Facts So Romantic

In “Half-Wit,” an episode of House, Gregory House, a brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like doctor (and a decent musician) wheels a piano into a patient’s room. It’s a delightful moment:…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe…

It’s hard to quantify charisma, but by any measure Joel Osteen has some pretty impressive stats. Every week, the man some call “The Smiling Preacher,” draws an estimated 43,500 individuals…

For millennia, cosmological and religious systems of thought were intertwined—and usually indistinguishable. European artwork of, say, the arrangements of planets and stars often went…

Mattel’s AI nanny, called Aristotle, recently gained the notorious distinction of being subject to a bipartisan protest in the US Congress. Plus, there was a petition against it with…

In August 2013, Finland’s young nuclear professionals, under 35 years old, met up for the Summer Games in Mikkeli municipality, put on by the Finnish Nuclear Society’s Young Generation…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The controversial idea that our universe is just a random bubble in an endless, frothing multiverse arises logically…

While cosmologists may be fascinated by what dark matter does, particle physicists are fascinated by what dark matter is. For us, dark matter should be—naturally—a particle, albeit…

The other day I stepped into my apartment elevator and saw a neighbor of mine joking around with a construction worker. “You know what you do with these guys?” my neighbor said to me.…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Despite its ability to bend both minds and space, an Einsteinian black hole looks so simple a child could draw it.…