By: Tim Carmody

He defamiliarized science rather than taming it.

By: Matthew Battles

As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, a pair of physicists have offered a novel theory to explain the troubles bedeviling the Large Hadron Collidor, the world’s most powerful — and to date, […]

By: Matthew Battles

Electronica composer John Boswell remixes the preambles and perorations of Carl Sagan for a groovy take on the wonder-struck spiritual cosmology at the heart of the landmark PBS series Cosmos. With a guest appearance by […]

By: Matthew Battles

Monkeys are making news across the world of science. As we discussed last week, researchers discovered that tamarin monkeys prefer music composed for them. Yesterday, Science Daily reported a study in which monkeys were found […]

By: Franklin Bruno

Over his fecund scientific career, ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER (1887-1961) placed quantum wave mechanics on a firm mathematical basis, contributed to the theory of color measurement and perception, and, in the 1944 lecture “What Is Life?”, anticipated […]

By: Joe Alterio

In his seminal works, The Mechanical Bride (1951) and Understanding Media (1964), the Canadian philosopher MARSHALL MCLUHAN (1911-80) offered astute, didactic examinations of how the public receives and processes media, and what advertising tells us […]

By: Tor Aarestad

A self-described “physicist turned historian for philosophical purposes,” THOMAS KUHN (1922-96) was largely an autodidact in his eventual home — the then-new field of the history of science. With his scattershot academic background, it seems […]

By: Matthew Battles

FROM THE STRUGGLE between Cartesian science and the Classics lampooned by Jonathan Swift in his “Battle of the Books,” to the “Two Cultures” argument of physicist and novelist C. P. Snow, to the “nonoverlapping magisteria” […]

By: Matthew Battles

They’ve always been with us

By: Matthew Battles

AUTO­NOMOUS CITY EXPLORER, or “Ace,” is a robot built by researchers at the University of Munich that navigates city streets by asking passers-by for directions. New Scientist has the story.

By: Matthew Battles

THE STAR TREK MYTHOS hosts one of the most flourishing bodies of fan fiction since Euripides and the boys got busy on Homer back in the day (indeed, Trekkies ushered in the modern fan fiction […]

By: Matthew Battles

VENETIA PHAIR (née Burney), who named the planet Pluto, died on April 30 in Banstead, Surrey. She was 90. In March 1930, Eleven-year old Venetia was talking to her grandfather, Falconer Madan, about the discovery […]

By: Matthew Battles

The catalogue of the MIT Press arrived in the mail today. One of my favorite university presses, MIT publishes books that are terrifyingly smart, but often audacious and surprising as well. (last year’s Digital Apollo […]

By: Matthew Battles

FREE­LANCERS, GIVE UP your paltry hopes of making a killing by cooking up a killer iPhone app. The Google Lunar X Prize — $30 million to the first private enterprise that lands a rover on […]

By: Matthew Battles

MARGARET and CHRISTINE WERTHEIM are crocheting a coral reef, and they’re eager for help. The sisters direct the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles, which supports lectures, publications, and projects that explore the “figurative ecology” […]