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A Pendulum for the Multiverse: David Albert, Hugh Everett, and the Worlds We Never Feel

On my grandfather’s porch in North Loup, Nebraska, the ground kept its promises. Summer evenings the floorboards held the day’s heat, the corn stood in rows that ran clear to the horizon, and nothing in all that flat immensity so much as trembled. When a teacher first told me the Earth was spinning at close to a thousand miles an hour while racing around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand more, I pressed my bare feet against those boards and waited to feel the ride. The stillness came back like a verdict. Whatever the books claimed, my soles reported a stationary world, and a boy trusts his soles. Every child who has run that experiment has rebuilt, in miniature, the strongest objection the seventeenth century could throw at Copernicus. If the Earth turns, why does a dropped stone land at the foot of the tower and never a few feet to the west? Why does the gale of our orbital speed fail to strip the leaves from the trees? The objection deserved respect because it rested on evidence, on the honest testimony of every human body that had ever stood still. It took Galileo’s ship, and then Newton’s laws, to explain why that testimony, though honest, was worthless.

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There, But Not There: The Phantom DNA Effect and the Physics of Absence

A viral video promises a ghost in the machine. The real ghosts of science are stranger, and they had to earn the name. A reader sent me a short video this week with the kind of claim that arrives already glowing. A Russian scientist, the narrator says, shone laser light through a sealed vacuum chamber. Empty, the light scattered at random. Drop in a sample of DNA, and the photons arranged themselves into the shape of a double helix, as if the molecule had taught the light how to hold a form. Then comes the part that makes people forward the video to friends. The scientist removed the DNA, disturbed nothing else, and shone the light again. The helix pattern was still there. The molecule had left a ghost in the empty chamber, an imprint pressed into the quantum field. The narrator calls it the DNA phantom effect and lets the word “amazing” do the rest.

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The Plume and the Alibi

An answer to Caroline Fraser, whose book Murderland argues that lead and arsenic from the smelters of the Pacific Northwest helped produce the serial killers of the 1970s and 1980s. A reader sent me a fragment of an interview with you. You are asking why the Pacific Northwest produced so many serial killers, and you have arrived at smelters, at lead, and at a pair of graphs that lie on top of each other. You won a Pulitzer for Prairie Fires and you do not deserve a lazy reply, so here is the long one. One half of what you are saying is sound. The other half is rotten, and the rot is spreading into the half that deserves to survive.

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One Electron, Threaded Through Time

In the spring of 1940 the telephone rang in the graduate residence at Princeton, and Richard Feynman, then a doctoral student, picked it up to hear the voice of his advisor, John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler skipped the greeting. He had solved a mystery no one else had thought to name, he said, and he knew why every electron in the universe carries exactly the same mass and exactly the same charge. The answer was that they are all the same electron.

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The Mirror at the Bottom of the Telescope

We have spent a century waiting for a signal from the stars while the harder evidence accumulated quietly, under our own instruments. The belief that human beings are the first and last word in living things is a habit we inherited from a smaller universe, and every measurement of the last thirty years has been quietly taking it apart. The question most people ask about other life rests on a misunderstanding of what the evidence would look like. They are waiting for an arrival: a radio transmission decoded at a desert array, a craft on a runway, a face on a screen. That image of contact comes from a century of film and pulp fiction, and it has trained the public to assume that until the ship lands, the rational position is that we are alone. The opposite is closer to the truth. The case that life is not a one-time accident confined to a single damp rock has been arriving for thirty years, in increments, written in the language of chemistry and statistics rather than the language of greeting. We failed to notice because it never knocked.

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The Glass People: The Materials of Madness, from the Glass King to the Simulation

More than six hundred years ago, the King of France stopped letting anyone touch him. Charles VI had iron rods sewn into his clothing and moved through his palace with the stiff care of a man carrying something breakable, because he believed he was carrying something breakable. He believed it was himself. The chronicles of his reign record that the king became convinced his body had turned to glass, and that a careless embrace or an ordinary stumble would shatter him to pieces on the stone floor.

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The Honest Button

The crosswalk button at the corner of my downtown intersection has an LED above it that lights up red and says “Wait!” when you press it. The traffic signal does not change any faster. No wire runs from the button to the signal timer. The LED is connected only to the button itself, and it does the single job of telling the pedestrian to wait. A reader who pressed one of these recently described pushing it three or four times rapidly anyway, because it’s fun. They are correct on both counts. The button is fun. The button is also a different kind of object than the placebo buttons it replaced.

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