Boris Kriger

For twenty-four centuries a stubborn Greek has been telling us that motion is impossible, and no one has quite managed to prove him wrong. Achilles can never catch the tortoise. The arrow in flight is, at every instant, perfectly still.

He is the second most translated author on the planet, and he is famous for something he never claimed to do.For a century and a half, Jules Verne has been graded as a prophet — points for the submarine, points for the moon shot, a forgiving shrug for the hollow earth. It is a strange way to...

Nobody read him. Not one of his discoveries entered science through him. Every single one had to be found again, from scratch, by people who had never heard his name.This is a book about what that costs — and about the method that produced the discoveries in the first place. Leonardo da Vinci...

This book begins with a simple physical law and follows it far beyond its usual domain. Ohm’s law, often taught as a practical rule of electrical engineering, is here treated as a structural statement about reality itself. Resistance is not presented as an obstacle to be eliminated, but as the...

For millennia, the North Star has stood as humanity’s ultimate emblem of constancy—the unmoving nail around which the night turns, guiding ancient caravans, ocean-going caravel fleets, and fugitives walking toward freedom. Yet almost every element of that legendary reputation collapses under...

He swam in the Danube with a flotilla of geese who were convinced he was their mother, and he was right about something enormous: that behavior is inherited the way a bone is inherited, that it can be compared across species, and that the categories we think with were shaped long before anyone...

In 1965 Vera Rubin became the first woman formally permitted to observe at Palomar, a mountain whose administrators explained that her time there would have to be short because the building had no ladies' room.

A linguist steps off a boat onto an unmapped shore. A rabbit runs past. A native speaker points and says a single word: gavagai. The linguist writes in a notebook, with reasonable confidence, the translation rabbit. And in that moment of reasonable confidence, as Willard Van Orman Quine...

Everything in the world runs one way. Coffee cools, glass shatters, memory reaches backward and never forward. In the last decades of the nineteenth century one Viennese physicist tried to explain that one-way world using nothing but particles obeying laws that work perfectly well in reverse. He...

Eighty years after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry vanished over the Mediterranean, his small book about a boy with golden hair, a single rose, and a fox who taught him what the word "tame" really means continues to outsell almost every other work of literature on Earth. It is read by children who...

Nobody in the ancient world left behind more of himself than Marcus Tullius Cicero. Speeches, letters, treatises, private grumbles, public boasts, jokes at dinner parties recorded for posterity — the paper trail is so vast that we know his moods better than we know those of most politicians...

In 1946 a five-year-old from Queens stood under a tyrannosaur and decided, on the spot, what he would do with his life. He kept the promise for fifty-six years. What nobody could have predicted is that he would spend most of them arguing with people, cheerfully and at enormous length, in a prose...

Everything in the heavens turns. Moons wheel around planets, planets around stars, stars around the bright hubs of their galaxies, and galaxies around one another in gravitational waltzes so slow that a single step outlasts a mountain range. Rotation is the most ordinary fact in the sky. Yet by...

Twenty-four centuries ago, in a windblown town on the northern coast of Greece, a man who reportedly could not stop laughing made one of the strangest and most consequential claims in the history of thought.

We are told that the moral life is a matter of choices, and that a good person is someone who chooses well. Iris Murdoch spent a lifetime quietly dismantling that comfortable picture.

What is it that we do when we think? We imagine the mind as a mirror, faithfully reflecting a world that shines in through the senses. It is nothing of the kind. The mind is a fire that exists only while it burns—an activity, not a container; a verb, not a vessel.

We have spent sixty years repeating Hannah Arendt’s most famous phrase without noticing that she may have left it half-finished. Evil, she found at the trial of a tidy bureaucrat, was not monstrous but banal. This book takes the sentence and turns it over.

Classical epistemology asked "how does the mind acquire knowledge of the world?" and spent three and a half centuries unable to answer, because the question was badly posed.

How do we tell the difference between knowledge and a story that merely sounds like knowledge? For most of the twentieth century, one answer dominated. A claim deserves the name scientific, Karl Popper argued, not because it can be proven, but because it can be proven wrong.

You wake up every morning convinced that someone is home. There is a self in there, you assume, a small steady captain at the wheel, the same one who went to sleep the night before, the same one who will sign your name and remember your childhood and answer when called.