A physicist’s letter of complaint “I have become Time, the destroyer of your desire to do physics.” Bhagavad Gita, approximate translation Why is time giving us such a hard time? Photo by Ben White on Unsplash Every child knows what time is. It’s literally everywhere. Nothing makes

“When one understands the causes, all vanished images can easily be found again in the brain through the impression of the cause. This is the true art of memory…” Rene Descartes, Cogitationes privatae. Close your eyes (bad opening phrase when you’re trying to convince people to read your article)

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash How much information do you need to build a human being and, more specifically, a human brain? After all, we are by far the most complex species on the planet. To take it up a notch, some of our brains think

Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash Why did you click on this post? Because of the title? Because of the picture of an explosion that will be absolutely unrelated to the content of this article? Did you even consciously decide to click? The attention industry The internet has become

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, — My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old

On the importance of Sexual Selection in the Evolution of Human Intelligence The question of how mankind got here is a curious one. How is it that we differ so profoundly from all the other animals on the planet? How is it that we are so (relatively speaking) unreasonably

How our brain evolved to look into the future If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not… Macbeth, William Shakespeare Life is riddled with uncertainty, and no one can tell the future. According to Blaise Pascal, we sail within

In my previous article, I looked at What’s so Weird About Quantum Mechanics. I closed with a quote of Feynman stating that “Quantum Mechanics is so confusing that I don’t even know if there’s a problem.” Now I want to move on to discuss why this problem itself is so

I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”  (R. Feynman) Quantum Mechanics (QM) is the “best” theory of the world physicists have at the moment (at least of everything apart from gravity). But it’s infamously hard to wrap one’s head around what it actually means. It’s