The last ice age ended about 11,500 years ago — recently enough that its effects are still plainly visible. Take drumlins, for example. Whenever I fly from Toronto to my hometown of Halifax, I see them from the airplane window: low, elongated hills, roughly teardrop shaped, the “tail” pointing in the direction in which the ice…
Dan Falk
Dan Falk is a science journalist based in Toronto. His books include In Search of Time and The Science of Shakespeare.
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Dan Falk
Toward the end of The Pale Blue Data Point, Jon Willis asks, “How can we, without ever having discovered the merest cellular speck of evidence for alien life, call ourselves astrobiologists?” It’s a serious question. We would be wary of a physician who had never seen a patient, a plumber who had never touched a…
Fans of The Big Bang Theory will know that “our whole universe was in a hot, dense state”— which is indeed how scientists often describe the earliest moments of the cosmos. The devil, though, is in the details. We’re pretty confident in the big bang model of cosmology (now slightly harder to google, thanks to the TV…
As I write this, four of the five naked-eye planets — Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn — are all visible in the evening sky. Such celestial alignments often cause a bit of a stir on social media, for their supposed rarity (they’re not that rare) or their alleged influence on terrestrial events — of which there is…
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…