Free Republic

It's been nearly a century since scientists first theorized that the Universe was expanding, and that the farther away a galaxy was from us, the faster it appears to recede. This isn't because galaxies are physically moving away from us, but rather because the Universe is full of gravitationally-bound objects, and the fabric of space that those objects reside in is expanding. But this picture, which held sway from the 1920s onward, has been recently revised. It's been only 20 years since we first realized that this expansion was speeding up, and that as time goes on, individual galaxies will...

In this centennial year of Albert Einstein's revolutionary theories of space, time, and gravity, humanities scholars say that his influence extended far beyond science. Time is a nebulous thing, except maybe for lunchtime. That's a lesson from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the science-fiction romp by Douglas Adams that was thrown into Hollywood's Infinite Improba bility Drive and emerged as an early-summer movie hit. Consider the elaborately imagined history of the Guide itself, and of its various editors. We learn that one Lig Lury Jr., hired by a publishing consortium operating from a chunk of celestial real estate called...

Care to get involved in the first great scientific debate of the new millennium? The good news is that you don't even have to know much about science to play. You can start with the new book A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. In case you didn't notice, it shot to No. 1 book on Amazon.com earlier this month. No bookstore best seller, that performance was the result of huge pent up demand, with many anxious readers having waited as much as five years for its publication. Already, there's been a burst of stories about it in the...