The empty set may seem a bit feeble, but appearances deceive; it provides a vital building block for the whole of mathematics.
In fall 2009, the theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss gave a talk about recent discoveries in cosmology that he engagingly titled, “A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing.” The popularity of the video, viewed nearly a million times on YouTube, prompted Krauss to develop the ideas in the talk into a…
The Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for the Future have invited gamers from all walks of life to join them on the Catalysts for Change platform to help identify new solutions to global poverty. Participants will leverage 140-character messages to play a game of cards, with each card capturing an idea. Game participants will use…
Though I am unpersuaded by the overall argument, it is a pleasure to say that the book is for the most part wonderfully lucid at the individual sentence level, and often displays a charmingly light touch.
A rabbi, a descendant of Charles Darwin, a philosopher, and a scholar walk into an auditorium. It sounds like the start of a bad joke, but the group came together for the latest Intelligence Squared U.S. debate and faced off two against two on the motion “The World Would Be Better Off Without Religion.” Author…
Astronomers have discovered a new kind of supernova, a star explosion so weak that scientists dubbed it a miniature stellar blast. Supernovas represent the deaths of stars, which collapse in powerful explosions. They generally are classified into two main types; the new class, called Type Iax, “is essentially a mini-supernova,” said lead researcher Ryan Foley,…
Quantum entanglement is such a mainstay of modern physics that it is worth reflecting on how long it took to emerge. What began as a perceptive but vague insight by Albert Einstein languished for decades before becoming a branch of experimental physics and, increasingly, modern technology. In 1964 John Bell figured out how to convert…