Stephen Hawking surrounded himself with a cloud of myth, made himself into a commercial product and an international brand. The celebrity eclipsed the scientist. There’s a scientific story to tell, and most of Hawking’s later life served to conceal it.
First it was a heavenly body—a beacon, or a world, a place where no one could possibly go. Then, from 1969 to 1972, twelve people landed there in spaceships. On behalf of all humanity, they said. Is it time to go back?
Your favorite time traveler may be missing from my chronicle, Time Travel: A History. I'm sorry about that. Some readers are already pointing out the omissions. Consider the case of Alley Oop.
Let us all—wherever and whenever—live on what the world’s timekeepers call Universal Time, or UTC (though “Earth time” might be less presumptuous). When it’s noon in Greenwich, England, let it be 12:00 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. No more befuddled headaches crossing the International Dateline from Tuesday back into Monday.
What was the "most characteristic feature of the thought" of the early 20th century?
Ben Lerner's appreciation for "Chris Marker, whose name was not 'Chris Marker' ... "
[First published in The New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1995, under the headline “This Is Sex?”A version of this essay appears in What Just Happened.] AT FIRST GLANCE, THERE’S a lot of sex on the Internet. Or, not at first glance—nobody can find anything on the Internet at first glance. But if you have time on your hands, if you’re comfortable with computing, and if you...
Removing doubts about the meaning of time is an ambitious goal, but not too ambitious for the Queen and Parliament of Britain in 1880. They enacted the "Statutes (Definition of Time) Act" to settle the matter once and for all. So now we know. Or do we?