Adam Frank

Questions ... questions ... So many big questions ...

Everybody has them. We are born cute but clueless, come of age through the ignominy of high school; shoulder the burden and joys of adulthood and then — BAM — it's over. And all around us is this space of infinite ...

It's easy to know what creativity means in the arts. Tom Waits produces an album that sounds like someone banging on a steel pipe and manages to make it both sweet and haunting. Merce Cunningham takes ideas about pattern and chance and invents an entirely new language for ...

Odds are good that there's a mass extinction going on right now. It will be only one of six in the entire history of the planet. In the past these great die-offs have been caused by asteroid impacts and rapid, devastating climate change driven by volcanism.

This time it's driven ...

In his 2004 book Cloud Atlas, novelist David Mitchell imagines Nea So Copros, a dystopian future version of Seoul, Korea, in which consumer culture has become its own form of totalitarianism. It's a world where brands and logos become their own form of political power.

The reduction of citizens ...

We have taken on the issue of science and politics a lot in this blog. As a culture saturated with science, one of the most pressing issues we face is how to evaluate research when its conclusions challenge our world-views. This is certainly the issue with climate change, where ...

So it's New Year's Eve again and that means resolutions — resolutions to stop this and resolutions to start that. We resolve to be thinner, to get stronger, to focus more, to be spontaneous. But regardless of our resolutions and regardless of our ability to achieve those resolutions, our lives ...

Is science complete and unitary? Does it offer an overarching and all-inclusive description of reality, reaching from the foundations of space-time to the self-illuminating capacities of consciousness? This question strikes at the heart of much of the debate between science and religion as atheists argue that the explanatory powers of ...

It's called the infinite monkey theorem, and it goes something like this: Given enough time, a monkey randomly striking keys on a typewriter will end up banging out a copy of Hamlet.

Crazy as it seems, the infinite monkey theorem can be proved using basic probability (the trick is ...

Imagine stepping into an elevator and bumping into Lou Reed or Maya Angelou or Paul Newman. What would you do? What would you say? And what if the legend you bumped into on your ride up the 32nd floor was none other than the father of the comet (kind of)?

We live in a world of shadows. We live amidst unseen forces that influence the universe even as we are blind to their presence. In other words, we live amidst ghosts.

Now, before you think I'm showing up a bit late for Halloween, you should consider this piece of

Carl Sagan, an astronomer with the soul of a poet, liked to remind us that we were all "star stuff." It was, without a doubt, one of his most beautiful images. But what, really, was Sagan talking about?

Well, there are two answers to this question. The first is remarkable, ...

Science is unabashedly radical, willing to toss aside established wisdom and ideas to embrace mind-warping new concepts (if the data backs them up). Science is relentlessly conservative, deeply suspicious of new claims and determined to hold firm to cherished truths that have stood the test of time. As strange as ...

Is it better to walk or run in the rain? MinutePhysics has the answer.

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This is the latest installment of Adam Frank's series "How to See The Universe In A Grain of Sand: Working To See The Extraordinary In The Ordinary."

Everyone will tell you that time marches on. But no will ever tell you why. Well, on that point, I have ...

Today I'll walk into a classroom of advanced undergraduate physics students and begin teaching them about the stars. It will take 13 weeks, beginning with the basic principles of astrophysics and ending with the structure of the Milky Way. I will chart that path, as I do every year, by ...

So all of us here at 13.7 Cosmos and Culture have day jobs. Much as we love exploring the big topics of life, the universe and ... um ... the meaning of zombie movies for NPR, we have academic jobs, too. In honor of the last week of summer ...

We humans are a tribal lot. We can take the subtlest difference and drive it into a wedge seemingly worthy of anger, intolerance and violence. While there are situations where differences appear between people (or whole cultures) that demand lines be drawn, for the most part the fractures we create ...

It's your neck that's the problem. Your neck is lying to you.

All your life you've had to look up at the stars. You walk along on a summer's evening and they're always there, those stars, those bright mysterious points of light, waiting for you to notice, waiting for you ...

Can you be a strident defender of science and still be suspicious of the way it is appropriated within culture? Can you be passionate about the practice and promise of science, yet still remain troubled by the way other beliefs and assumptions are heralded in its name? If such a ...