Every year, a space rock the size of a person hits Earth and releases an amount of energy similar to the Hiroshima atomic bomb, 15 kilotons of TNT. This is equivalent to the average electric power consumption worldwide, a few Terra-Watt, for twenty seconds. The likelihood of a close passage…

The final decision was reached today. Within a couple of months, I will be leading an expedition to collect the fragments of the first interstellar meteor. This meteor is the first near-Earth object ever detected by humans from outside the solar system. In anticipation of meeting it, I would not…

Albert Einstein said: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” But actually, there is a middle ground. And as in political choices, taking the middle of the road is sometimes the…

John Lennon mused in 1971: “Imagine all the people living life in peace.” Imagination is required because wars are an integral part of our history. For millions of years, survival of the fittest favored those who were better at fighting for limited resources in the zero-sum games that characterize natural…

The exponential growth in new scientific and technological knowledge creates a fertile foundation for major advances. However, a new Nature paper discovered a steady drop from 1945 through 2010 in the fraction of disruptive advances within science and technology, with progress slowing down in many major fields. The study examined…

Yesterday, I received a letter congratulating me for my thirty year service as a professor at Harvard University. I was offered a gift and chose a necklace for my wife and daughters whose love supported this journey. My new book “Interstellar”, to be published in August 2023, is already dedicated…

The Nobel Prize winning physicist and cosmologist, Steven Weinberg, argued: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” He referred to what we learned so far about the physical universe, namely the matter, radiation, galaxies and large-scale structure that followed the Big Bang. As a young…

The highest energy conceivable for an elementary particle is the so-called Planck energy. With this energy, quantum mechanics changes the nature of gravity and gravitational interaction is as strong as the electromagnetic, weak and strong interactions. The Planck energy is 19 orders of magnitude larger than the mass of a…

It is commonly thought by “down to Earth” scientists that dark matter has no impact on our daily life. However, if dark matter had been composed of asteroid-mass primordial black holes, some of them could have collided with the Sun and sunk to its center. Stephen Hawking suggested in 1971…