In 1978 Alan Guth heard about the “flatness problem” of the universe while attending a talk on cosmology—a field he was only marginally curious about. A year later, Guth found a solution.
How many CDs are in the box? "100," a child guessed. "1000," said another. The answer was 2000, the equivalent of just 0.1 percent of the database capabilities at SLAC. "Imagine 2 million CDs in your bedroom."
Maori lore says that the rising and falling of the water level in Lake Wakatipu every 51 minutes is due to the breathing of the giant sleeping beneath.
Quick, what's 987654321 divided by 123456789? The answer is close to 8, but not exactly 8. Why does the result differ by about a tenth of a million, yielding 8.0000000729...?
From cave paintings of bison to Monet landscapes, artists have studied and interpreted the natural world. Dawn Neal Meson, a San Francisco artist, has taken this theme one level further, or, rather, many orders of magnitude smaller.
Russian physicist Nikolay Solyak has been a Fermilab employee since 1999. When he left the United States in September 2003, a short trip abroad turned into a four-month odyssey, separating him from his work and family in the United States. His documents tell the story.