Humans are tool complexes—hands for certain tasks, feet, ears, teeth. etc., for others. Using their human tool complexes, human minds, comprebending variable interrelationship principles, invent detached-from-self tools—the bucket can lift out more water from the well than can a pair of cupped human hands—that are…
Men give me some credit for genius. All the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It…
The zodiacal light is caused by sunlight reflecting from meteoric dust that orbits the sun in the plane of the solar system, remnants of the vast nebula of dust and gas out of which the solar system was born more than four billion years ago. Like the planets, this diffuse stream of particles reflects light, although…
The virtue of thinking about life elsewhere is that it forces us to stretch our imaginations. Can we think of alternative solutions to biological problems already solved in one particular way on Earth? For example, the wheel is a comparatively recent invention on the planet Earth. It seems to have been invented in the…
Pysicists are trying to find out how nature behaves; they may talks carelessly about some "utlimate particle" because that's the way nature looks at a given moment, but... Suppose people are exploring a new continent, OK? They see water coming along the ground, they've seen that before, and they call it "rivers." So…