Culture | Art
eBook Editions
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ebook editions
Chapter one
Convergence
Numbers | Math
Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile
Infinite patterns that never repeat have moved from fantasy to reality.
Matter | Physics
How Supermassive Black Holes Were Discovered
Astronomers turned a fantastic concept into reality.
Chapter two
Disturbances
Culture | Science Practice
Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think
Two philosophers of science diagnose our age of fake news.
Biology | Health
The Case For Leaving City Rats Alone
A Vancouver rat study is showing us how pest control can backfire.
Matter | Physics
How to Get Close to a Black Hole
Want to understand the most mysterious object in the universe? Make one at home.
Chapter three
Surprises
Biology | Evolution
Why We Stink at Tackling Climate Change
Global threats result from human culture outrunning human biology.
Culture | Sociology
Watch and See: The Medium Really Is the Message
How communication technologies shaped the arts and sciences.
Numbers | Math
The Impossible Mathematics of the Real World
Near-miss math provides exact representations of almost-right answers.
Matter | Physics
What Dark Matter Needs Are New Kinds of Experiments
After 30 years and no results, it’s time to support more entrepreneurial physicists.
Chapter four
Breaks
Numbers | Math
The Math That Takes Newton Into the Quantum World
How a math professor learned to stop worrying and love algebraic geometry.
Biology | Environment
The Deadly Plant Sneeze
High-speed cameras capture how bouncing rain spreads crop disease.
Matter | Physics
How the Universe Remembers Information
A “memory matrix” might solve Stephen Hawking’s black-hole paradox.
Related Facts So Romantic
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” —Jules Verne
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Ideas
Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious
The Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously asked whether “philosophical zombies” are conceivable—people who behave like you and me yet lack subjective experience. It’s an…
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Matter
How Our Universe Could Emerge as a Hologram
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.The fabric of space and time is widely believed by physicists to be emergent, stitched out of quantum threads according…
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Culture
The Case for Being Skeptical of Moral Outrage
The episode last month at the Lincoln Memorial, involving the boys from Covington Catholic High School, and a Native American man, was like so many Internet-born controversies before it:…
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Ideas
Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space
There are lots of reasons why colonizing space seems compelling. The popular astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that it would stimulate the economy and inspire the next generation of…
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