As a kid visiting the Oregon coast I often wondered, “How wide is the ocean, and what is there beyond the horizon?” As I grew older and turned my sights to the night sky, I wondered…

Excerpted from HERETICS! The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy by Steven Nadler and Ben Nadler. Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted…

Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, a former neuroscientist-turned-designer, wants to galvanize us to safeguard science. Her solution? Put a human face on it. “To encourage the next generation…

Heads down, we plodded along a coastal path into an almost gale-force wind that came howling straight up the English Channel, driving the rain into our faces and making it hard to…

What would physics look like if Einstein had never existed, or biology without Darwin? In one view, nothing much would change—the discoveries they made and theories they devised…

One gets the sense that Freeman Dyson has seen everything. It’s not just that at 92 he’s had a front row seat on scientific breakthroughs for the past century, or that he’s been…

It had always been Katherine Goble’s great talent to be in the right place at the right time. In August 1952, 12 years after leaving graduate school to have her first child, that…

Sports are a human universal, found in every known culture. We can hardly imagine England without cricket or the United States without baseball, basketball, and football. Japan without…

Nathaniel Comfort has spent 10 years of his life studying music, 10 years studying science, and the last 20 years studying history. “What I try to do, really, is integrate all of…

Sometime in 1882, a skinny, dark-haired, 11-year-old boy named Harry Brearley entered a steelworks for the first time. A shy kid—he was scared of the dark, and a picky eater—he…