Abstract art has a bad reputation. For many people, it’s just shapes and lines, sometimes also some smears of paint thrown in ...

I once suggested that monotheism and codified law, two features of Western culture absent in China, led to a notion of universal law, which influenced the development of abstract science in ancient ...

Deep beneath the ocean’s surface lies a profound space between what science can explain and what's left to our imaginations. As a result, humans have spent centuries spinning tales of enormous ...

ON Thursday evening, May 4, the first “James Forrest” Lecture was delivered at the Institution of Civil Engineers, by Dr. William Anderson, F.R.S. The subject was “the interdependence of abstract ...

If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in ...

Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www ...