"Then it is dark; a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains." - John Cheever

Friday, November 17, 2006

New Scientist 50th Anniversary

I bought the 50th Anniversary edition of the New Scientist on the way to work this morning, thinking it would provide some light reading for the Tube. Opened it up to be confronted by the following articles: 'What is Reality?', 'Do We Have Free Will?', 'What is Life?', 'Is the Universe Deterministic?', 'What is Consciousness?', 'Will We Ever Have a Theory of Everything?', 'What Happens After You Die?', and 'What Comes After Humans?'. I read Metro instead. Looking forward to tackling the 'the biggest questions ever asked', but need to wait until I'm feeling a bit more alert and a bit less dim!

4 comments:

John said...

That sounds brilliant (bet there aren't many definitive answers though...)

Tom said...

Yes, cheers - will definitely get it. I love the NS, though it does very little to calm my apocalyptic anxieties.

Col said...

The other half of the magazine is a 'best of' NS articles through the decades. There's one from 1980 that basically says we're producing greenhouse gases, it will lead to climate change, we need to do something about it fast. Er, 26 years ago.

Col said...

In fact, much of it is available online, including the article mentioned above, and lots of predictions from eminent scientists on what the next 50 years will bring. (e.g. - alien life, ability for people to regrow severed limbs and defy ageing, recreation of formation of life in primordial ooze, lots of quantum stuff about gravitational waves that I don't understand...)