Margaret Wertheim

The Ice Man Formeth

Margaret Wertheim
Ken Libbrecht turns up the dial on his pressure-cooker-size chamber to 2,000 volts. As I watch, a tiny needle of ice comes shooting out the end of a probe inside what serves as the world’s premier laboratory for studying snow crystals. Most of us might use the term “snowflakes,” but......

Space(F)light

Margaret Wertheim
Photo by Louis Friedman, ThePlanetary Society THROUGHOUT THE AGES humans have been borne across oceans by the power of wind. Propelled by nothing more substantial than air, schooners and brigantine have ferried men to the farthest reaches of our globe. Now a fantastical descendant of these windblown craft is about......

The Zombie Within

Margaret Wertheim
Photos by Max S. Gerber 1. EXPERIENCING THE ABSOLUTE A hundred feet above me, Christof Koch is hanging by a thread. Three quarters of the way up a rock face, he has lost his grip and is now dangling at the end of a rope above cascading waves of flesh-colored......

Brain Worlds

Margaret Wertheim
Photo by Markus Schreiber/AP STEPHEN Hawking’s voice drifts through the air, eerily familiar. These are the synthesized vocal cords that attempted to explain to Homer Simpson the nature of space and time, that joshed on the Star Trek holodeck with Newton and Einstein. Along with the latter’s shock of hair,......

Prime Obsession

Margaret Wertheim
It’s been called the hardest problem in mathematics, and also the most important. Three books have recently been published about it and dozens of the world’s most brilliant mathematicians are devoting themselves to it. A million- dollar prize awaits the person who solves it. Known as the Riemann Hypothesis, no......

Sightlines

Margaret Wertheim
Photo: Courtesy of NRAO/AUI Out along Highway 60, 700 miles east of Los Angeles, photons are being gathered, the raw material for a fantastical poetics forged from a confluence of man, nature and technology. Within 60 miles of one another stand two installations that harvest and transmute signals from the......

Beetles and Boys

Margaret Wertheim
Illustration by Debby Wolfensohn It is not often that science forms the foundation for a great work of literary fiction. As Jay McInerney recently wrote in The New York Times Book Review, the literary novel should require of us new kinds of reading skills, unlike the conventional novel, which “depends......

The House That Behrokh Built

Margaret Wertheim
On the computer screen in front of me, a house is going up. Before my eyes the building materializes rapidly as layer by layer of concrete is laid down, each stratum squeezed out of a huge nozzle as if from a gigantic toothpaste tube. This is not the construction of......
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Extended Warranty

Margaret Wertheim
“I don’t want to become immortal through my work,” Woody Allen once quipped, “I want to become immortal by not dying.” From Egyptian Pharaohs to California Extropians, people have dreamed of eternal life, and few goals have inspired such outrageous leaps of imagination and faith. For Christians, of course, eternity......

The Beasts Within

Margaret Wertheim
In the ur-time of mythology, man’s most fearsome foes were large and toothy beasts — monsters and dragons, tigers, bears and sharks — huge, meaty things with visible fangs and long shadows that inspired awe as much as fear. Today, most of the megafauna are dead or behind bars, more......