John F. Haught— Scientists now know that the universe is a story still unfolding. Geology, biology, cosmology, and other sciences have demonstrated that our Big Bang universe is almost 14 billion years old. Very recently, as the story goes, on planet Earth in the Milky Way galaxy a new species
John Gribbin— The Universe began. The origin of everything we see about us – stars, planets, galaxies, people – can be traced back to a definite moment in time, 13.8 billion years ago. The ‘ultimate’ question that baffled philosophers, theologians and scientists for millennia has been answered in our lifetime.
Priyamvada Natarajan— Rather unusually, the team leaders who led the observational efforts that discovered dark energy were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009 for a discovery from 1998, a rather swift reward by normal standards in physics. According to Alfred Nobel’s wishes, this annual physics prize can be awarded to
David Bercovici— I was born in 1960, and by the time I decided I wanted to be a scientist at the young age of 12, the Vietnam War had been going on for my entire life. As far as any of us of that generation were concerned, the war had
James Owen Weatherall— When Vera Rubin was first invited to use the telescope at the Palomar Observatory, in the mountains outside San Diego, the form she was asked to fill out included the following notice: “Due to limited Facilities, it is not possible to accept application from women.” In pencil, someone
Follow @yaleSCIbooks The Dwight H. Terry Lectures are an annual two-week lecture series that presents leading scholars in religion, science, and philosophy who reflect on how religion can embrace advances in scientific fields of inquiry and remain applicable in our everyday lives. Yale University Press publishes a print accompaniment to
Follow @yaleSCIbooks The newest 3@2 Interview brings Terry Lecturers Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack, authors of The New Universe and the Human Future, to discuss the new scientific picture of the universe and its meaning for our lives, societies, and long-term future as a species. Yale University
Follow @yaleSCIbooks In our age of calculators, computers, and the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, most questions are pretty easy to answer. Why is the sky blue? What is the cube root of 1331? Who was Fredrick the Great of Prussia? Still, in some areas, uncertainty lingers—even though we
Photographs from this month’s Perseid meteor shower from the International Space Station follow a long tradition of science and art blurring boundaries between each other. As curator Susan Dackerman argues in Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, the catalog for Harvard Art Museums’ exhibition opening September 6, art and science often have a close relationship with only vaguely definable boundaries.
This spring and summer marks the premiere of the film and companion book, Journey of the Universe, by Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, an evolutionary philosopher and a historian of religions, respectively. Their science-based narrative tells the epic story of the universe, leading up to the challenges of