The Big Rip Theory might be the scariest scenario for the end of everything we’ve come across. That the universe will just tear itself apart.   Most experts believe the amount of matter in the universe will cause the expansion of the universe to slow down — and the universe may...

With respect to the cosmos, mankind has just been born. Hypothetically, if our 14 billion-year-old universe were scaled down to just 10 years (for the sake of comparison), dinosaurs would have been extinct 17 days ago, our earliest relative Lucy would have been playing around on the Savannah...

Without it, the evolution of ideas can’t take place. In order to choose the best ideas, we must be able to debate all ideas equally and freely. No doubt most of us are tired of dealing with President Zuma’s penis. But the important issue of “dignity” versus “free expression” was...

There’s a myth out there that has gained the status of a cliché: that scientists love proving themselves wrong, that the first thing they do after constructing a hypothesis is to try to falsify it. Professors tell students that this is the essence of science. Yet most scientists behave...

At some point, the Mongol military leader Kublai Khan (1215–94) realized that his empire had grown so vast that he would never be able to see what it contained. To remedy this, he commissioned emissaries to travel to the empire’s distant reaches and convey back news of what he owned....

In a recent Search Engine podcast, host Jesse Brown wondered about music’s ongoing centrality to the debate over file-sharing and freedom. After all, the music industry has all but abandoned lawsuits against fans, and services from Last.fm to the Amazon MP3 store present a robust set of...

Geneva, 4 July 2012. At a seminar held at CERN1 today as a curtain raiser to the year’s major particle physics conference, ICHEP2012 in Melbourne, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest preliminary results in the search for the long sought Higgs particle. Both experiments...

There’s trouble at the start of time: the theory of cosmic inflation has got way out of control. Can quantum theory and holograms tame it?   “You know how sometimes you meet somebody and they’re really nice, so you invite them over to your house and you keep talking with...

When it comes to light, Albert Einstein would agree with Daniel J. Boorstin‘s quote that “the greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.” Even though we know so much, we still are far from knowing enough. One aspect of this illusion is...

How evolution sculpts moral systems The most hotly debated issues in culture and politics tend to get framed in moralistic terms, such as the fairness of income inequality, the sanctity of heterosexual marriage, the ethics of campaign finance laws, and the obligation of society to protect...