“Excuse me, but what’s the time?” I’m guessing that you, like me, are guilty of having asked this question, as if it were obvious that there is such a thing…

Max Tegmark, professor of physics at MIT, strode into the room smiling and laughing, and stayed that way for all of the couple of hours we spent together. That he takes the keenest…

String theorist Vijay Balasubramanian grapples with the garbage cans of the universe: black holes. His research on particle physics at the University of Pennsylvania and The City University…

For two weeks every summer, my parents rented a holiday apartment by the beach in Vlora, an old coastal town along the Adriatic. It was known as Aulona in Greek and Roman times, and…

Laura Mersini-Houghton is on the trail of, quite literally, the biggest secret code going. Her analysis of the faint microwave radiation that permeates the sky, called the Cosmic Microwave…

Let me tell you the tale of two Nobel Prizes—well, almost. The first Prize I want to tell you about was awarded to Wilhelm Röntgen in 1901 for the discovery of X-rays. The details…

It’s a sunny summer day in Geneva, Switzerland. The birds are singing as lovers canoodle near the Jet d’Eau. Somewhere, someone is listening to techno music a little too loudly.Nearby,…

Let me tell you a short, fictitious story about a very real Spanish conquistador, Francisco de Orellana. In 1546 he was captured and imprisoned in a small, dank cell. Before long he…

One of science’s most crucial yet underappreciated achievements is the description of the physical universe using mathematics—in particular, using continuous, smooth mathematical…