The woman who taught Einstein
March 5, 2025
Emmy Noether is responsible for an idea so important that it ranks alongside Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection as a central and unifying principle in science… Read more Subscribe to Prospect Magazine
You can know more than you can prove
February 13, 2025
Years ago, when I was a student at Caltech, I remember the physicist Richard Feynman saying: “You can know more than you can ever prove.” Never was this scientific intuition used to greater effect than by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who in the ear …
Ghost detector
January 19, 2025
In an enormous cavern, 700 metres beneath a wooded hill in southern China, an extraordinary scientific instrument is under construction. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, a 20,000 tonne sphere of a detector liquid surrounded by 43,000 supe …
Forgotten black hole woman
May 20, 2024
A black hole is a bottomless pit in the fabric of space-time into which stuff, including light, plummets, never to be seen again. The term paints so vivid an image that it has entered everyday language, and we commonly talk of losing this or that “down …
A million invisible colours
December 16, 2023
By convention, the rainbow contained seven colours. But, in addition to these, he now realised, there must be other “colours”, utterly invisible to the naked eye. Millions upon millions of them. It was an extraordinary, mind-expanding thought. For a mo …
What starlings can tell us about the Universe
September 6, 2023
Brighton, 21st February 2022, 6.14pm: collar up against the wintry cold, I am leaning on the rail of the Palace Pier, watching the salmon-pink sun emerge beneath the cloudbank that is hugging the horizon and instantly begin melting into the sea. All ar …
One answer at a time
April 13, 2023
Baffled by black holes? Exasperated by evolution? Confused by quantum theory? Science writer Marcus Chown breaks down the mysteries of the universe into manageable chunks you can get your head around
The Festival Experience
November 3, 2022
Doris Lessing sits on stage at Cheltenham’s Everyman Theatre, straight-backed, steel-grey hair tied back in a bun, the epitome of a serene English woman – though she was born in Iran. There is something godlike about Lessing, a sense she sees everythin …
My most treasured moments as a writer
September 9, 2022
It’s been a whirlwind but hugely enjoyable 24 hours and I am glad to get on a train at Manchester Piccadilly. Yesterday afternoon, shaking snow from our coats, my wife and I checked into a hotel at Salford Quays. And, this morning, I represented Queen …
The writers who inspire me
July 7, 2022
The Zodiac Bookshop was in a non-descript suburban parade of shops. It was run by a man whose glasses were on a chain around his neck and who, when he peered over them at a customer, never, at least in my memory, cracked the slightest smile. It did not …