Funny stuff from McSweeney's: General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons. Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date,...
Posted on July 23, 2008 12:26 PM • 37 Comments •
This makes me feel very lonely: The "Pillars of Creation" may be the most iconic Hubble photograph ever taken. "Located in the Eagle Nebula, the pillars are clouds of molecular hydrogen, light years in length, where new stars are being...
Posted on June 30, 2008 10:53 AM • 16 Comments •
How would science ever progress without anomalies? Theories are useful things, but they are most useful when they're wrong, when their Newtonian predictions are off, as in the case of the Pioneer space probes, by a hundred-millionths of an inch...
Posted on May 16, 2008 11:12 AM • 2 Comments •
First, read this: Prince Rupert's Drops are a glass curiosity created by dripping hot molten glass into cold water. The glass cools into a tadpole-shaped droplet with a long, thin, tail. The water rapidly cools the molten glass on the...
Posted on February 18, 2008 11:24 AM • 8 Comments •
So I'm reading about the latest cosmological absurdity and feeling pretty smug. It turns out that, according to the equations, your existence is simply "some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space...Your memories and the...
Posted on January 15, 2008 1:16 PM • 43 Comments •
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
