Topic
Big numbers
3 articles
Astronomy
Why does a total eclipse fit so exactly?
The Moon covers the Sun almost perfectly, leaving only the glowing edge behind. Nothing arranged that. The Sun is four hundred times wider and four hundred times further away, and it is a coincidence with an expiry date.
Astronomy
Why can’t we feel the Earth spinning?
Standing still at the equator, you are being carried eastward faster than an airliner flies. Nothing rattles, nothing leans, and a dropped ball falls straight down. For two thousand years that was the best argument against the Earth moving at all.
Mathematics
Why has no shuffled deck ever come up twice?
People have been shuffling playing cards for more than six hundred years, in millions of homes, on billions of evenings. Give a deck a proper shuffle tonight and the order in your hands has almost certainly never existed before.