Facts So Romantic

What does the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way look like? Early next year, we might find out. The Event Horizon Telescope—really a virtual telescope with an effective…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The first time I heard a mathematician use the phrase, I was sure he’d misspoken. We were on the phone, talking…

Earlier this year, Dan Doctoroff, the C.E.O. of Sidewalk Labs, Google’s sibling company under Alphabet, answered a question about what his company “actually does” during a Reddit…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The cosmos plays hide-and-seek. Sometimes, though, even when astronomers have a hunch for where their prey might…

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.If you watch an exhausted baby carefully, you may be able to see gravity tug heavy eyelids down. Likewise, a sleeping honeybee’s…

As a kid, when my pet turtle died we had a funeral—of course—and buried him in the backyard. When the family dog passed, his remains were cremated and placed in an urn on the mantle.…

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…