John Ruskin called it the pathetic fallacy: to see rainstorms as passionate, drizzles as sad, and melting streams as innocent. After all, the intuition went, nature has no human passions.…

Let’s play a game. You get a box with two compartments and one ball. The ball could be in either compartment with equal probability, and my job is to guess which one. Ok, it’s…

Describing his life, shortly before his death, Newton put his contributions this way: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like…

To those who say that there is no room for genius in modern science because everything has been discovered, Fabiola Gianotti has a sharp reply. “No, not at all,” says the former…

Paul J. Steinhardt does not look like a firebrand. With his wiry spectacles and buttoned-up bearing, he would not seem out of place in an office of accountants. But the Director of…

Alan Lightman was waiting for me by a post office in small-town Maine. “I’m not going to be able to say anything interesting enough,” he told me after shaking my hand, “to…

The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.” So concluded William James in thinking about that most basic of riddles: how did something come from nothing? The question…

The darkest hole in the universe lies near the constellation Boötes, the plowman of the northern sky. This region, called a void, is 250 million light-years across and is almost entirely…

All that Hans-Jörg Fahr wants is for someone to prove him wrong. A professor of astrophysics at the University of Bonn in Germany, he has taken a stand against nearly the entire field…

The water is always running in Björn Hof’s laboratory. Like a Zen water fountain, it gently flows over the top of a reservoir into a tube, and from there into a glass pipe 15 meters…