scientist

My autograph collection includes a handwritten note from Aldous Huxley saying “Gratitude is heaven itself,” a fitting thought with Thanksgiving approaching. I’m thankful for many things, including resisting the urge to play mood music at my observatories, since tastes differ and silence still best suits the Orion Nebula in Ulster County. The holiday also prompts a modern cosmological question: whether the universe is an interconnected whole with some underlying intelligence rather than a product of randomness. This idea has scientific grounding, since the laws of physics and the four forces are astonishingly fine-tuned for life—small changes to the strong force or gravity would make stars, water, and life impossible. So we’re left to wonder whether such precision needs an explanation, and whether Nature itself might hold some unseen intelligence, as scientists continue trying to make sense of a cosmos that seems improbably well-suited to us.

"Brave the Wild River" by Melissa L. Sevigny tells the riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. The book is a spellbinding adventure of two women, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West, at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.

One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? While the science behind this inquiry is fascinating, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values, our fears, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope.In "The Possibility of Life," acclaimed science journalist Jaime Green traces the history of our understanding, from the days of Galileo and Copernicus to our contemporary quest for exoplanets.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy proposed the nation spend twenty billion dollars to land a man on the Moon before the end of the decade.Based on…

During graduate school, as she conducted experiments on the peculiarly misshapen beaks of chickadees, ornithologist Caroline Van Hemert began to feel…