A few months ago, I sat poolside with friends in Palm Springs. Amid the quiet desert sublime, we reminisced about all the live music we’ve experienced over the years, just about…

In “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men,” published in 1934, the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll attempted to show that every animal creates a “world” (he…

The nature of consciousness seems to be unique among scientific puzzles. Not only do neuroscientists have no fundamental explanation for how it arises from physical states of the brain,…

If physics is understood as a descriptive mode of explanation, free of the unifying quest, the angst of not knowing it all is exorcised.Image by Andrew J. Hanson / Indiana University.In…

The universe is not just expanding; it’s accelerating. When cosmologists first realized this in 1998, it was alarming. The attractive gravitational pull of matter should cause the…

Particle physicists had two nightmares before the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012. The first was that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator would see precisely…

How about that! Mr. Galileo was correct in his findings.” That conclusion wasn’t based on the most careful experiment you’ll ever see, but it was one of the most spectacular…

If you’ve ever tried to give yourself a haircut, you know just how hard it is to make something precisely symmetrical. We value symmetry so highly in part because it’s really hard…

Atlas knew the answer. Straining under the task of holding up the Earth, this Titan god likely got a good idea of how much the Earth weighed. But none of us are so conveniently situated.…

Being an experimental scientist can sometimes seem like a thankless task. You may be used to reading headlines about experiments that end up making great discoveries, but less is heard…