Quantum mechanics and general relativity are the two great triumphs of twentieth-century theoretical physics. Unfortunately, they don't play well together.
Anthony Pinn grew up as a devout Methodist, but became a humanist when he felt that religion wasn't really helping the communities that he cared about.
Geoffrey West is a particle physicist turned complexity theorist, who studies how features from metabolism to lifespan change as people adjust the size of an organism
Poker, like life, is a game of incomplete information. To do well in such a game, you have to think in terms of probabilities, unpredictable strategies, and Bayesian inference.
Few events in recent astronomical history have had the worldwide emotional resonance as the 2006 announcement that Pluto was no longer considered a planet, at least as far as the International Astronomical Union was concerned.
For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. It can, as Homer Simpson once memorably noted, be exchanged for goods and services.
The job of science fiction isn't to predict the future; it's to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring the implications of different ways the world could be different from our actual one.
String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechanical framework.
Humans love to tell themselves stories about why things happened the way they did, and if the stories are sufficiently serious, they label this activity "history."
There's no question that human activity is causing enormous changes in the planet's environment, from deforestation to mass extinction to climate change.
The "Easy Problems" of consciousness have to do with how the brain takes in information, thinks about it, and turns it into action. The "Hard Problem" is explaining our individual, subjective, first-person experiences of the world.
Everywhere around us are things that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in cars. But these things don't only serve functions, they also come in particular forms.
Janna Levin, is a physicist who has delved into some of the trippiest aspects of cosmology and gravitation: the topology of the universe, extra dimensions of space, and the appearance of chaos in orbits around black holes.
Reality is a tricky thing. Is love real? What about the number 5? This is clearly a job for a philosopher, and James Ladyman is one of the world's acknowledged experts.
Within every person's mind there is on ongoing battle between reason and emotion. It's not always a battle, of course; very often the two can work together.
Why, after such a long and prosperous run, would an essentially democratic form of government change with a good deal of approval from its citizens into an autocracy?
Let's say, for sake of argument, that you don't believe in God or the supernatural. Is there still a place for talking about transcendence, the sacred, and meaning in life?
One of the most important insights in the history of science is the fact that complex behavior can arise from the undirected movements of small, simple systems.
The space age officially began in 1957 with the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite. But recent years have seen the beginning of a boom in the number of objects orbiting Earth, as satellite tracking and communications have assumed enormous importance in the modern world.
It's easy to be cynical about humanity's present state and future prospects. But we have made it this far, and in some ways we're doing better than we used to be.
It's fun to spend time thinking about how other people should behave, but fortunately we also have an inner voice that keeps offering opinions about how we should behave ourselves: our conscience.