A physicist explains what the composer has in common with the dawn of the cosmos.

It’s been said that the true harbinger of scientific discovery is not “Eureka!” but “Huh… that’s funny….” That certainly proved to be the case for Sebastian Bianchi: a simple cup of tea led him to some intriguing, counter-intuitive insights into the surface tension of water. Back when he was an undergraduate physics major at the […]

The remarkable science that helped me understand what it means to be a physicist.

When I published Life’s Ratchet four years ago, I was focused on how life can create and sustain highly ordered systems in the presence of the surrounding molecular chaos—how molecular ratchets, in other words, “extract order from chaos.” To my surprise, the book generated great interest in the area of aging research. Aging, says Ed […]

The director of the Institute for Advanced Study on the wonders of his childhood attic.

An alternative to the Newtonian worldview promises to help explain quantum weirdness.