The Great Matrix of Being
The four dimensions in the Great Matrix of Being give us four ways of measuring reality — by time, by scale, by energy density flow, and by thresholds of emergent complexity. All phenomena can be located within this Matrix.
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The Big Book on Big History: An Illuminated Manuscript
Dorling Kindersley Books (DK) recently published a four-hundred-page textbook on Big History with spectacular illustrations and content. This twenty-first century version of an illuminated manuscript might well be your best Bible to Big History. Big History also makes a great gift for growing minds. At five and a half pounds, this is not a book you’ll…
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Science’s Humanities Gap
In his recent sermon to humanists, “Science Is Not Your Enemy,” the psychologist Steven Pinker makes an impressive plea for humanists to pay more attention to science and urges them to an interdisciplinary approach that he thinks has been sadly lacking. His general point is surely right: specialists in any area are likely to benefit…
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Putting Time in Perspective
Putting Time In Perspective is a series of timelines posted on WaitButWhy.com. Informative and fun, start with your morning coffee today and change up the scales of your reality with these annotated timelines.
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The Science of Big Science
Science is getting bigger. Just about every scientific discipline — astronomy, conservation, drug development, genetics, neuroscience, physics — is organizing massive collaborations of researchers in the name of reaching massive goals. These so-called Big Science efforts have big budgets, big lists of participating institutions, big press coverage, and big pronouncements. Big Science isn’t new (the…
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Miraculous Conception: Are Planets Forming Without Stars?
One of the most remarkable discoveries about exoplanets—planets that exist outside of our solar system—is that some of them appear to be flying through interstellar space on their own. They’re not orbiting a star, nor are they tied to any other obvious companion. The precise number of these planets—alternately called “free-floating,” “Steppenwolf,” “unbound,” or “rogue”…
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Parallel Worlds
Andy Murray’s unexpectedly strong start against Roger Federer in the Wimbledon 2012 final put the Daily Telegraph columnist Matthew Norman in a science-fiction mood. ‘It seemed we’d been transported to one of those parallel universes into which Doctor Who likes to slip with insouciant ease,’ he commented. A year later, that alternative world became reality,…
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Gorgeous Glimpses of Calamity
“Welcome to the Anthropocene.” That is the message of a stunning collection of satellite images recently compiled by the New York Times.
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Four Reasons You Shouldn’t Exist
You’re almost unfathomably lucky to exist, in almost every conceivable way. Don’t take it the wrong way. You, me, and even the most calming manatee are nothing but impurities in an otherwise beautifully simple universe. We’re lucky life began on Earth at all, of course, and that something as complex as humans evolved. It was…
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Are We Martians After All?
If you looked in a mirror this morning, you may have seen a descendant of creatures from Mars. That is, if biochemist Steven Benner of the Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology in Gainesville, Florida, is right. “Life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock,” Benner declares. Today, at the European Association…
