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From the archives

Claim Game

The high stakes of fraudulent identity

But Blind They Were

The fallacy of an empty continent

The Canadian Conversation

A Polish journalist’s perspective on residential schools

Dan Falk

Dan Falk is the author of  The Science of Shakespeare and In Search of Time.

Articles by
Dan Falk

Tech Support

Who’s helping who? December 2020
As George Dyson’s Analogia opens, we find the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the court of Peter the Great. It’s 1716, and Leibniz, age seventy, is as full of ideas as ever. (We know, though presumably he does not, that he will be dead within a year.) Leibniz presents the tsar with three grand…

A Big Bang of Physics

Yearning to know our universe March 2019
If you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you do not understand it.” That vote of non-­confidence comes to us from John Wheeler, one of the great minds of twentieth-­century physics, who died in 2008. The Toronto-based physicist Lee Smolin had many conversations with Wheeler over the years. He remembers Wheeler as a towering intellect, but also someone who spoke “in riddles and paradoxes.” Wheeler once asked Smolin what he would say if he were to find himself at the Pearly Gates and Saint Peter…

Flipped Out

What magnetism’s mysteries mean (and don’t) for Earth March 2018
Every author hopes that their book release will make a splash, and Alanna Mitchell’s new book has certainly done so. That’s the good news. The bad (or, at least, awkward) news is that after the first wave of coverage, there was a second, smaller splash, in which Mitchell was taken to task over the validity of one of the book’s central…