Tonight the 2015 Major League Baseball season opens at Chicago’s Wrigley Field with a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the host Chicago Cubs. This essay originally appeared a year ago on The Last Word on Nothing, a science writers’ collective, in honor of both Wrigley Field’s 100th anniversary and one book’s indelible evocation of an era. By […]
By Richard Panek How could it happen? Was it the wrath of God or the malice of Poland? Was the crew drunk or was the Vasa wrongly built? The town was alive with rumours. I’ll bet it was. On August 10, 1628, the warship Vasa—the pride of Sweden, the talk of Stockholm—set sail on its maiden […]
(This essay was the author’s faculty reading at a recent MFAW-VT residency. It commemorates an event that happened 51 years ago this week.) By Richard Panek I was watching the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” recently when I got to thinking about Galileo. “Ladies and gentlemen, here are The Beatles!” cried Ed, in his imitable style, […]
By Richard Panek The 16-year-old student has an idea, but she doesn’t have the maths to support it. She does, however, have a drawing. She submits it to her tutor. He examines it, then delivers his verdict. “This is not science,” he says. “This is story-telling.” He’s right: Through her art she has told a story. […]
What happens when the projector doesn’t work? The Haybarn Theater on the Plainfield campus has a beautiful new sound system, concert-worthy; state of the art lighting; a rich red velvet curtain; a podium that adjusts for height at the press of a button…but when the faculty are about to read and there is some kind of […]
From The Last Word on Nothing, by Richard Panek: If you haven’t seen the movie Interstellar, you might not recognize the image above. It’s the black hole that figures prominently in the climax. But even if you have seen the movie, chances are excellent you still don’t know what you’re looking at. I didn’t, anyway, at […]
