James' World 2

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As human beings, we can’t really think of ourselves without time. We organize our days around its passing. We define ourselves through the events that have been encoded into our memories. Experiences unfold through a present that passes relentlessly from one moment to the next, and we make plans to achieve our goals with the knowledge that tomorrow will arrive on schedule, as it always does. 

This is the phenomenology of time, or what neuroscientists call time consciousness. These aspects, or layers, of our experience of time, have played an important role in informing our intuitions about the nature of physical time. We assume that it has directionality, moving from an unchangeable past to an immersive present to unknown future— and that all of the above unfolds at a uniform rate throughout the cosmos.

But the more scientists have scrutinized the concept of time, the more they’ve come to understand that these common-sense assumptions may not reflect time’s true nature. 

Einstein’s Big Idea

The first radical shift in our understanding of time came with the widespread scientific acceptance of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Up until then, Newtonian time, or absolute time, existed independently of a perceiver, and progressed at a constant rate, everywhere. Relativity changed all of this. By perceiving space and time as an interwoven material, Einstein explained how mass warps this fabric to create gravity. The implications for merging space and time meant that mass not only distorted space; it distorted time, too.

Today, GPS satellites have to account for Earth’s varying distortion of space-time at different locations by adjusting the clocks in satellites and building mathematical corrections into their computer chips. Without this adjusting for relativity, Earth’s GPS systems would fail in about two minutes. 

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The ancient village of Culham, nestled in a bend of the River Thames west of London, seems an unlikely launching pad for the future. But next year, construction will start here on a gleaming building of glass and steel that could house what many people consider to be an essential technology to meet demand for clean energy in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Long derided as a prospect that is forever 30 years away, nuclear fusion seems finally to be approaching commercial viability. There are now more than 30 private fusion firms globally, according to an October survey by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) in Washington DC, which represents companies in the sector; the 18 firms that have declared their funding say they have attracted more than US$2.4 billion in total, almost entirely from private investments (see ‘Fusion funding’). Key to these efforts are advances in materials research and computing that are enabling technologies other than the standard designs that national and international agencies have pursued for so long.

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Artist’s impression of General Fusion’s planned plant at Culham, UK. Credit: AL_A for General Fusion. Lead image: The world’s strongest high-temperature superconducting magnet will be used in a 2025 fusion reactor in Massachusetts. Credit: Gretchen Ertl, CFS/MIT-PSFC, 2021

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Kisanfu is a new cobalt and copper mine being built by a Chinese conglomerate in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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In November 1915, Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity to a bewildered Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, the theory that revolutionized our view of the universe.

Einstein’s theory reframed the idea of gravity in a completely novel way, profoundly different from the then accepted theory, created by Isaac Newton in 1686. Newton’s theory worked beautifully describing a host of gravitational phenomena, from the orbits of planets and comets around the sun to the tides and the oblateness of the Earth. (The Earth is an oblate spheroid — that is, slightly flattened at the poles.) Rocket engineers still use Newton’s theory to calculate their paths to reach other worlds in the solar system. The theory only begins to fail when gravitational forces are extremely strong, far from our everyday lives. But its premise, Einstein discovered, albeit an excellent approximation, is profoundly wrong.

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A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels.

The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases—rather than requires—energy, was reported Nov. 8 in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

“The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy,” explains Christian Wallen, an author of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UW-Madison chemist John Berry. “It’s not a great economy because we burn hydrocarbons, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We don’t have a way to close the loop for a true carbon cycle, where we could transform carbon dioxide back into a useful fuel.”

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In 2009, global health officials started tracking a new kind of flu. It appeared first in Mexico, in March, and quickly infected thousands. Influenza tends to kill the very young and the very old, but this flu was different. It seemed to be severely affecting otherwise healthy young adults.

American epidemiologists soon learned of cases in California, Texas, and Kansas. By the end of April, the virus had reached a high school in Queens, where a few kids, returning from a trip to Mexico, had infected a third of the student body. The Mexican government closed its schools and banned large gatherings, and the U.S. considered doing the same. “It was a very scary situation,” Richard Besser, who was then the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. Early estimates suggested that the “swine flu,” as the new strain became known, killed as many as fourteen percent of those it infected—a case fatality rate more than two hundred times higher than typical seasonal flu. The virus soon spread to more than a hundred and fifty countries, and the Obama Administration considered delaying the start of school until after Thanksgiving when a second wave could be underway. Manufacturers worried about vaccine supplies. Like most flu vaccines, the one for the swine flu was grown in chicken eggs. “Even if you yell at them, they don’t grow faster,” Tom Frieden, who replaced Besser as the director of the C.D.C., said, at a press conference.

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Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

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