Dan Falk

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…

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…

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…