Stories by Lawrence Rifkin

It’s true, Mr. and Ms. Hollywood Producer, Nash, Hawking, Turing were great and all, and their stories brought big bucks and a few Oscars rolling your way, but come on!

I have a prediction. There is a scientific hypothesis, formulated over 20 years ago, that we will one day look back on, when the evidence is in, and say “Of course that was right!

I am about to turn 50 years old, a mark of time that perhaps triggered the impetus to try to understand human life in the context of the largest possible backdrop — cosmic time.

Science just gives facts. Our sense of meaning, in the big-picture, must derive from elsewhere. Right? Wrong. Below are 10 sublime wonders of science, to make your mind reel and your emotions swell.

An existential catastrophe would obliterate or severely limit the existence of all future humanity. As defined by Nick Bostrom at Oxford University, an existential catastrophe is one which extinguishes Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently destroys a substantial part of its potential.  As such it must be considered a harm of unfathomable magnitude, far beyond tragedy [...]