検索キーワード： 著者 "Boris Kriger" すべてのカテゴリー

What if one life is simply not enough?At thirty-five, Boris Kriger set out to live a thousand of them. He washed floors and wrapped the dead, escaped the claims of two armies, crossed countries and languages, built businesses, wrote books, studied medicine and cosmology, bought a house in a...

Nothing in this book can be seen.The forces that hold the world together announce themselves only through their effects: a needle that twitches, a filing that stands on end, a wire that jumps when nobody has touched it. For most of human history this was taken as evidence that such forces were...

In 1948 a shy, unicycling engineer at Bell Laboratories published a paper that quietly rebuilt the twentieth century, and he did it by refusing to answer the most interesting question in his field. Claude Shannon wanted to know how much could be sent through a wire. He did not want to know what...

His family cut stone in Salzburg for three generations. Christian Doppler was too frail to lift it, so he was sent off to do arithmetic instead, which everyone agreed was a lesser calling. In May 1842, in a half-empty room in Prague, he stood up before a learned society and explained why the...

In the autumn of 1934, in the garden behind a physics institute in Rome, a group of young men lowered cylinders of silver into an ornamental pond with goldfish in it, and discovered slow neutrons. The pond was not chosen for its elegance. It was chosen because it held water, it was ten steps...

He left school at fifteen to learn his father’s wool business, used his position as a company officer to keep himself out of the trenches, and sat his high school examinations at the age of twenty-four alongside boys nine years younger. Then he founded the most bookish school of thought of the...

A century ago, an American philosopher made a claim so simple that almost no one believed he meant it. William James said there is nothing hidden behind our experience. No invisible matter propping up the world from below. No cosmic Mind holding it together from above. Whatever joins one moment...

Everyone knows the headline. Heisenberg proved there are things we can never know. It is the most quoted result in modern science and one of the most thoroughly misunderstood, and this book explains why the misunderstanding has survived so long and what the discovery actually was.In 1925 a...

NASA had a problem. It wanted to know whether there was life on Mars, and the only way to find out appeared to involve landing a very expensive machine on it and scraping the dirt. The consultant they hired suggested something cheaper. Do not look at the ground, he said. Look at the air. A...

On the night of 25 March 1655, a young Dutchman aimed a telescope he had ground himself at Saturn and noticed a faint point of light beside it. He wrote it down and went to bed. That point was Titan, and while he watched it, methane rain was falling into rivers that had been cutting channels...

A Quaker schoolmaster who could not tell a scarlet geranium from its leaves, and who believed until his dying day that the fluid in his own eyeball was tinted blue, gave chemistry the one thing it had been missing for two thousand years. It was not the atom. Atoms were free. Democritus had them...

A Greek poet left behind a single line about a fox and a hedgehog. Twenty-six centuries later, an Oxford professor who had watched a man torn apart by a crowd in Petrograd turned that line into the most famous classification in modern thought, then spent the rest of his life insisting he had...

In the year 1148, a fanatical army rode into Cordoba and gave its Jews a simple choice: convert, leave, or die. Among the families who fled was a thirteen-year-old boy named Moses, son of Maimon. He would spend the rest of his life answering a harder question than the one the conquerors had...

In 1543 a church administrator in a cold corner of Poland published a book claiming that the ground beneath our feet is in motion. Everything you have been told about what happened next is wrong. He was not persecuted. He was not mocked. His system was not simpler than the one it replaced, and it was not more accurate. Sixty years after publication, the number of astronomers in all of Europe who accepted it could be counted on the fingers of two hands, with fingers to spare.

For a hundred years Martin Buber has been read with bowed heads. The gentle prophet of dialogue, the bearded sage who taught a tired century to say “Thou,” he became the conscience of a people and the symbol of an age. His slim book I and Thou is quoted everywhere and examined almost nowhere. This is the examination it never received.

He is a highway in Missouri, a middle school in Illinois, a crater on the Moon, and the most famous telescope ever built. He is also the author of a sentence he never wrote. Edwin Hubble began as a small-town athlete who could not spell, promised his dying father he would study law, taught Spanish to Indiana teenagers, and coached a high school basketball team before he ever pointed a serious telescope at the sky.

We are taught to think of culture as a museum: a building full of finished objects, each with a little label, each waiting quietly to be admired. Yuri Lotman spent his life arguing that this picture is precisely wrong. Culture, he insisted, is not a warehouse of things but a living process of making meaning—a vast, restless conversation in which a poem, a duel, a city street, a silence, and a wedding ring are all sentences in the same enormous language. Nothing in it is ever neutral. Nothing in it ever quite finishes. This book is an invitation into that conversation.

Some twenty-three centuries ago, a minor official in a doomed little state was offered the second-highest office in a great kingdom. He was fishing at the time. He did not look up. He asked the messengers whether they had heard of a certain sacred tortoise, three thousand years dead, whose shell the king kept wrapped in silk and stored in the ancestral temple. Would that tortoise, he wondered, rather be honored bones in a basket, or a living creature dragging its tail through the mud? The messengers admitted it would rather drag its tail. "Go away," he said.

For nearly eighty years George Orwell has been read as a prophet, which is a comfortable way of reading him, because prophecies are always about somebody else. This book reads him instead as an experiment that has now run its full course. The results are in, and they are worse than the prophecy.

He gave quantum mechanics its mathematical form, invented the theory of games, designed the lenses that squeezed the plutonium core at Trinity, ran the first computer weather forecast, described self-reproducing machines before anyone knew what a gene was made of, and left behind the design that every device you own still follows. He did all of it in fifty-three years, in a three-piece suit, usually while somebody in the next room complained about the volume of his record player.