Stories by Dan Falk

Large language models lack emotion and self-consciousness, but they appear to generate reasonable answers to moral quandaries

Everything in the universe may be preordained, according to physics

Eclipses bring the future—or at least a tiny sliver of it—into sharp focus

A materials scientist unravels the hype around research on high-temperature superconductor research like LK-99

A theory called panpsychism proposes that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality

The late physicist’s most infamous statement still beguiles scientists and vexes believers

New experimental results suggest these long-sought subatomic particles could explain the universe’s missing mass

It worked for Shakespeare and Isaac Newton during plagues, but let’s not put more pressure on ourselves than we already have

Scientists are finally approaching a consensus on the decades-old question

Physicists, philosophers debate whether research can ever solve certain mysteries of the universe—and the human mind

In non-Western societies criminal intent can matter less when judging wrongdoing

Building on advances in object recognition, machine translation and neural networks, scientists have developed software that converts pictures into sentences

In his latest book Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg explores how science made the modern world, and where it might take us from here

This winter an airborne experiment named Spider will probe the earliest remnants of the universe

Dan Falk discusses his latest book, The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright's Universe   

Dan Falk discusses his latest book, The Science of Shakespeare: A New Look at the Playwright's Universe   

William Shakespeare may well have been more aware of his era’s science—including the Copernican view that the planets revolve around the sun—than has generally been thought