What role do we have as human beings who perceive, make decisions, laugh and cry, in this great fresco of the world as depicted by contemporary physics? If the world is a swarm of ephemeral quanta of space and matter, a great jigsaw puzzle of...
With greater longevity, the quest to avoid the infirmities of aging is more urgent than ever. Coughlin hates what he calls “the narrative,” according to which new tech appeals to newer people. “There’s no reason for this enormous prejudice in favor of youthfulness in Silicon Valley...
With greater longevity, the quest to avoid the infirmities of aging is more urgent than ever. Aging, like bankruptcy in Hemingway’s description, happens two ways, slowly and then all at once. The slow way is the familiar one: decades pass with little sense of internal change,...
It is the echo of Euclid, 23 centuries after he lived. The work was studied by the great Italian scholars of the sixteenth century and by a young Cambridge student named Isaac Newton a century later. We have a passage from Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln...
This work had a profound impact on Western thought as it was studied, analyzed, and edited for century upon century, down to modern times. We can think, for instance, of a circle as being a totally curvilinear, and thus quite intractable, plane figure. But, if we...
The Academy produced many capable mathematicians and one indisputably great one, Eudoxus of Cnidos. A century and a half passed between Hippocrates and Euclid. During this span, Greek civilization grew and matured, enriched by the writings of Plato and Aristotle, of Aristophanes and Thucydides, even as...
In the Monty Hall problem you are facing three doors: behind one door is something valuable, say a shiny red Maserati; behind the other two, an item of far less interest, say the complete works of Shakespeare in Serbian. You have chosen door 1. The...
As newspaper columns go, Parade magazine's "Ask Marilyn" has to be considered a smashing success. Distributed in 350 newspapers and boasting a combined circulation of nearly 36 million, the question-and-answer column originated in 1986 and is still going strong. One might ask, especially if one knows a...
The structure of society and the personality of man changed in the late Middle Ages. The unity and centralization of medieval society became weaker. Capital, individual economic initiative and competition grew in importance; a new moneyed class developed. A growing individualism was noticeable in all...
Modern rationalism has looked upon the Middle Ages as an essentially dark period. It has pointed to the general lack of personal freedom, to the exploitation of the mass of the population by a small minority, to its narrowness which makes the peasant of the...
