Imagine a question that is of great interest to the public and to authorities but scholars argue that it should be banned and ridicule peers who engage with it. Sounds like the Earth-centric theologians who persecuted Galileo Galilei four centuries ago? If so, we might feel relieved and argue that…

A century ago, the philosopher Martin Buber defined two fundamental interactions for humans: the “I-Thou” interaction with other humans, and the “I-It” interaction with physical objects. Unfortunately, Martin Buber was born a century too early for him to have the pleasure of interacting with GPT-4 from OpenAI. Those of us…

It is a great privilege to be a physicist because all you need to remember are the fundamental laws of nature and everything else is derived from them. There is no need to memorize individual phenomena because they represent manifestations of these laws. Knowing the laws that govern nature brings…

In a new paper that I submitted this morning for publication in collaboration with Thiem Hoang, we show that the paper published today in Nature by Jennifer Bergner and Darryl Seligman miscalculated the surface temperature of `Oumuamua. …

In a new paper published today in Nature, Jennifer Bergner and Darryl Seligman suggest that the peculiar acceleration observed for the first known interstellar object `Oumuamua, can be explained if `Oumuamua was made of water ice which was partly dissociated into hydrogen by cosmic-rays along its interstellar journey. In the…

In a 1957 paper, the cosmologist Hermann Bondi considered the possibility that an object with a negative mass would create a repulsive force of gravity. When placed next to a positive mass, it would repel it but the positive mass would attract the negative mass. If the two masses are…

The Jewish Talmud says: “Since the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, prophecy has been taken from prophets and given to fools and children.” Another way to put it is that as of right now, there is no way of knowing the future. In physics, this statement boils down to…

My undergraduate student at Harvard, Carson Ezell, suggested that in anticipation of my forthcoming expedition to the Pacific Ocean to retrieve relics from the first interstellar meteor, IM1, he will train GPT-4 on my essays so that my followers will continue to enjoy fresh writings in my absence. This sounded…

In the 1994 film about Forrest Gump, he says: “… life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” In politics or business, the number of chocolate pieces in the box is finite and consuming them with partners is a zero-sum game. In science, however…