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Readers letters

A radical quantum hypothesis casts doubt on objective reality

Six new paperbacks to check out this week.

5 Books Culturally Aware Americans Should Read This Summer May 3, 2021 Five noteworthy books recently published seem, at first or second glance, to be totally unrelated to one another. Collectively, however, they address critical public issues in remarkably well-researched and illuminating ways. Each addresses monumental, even foundational human issues intimately related to what it means to be human, how we order our lives together at the most basic level, and the nature of truth and how we can...

The Machine Stops: Science and Its Limits Michael Strevens “IMAGINE, IF YOU CAN, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee.” So begins a story by E. M. Forster from over a century ago, about a future that feels uncannily like our present. Called “The Machine Stops,” the story conjures a world of individual humans isolated in such rooms who pass the time by streaming lectures and videoconferencing as the titular Machine tends to their every need. It is a world in which eve...

Why the ‘iron apparatus’ of the scientific method counts for more than any single genius. ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’ (1768) by Joseph Wright of Derby. Photo: Corbis via Getty Images By Christoph Irmscher Dec. 18, 2020 6:22 pm ET Among the missed opportunities in my life, the elaborate physics kit my parents gave me for my 10th birthday reigns supreme. Intimidated by the sheer number of parts, I never perform...