Author: Terrence Cons

The staunch atheist and essayist Christopher Hitchens once said that “the most overrated of the virtues is faith.” It’s a reasonable conclusion if you believe, as the astrophysicist Carl Sagan did, that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”1 To believe something without evidence—or have faith—is, in their view, something to avoid (and, when called for, to […]

The sweet, avian romance of Harold and Maude.

The powerful allure of the deep azure.

The pressure it takes to break everything from raindrops to stars.

The tragic story of the simple solution to one of the world’s most neglected diseases.

You may think twice about your diet when you follow the metabolic fate of your food.

After my father died, my journey of rediscovery began with the Czech language.

There is no known physics theory that is true at every scale—there may never be.

Gregory Laughlin has a funny story: While he was working as a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in the early 2000s, he was accused in the press of trying to shove Earth into a new orbit, farther from the Sun. “I got into major trouble,” Laughlin remembers in a conversation with Nautilus. […]