002, Golden Rice was technically ready to go. Animal testing had found no health risks. Syngenta, which had figured out how to insert the Vitamin A-producing gene from carrots […]