Today, humans speak or use signs in approximately 7,500 different languages. However, this figure, impressive as it may seem, represents only a snapshot of a constantly changing history, and questions about the evolution of linguistic diversity have remained among the most elusive for science for decades. How many languages existed before the appearance of written […]
The New York Times recently published a 124-page special issue of its Style Magazine entitled “How to be cultured”. According to the cover of this glossy, ad-driven supplement, the contents were “idiosyncratic” but amounted to a “compendium of what you need to know right now”. The material had been “chosen by experts” for the purpose of “teaching readers how to be more cultured”.
Curious as to what would be included, my hopes were raised by the magazine’s lead editorial. It said that the issue “celebrates expertise, a quality ever less valued in our culture today, where learnedness and firsthand research can be overshadowed by slick presentation and dumb certainty”.
Now, I’m not naïve. I know that the New York Times Style Magazine caters to advertisers, who in turn cater to wealthy readers who feel the need to spend gobs of money to get culture. It didn’t therefore surprise me to have to leaf through 40 pages of adverts for jewellery, champagne, watches and home furnishings before finally coming across the table of contents.
I saw headings for film, food, music, theatre, fashion and the visual arts. Shakespeare showed up several times: over half a dozen plays, sonnet #94 and one of his monologues. There were entries for 1930s movies, animated videos and films from Brazil. One page on food and drink covered porridge from Norway, meat from Mexico, lemonade from Vietnam and wine from Austria.
There was no mention of science in “How to be cultured”, nothing at all
Novels from the US, UK, France, Japan, India and Brazil made the list, as did selections of music from medieval times to opera and hip-hop. Samples of theatre, puppetry and architecture made it in too. But there was no mention of science, nothing at all. The closest I found were architectural materials such as plaster, glass, steel and textiles.
Snow’s lament
The absence of anything scientific should not have shocked me; in fact, it reminded me of the British scientist and novelist C P Snow’s 1959 essay The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Even back then, Snow lamented that humanists and scientists were living in two separate cultures divided by a “gulf of mutual incomprehension”.
In the essay’s most famous passage, Snow wrote that “a good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists”.
“Once or twice,” he went on, “I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of ‘Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’”
Snow did not stop there. “I now believe,” he continued, “that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, ‘What do you mean by mass, or acceleration’, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.”
“So the great edifice of modern physics goes up,” he concluded, “and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.”
Culture club
Snow’s tone was snobby and arrogant, but he was on to something. Can someone who knows nothing about, say, Einstein’s equation E = mc2 or about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle really be called cultured? Sure, cultured individuals don’t need to know much about these topics. But they ought at least to realize that those equations concern how mass and energy work and the inherent limitations to what humans can know.
I’d say those are principles fundamental to the formation, maintenance and fate of the universe – and ones that a cultured person ought to know something about. Indeed, references to them are routinely found in arts and popular culture. Einstein’s equation has made the cover of Time magazine, while the uncertainty principle has been taken up by novelists, theologians and comedians.
Shouldn’t a cultured person be acquainted in some way with the existential threats facing the world?
Further, shouldn’t a cultured person be acquainted in some way with the existential threats facing the world? Wouldn’t such a person have to have an inkling of the way a carbon molecule absorbs and emits heat, of how vaccines work, and of safe and unsafe levels of substances toxic in high doses? How cultivated can an ostrich be?
Of course, there was nothing about the second law in “How to be cultured”, or about any other science of the sort Snow had in mind.
Nothing about scientific equations, experiments, theories or facts that a cultured person ought to know.
No discussion of dark matter, dark energy or of quantum physics, genes or vaccines. Nor about the Pythagorean Theorem or the double-slit experiment.
The critical point
Culture refers to the influences and values that are embedded in the way we live. Judging such influences and values – deciding which influences and values ought to be so embedded – is a tempting but arrogant game.
So let’s play. Imagine that you are among the experts charged with compiling a “compendium of what you need to know right now”. What would you include of science – and why? Send me your contributions, and tell me why they are what we need to know, and I’ll write about them in a future column.
Meet the family Demons come in four types: one-off, law-governed, instructional and place-holder. (Courtesy: iStock/ringo sono)
Demons might be mythical, but for hundreds of years these imaginary creatures have been fantastically useful for thinking about science and the humanities. For physicists, the most famous demon was dreamed up by James Clerk Maxwell in 1867. His creature appeared to violate the second law of thermodynamics by letting hot molecules in a box of gas go in one direction through a trap door, leaving cold molecules behind.
Inspired by the rich history of demons, my Stony Brook University colleague Elyse Graham and I created what we believe is the first university course that both studies demons and teaches students to code them. We taught the course, entitled “Demons to think with”, for the first time in spring 2025 and again in spring 2026, each time to almost 100 students. The course proved to be a great way of getting students in the humanities and sciences to talk to, work with, and learn from each other.
We surveyed demons from ancient times to the present and discussed their presence throughout art, literature and religion, where they prey on human vulnerabilities to steal souls. We also taught students about what computer engineers call “daemons”, whose malicious members prey on human vulnerabilities via clickbait and other temptations to steal passwords and social-security numbers. But what struck Graham and me most was the sheer number, variety and ambition of scientifically informed demons.
Fictional and frictional
One species was what we might call one-off demons, which explain puzzles about a specific phenomenon. Back in the early 1950s, explanations that rely on this kind of demon were parodied by the American psychologist Wendell Johnson in his 1946 book People in Quandaries: the Semantics of Personal Adjustment.
Once upon a time, Johnson wrote, people were puzzled by the fact that they could rarely find a lead pencil when they needed one – and when they did, its sharpener was sure to be filled with pencil shavings. A committee was appointed to develop a theory to explain this conundrum.
According to this made-up theory, there are lots of little people called plogglies who live underground. “At night, when people are asleep,” Johnson wrote, “the plogglies come into their houses. They scurry around and gather up all the lead pencils, and then they scamper over to the pencil sharpener and grind them all up. And then they go back into the ground.”
Even though it was impossible to know when, where and on what the plogglies will act, Johnson pointed out, this was a brilliant theory as it accounted for two mysteries at once.
Another species of demon comprises law-governed demons. The Princeton University physicist Eric Rogers gave an example in his 1960 book Physics for the Inquiring Mind. Demons cause friction, in this explanation, because they “stand in front of things and push to stop them from moving”. These demons are transparent and too small to see, and the more demons there are, the greater the friction.
Oil reduces friction because it drowns the demons, while heavy objects crush their bones. The laws of friction spring from the fact that the demons have strict habits in the way they rush out of the pores of a surface and get crushed or drowned, and multiply and return to duty at a steady rate.
Law-governed demons play what I think of as a metaphysical role, for they explain the agency behind the regularities of a phenomenon in a way that can be divorced from the regularities themselves. Scientists can study and apply the laws of friction, for example, independently of the demons that cause it. The laws can be studied in what philosophers call the “immanent frame”, apart from whatever transcendent features are involved in putting them in that frame. That lets philosophers and scientists go their separate ways.
Stand-ins and tutors
A third category of demons are what we might call placeholder demons. In 1959 the US physicist David Pines proposed the existence of a massless, chargeless quasiparticle that is an out-of-phase collective excitation of electrons. With a nod to Maxwell, he named it Pines’ demon, reinforcing the term with an improvised acronym (Distinct Electron Motion + on).
Back in 2023 a team of researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign discovered the particle – a kind of plasmon – using specialized electron spectroscopy in strontium ruthenate. Pines’ creature was a placeholder demon because it simply gave a name for something that we know is lurking in the immanent frame and only have to find it.
The emergence of quantum physics at the start of the 20th century spawned a new generation of instructional demons
Physicists, finally, use instructional demons. Its most famous member is Maxwell’s demon, mentioned at the beginning of this article. Even a century and a half later it still teaches theorists about the intersection of energy, entropy and information. But the emergence of quantum physics at the start of the 20th century spawned a new generation of instructional demons, including two from Nobel-prize-winning physicists.
In 1911 Marie Curie wondered about a demon that could manipulate quantized packets of energy, while in 1935 Arthur Compton imagined a demon that could open a door for “good” photons and slam the door on “bad” photons that might trigger a stick of dynamite. Working out how far these demons could get – whether law-abiding, law-breaking or law-bending – teaches physicists much about the intersection of information, entropy and quantum mechanics. Instructional demons teach theorists not so much about pieces of the immanent frame as about the structure of the frame itself.
The critical point
As the science historian Jimena Canales showed in her 2020 book Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, demons inhabit even the most methodical and evidence-based thinking. Scientific demons are like other kinds of demons in that they are wily supernatural creatures with superhuman powers. They are unlike other kinds of demons, however, in that they don’t try to take advantage of human vulnerabilities to change us but try to take advantage of nature’s vulnerabilities to change it.
Postulating demons with supernatural powers is a way that scientists have used to explore nature. Studying scientific demons therefore not only tells us about nature but scientific thinking itself.
Displayed in a sealed case at the National Archives Museum in Washington DC, the US Declaration of Independence is – alongside the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address – one of America’s most sacred documents. Just a single sheet of parchment, it was signed on 4 July 1776 by 56 representatives of 13 colonies, declaring themselves free of British rule. Even though years of fighting followed and Britain did not officially recognize the colonies’ independence until 1783, America dates its birth to that signing.
For many American citizens, the Declaration of Independence is greatly revered. I remember my grandfather had a copy mounted in the entryway to his home, and when I was 10 years old offered me $1 if I memorized it. I had no trouble with the start, for the document’s first sentence is arresting. “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”, decency requires that “they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation”.
The second sentence is equally exhilarating and unforgettable: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”. I didn’t discover until years later that this evidently didn’t include women, slaves, or the people referred to as “merciless Indian Savages”. Four truths later, the signatories zoomed in. When a government destroys “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” it is the “Right of the People to alter or abolish it”.
King George III was doing just that, they claimed, and the signatories followed with a laundry list of appalling grievances that amounted to tyranny. These included: obstructing justice, bending judges to his will, sending agents to harass and murder people, giving amnesty to those agents, transporting people overseas, cutting off trade with the rest of the world, making the military responsive to himself alone, and on and on.
Current US president Donald Trump claims that the Declaration of Independence led to “the greatest political journey in human history”. The document, he adds, set an example for the world. “The Story of America Makes Everyone Free,” he writes on an official website that has been counting down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to the 250th anniversary of the signing.
Destroyers of Earth
The enormous attention that the US administration is paying to this anniversary has made me wonder, however, whether a government today could destroy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness badly enough to make it necessary to alter or abolish it. The answer was staring me in the face. What if it destroyed science enough to make citizens vulnerable to natural threats?
I’ve therefore been trying to imagine a revised declaration. Among the self-evident truths, I think, is that human beings are endowed with the right to protection against nature, that the purpose of science is to understand nature and its threats, and that a sovereign’s duty is therefore to foster science and act appropriately on its findings. A no-brainer, right?
These truths are more important than ever in the 21st century, I envision the document saying. Until recently in human history, nature could be treated as an inert stage for human activity. But human activity can now interact with nature in a destructive way to threaten human life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
We experience such destruction in the degradation of the Earth’s atmosphere, in rising sea levels, in the spread of infectious diseases, in the increasing pollution of land, sea and air, and in coastal floods and water shortages. The current US administration, I’d continue, is not only doing nothing to prevent this destruction, but also actively campaigning against people who are fighting it and trying to make the world safer.
Human freedom and independence require developing science to understand and cope with nature’s threats. When science is ignored, nature rules
The administration claims that stopping these attempts increases the freedom of US citizens. It does not, however, and instead enslaves us to nature. Human freedom and independence require developing science to understand and cope with nature’s threats. When science is ignored, nature rules.
Yet the current US sovereign, a wannabe King, has made unprecedented attacks on science. His ignorance, denials and repudiations have unleashed untold damage and destruction to the health, welfare and safety of citizens. His actions threaten not only our lives but human lives elsewhere. His actions even threaten the global conditions that make human life possible at all.
Our grievances
My revised declaration would follow with a long and easily verifiable list of modern-day grievances. These would include the fact that Trump has declared that threats whose existence is scientifically well-established are hoaxes, scams and have “no basis in fact”. He has prevented agencies from investigating these threats and from developing technologies to use against them.
He has fired people who study these threats and installed political appointees to oversee funding of research. Despite publicly denying and ridiculing findings about climate change and rising seas, he has admitted their truth when it comes to protecting his own golf course.
The US administration has also declared, contrary to scientific findings, that claims of outbreaks of disease have been “fabricated” and that vaccines do not work. It has cancelled grants to develop vaccines, attacked vaccine makers, revoked recommendations that children be vaccinated, fired experts in vaccines, and damaged the process of vaccine development.
The US administration has sought to gut or close the most important US science agencies. He has withdrawn the US from international agencies that track and address the most important threats to human life and health. He has invented false facts about nature and forced US agencies to agree with him. And he has damaged and extorted America’s top universities by trying to dictate their research, hiring, admissions, courses and curricula.
The critical point
My document would reach a rousing conclusion.
A people, it would say, are only truly free and independent when they and their offspring are able to live in a safe environment, not stalked by disease, and educated freely without government interference. A sovereign who ignores and damages science is unfit to be a ruler by exposing the people to the enslavement of nature. Citizens in a democracy have the right to a leader who does not enslave them to nature.
The final sentence of the document would be: “Let us take those rights back.”
Like the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, my imagined one may seem revolutionary but only expresses what Thomas Jefferson, the author of the original, called “the common sense of the subject.”
The Great Pyramid of Giza is built from something like 2.3 million stone blocks, averaging about 2.5 tons each, and it took roughly 20 years to build. Divide one number by the other and the pace reads like a typo. A block set, then the next, then the next, every few minutes, for two decades without stopping.
It isn’t a curiosity about one heavy rock. It’s a claim about a whole human system holding a steady tempo, day after day, for longer than most modern building projects, with no engine anywhere in the chain.
The math is almost embarrassingly simple, which is part of what makes it land. A 2025 paper in npj Heritage Science lays out the standard figures: about 2.3 million blocks of around 2.5 tons each, and a required pace of roughly one block every one to three minutes across a 20-year build of long working days. Squeeze the schedule and it gets worse. The same paper notes that a 10-year build would need a block set every 30 to 90 seconds.
The blocks weren’t uniform, either. The lowest rows carry stones reaching around 10 tons or more, so “some weighing several tonnes” isn’t rhetorical. All told, laborers moved into position six and a half million tons of stone.
What that pace really describes isn’t a single feat of strength. It’s a feat of scheduling, repeated a couple of million times.
A block every few minutes only works if you stop picturing one crew doing it all. Nobody was setting a stone, catching their breath, and setting the next. The pace is an average across a whole site working at once, with many teams quarrying, hauling, shaping, and placing in parallel, so the finished total climbs at that headline speed even though no single person is moving that fast.
That reframing is what modern Egyptology has spent decades building. The old image of whip-driven slaves has been replaced with evidence of an organized, housed, and fed workforce. Egyptologists Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass estimate the peak labor force at 20,000 to 30,000 people. Not all of them were lifting stone. Vaclav Smil’s energy-based calculation for IEEE Spectrum puts the core stone-raising and placing crew at only about 3,300 workers, far from the 100,000 men the ancient historian Herodotus reported working in three-month shifts.
Perhaps the most intriguing evidence for how the tempo held came out of the ground fairly recently. In 2013, the French Egyptologist Pierre Tallet dug up a set of papyri at Wadi al-Jarf, the oldest known papyri in the world. Among them was the journal of an official named Merer, who led a crew of some 200 men and recorded ferrying fine limestone by boat to the Great Pyramid. It’s a logistics record, dated to the 27th year of Khufu’s reign, describing the movement of stone in plain administrative terms.
The build itself was probably more clever than brute. Most modern scholars think the blocks were moved with ramps and sledges rather than any single heroic lift, and the recent npj Heritage Science paper argues the internal passages themselves may have doubled as sliding ramps for counterweights. Whatever the exact method, the common thread is doing many things at once so the average holds.
What we still don’t know
The rate calculation, honestly, is the easy part. You can do it on the back of an envelope, and every serious source lands in roughly the same range.
What none of the math answers is the harder question underneath it: how a single human organization, with no machinery and no written management theory we’d recognize, held that cadence for the better part of a generation.
Consider what the pace assumes. Quarries feeding the site without running dry. Boats arriving on schedule. Ramps maintained. Thousands of workers fed, housed, rotated, and replaced as they tired or died, all without the whole tempo collapsing when any one link failed for a season. Merer’s journal gives a single thread of that operation for a few months of one year. The rest is guesswork. I find it hard to believe we’ll ever fully reconstruct the day-to-day of it, and the papyri, for all they reveal, mostly sharpen the question rather than answer it.
So the number that stops you cold turns out to be the part we understand best. Set a block every few minutes for twenty years, and the strain isn’t on any one back. It’s on the organization that had to keep that rhythm going, on schedule, in the sun, for two decades, while the thing it was building slowly blotted out the horizon.
Civil servants face being sanctioned if they fail to use the preferred name or gender of a transgender colleague, leaked Whitehall guidance has revealed.
Giovanni Kanter goes to at least one art museum whenever he visits a new city. That’s on top of his regular exploration of galleries in New York, where the 25-year-old ICU nurse lives and studies. He typically discovers new artists and gallery openings through word of mouth, though he has recently started curating his social media feed to serve relevant content (he’s currently in what he terms a “surrealism phase”).
He was raised on visual art; he's the son of painter Marianne Gargour and nephew of mixed-media artist Heather Hutchison and painter-printmaker Mark Thomas Kanter. His “exposure-oriented education” featured childhood visits to galleries and shows in and around Dallas, where he grew up, and in France, where he spent time with his grandparents.
But Kanter is an exception. Many other young people have a less immersive artistic education, perhaps shaped by occasional school trips or family visits to museums. If they haven’t internalized an instinct for what Kanter calls “moving through the art and absorbing it,” the museum experience is central to how they learn about and understand art.
Giovanni Kanter goes to at least one art museum whenever he visits a new city. That’s on top of his regular exploration of galleries in New York, where the 25-year-old ICU nurse lives and studies. He typically discovers new artists and gallery openings through word of mouth, though he has recently started curating his social media feed to serve relevant content (he’s currently in what he terms a “surrealism phase”).
He was raised on visual art; he's the son of painter Marianne Gargour and nephew of mixed-media artist Heather Hutchison and painter-printmaker Mark Thomas Kanter. His “exposure-oriented education” featured childhood visits to galleries and shows in and around Dallas, where he grew up, and in France, where he spent time with his grandparents.
But Kanter is an exception. Many other young people have a less immersive artistic education, perhaps shaped by occasional school trips or family visits to museums. If they haven’t internalized an instinct for what Kanter calls “moving through the art and absorbing it,” the museum experience is central to how they learn about and understand art.
Picture someone leaving their apartment on a hillside above the water, coffee in hand, stepping onto a train. Four minutes later they get off in a different continent. No passport, no fuss, no sense of having crossed anything at all. They do it again on the way home.
For a lot of people in Istanbul, this is just the shape of an ordinary working day.
It sounds like a geography quiz answer, and it is one. You can hop from Asia to Europe before your coffee cools.
What does that tell us about the lines we draw on maps?
The city that broke the map
Istanbul is by far the largest city in the world shared by two continents, Europe and Asia. There are other transcontinental cities, including Atyrau and Suez, but none come close to Istanbul’s scale. This is a city of roughly 15 million people, and the continental boundary runs right through it.
The thing doing the dividing is the Bosphorus, a narrow channel of water about 31 km long that links the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and runs entirely inside Turkey. It is water, but it is also a border. This strip of sea is treated as part of the accepted line between Europe and Asia, which is why crossing it counts as changing continents.
Until the first Bosphorus bridge opened in 1973, travelling by boat was the only direct way across, and that history still shapes the city’s rhythm. Ferries are woven into daily life in a way that’s hard to picture from the outside.
As Adil Bali, an expert on the history of Istanbul’s ferries, puts it, “It is one of the few cities in the world that can be crossed by sea, so the ferries are indispensable here.” That’s a romantic framing, but the point holds: those city ferries still carry at least 40 million passengers a year.
The commute that crosses a continent
Ferries are the old way. The Marmaray rail line runs through a tunnel beneath the strait, and its trains make the crossing in about four minutes. Not a scenic voyage between continents. Just four minutes of a normal train ride, mostly in the dark.
So the intercontinental commute is not a novelty. It’s the plain logistics of getting to work for hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom, I’d guess, think about it about as much as anyone thinks about their morning train, which is to say not at all.
Why this matters beyond the geography trivia
Here is what I keep circling back to. If millions of people can cross between Europe and Asia without noticing, maybe the noticing was always the strange part, not the crossing.
Geographers have made this point for a long time: the boundary between Europe and Asia is debated, not a simple fact of geology. There is no ocean between them, no crack in the Earth’s crust, nothing underfoot that says “you are now leaving one continent.” It’s a single connected landmass, Eurasia, with a line drawn across it by historical and geographic convention rather than by a clean geological break. The Bosphorus got picked as part of that line, which is convenient and tidy and completely human-made.
Istanbul is where that idea meets a commuter train timetable. The city doesn’t disprove continents so much as show how soft the concept is once you stand on top of it. A person eating breakfast in Asia and clocking in in Europe an hour later isn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. They’re just moving through a city that happens to sit on a line somebody else decided mattered.
The continents are an agreement, not a discovery. Istanbul is the place where you can ride straight through the seam and feel nothing change, because there was never really anything there to change.
Over the last several years, the Imax format has taken on a few different forms—but only a few dozen theaters are capable of screening it in its full glory.
Over the last several years, the Imax format has taken on a few different forms—but only a few dozen theaters are capable of screening it in its full glory.
"This is the fastest and clearest way to prove that this transaction is good for competition, good for consumers, and good for creators," Paramount said.
Comfort is crucial to the gaming experience. It’s hard to focus on blasting aliens or taking Stoke to the Champions League final if your bum has gone to sleep because you’ve been sitting on an old chair for three hours. We’re spending more time playing games than ever before, so good posture matters. If you have set up a dedicated gaming space, then a rickety seat just won’t cut it.
From luxurious ergonomic thrones to cheap-and-cheerful bucket seats, the options available are bewildering. So I set out on an epic quest: to find the most comfortable, durable and stylish gaming chairs. Here’s what I discovered.
Going by the mantra, if you want to make someone laugh, make them cry first, the game’s developers have created a lonely magpie who fills the void by wreaking havoc
Amid the gleeful anarchy of Bad Magpie’s debut trailer, there’s a striking note of melancholy. The game’s protagonist – a wounded corvid that creates havoc wherever she goes – calls out forlornly as a flock of her kind passes above, with a conspicuous gap in their formation.
Milktooth games designer and co-founder Daisy Fernandez has had this particular image in her head for years. Lying in the grass one afternoon during the 2020 lockdowns, she looked up and saw a V-shaped pattern in the sky, poignantly incomplete. “It really stuck with me,” she says. “I posted about it online and someone told me about a ‘missing man’ formation, which is an aerial salute to a fallen pilot.”
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