Humanity is Fortunate to Have a Variety of Energy Sources...

Humanity is fortunate in having such a variety of energy resources at its disposal. In the very long run we shall need energy that is unpolluting; we shall have sunlight. In the fairly long run we shall need energy that is inexhaustible and moderately clean; we shall have deuterium. In the short run we shall need energy that is readily usable and abundant; we shall have uranium. Right now we need energy that is cheap and convenient; we have coal and oil. Nature has been kinder to us than we h...

 Newton on Why There is a God

As to your first query, it seems to me that if the matter of our sun and planets and all the matter of the universe were evenly scattered throughout all the heavens, and every particle had an innate gravity toward all the rest, and the whole space throughout which this matter was scattered was but finite, the matter on the outside of this space would, by its gravity, tend toward all the matter on the inside and, by consequence, fall down into the middle of the whole space and there compose on...

 The Anthropic Principle

As an example of the power of the Anthropic Principle, consider the number of directions in space. It is a matter of common experience that we live in three-dimensional space. That is to say, we can represent the position of a point in space by three numbers. For example, latitude. longitude and height above sea level. But why is space three-dimensional? Why isn't it two, or four, or some other number of dimensions, hke in science fiction? In fact, in M-theory space has ten dimensions (as wel...

 Space is Negative Energy

The great mystery at the heart of the Big Bang is to explain how an entire, fantastically enormous universe of space and energy can materiahse out of nothing. The secret lies in one of the strangest facts about our cosmos. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called "negative energy." To help you get your head around this weird'd but crucial concept, let me draw on a simple analogy Imagine a man wants to build a hill on a flat piece of land. The hill will represent the univ...

 Scientific Laws Mean That God has No Freedom

he one remaining area that reHgion can now lay claim to is the origin of the universe, but even here science is making progress and should soon provide a definitive answer to how the universe began. I published a book that asked if God created the universe, and that caused something of a stir. People got upset that a scientist should have anything to say on the matter of religion. I have no desire to tell anyone what to believe, but for me asking if God exists is a valid question for science...

 Science Poem

The worm drives helically through the wood And does not know the dust left in the bore Once made the table integral and good; And suddenly the crystal hits the floor. Electrons find their paths in subtle ways, A massless eddy in a trail of smoke; The names of lovers, light of other days Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke. The universe winds down. That's how it's made. But memory is everything to lose; Although some of the colors have to fade, Do not believe ...

 Probability is Truth-Resembling

The study of mathematical uncertainty is called probability. According to Richard Epstein, "The word 'probability' stems from the Latin probabilis, meaning 'truth-resembling'; thus the word itself literally invites semantic misinterpretation." [1]What Epstein means by "semantic misinterpretation" is that if something is "truthresembling," then it isn't actually truthful; at the same time, the truth is exactly what the something does resemble.

 Summary of Human Evolution

ABOUT 13.5 BILLION YEARS AGO, MATTER, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The story of these fundamental features of our universe is called physics. About 300,000 years after their appearance, matter and energy started to coalesce into complex structures, called atoms, which then combined into molecules. The story of atoms, molecules and their interactions is called chemistry. About 3.8 billion years ago, on a planet called Earth, certain molecules combi...

 Engineering New Ways to Think About Things

One cluster looks, for example, for new ways of representing and understanding complex systems. A second cluster aims for more access to knowledge by undoing contemporary media’s restrictions (such as the restriction of the screen, which produces, with its peek-a-boo access to complexity, impenetrable forms of knowledge such as the trillions of lines of code, written on screens and then stared at on screens). A third cluster explores new forms of representing time, and a fourth one more eff...

 Unlike Physics, Biology Can't Ignore Information

Physicists love to think about systems that take only a little information to describe. So when they get a system that takes a lot of information to describe, they use a trick called 'statistical mechanics', where you try to ignore most of this information and focus on a few especially important variables. For example, if you hand a physicist a box of gas, they'll try to avoid thinking about the state of each atom, and instead focus on a few macroscopic quantities like the volume and total en...