Flow

Nautilus

Nautilus is a new kind of science experience, weaving together the endeavors of human knowledge, belief and ideas into broad conversations that challenge, illuminate and educate.

Nautilus8 min cititeSelf-Management
Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes: The high speed of society has jammed your internal clock.
Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition of sidewalk rage. It’s most pronounced when it comes to a certain friend who is a slow walker. Last month, as we sashayed our way to dinner, I found myself biting my tongue, think
Nautilus9 min citite
The Mystery of Time’s Arrow: This simple model of the universe shows how one natural law points toward order.
As conscious beings, we are constantly aware of the relentless march of time. You can make an egg into an omelet, but you can’t turn an omelet back into an egg. Dropped glasses shatter and do not reassemble themselves. Above all, we age and become de
Nautilus12 min citite
The Dam Problem in the West: On a raft trip down the Green River, a writer faces her environmental preconceptions.
I am paddling through the silt of the Green River, the largest, most remote, and least developed tributary of the Colorado River, which brings water to nearly 40 million people across the western United States. It’s crucial, it’s overused, and it’s a
Nautilus2 min cititeScience & Mathematics
A Precursor Piece to DNA Was Found in Star Material
April—National Poetry Month—prompted me to reread some of the work of English-American poet W.H. Auden. In “Funeral Blues,” famously recited in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Auden pairs musings on the cosmos with those on the human condition. The last
Nautilus6 min citite
Nassim Taleb’s Case Against Nate Silver Is Bad Math
Since the midterm elections, a feud has been raging on Twitter between Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, hedge-fund-manager-turned-mathematical-philosopher and author of The Black Swan. It began, late last year, with
Nautilus6 min citite
In Quantum Games, There’s No Way to Play the Odds
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. In the 1950s, four mathematically minded U.S. Army soldiers used primitive electronic calculators to work out the optimal strategy for playing blackjack. Their results, later publish
Nautilus7 min citite
The Strangeness of Black Holes: From quantum information to the Schwarzschild radius.
This essay is one of the five winners in the 2019 writing competition held by the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University. “The Black Hole Initiative offers a unique environment for thinking about the topic of black holes more creatively and comp
Nautilus3 min citite
The Day Feynman Worked Out Black-Hole Radiation on My Blackboard
The amazing image of a black hole unveiled Wednesday, along with data from the Event Horizon Telescope, may not substantiate Stephen Hawking’s famous theory that radiation, an example of spontaneous emission at the quantum level, is emitted by a blac
Nautilus7 min citite
Paradox Is Illuminating the Black Hole: How reconciling opposites is driving the science of black holes forward.
This essay is one of the five winners in the 2019 writing competition held by the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University. “The Black Hole Initiative offers a unique environment for thinking about the topic of black holes more creatively and comp
Nautilus9 min cititeBody, Mind, & Spirit
The Beckoning of the Ice Worlds: We’ve been looking for life on Earth-like planets. Will Europa teach us better?
I have seen the future of space exploration, and it looks like a cue ball covered with brown scribbles. I am talking about Europa, the 1,940-mile-wide, nearly white, and exceedingly smooth satellite of Jupiter. It is an enigmatic world that is, in m
Nautilus6 min cititeScience & Mathematics
How Supermassive Black Holes Were Discovered: Astronomers turned a fantastic concept into reality.
This essay is one of the five winners in the 2019 writing competition held by the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University. “The Black Hole Initiative offers a unique environment for thinking about the topic of black holes more creatively and comp
Nautilus6 min citite
How Black Holes Nearly Ruined Time: Quantum mechanics rescued our understanding of past and future from the black hole.
This essay is one of the five winners in the 2019 writing competition held by the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University. “The Black Hole Initiative offers a unique environment for thinking about the topic of black holes more creatively and comp
Nautilus4 min cititeScience & Mathematics
First Black-Hole Image: It’s Not Looks That Count
The Italian 14th-century painter, Giotto di Bondone, when asked by the Pope to prove his talent, is said to have swung his arm and drawn a perfect circle. But geometric perfection is limited by the medium. Inspect a canvas closely enough, and every c
Nautilus5 min citite
Viruses Have a Secret, Altruistic Social Life
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Social organisms come in all shapes and sizes, from the obviously gregarious ones like mammals and birds down to the more cryptic socializers like bacteria. Evolutionary biologists o
Nautilus3 min citite
Taking Another Person’s Perspective Doesn’t Help You Understand Them
No moral advice is perfectly sound. The Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—is only as wise as the person following it. A more modern-sounding tip—take the perspective of others—can seem like an improvement. It was Dale Carn
Nautilus9 min cititeBody, Mind, & Spirit
Why Europa Is the Place to Go for Alien Life: NASA is scheduled to probe the Jovian moon in 2023.
I have seen the future of space exploration, and it looks like a cue ball covered with brown scribbles. I am talking about Europa, the 1,940-mile-wide, nearly white, and exceedingly smooth satellite of Jupiter. It is an enigmatic world that is, in m
Nautilus7 min cititePhysics
When Beauty Gets In The Way Of Science: Insisting that new ideas must be beautiful blocks progress in particle physics.
The biggest news in particle physics is no news. In March, one of the most important conferences in the field, Rencontres de Moriond, took place. It is an annual meeting at which experimental collaborations present preliminary results. But the recent
Nautilus9 min citite
How Does Turbulence Get Started?: The high stakes of solving one of science’s most obstinate problems.
The water is always running in Björn Hof’s laboratory. Like a Zen water fountain, it gently flows over the top of a reservoir into a tube, and from there into a glass pipe 15 meters long, but thinner than a glass thermometer. To keep the flow as smo
Nautilus6 min cititeRobotics
Most Tech Today Would be Frivolous to Ancient Scientists
Surrounded by advanced achievements in medicine, space exploration, and robotics, people can be forgiven for thinking our time boasts the best technology. So I was startled last year to hear Sarah Stroup, a professor of classics at the University of
Nautilus5 min cititeSelf-Improvement
The Problem with Mindfulness
Should we be mindful of how popular “mindfulness” now is? Carl Erik Fisher says we should. Fisher is a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and a practicing psychotherapist who integrates meditation in his practice, and meditates h
Nautilus6 min cititePhysics
Why The Flow Of Time Is An Illusion: Getting human feeling to match the math is an ultimate goal in physics.
In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.” In this month’s issue of Nautilus, which looks at the concept of flow through various port
Nautilus5 min citite
Why a Traffic Flow Suddenly Turns Into a Traffic Jam: Those aggravating slowdowns aren’t one driver’s fault. They’re everybody’s fault.
Few experiences on the road are more perplexing than phantom traffic jams. Most of us have experienced one: The vehicle ahead of you suddenly brakes, forcing you to brake, and making the driver behind you brake. But, soon afterward, you and the cars
Nautilus9 min cititePsychology
In the Flow on Half Dome: “I felt elated, alive. ‘Look where we are!’ I shouted. ‘This is crazy!’”
We reached Thank God Ledge on the Regular Northwest Face, of Yosemite’s iconic Half Dome climb, by mid-afternoon. This 40-foot horizontal plank-like feature is the most famous part of the route: not for its physical difficulty, but for its stomach-ch
Nautilus9 min cititeMedical
Nurture Alone Can’t Explain Male Aggression
A young bank teller is shot dead during a robbery. The robber flees in a stolen van and is chased down the motorway by a convoy of police cars. Careening through traffic, the robber runs several cars off the road and clips several more. Eventually, t
Nautilus6 min citite
The Problem with the Way Scientists Study Reason
In March, I was in Paris for the International Convention of Psychological Science, one of the most prestigious gatherings in cognitive science. I listened to talks from my field, human reasoning, but I also enjoyed those on ethology, because I find

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