Some say the world will end in fire; some say ice. Others prefer to trot out obscure scientific theories. Strange as it might seem, the pole shift hypothesis, in which the Earth’s crust and mantle (or outermost layers) move as one piece, did not spring from the fevered imaginations of the sandwich-board set, but from scientific circles, and it’s rooted solidly in physics.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Hollywood got it right …
We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.
We study mathematics for its beauty, its elegance and its capacity to codify the patterns woven into the fabric of the universe. Within its figures and formulas, the secular perceive order and the religious catch distant echoes of the language of creation. Mathematics achieves the sublime; sometimes, as with tessellations, it rises to art.
Related Article:
• Quiz: Tessellate this!
Alfred Nobel and several recipients of his namesake Peace Prize alike contributed to warfare and violence in numerous ways—a fact that some find ironic. Yet, Nobel lived at a time when scientists didn’t consider themselves responsible for how others used their inventions, and he held a view of destructive-weaponry-as-deterrent that presaged the Cold War philosophy of Mutually Assured Destruction, so perhaps there was a method to his M.A.D.-ness. As for the others I discuss in my article below, only history can judge.
Blaise Pascal was the quintessential Renaissance man. After all, how many people have a computer language, a religious argument, a triangle, a mathematical theorem, a law of physics and a unit of pressure named after them? Here was a man who could not only pose a philosophical wager, but also invent the system for calculating its odds and a digital calculator with which to tally the results.
It is unusual for a prodigy to stray so widely and successfully from their first area of excellence, but, as Pascal put it, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.”