Health Care
An Elbow Injury Exposes the Exorbitant Costs of Health Care
Bills totaling $287,365.08 provide insights into the dysfunctional economics of American medicine
Stories by John Horgan
Exercise
Big Data, Questionable Benefits and My Girlfriend’s Magic Ring
Wearable devices that track our health may do more harm than good
Consciousness
Death, Physics and Wishful Thinking
Fear of mortality might underlie physicists’ fondness for the anthropic principle, multiverses, superdeterminism and other shaky ideas
Quantum Physics
Is There a Thing, or a Relationship between Things, at the Bottom of Things?
Quantum mechanics inspires us to speculate that interactions between entities, not entities in themselves, are fundamental to reality
Quantum Physics
Talking to My Daughter Can Be Harder Than Learning Quantum Mechanics
Ordinary human dilemmas are tougher to solve than the most difficult problems of physics and mathematics
Behavior
What God, Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Have in Common
Theories that try to explain these big metaphysical mysteries fall short, making agnosticism the only sensible stance
Behavior
What Is a Question?
A 92-year-old essay provokes musings on the nature of knowledge, reality—and uptalk
Cognition
Quantum Mechanics, Plato’s Cave and the Blind Piranha
Can we ever really know the world?
Fitness
My Stupid Elbow and the Crisis in Health Care
A lingering hockey injury forces a science writer to reconsider his criticism of American medicine
Policy
Science Should Not Try to Absorb Religion and Other Ways of Knowing
Our diverse ways of seeing reality will never, and should never, meld into a monolithic worldview
Space & Physics
Can Science Survive the Death of the Universe?
Three physicists envision ways in which the quest for knowledge can last forever
Behavior
As Its Longest War Comes to an End, the U.S. Should Seek to End All Wars
Along with other nations, we should begin talking about how to put militarism behind us
Quantum Computing
Will Quantum Computing Ever Live Up to Its Hype?
One expert warns that the field is overpromising, while another says his firm is on the verge of building “useful” machines
Behavior
A Pep Talk from Steven Pinker
Despite what we see in the headlines, the data-driven optimist thinks we should be grateful to live in the best era in humanity’s long, troubled history
Behavior
I’m Agonizing over My Naive Realism
The philosophical position that the world has an objective, physical existence may be dubious, but we need it to address our very real problems
Space & Physics
Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room Experiment and the Limits of Understanding
All of us, even physicists, often process information without really knowing what we’re doing
Space & Physics
Hearing about the Big Bang for the First Time
A jaded old science writer rediscovers the thrill of science by teaching undergraduates
The Sciences
Quantum Mechanics, Free Will and the Game of Life
Some thoughts triggered by the death of the mathematician John Conway
Neuroscience
Can Science Illuminate Our Inner Dark Matter?
Neither introspection nor brain scans can reveal our deepest thoughts
Policy
Premature Freak-Outs about Techno-Enhancement
Debates about whether to “improve” our mind and body often exaggerate the feasibility of doing so
