Putting aside that cheery bit of news for a moment, another physicist recently said that even if that particular scenario didn't come to pass, the simple matter of traveling warp speed could kill you--all because of some stray hydrogen atoms.
Perhaps the biggest question of all is whether the process of inquiry that has revealed so much about the universe since the time of Galileo and Kepler is nearing the end of the line. "I worry whether we've come to the limits of empirical science," says Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University.
The Big Idea: Roger Highfield explains why Garrett Lisi, the surfer who drew up a 'theory of everything' to explain the universe, is a great role model for science.
A major revolution occurred in science during the twentieth
century. This change leads to a profound transformation of the scientific conception of human beings. Whereas the former conception of man undermines rational moral philosophy, the new one can buttress it.
Murray Gell-Mann had a smash success with particles, notorious dustups with Feynman, and a missed opportunity with Einstein.
The most accessible, entertaining, and enlightening explanation of the best-known physics equation in the world, as rendered by two of today’s leading scientists. Professor Brian Cox and Professor Jeff Forshaw go on a journey to the frontier of 21st century science to consider the real meaning behind the iconic sequence of symbols that make up Einstein’s most famous equation, E=mc2. Breaking down the symbols themselves, they pose a series of questions: What is energy? What is mass? What has the speed of light got to do with energy and mass? In answering these questions, they take us to the site of one of the largest scientific experiments ever conducted. Lying beneath the city of Geneva, straddling the Franco-Swiss boarder, is a 27 km particle accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider. Using this gigantic machine—which can recreate conditions in the early Universe fractions of a second after the Big Bang—Cox and Forshaw will describe the current theory behind the origin of mass.
