My interview with Carlo Rovelli
March 29, 2021
My interactions with my surroundings define me. I do not exist in any meaningful sense independently of those interactions. Air molecules are bouncing off the atoms of my skin, photons of light are being absorbed by atoms in my eye, compressions and ra …
Why does nature do things in threes?
March 31, 2021
The beauty of Lego is that an infinite variety of things can be built by simply combining a finite number of basic building bricks. But say one day the Lego corporation launched a version of its bricks in which each was hundreds of times bigger than it …
Expect the unexpected
November 27, 2020
The history of science teaches us that the Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. The most exciting discoveries – the ones that scientists live for – are the unexpected ones. Read article. Subscribe to New Hu …
Miracle of the plague year
May 21, 2020
It is August 1665. Bubonic plague is raging in London. So great is the dread of contamination that in Cambridge, 55 miles to the northeast, the university is closed. A 22-year-old man, unknown, unremarkable, makes the trek by foot, by horse-drawn cart, …
Chapter 7: The holes in the sky
April 15, 2020
Herstmonceux, Sussex, Autumn 1971 There was something terribly wrong about the blue star. It seemed to be orbiting a body that was not there. Two astronomers sat at a desk in an octagonal turret room of a fifteenth-century English castle and surveyed t …
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
September 4, 2019
Time and time again mathematics has demonstrated that that it is the unique language of the universe. Among its spectacular successes have been the predictions of the existence of radio waves, black holes, antimatter, the Higgs boson and gravitational …
10 Things You May Not Know About the Moon
August 28, 2019
“This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. When Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder from the Apollo 11 lunar module and became the first person to step onto another world, it was arguably the most significant moment in the hist …
Ghost cosmos
June 4, 2019
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is,” wrote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. “I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” …
Our incredible shrinking brains
March 8, 2019
In his 1991 book Consciousness Explained, the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett describes the juvenile sea squirt, which wanders through the sea looking for a rock to cling to. On finding one, it no longer needs its brain. So it . . . eats it. Dennett …
In the beginning…
December 17, 2018
The greatest discovery in the history of science is that there was a day without a yesterday. The universe has not existed for ever but was born. Almost 14bn years ago, all matter, energy, space — and even time — burst into being in a titanic fireball …