Our Universe, to the best of our knowledge, doesn’t make sense in an extremely fundamental way. On the one hand, we have quantum physics, which does an exquisite job of describing the fundamental particles and the electromagnetic and nuclear forces and interactions that take place between them. On the other hand, we have General Relativity, which — with equal success — describes the way that matter and energy move through space and time, as well as how space and time themselves evolve in the presence of matter and energy. These two separate ways of viewing the Universe, successful though they may be, simply don’t make sense when you put them together: they’re fundamentally incompatible.
When it comes to gravity, we have to treat the Universe classically: all forms of matter-and-energy have well-defined positions and motions through space and time, without any hint of uncertainty. But quantum mechanically, position and momentum can’t be simultaneously defined for any quantum of matter or energy; that’s one clear illustration of an inherent contradiction between these two frameworks for viewing the Universe.
For over 100 years, now, ... Continue Reading »
Sometimes, great writing makes me angry.
It’s nothing to do with the ideas inside, of course. Poets and bestselling authors are good at their game. What bothers me is when those ideas are expressed with such perfect beauty that I cannot hope to match them.
There might be a degree of professional pride to this. When I gawp at an old poet like T.S. Eliot or a modern writer like Samantha Harvey, I’m just jealous. Yes, they might be better trained than I am. Yes, they likely took more time on their writing than I did on this article. But, in the main, I’m left bitterly squinting at how someone can be so damn good.
There’s more to it, though. It’s often said that the joy of great literature lies in poets and writers expressing feelings and thoughts in ways we couldn’t imagine. They name emotions we didn’t know we felt. They dig up what was deeply buried away. But this joy is a coin with two sides.
I would like to invent a word: Psychoklepsis. Psychoklepsis — literally “soul-theft” — is when someone ... Continue Reading »
As humanity basks in the aftermath of the unprecedented success of Artemis II, which took humans back to the Moon for the first time in 54 years and brought them farther from Earth than ever before, many of us can’t help but think about grander goals. As a species, we don’t just dream of returning to the Moon, but of heading to places we’ve never been: other planets, other star systems, or even other galaxies. However, there are big problems we have to solve if we ever want to send humans outside of the Solar System: the problems of distance, time, speed, and fuel efficiency.
Interstellar distances are huge, even compared to the vast interplanetary distances we encounter in the Solar System. With current rocket technology, it would take hundreds of human lifetimes to reach even the nearest star, and that’s because we’re limited by speed, which is in turn limited by the efficiency of our fuel sources. Chemical-based rockets leverage quite efficient fuel sources, like liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, but transform less than a millionth of the fuel’s rest ... Continue Reading »
A week before Christmas, nearly 50,000 people living along Colorado’s Front Range lost power for multiple days.
The outage was deliberate. Xcel Energy, the region’s utility, had implemented a “public safety power shutoff” out of fear that high winds would down power lines and spark fires. The danger wasn’t hypothetical. Conditions were warm and dry, with wind gusts exceeding 100 miles per hour. In 2021, a similar windstorm had led to the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history: the Marshall Fire, which destroyed 1,084 homes in the region.
Given the risk, the December 2025 outage may have been justified, but a grid that must be shut down for multiple days because of high winds — disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of people in the process — points to a deeper problem: America’s power grid is at a breaking point.
To avoid a future plagued by more frequent blackouts, researchers are shifting some of the responsibility for keeping the lights on from utilities to the grid itself with “self-healing” technologies that can detect disruptions, isolate problems, and reroute energy — automatically.
Power grids ... Continue Reading »
Planning commission meetings in Joliet, Illinois, aren’t typically raucous affairs. The one on March 5, however, was buzzing and standing-room-only.
Hundreds of residents crammed into City Hall, filling multiple overflow rooms. Most were waiting for a chance to voice their opinion on a proposal to site a $20 billion AI data center — the largest in the state — on 795 acres of farmland on Joliet’s east side.
“These are mega-rich people who are not here to do charitable things,” said lifelong resident Isabel Gloria. “They don’t love Joliet. I’m here because I love Joliet, and I don’t want to see my utilities go up.”
While many who stepped up to the microphone spoke in favor of the proposed data center, touting the economic and tax benefits it would provide, proponents were clearly in the minority. Expressing concerns about rising electricity rates, water shortages, and uncaring tech oligarchs, most attendees were resolutely opposed.
The commission advanced the plan regardless.
Across the U.S., nebulous worries over AI taking jobs and raising electricity rates have crystallized into a clear goal: stop data centers from being built.
What happened ... Continue Reading »
When I signed a book deal in the middle of my PhD, I knew that I’d have to be very disciplined when it came to rest, so I did what most people would consider the “right” thing: I took regular breaks and went to bed early.
On paper, I was doing everything you’re supposed to do to protect your energy. And yet, I kept feeling tired. It didn’t make sense, so I started looking into it, and what I found is that most of us are working with the wrong model of energy management.
We tend to think of personal energy like a battery: We use it up, and then recharge by doing nothing. But biologically, energy behaves less like a battery and more like a machine: It doesn’t automatically repair itself just because you stop using it.
It might sound counterintuitive, but doing less can actually make you feel more tired.
The mistake is assuming that feeling tired means you just need to do less. Sometimes that helps. But often, the issue isn’t the level of demand — it’s whether your body and ... Continue Reading »
For you to live, other organisms have to die.
That’s because humans, like all animals, are heterotrophs. To fuel our bodies, we must eat other living things, killing them in the process. However, most plants and algae are autotrophs. They bootstrap their biomass without the barbarism of eating others: using photosynthesis, turning sunlight, water, and carbon (pulled from the air) into energy. They may kill through competition, but they don’t need to kill to eat.
Ultimately, everything we animals eat is a product of photosynthesis. One way or another, sunlight fuels the growth of our food (or our food’s food) before it fuels us. This realization initiated a generations-long mission in humanity to, like plants, disintermediate ourselves from the messiness and immorality of food chains, farming, and carnivorism. To stop killing to live and instead become something cleaner. To get our energy more directly, less brutally.
To become stellivores, a.k.a. “Sun-eaters.”
By copying the humble autotroph, scientists are helping solve civilization’s profoundest, most perennial problem: how to consume available energy with maximal compassion and minimal externality.
That ambition is no longer purely speculative. Across the ... Continue Reading »
“When you compare a dead body with a living one, the only difference is the presence of energy — the physical machinery, the DNA, the proteins, the skin, the organs, it’s all still there.”
I was surprised by Martin Picard’s choice of words. Evoking a lifeless image to start a conversation about energy flow was counterintuitive, but the image lingers and proves his point. Cadavers have all the “stuff” we associate with being human. The only thing missing, the Columbia professor suggests, is the flow of energy. He calls this the “potential for change,” and it’s what defines us, gives us vitality, and shapes our experience.
“We are not molecular machines, but energetic beings,” he tells me, “and we relate to one another on an energetic dimension.” It’s a succinct but provocative idea, one Picard believes could not only reshape how we understand the human experience but also lead to new treatments for a variety of diseases.
Every process in the body exists downstream of energy flow.
It’s also what drew me to his research in the first place. A self-professed “high-energy” individual, I’ve ... Continue Reading »
In the mid-20th century, while Carl Sagan pioneered the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the U.S., eminent Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev did the same in the Soviet Union, which was, at the time, the other great scientific superpower.
From that vantage point, he proposed using the energy demands of an alien civilization as a way to categorize its place on the ladder of technological advancement. This framework became known as the Kardashev scale, and it is one of the oldest and most visionary ideas in SETI, as well as a fixture of science fiction.
It is also profoundly incomplete — and if we want to advance our own civilization, we need to take the whole picture into account.
The energy ladder
Kardashev’s thinking about advanced alien civilizations was grounded in fundamental physics: No matter how advanced a civilization might become, it would still need energy to power its technology.
The Kardashev scale not only gave scientists a new framework for thinking about extraterrestrials, but also a new way to think about humanity.
Kardashev’s proposal was to be explicit about what energy sources would become available ... Continue Reading »
Our Universe, to the best of our knowledge, doesn’t make sense in an extremely fundamental way. On the one hand, we have quantum physics, which does an exquisite job of describing the fundamental particles and the electromagnetic and nuclear forces and interactions that take place between them. On the other hand, we have General Relativity, which — with equal success — describes the way that matter and energy move through space and time, as well as how space and time themselves evolve in the presence of matter and energy. These two separate ways of viewing the Universe, successful though they may be, simply don’t make sense when you put them together: they’re fundamentally incompatible.
When it comes to gravity, we have to treat the Universe classically: all forms of matter-and-energy have well-defined positions and motions through space and time, without any hint of uncertainty. But quantum mechanically, position and momentum can’t be simultaneously defined for any quantum of matter or energy; that’s one clear illustration of an inherent contradiction between these two frameworks for viewing the Universe.
For over 100 years, now, ... 
Sometimes, great writing makes me angry.
It’s nothing to do with the ideas inside, of course. Poets and bestselling authors are good at their game. What bothers me is when those ideas are expressed with such perfect beauty that I cannot hope to match them.
There might be a degree of professional pride to this. When I gawp at an old poet like T.S. Eliot or a modern writer like Samantha Harvey, I’m just jealous. Yes, they might be better trained than I am. Yes, they likely took more time on their writing than I did on this article. But, in the main, I’m left bitterly squinting at how someone can be so damn good.
There’s more to it, though. It’s often said that the joy of great literature lies in poets and writers expressing feelings and thoughts in ways we couldn’t imagine. They name emotions we didn’t know we felt. They dig up what was deeply buried away. But this joy is a coin with two sides.
I would like to invent a word: Psychoklepsis. Psychoklepsis — literally “soul-theft” — is when someone ... 
In this monthly issue, we examine how our understanding of energy — and how we source and use it — is evolving.
As humanity basks in the aftermath of the unprecedented success of Artemis II, which took humans back to the Moon for the first time in 54 years and brought them farther from Earth than ever before, many of us can’t help but think about grander goals. As a species, we don’t just dream of returning to the Moon, but of heading to places we’ve never been: other planets, other star systems, or even other galaxies. However, there are big problems we have to solve if we ever want to send humans outside of the Solar System: the problems of distance, time, speed, and fuel efficiency.
Interstellar distances are huge, even compared to the vast interplanetary distances we encounter in the Solar System. With current rocket technology, it would take hundreds of human lifetimes to reach even the nearest star, and that’s because we’re limited by speed, which is in turn limited by the efficiency of our fuel sources. Chemical-based rockets leverage quite efficient fuel sources, like liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, but transform less than a millionth of the fuel’s rest ... 
A week before Christmas, nearly 50,000 people living along Colorado’s Front Range lost power for multiple days.
The outage was deliberate. Xcel Energy, the region’s utility, had implemented a “public safety power shutoff” out of fear that high winds would down power lines and spark fires. The danger wasn’t hypothetical. Conditions were warm and dry, with wind gusts exceeding 100 miles per hour. In 2021, a similar windstorm had led to the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history: the Marshall Fire, which destroyed 1,084 homes in the region.
Given the risk, the December 2025 outage may have been justified, but a grid that must be shut down for multiple days because of high winds — disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of people in the process — points to a deeper problem: America’s power grid is at a breaking point.
To avoid a future plagued by more frequent blackouts, researchers are shifting some of the responsibility for keeping the lights on from utilities to the grid itself with “self-healing” technologies that can detect disruptions, isolate problems, and reroute energy — automatically.
Power grids ... 
Planning commission meetings in Joliet, Illinois, aren’t typically raucous affairs. The one on March 5, however, was buzzing and standing-room-only.
Hundreds of residents crammed into City Hall, filling multiple overflow rooms. Most were waiting for a chance to voice their opinion on a proposal to site a $20 billion AI data center — the largest in the state — on 795 acres of farmland on Joliet’s east side.
“These are mega-rich people who are not here to do charitable things,” said lifelong resident Isabel Gloria. “They don’t love Joliet. I’m here because I love Joliet, and I don’t want to see my utilities go up.”
While many who stepped up to the microphone spoke in favor of the proposed data center, touting the economic and tax benefits it would provide, proponents were clearly in the minority. Expressing concerns about rising electricity rates, water shortages, and uncaring tech oligarchs, most attendees were resolutely opposed.
The commission advanced the plan regardless.
Across the U.S., nebulous worries over AI taking jobs and raising electricity rates have crystallized into a clear goal: stop data centers from being built.
What happened ... 
When I signed a book deal in the middle of my PhD, I knew that I’d have to be very disciplined when it came to rest, so I did what most people would consider the “right” thing: I took regular breaks and went to bed early.
On paper, I was doing everything you’re supposed to do to protect your energy. And yet, I kept feeling tired. It didn’t make sense, so I started looking into it, and what I found is that most of us are working with the wrong model of energy management.
We tend to think of personal energy like a battery: We use it up, and then recharge by doing nothing. But biologically, energy behaves less like a battery and more like a machine: It doesn’t automatically repair itself just because you stop using it.
It might sound counterintuitive, but doing less can actually make you feel more tired.
The mistake is assuming that feeling tired means you just need to do less. Sometimes that helps. But often, the issue isn’t the level of demand — it’s whether your body and ... 
For you to live, other organisms have to die.
That’s because humans, like all animals, are heterotrophs. To fuel our bodies, we must eat other living things, killing them in the process. However, most plants and algae are autotrophs. They bootstrap their biomass without the barbarism of eating others: using photosynthesis, turning sunlight, water, and carbon (pulled from the air) into energy. They may kill through competition, but they don’t need to kill to eat.
Ultimately, everything we animals eat is a product of photosynthesis. One way or another, sunlight fuels the growth of our food (or our food’s food) before it fuels us. This realization initiated a generations-long mission in humanity to, like plants, disintermediate ourselves from the messiness and immorality of food chains, farming, and carnivorism. To stop killing to live and instead become something cleaner. To get our energy more directly, less brutally.
To become stellivores, a.k.a. “Sun-eaters.”
By copying the humble autotroph, scientists are helping solve civilization’s profoundest, most perennial problem: how to consume available energy with maximal compassion and minimal externality.
That ambition is no longer purely speculative. Across the ... 
“When you compare a dead body with a living one, the only difference is the presence of energy — the physical machinery, the DNA, the proteins, the skin, the organs, it’s all still there.”
I was surprised by Martin Picard’s choice of words. Evoking a lifeless image to start a conversation about energy flow was counterintuitive, but the image lingers and proves his point. Cadavers have all the “stuff” we associate with being human. The only thing missing, the Columbia professor suggests, is the flow of energy. He calls this the “potential for change,” and it’s what defines us, gives us vitality, and shapes our experience.
“We are not molecular machines, but energetic beings,” he tells me, “and we relate to one another on an energetic dimension.” It’s a succinct but provocative idea, one Picard believes could not only reshape how we understand the human experience but also lead to new treatments for a variety of diseases.
Every process in the body exists downstream of energy flow.
It’s also what drew me to his research in the first place. A self-professed “high-energy” individual, I’ve ... 
In the mid-20th century, while Carl Sagan pioneered the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the U.S., eminent Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev did the same in the Soviet Union, which was, at the time, the other great scientific superpower.
From that vantage point, he proposed using the energy demands of an alien civilization as a way to categorize its place on the ladder of technological advancement. This framework became known as the Kardashev scale, and it is one of the oldest and most visionary ideas in SETI, as well as a fixture of science fiction.
It is also profoundly incomplete — and if we want to advance our own civilization, we need to take the whole picture into account.
The energy ladder
Kardashev’s thinking about advanced alien civilizations was grounded in fundamental physics: No matter how advanced a civilization might become, it would still need energy to power its technology.
The Kardashev scale not only gave scientists a new framework for thinking about extraterrestrials, but also a new way to think about humanity.
Kardashev’s proposal was to be explicit about what energy sources would become available ...