Robert Charles Wilson

In June 2016, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, hosted a conference on the subject of “Time in Cosmology.” One of the questions debated by the attendees was the reality of time. Do past, present and future exist in any meaningful sense? Any expectation that physicists might have a comprehensive answer to that venerable question would not have survived exposure to even a single…

From one perspective, contemporary science can seem like an expensive inquiry into nature’s vast store of trivia. Few of us lie awake at night worrying about the mass of the Higgs boson, after all. String theory does not balance a chequebook, and loop quantum gravity will not drive your ten-year-old to soccer practice. It is easy to forget that the questions scientists are addressing…

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood is a sequel and a companion piece to her earlier novel Oryx and Crake. Like that book, The Year of the Flood is arguably a work of science fiction, and, like that book, it raises interesting questions about literature and genre. The Year of the Flood takes place in a near-future dystopia that is collapsing under its own…