We all learn in school, or at least from our more rigorous choices of science fiction, that we’ll never be able to travel faster than the speed of light. At first, this may sound disappointing, but upon reflection, 186,000 miles per second is nothing to sneeze at. Questions about how to achieve that speed soon give way to questions about what an attempt to do so would be like, many of them answered by the animated video from ScienceClic above. The first surprise is that moving so fast, in and of itself, would have no negative effect on us. When we travel by bicycle, car, airplane, spacecraft, or what have you, we feel only the acceleration. If that remains at a safe rate, no absolute speed will be a problem, in theory, assuming you can get up to it. Still, it couldn’t hurt to buckle up, not that it would help much in the event of a collision, even with a speck of dust.
Putting that out of our minds by assuming that “our ship is equipped with a force field that repels dangerous objects and allows us to roam freely through space,” we can concentrate on what we’d see through the window. First, “the stars in front of us, which we get closer to, seem to gradually move away. The sky contracts before us,” much as rain appears to fall from the front when you’re driving through it.
“Behind us, the sky seems to widen, and becomes darker,” and any object we pass “would appear to be slightly angled in our direction.” Just as the light in the sky we see while stargazing takes some time to reach us, thus constituting a view of the stars as they were in the past, events on the Earth from which we’re moving away — presuming we had a way to see them — would appear to be taking place in “slow motion.” Earth’s image would shift toward the color red, and that of everything in front of us would shift toward blue. After a few hundred days, our ship begins to approach light speed, and that’s when things get even stranger.
This, scientifically speaking, is when special relativity comes into play, causing our ship to swerve onto its own “time axis” apart from the one followed by Earth. From our perspective, the entire universe would contract along our length of motion, making our journey shorter than we’d expected. As we move faster and faster, the view in front of us intensifies, while the view behind us turns completely black. And what would happen when we finally reach light speed? Nothing, because we can’t reach it: “You may try to catch a light ray, but from your point of view, it will always escape at the same speed.” Accelerate all you like; “from your point of view, you are still motionless, and light escapes inexorably.” At best, “our ship will continue to accelerate forever, and our field of vision will shrink ever more, until forming an infinitely bright spot in front of us, surrounded by an infinitely black sky.” But there may be a loophole, in that, even if an object can’t do it, “nothing prohibits space itself from moving faster than light” — a premise for some truly mind-blowing sci-fi if ever there was one.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Marie Curie’s 1911 Nobel Prize win, her second, for the discovery of radium and polonium, would have been cause for public celebration in her adopted France, but for the nearly simultaneous revelation of her affair with fellow physicist Paul Langevin, the fellow standing to the right of a 32-year-old Albert Einstein in the above group photo from the 1911 Solvay Conference in Physics.
Both stories broke while Curie—unsurprisingly, the sole woman in the photo—was attending the conference in Brussels.
Equally unsurprisingly, the press preferred le scandale to la réalisation scientifique. Sex sells, then and now.
The fires of radium which beam so mysteriously…have just lit a fire in the heart of one of the scientists who studies their action so devotedly; and the wife and the children of this scientist are in tears.…
—Le Journal, November 4, 1911
There’s no denying that the affair was painful for Langevin’s family, particularly his wife, Jeanne, who supplied the media with incriminating letters from Curie to her husband. She must have been aware that Curie would be the one to bear the brunt of the public’s disapproval. Double standards with regard to gender are nothing new.
A furious throng gathered outside of Curie’s house and anti-Semitic papers, dissatisfied with labeling the pioneering scientist a mere home wrecker, declared—erroneously—that she was Jewish. The timeline was tweaked to suggest that Curie had taken up with Langevin prior to her husband’s death. Fellow radiochemist Bertram Boltwood seized the opportunity to declare that “she is exactly what I always thought she was, a detestable idiot.”
In the midst of this, Einstein, who had made Curie’s acquaintance at the conference, proved himself a true friend with a “don’t let the bastards get you down” letter, written on November 23. Other than a delicate allusion to Langevin as a person with whom he felt privileged to be in contact, he refrained from mentioning the cause of her misfortune.
A friendly word can go a long way in times of disgrace, and Einstein supplied his new friend with some stoutly unequivocal ones, denouncing the scandalmongers as “reptiles” feasting on sensationalistic “hogwash”:
Highly esteemed Mrs. Curie,
Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.
With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin, yours very truly,
A. Einstein
PS I have determined the statistical law of motion of the diatomic molecule in Planck’s radiation field by means of a comical witticism, naturally under the constraint that the structure’s motion follows the laws of standard mechanics. My hope that this law is valid in reality is very small, though.
That deliberately geeky postscript amounts to another sweet show of support. Perhaps it fortified Curie when a week later, she received a letter from Nobel Committee member Svante Arrhenius, urging her to skip the Prize ceremony in Stockholm. Curie rejected Arrhenius’ suggestion thusly:
The prize has been awarded for the discovery of radium and polonium. I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life. I cannot accept … that the appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by libel and slander concerning private life.
For a more in-depth look at Marie Curie’s nightmarish November, refer to “Honor and Dishonor” the sixteenth chapter in Barbara Goldsmith’s Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2018.
At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus.
But while the young Einstein was engrossed in intellectual pursuits, he didn’t much care for school. He hated rote learning and despised authoritarian schoolmasters. His sense of intellectual superiority was resented by his teachers.
At the Gymnasium a teacher once said to him that he, the teacher, would be much happier if the boy were not in his class. Einstein replied that he had done nothing wrong. The teacher answered, “Yes, that is true. But you sit there in the back row and smile, and that violates the feeling of respect that a teacher needs from his class.”
The same teacher famously said that Einstein “would never get anywhere in life.”
What bothered Einstein most about the Luitpold was its oppressive atmosphere. His sister Maja would later write:
“The military tone of the school, the systematic training in the worship of authority that was supposed to accustom pupils at an early age to military discipline, was also particularly unpleasant for the boy. He contemplated with dread that not-too-distant moment when he will have to don a soldier’s uniform in order to fulfill his military obligations.”
When he was sixteen, Einstein’s parents moved to Italy to pursue a business venture. They told him to stay behind and finish school. But Einstein was desperate to join them in Italy before his seventeenth birthday. “According to the German citizenship laws,” Maja explained, “a male citizen must not emigrate after his completed sixteenth year; otherwise, if he fails to report for military service, he is declared a deserter.”
So Einstein found a way to get a doctor’s permission to withdraw from the school on the pretext of “mental exhaustion,” and fled to Italy without a diploma. Years later, in 1944, during the final days of World War II, the Luitpold Gymnasium was obliterated by Allied bombing. So we don’t have a record of Einstein’s grades there. But there is a record of a principal at the school looking up Einstein’s grades in 1929 to fact check a press report that Einstein had been a very bad student. Walter Sullivan writes about it in a 1984 piece in The New York Times:
With 1 as the highest grade and 6 the lowest, the principal reported, Einstein’s marks in Greek, Latin and mathematics oscillated between 1 and 2 until, toward the end, he invariably scored 1 in math.
After he dropped out, Einstein’s family enlisted a well-connected friend to persuade the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH, to let him take the entrance exam, even though he was only sixteen years old and had not graduated from high school. He scored brilliantly in physics and math, but poorly in other areas. The director of the ETH suggested he finish preparatory school in the town of Aarau, in the Swiss canton of Aargau. A diploma from the cantonal school would guarantee Einstein admission to the ETH.
At Aarau, Einstein was pleasantly surprised to find a liberal atmosphere in which independent thought was encouraged. “When compared to six years’ schooling at a German authoritarian gymnasium,” he later said, “it made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority.”
In Einstein’s first semester at Aarau, the school still used the old method of scoring from 1 to 6, with 1 as the highest grade. In the second semester the system was reversed, with 6 becoming the highest grade. Barry R. Parker talks about Einstein’s first-semester grades in his book, Einstein: The Passions of a Scientist:
His grades over the first few months were: German, 2–3; French, 3–4; history, 1–2; mathematics, 1; physics, 1–2; natural history, 2–3; chemistry, 2–3; drawing, 2–3; and violin, 1. (The range is 1 to 6, with 1 being the highest.) Although none of the grades, with the exception of French, were considered poor, some of them were only average.
The school headmaster, Jost Winteler, who had welcomed Einstein into his home as a boarder and had become something of a surrogate father to him during his time at Aarau, was concerned that a young man as obviously brilliant as Albert was receiving average grades in so many courses. At Christmas in 1895, he mailed a report card to Einstein’s parents. Hermann Einstein replied with warm thanks, but said he was not too worried. As Parker writes, Einstein’s father said he was used to seeing a few “not-so-good grades along with very good ones.”
In the next semester Einstein’s grades improved, but were still mixed. As Toby Hendy of the YouTube channel Tibees shows in the video above, Einstein’s final grades were excellent in math and physics, but closer to average in other areas.
Einstein’s uneven academic performance continued at the ETH, as Hendy shows. By the third year his relationship with the head of the physics department, Heinrich Weber, began to deteriorate. Weber was offended by the young man’s arrogance. “You’re a clever boy, Einstein,” said Weber. “An extremely clever boy. But you have one great fault. You’ll never allow yourself to be told anything.” Einstein was particularly frustrated that Weber refused to teach the groundbreaking electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell. He began spending less time in the classroom and more time reading up on current physics at home and in the cafes of Zurich.
Einstein increasingly focused his attention on physics, and neglected mathematics. He came to regret this. “It was not clear to me as a student,” he later said, “that a more profound knowledge of the basic principles of physics was tied up with the most intricate mathematical methods.”
Einstein’s classmate Marcel Grossmann helped him by sharing his notes from the math lectures Einstein had skipped. When Einstein graduated, his conflict with Weber cost him the teaching job he had expected to receive. Grossmann eventually came to Einstein’s rescue again, urging his father to help him secure a well-paid job as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. Many years later, when Grossmann died, Einstein wrote a letter to his widow that conveyed not only his sadness at an old friend’s death, but also his bittersweet memories of life as a college student:
“Our days together come back to me. He a model student; I untidy and a daydreamer. He on excellent terms with the teachers and grasping everything easily; I aloof and discontented, not very popular. But we were good friends and our conversations over iced coffee at the Metropol every few weeks belong among my nicest memories.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2020.
Scientists need hobbies. The grueling work of navigating complex theory and the politics of academia can get to a person, even one as laid back as Brown University professor and astrophysicist Stephon Alexander. So Alexander plays the saxophone, though at this point it may not be accurate to call his avocation a spare time pursuit, since John Coltrane has become as important to him as Einstein, Kepler, and Newton.
Coltrane, he says in a 7‑minute TED talk above, “changed my whole research direction… led to basically a discovery in physics.” Alexander then proceeds to play the familiar opening bars of “Giant Steps.” He’s no Coltrane, but he is a very creative thinker whose love of jazz has given him a unique perspective on theoretical physics, one he shares, it turns out, with both Einstein and Coltrane, both of whom saw music and physics as intuitive, improvisatory pursuits.
Alexander describes his jazz epiphany as occasioned by a complex diagram Coltrane gave legendary jazz musician and University of Massachusetts professor Yusef Lateef in 1967. “I thought the diagram was related to another and seemingly unrelated field of study—quantum gravity,” he writes in a Business Insider essay on his discovery, “What I had realized… was that the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s theory was reflected in Coltrane’s diagram.”
Alexander describes the links between jazz and physics in his TED talk, as well as in the brief Wired video further up. “One connection,” he says, is “the mysterious way that quantum particles move.… According to the rules of quantum mechanics,” they “will actually traverse all possible paths.” This, Alexander says, parallels the way jazz musicians improvise, playing with all possible notes in a scale. His own improvisational playing, he says, is greatly enhanced by thinking about physics. And in this, he’s only following in the giant steps of both of his idols.
It turns out that Coltrane himself used Einstein’s theoretical physics to inform his understanding of jazz composition. As Ben Ratliff reports in Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, the brilliant saxophonist once delivered to French horn player David Amram an “incredible discourse about the symmetry of the solar system, talking about black holes in space, and constellations, and the whole structure of the solar system, and how Einstein was able to reduce all of that complexity into something very simple.” Says Amram:
Then he explained to me that he was trying to do something like that in music, something that came from natural sources, the traditions of the blues and jazz. But there was a whole different way of looking at what was natural in music.
This may all sound rather vague and mysterious, but Alexander assures us Coltrane’s method is very much like Einstein’s in a way: “Einstein is famous for what is perhaps his greatest gift: the ability to transcend mathematical limitations with physical intuition. He would improvise using what he called gedankenexperiments (German for thought experiments), which provided him with a mental picture of the outcome of experiments no one could perform.”
Einstein was also a musician—as we’ve noted before—who played the violin and piano and whose admiration for Mozart inspired his theoretical work. “Einstein used mathematical rigor,” writes Alexander, as much as he used “creativity and intuition. He was an improviser at heart, just like his hero, Mozart.” Alexander has followed suit, seeing in the 1967 “Coltrane Mandala” the idea that “improvisation is a characteristic of both music and physics.” Coltrane “was a musical innovator, with physics at his fingertips,” and “Einstein was an innovator in physics, with music at his fingertips.”
Alexander gets into a few more specifics in his longer TEDx talk above, beginning with some personal background on how he first came to understand physics as an intuitive discipline closely linked with music. For the real meat of his argument, you’ll likely want to read his book, highly praised by Nobel-winning physicist Leon Cooper, futuristic composer Brian Eno, and many more brilliant minds in both music and science.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the most important and influential scientist in history, discovered the laws of motion and the universal force of gravity. For the first time ever, the rules of the universe could be described with the supremely rational language of mathematics. Newton’s elegant equations proved to be one of the inspirations for the Enlightenment, a shift away from the God-centered dogma of the Church in favor of a worldview that placed reason at its center. The many leaders of the Enlightenment turned to deism if not outright atheism. But not Newton.
In 1936, a document of Newton’s dating from around 1662 was sold at a Sotheby’s auction and eventually wound up at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. The Fitzwilliam Manuscript has long been a source of fascination for Newton scholars. Not only does the notebook feature a series of increasingly difficult mathematical problems but also a cryptic string of letters reading:
Nabed Efyhik
Wfnzo Cpmfke
If you can solve this, there are some people in Cambridge who would like to talk to you.
But what makes the document really interesting is how incredibly personal it is. Newton rattles off a laundry list of sins he committed during his relatively short life – he was around 20 when he wrote this, still a student at Cambridge. He splits the list into two categories, before Whitsunday 1662 and after. (Whitsunday is, by the way, the Sunday of the feast of Whitsun, which is celebrated seven weeks after Easter.) Why he decided on that particular date to bifurcate his timeline isn’t immediately clear.
Some of the sins are rather opaque. I’m not sure what, for instance, “Making a feather while on Thy day” means exactly but it sure sounds like a long-lost euphemism. Other sins like “Peevishness with my mother” are immediately relatable as good old-fashioned teenage churlishness. You can see the full list below. And you can read the full document over at the Newton Project here.
Before Whitsunday 1662
1. Vsing the word (God) openly
2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it.
5. Making a mousetrap on Thy day
6. Contriving of the chimes on Thy day
7. Squirting water on Thy day
8. Making pies on Sunday night
9. Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day
10. Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him.
11. Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons
12. Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command.
13. Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese.
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
19. Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it
20. Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee
21. A relapse
22. A relapse
23. A breaking again of my covenant renued in the Lords Supper.
24. Punching my sister
25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar
26. Calling Dorothy Rose a jade
27. Glutiny in my sickness.
28. Peevishness with my mother.
29. With my sister.
30. Falling out with the servants
31. Divers commissions of alle my duties
32. Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times
33. Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections
34. Not living according to my belief
35. Not loving Thee for Thy self.
36. Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us
37. Not desiring Thy ordinances
38. Not long {longing} for Thee in {illeg}
39. Fearing man above Thee
40. Vsing unlawful means to bring us out of distresses
41. Caring for worldly things more than God
42. Not craving a blessing from God on our honest endeavors.
43. Missing chapel.
44. Beating Arthur Storer.
45. Peevishness at Master Clarks for a piece of bread and butter.
46. Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne.
47. Twisting a cord on Sunday morning
48. Reading the history of the Christian champions on Sunday
Since Whitsunday 1662
49. Glutony
50. Glutony
51. Vsing Wilfords towel to spare my own
52. Negligence at the chapel.
53. Sermons at Saint Marys (4)
54. Lying about a louse
55. Denying my chamberfellow of the knowledge of him that took him for a sot.
56. Neglecting to pray 3
57. Helping Pettit to make his water watch at 12 of the clock on Saturday night
For 142 years now, Sagrada Família has been growing toward the sky. Or at least that’s what it seems to be doing, as its ongoing construction realizes ever more fully a host of forms that look and feel not quite of this earth. It makes a kind of sense to learn that, in designing the cathedral that would remain a work in progress nearly a century after his death, Antoni Gaudí built a model upside-down, making use of gravity in the opposite way to which we normally think of it as acting on a building. But as architecture YouTuber Stewart Hicks explains in the video above, Gaudí was hardly the first to use that technique.
Take St. Paul’s Cathedral, which Christopher Wren decided to make the tallest building in London in 1685. It included what would be the highest dome ever built, at 365 feet off the ground. “For a traditional dome design to reach this height, it would have to span an opening that’s 160 feet or 49 meters wide, but this made it much too heavy for the walls below,” says Hicks. “Existing techniques for building this just couldn’t work.” Enter scientist-engineer Robert Hooke, who’d already been figuring out ways to model forces like this by hanging chains from the ceiling.
“Hooke’s genius was that he realized that the chain in his experiments was calculating the perfect shape for it to remain in tension, since that’s all it can do.” He explained domes as, physically, “the exact opposite of the chains. His famous line was, ‘As hangs the flexile line, so but inverted will stand the rigid arch.’ ” In other words, “if you flip the shape of Hooke’s chain experiments upside down, the forces flip, and this shape is the perfect compression system.” Hence the distinctively elongated-looking shape of the dome on the completed St. Paul’s Cathedral, a departure from all architectural precedent.
The shape upon which Wren and Hooke settled turned out to be very similar to what architecture now knows as a catenary curve, a concept important indeed to Gaudí, who was “famously enamored with what some call organic forms.” He made detailed models to guide the construction of his projects, but after those he’d left behind for Sagrada Família were destroyed by anarchists in 1936, the builders had nothing to go on. Only in 1979 did the young architect Mark Burry “imagine the models upside-down,” which brought about a new understanding of the building’s complex, landscape-like forms. It was a similar physical insight that made possible such dramatic mid-century buildings as Annibale Vitellozzi and Pier Nervi’s Palazzetto dello Sport and Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center: pure Space Age, but rooted in the Enlightenment.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
It speaks to the importance of discoveries in physics over the past few generations that even the disinterested layman has heard of the field’s central challenge. In brief, there exist two separate systems: general relativity, which describes the physics of space, time, and gravity, and quantum mechanics which describes the physics of fundamental particles like electrons and photons. Each being applicable only at its own scale, one would seem to be incompatible with the other. What the field needs to bring them together is kind of a “grand unified theory,” a concept that has long since worked its way into popular culture.
In the Big Think video above, physicist Michio Kaku explains this scientific quest for what he calls “the God equation” in about five minutes. Such an equation “should unify the basic concepts of physics.” But general relativity as conceived by Albert Einstein is “based on smooth surfaces,” while quantum mechanics is “based on chopping things up into particles.”
The challenge of bringing the two into concert has attracted “the greatest minds of the entire human race,” but to no definitive avail. At this point, Kaku says, only one conception “has survived every challenge: string theory, which is what I do for a living” — and which has attained a rather high level of public awareness, if not necessarily public understanding.
Kaku breaks it down as follows: “If you can peer into the heart of an electron, you would see that it’s a rubber band: a tiny, tiny vibrating string, very similar to a guitar string. There’s an infinite number of vibrations, and that is why we have subatomic particles,” each variety of which corresponds to a different vibration. “A simple idea that encapsulates the entire universe” — and, crucially, a mathematically consistent one — string theory has attracted astute proponents and detractors alike, the latter objecting to its untestabillity. But one day, technology may well advance sufficiently to falsify it or not, and if not, the door opens to the possibility of time machines, wormholes, parallel universes, “things out of The Twilight Zone.” A physicist can dream, can’t he?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
In a 1956 New Statesman piece, the British scientist-novelist C. P. Snow first sounded the alarm about the increasingly chasm-like divide between what he called the “scientific” and “traditional” cultures. We would today refer to them as the sciences and the humanities, while still wringing our hands over the inability of each side to learn from (or even coherently communicate with) the other. Nevertheless, recent history provides the occasional heartening example of sciences-humanities collaboration, few of them as dramatic as the story told in the SciShow video above, “An Ancient Roman Shipwreck May Explain the Universe.”
The shipwreck in question occurred two millennia ago, off the western coast of Sardinia. Having set sail from the mining center of Cartegena, Spain, it was carrying more than 30 metric tons of lead, processed into a thousand ingots. An important metal in the ancient Roman Empire, lead was used to make pipes (like the ones installed in aqueducts), water tanks, roofs, and weapons of war. While our civilization has grown justifiably wary of putting water through lead pipes (and has at its command much stronger metals in any case), it still has plenty of use for the stuff, especially in shields against X‑rays and other forms of activity.
No matter how little contact you have with the scientific culture, you can surely appreciate how researchers in need of radioactivity shields must have felt when this lead ingot-filled shipwreck was discovered in 1988. Having spent a couple thousand years at the bottom of the ocean, the Roman lead aboard had lost most of its radioactivity, making it ideal for use in the shield of the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. Engineered for research into the mass of neutrinos, subatomic particles long thought to have no mass at all, CUORE held out the promise of data that could lead to insights into the origin of the universe.
Ultimately, the physicists and archaeologists struck a deal, allowing the former to melt down the least-well preserved ingots from the shipwreck (after first removing the historically valuable inscriptions from its manufacturer) and use it to shield the highly sensitive CUORE from outside radiation. The design worked, but as of last year, none of the experiments have produced conclusive results about the role of neutrinos in the emergence of life, the universe, and everything. Probing that question further will be a job for CUORE’s successor CUPID (CUORE Upgrade with Particle Identification), scheduled to come online later this year. Though C. P. Snow never lived to see these projects, he surely wouldn’t be surprised that, to find convergence between the sciences and the humanities, you’ve got to dive deep.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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