When astronaut Edgar Mitchell was returning from his flight to the moon, he had an epiphany that would change his life. Staring out the window of the Kittyhawk, he experienced a feeling of connectedness, as if all the planets and all the people of all time were attached by some invisible web. It was an [...]

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One of the most vexing problems to most physicists is the notion of time and its absolute relativity, depending on the subjectivity of the observer. In the normal course of events, we experience time as a flow, or arrow.
But during extraordinary experiences — during a mystic revelation, while taking a mind-altering drug, in a moment [...]

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So many of you have written in with brilliant comments to my blog last week about the Gulf oil spill that I thought I’d carry on the conversation this week.
As I wrote, it’s no good all of us demonizing BP. The bloodjet of oil pouring out of the earth now symbolizes something far deeper.  BP [...]

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Last week I watched the spectacle of US Senators behaving very righteously, as they scrambled over each other to shoot BP chief executive Tony Hayward, with Hayward clumsily dodging their bullets.
The culpability for the Gulf Oil spill is being laid at Hayward’s door, as an example of individual corporate irresponsibility in the drive for ever [...]

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One of medicine’s great textbook cases concerns a 25-year-old railroad construction foreman named Phineas P. Gage. Gage’s company, the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, was laying new tracks across Vermont in the summer of 1848, and Gage was in charge of overseeing the controlled explosions used to blast through the layers of stratified rock covering the [...]

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