The message from Quantum Mechanics is very clear: man and nature are intimately connected in mutual participation.  Man’s presence is in fact indispensable when it comes to the existence of natural phenomena and there is no way to interpret quantum theory without encountering consciousness.  All this runs counter to our ordinary experience of the world, [...]

If we could get into one of those wonderful Wellsian time machines, all shining oak and glass, with polished brass handles and instruments, and ride it back to some time in the latter half of the nineteenth century, we would encounter a very different world from the one of today.  Especially for Americans, it is [...]

Until Galileo and the Renaissance, man was firmly at the center of his universe, as defined and illustrated by scientists and philosophers alike.  This belief was perhaps best shown in the geocentric model of the solar system, started by the Egyptian astronomer, Ptolemy, nearly two thousand years ago, to which many others contributed before it became [...]

Galileo did not merely overthrow one way of looking at the solar system (the geocentric, Ptolemaic one) with a better one (the heliocentric Copernican model).  Other people had suggested that the sun was really at the center of the solar system, not the earth.  What made Galileo a truly revolutionary figure was his way of [...]

Most people remember Galileo, if they remember their schooldays at all, as the champion of the Copernican model of the solar system, with the sun at the center.  Perhaps they might even remember the story that he dropped a heavy and a light weight together, from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa, to [...]