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…

Following a routine colonoscopy procedure this morning, I was instructed by the nurse to rest and not take any interviews for the day. But an hour later, the 2022 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was released and five journalists and producers approached me for…

After a snow storm, there is no greater thrill than collecting fluffy snow to make a snowball and throw it away at a high speed. Similarly, in an accelerating universe — there is no greater thrill than collecting dark energy to make an object of negative mass that launches a…

On January 8, 2014, an object from interstellar space collided with Earth at a speed of 45 kilometers per second, traversing within a second a distance that cars usually take an hour to cross. As a result of its friction with air, the object disintegrated into tiny fragments tens of…