A mock debate on time with British physicist and science writer Julian Barbour and NYU philosophy professor Tim Maudlin, reposted from FQXi’s Setting Time Aright conference in Copenhagen.
Once upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet’s oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today. This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin…
At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, some of the most brilliant minds in the world work to build the spacecraft that humans use to explore their universe. But where space scientists now roam, dinosaurs used to call home, according to dino-hunter Ray Stanford. Stanford has discovered the footprint of a lumbering, spiny dinosaur…
Governments, businesses and civil society have much to gain from a spirit of determination within the international community
Sean Carroll: The multiverse might be impossible to test directly. Even if such a theory were true, the worry goes, how would we ever know? Is it scientific to even talk about it? Author Metanexus Editors
Lack of rain has left many rivers at low levels unseen for decades, and while this creates problems for river commerce, it also offers an occasional treasure trove of history. For example, a rock containing what is believed to be an ancient map has emerged in the Mississippi River in southeast Missouri, with etchings that may be 1,200 years old.
The system of inheritance of ideas is independent of the system of inheritance of genes. All this is pointing steadily to a difference in being human, to a complex mind indeed adapted for culture, that is, to a distinctive human genius.