Nikola Tesla is known as an eccentric genius, even a visionary. The question is, did his eccentricities eclipse his genius? Does it matter? Larry Page, a founder of Google, praises him as “a hero.” Elon Musk’s car and company bear…Read more
Science & Tech
Bronze is the first metal that gets its own age, which began around 3300 BCE in Mesopotamia. Other metals were certainly in use before it—especially copper—but the addition of a small amount of tin to existing copper technology changed…Read more
It is in areas like math and metaphysics that we encounter one of the average human mind’s weirdest attributes. This is the ability to conceive of things that we cannot, strictly speaking, conceive of. We can conceive in some…Read more
COSMOGENESIS Ich schreite kaum, doch wähn’ ich mich schon weit. Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit. I hardly move, yet far I seem to have come. You see, son, here time becomes space. —Richard Wagner, Parsifal …Read more
I was still reeling from the shock of becoming an instant elephant-owner, when I got another: the current owners wanted the herd off their property within two weeks. Or else the deal would be off. The elephants would be…Read more
We homo sapiens are an omnivorous lot, with teeth and digestive systems well adapted to eating both plant and animal foods. But animal rights activists notwithstanding, it’s an undeniable fact that in our society, meat and fish are most…Read more
Working an integral or performing a linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense—or deciding whether the method is the right one to use in the first place—requires a guiding human…Read more
Liftoff Three days after Noyce and Moore founded Fairchild Semiconductor, at 8:55 p.m., the answer to the question of who would pay for integrated circuits hurtled over their heads through California’s nighttime sky. Sputnik, the world’s first satellite, launched by…Read more
DAWN OF QUANTUM COMPUTERS The transistor is a paradox. Usually, the larger an invention, the more powerful it is. Huge double-decker jetliners can carry loads of passengers halfway around the world in a matter of hours. Rockets today are towering…Read more