Edward Dolnick tells an escape story involving God, humanity, and a huge rewrite of cosmic laws. It began in 1665. A plague hit Cambridge University. All of the students were sent home. One of them is a twenty-something Isaac Newton, who spent his forced summer vacation solving "the problem of ...
The walls are closing in, you've got no way out... and then, suddenly, you escape! This hour, stories about traps, getaways, perpetual cycles, and staggering breakthroughs.
The following post is from Robert's excellent blog Krulwich Wonders. You can read all the articles from Krulwich Wonders here.
What we have here is better, more cunning and a damn sight more beautiful than magic. It's a pendulum dance.
Just after the Big Bang, the universe was a primordial soup made of light. Then, it started belching out matter. Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how deeply shocking this is, and Marcelo Gleiser reveals an imperfection in the laws of physics that makes our very existence possible.
This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert set out in search of order and balance in the world around us, and ask how symmetry shapes our very existence--from the origins of the universe, to what we see when we look in the mirror.
A cat and a piece of jellied toast: could you break the laws of physics with these two simple tools? Check out this week’s podcast, Gravitational Anarchy, and be sure to listen for Neil deGrasse Tyson’s explanation of one of the more elegant and DIY paradoxes out ...
A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.
There's no scientific metric for measuring a city's personality. But hit the streets, and you can see and feel it. Sxip Shirey avoided New York City most of his life. But as an aspiring musician, he decided that moving there was a necessary evil. Then, one night on a ...
In this podcast, Jad and Robert throw some physics at a bible story. We find out just how many trumpeters you'd actually need to blow down the walls of Jericho.
9. Booyah Mozart: Producer Lulu Miller brings us a conversation with geologist Jan Zalasiewicz about what we’ll leave behind … in a hundred million years. 10. Cyberternity: Producer Emily Voigt tells a story about a guy named Wyatt, fixed in time. 11. Goodbye: Paleontologist and professor Peter Ward describes the ...
Can you make your own universe? We usually think of the universe as 'everything that exists,' so how could you make another one?
The pursuit of knowledge leads sometimes to answers, often to failure, and almost invariably to more questions. In this hour of Radiolab, stories of love and loss in the name of science.
Erica Carmel was unimpressed in her physics class at MIT when a professor demonstrated that by swinging a bucket full of water around on a rope, he could invert the bucket above him without it dumping all over him. After all, she had made the same discovery when she was ...
Robert and Brian Greene discuss what's beyond the horizon of our universe, what you might wear in infinite universes with finite pairs of designer shoes, and why the Universe and swiss cheese have more in common than you think.
