Our paper discusses three very old “cosmologies” in Western thought, how these play out in economic theory, and how evolutionary biology can help evaluate their validity and policy relevance. These cosmologies are: (1) “natural man” as a rational, self-sufficient, egotistical individual, (2) competition among individuals can lead to a well-functioning society, and (3) there exists…
If our universe slammed into a neighboring one during a growth spurt in its first second, the collision would have left a mark. And Matthew Kleban thinks he sees it in the most detailed snapshot yet taken of the dawn of the universe. The satellite image, released by astronomers in March, confirmed what an earlier…
On an overcast afternoon in late April, physics professors and students crowded into a wood-paneled lecture hall at Columbia University for a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed, a high-profile theorist visiting from the Institute for Advanced Study in nearby Princeton, N.J. With his dark, shoulder-length hair shoved behind his ears, Arkani-Hamed laid out the dual, seemingly…
Of the many mysteries of modern physics, few compare to “nonlocality” in quantum physics. Nonlocality means that far away objects can influence one another instantaneously (or, at least, much faster than the speed of light). It is as if space and time didn’t exist! “Influence” may not be the right word here; in fact, we…
This is a phrase a lot of science communicators like to use because giving people a sense of scale when it comes to large numbers is so difficult. That’s why journalists report distances as number of football fields, mass as number of fully-loaded 747s, energy in terms of Hiroshima bombs, etc. Even though we can’t…
James Gleick reviews Lee Smolin’s new book “Time Reborn” in the New York Review of Books.
An enormous ribbon of gas that threads through the thinner gas of the Milky Way’s halo is the result of a gravitational tug-of-war between the two Magellanic clouds1, 2, the brightest satellite galaxies orbiting our own. The Magellanic Stream, as the ribbon is known, stretches for hundreds of thousands of light years, with a small…
Humans have created some pretty ingenious myths to explain the world around us: the sun and the moon chase each other across the sky because of an ancient disagreement or lustful encounter; a strangely shaped Hawaiian mountain called Nounou is a sleeping giant; the ostrich’s long neck is the result of straining to keep an…
In recent years astronomers have extended their view almost to the very edge of the observable universe. With the venerable Hubble Space Telescope researchers have spotted a handful of galaxies so faraway that we see them as they appeared just 400 million years or so after the big bang. But even as astronomers peer ever…
From a serene view of planet Earth, through the heart of the Milky Way and out to far-flung galaxies, take an armchair tour of the Universe with these dazzling images