Are all arranged marriages successful? No more than all romantic marriages are. But, ultimately, what makes a marriage work is not how it began what you do with it. Mutual respect, realistic expectations and a willingness to compromise may…

According to the rules of reason, a given conclusion is to be deemed true if, and only if, it flows from a logical sequence of thoughts founded on sound initial premises. Considering mathematics to be the model of good thinking, philosophe…

That nineteenth-century Britain was radically unequal is self-evidently true. For many, the difference in power and wealth between,on one hand, the very rich and others holding dominant positions in the British Establishment, and,on the ot…

If you are indecisive and plan to do something about it, you can take immediate comfort in the fact that indecision is not necessarily due to ignorance and slow thinking. On the contrary it is often thinking of so many things and considera…

The figures in fairy tales are not ambivalent—not good and bad at the same time, as we all are in reality. But since polarization dominates the child’s mind, it also dominates fairy tales. A person is either good or bad, nothing in between…

There are plenty of people who worry about language change. England seems to be full of people who write to the newspapers and the BBC complaining about the way in which the language is becoming corrupt, without appearing to realize that t…

On the other hand, you can exclude a great deal of distracting noise from your attention when you are getting to know an attractive stranger at a party, concentrating single-mindedly on the words being spoken. Unlike simple recording equip…

There are a lot of people today who demand that men of science should devote themselves to the pursuit of discoveries that can immediately be turned to account. To my mind, however, there could be no surer way of rendering the future compl…

The antithesis to labor is play. When we play a game, we enjoy what we are doing, otherwise we should not play it, but it is a purely private activity; society could not care less whether we play it or not.Between labor and play stands wor…

Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have …

Science is the attempt to discover, by means of observation, and reasoning based upon it, first, particular facts about the world, and then laws connecting facts with one another and in fortunate cases making it possible to predict future …

On March 30, 1961, Ronald Reagan spoke to the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce. He spoke these timeless words with great conviction:“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the blo…

If, therefore, I would observe the vow I had taken, I must abjure eggs. I therefore did so. This was a hardship in as much as inquiry showed that even in vegetarian restaurants many courses used to contain eggs. This meant that unless I kn…

As the mercury rises, the climate can change in unexpected ways. In addition to sea levels rising, weather can become more extreme. This means more intense major storms, more rain followed by longer and drier droughts—a challenge for growi…

Historically, Earth's climate has regularly shifted between temperatures like those we see today and temperatures cold enough to cover much of North America and Europe with ice. The difference between average global temperatures today and …

Now, humans have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution. Changes that have historically taken thousands of years are now happening over the course of decades.The rapid …

For thousands of years now, emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere have been balanced out by greenhouse gases that are naturally absorbed. As a result, greenhouse gas concentrations and temperatures have been fairly stable, which …

The short timescale of this recent warming is singular as well. Volcanic eruptions, for example, emit particles that temporarily cool the Earth's surface. But their effect lasts just a few years. Events like El Niño also work on fairly sho…

Human activity isn't the only factor that affects Earth's climate. Volcanic eruptions and variations in solar radiation from sunspots, solar wind, and the Earth's position relative to the sun also play a role. So do large-scale weather pat…

Levels of greenhouse gases have gone up and down over the Earth's history, but they had been fairly constant for the past few thousand years. Global average temperatures had also stayed fairly constant over that time—until the past 150 yea…

Scientists have known about the greenhouse effect since 1824, when Joseph Fourier calculated that the Earth would be much colder if it had no atmosphere. This natural greenhouse effect is what keeps the Earth's climate livable. Without it,…

The "greenhouse effect" is the warming that happens when certain gases in Earth's atmosphere trap heat. These gases let in light but keep heat from escaping, like the glass walls of a greenhouse, hence the name.Sunlight shines onto the Ear…

Climate change encompasses not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, shifting wildlife populations and habitats, rising seas, and a range of other impacts. All of those changes are emerging as humans continue to…

We often call the result global warming, but it is causing a set of changes to the Earth's climate, or long-term weather patterns, that varies from place to place. While many people think of global warming and climate change as synonyms, s…

Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, cloud forests are dying, and wildlife is scrambling to keep pace. It has become clear that humans have caused most of the past century's warming by releasing heat-trapping gases as we power our …

In our own solar system, robots such as the Mars rover Perseverance are collecting samples in search of fossils or molecules that might suggest that microbial life flourished on the Red Planet billions of years ago, when it was warmer and …

Sensitive telescopes, like the James Webb Space Telescope, can pick up tiny variations in the light coming off of faraway exoplanets, allowing researchers to detect oxygen, sulfur or other gases that might indicate that microbes are at wor…

The effort continues today with the Allen Telescope Array, a 42-antenna array that can tune in to microwave frequencies from across the Milky Way. The SETI Institute is also launching an effort to detect laser pulses that far-flung intelli…

The first serious radio-based search for extraterrestrial life occurred in 1960. It was masterminded by astronomer Frank Drake, who used two radio telescopes to search for signals from planets potentially orbiting stars 10 and 12 light-yea…

The first efforts in the search for extraterrestrial life started well before humans had the capacity to get off our own planet. According to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, the invention of radio opened the …