Easy to read non-technical articles

Unless you're one of my scientific colleagues, you'll find most of my articles rather boring to read since they're so technical. On this page, I've therefore collected some articles from the popular press that tie in with my work. They are generally more fun than my own articles for two reasons: because I haven't written them and because they explain things without loading you down with equations and technical science jargon. Please click on any article that you want to read. I've sorted them into categories at the bottom of this page (please scroll down) as well as linked some of my favorites to the covers below.

Cosmology: Cosmic microwave background

CMB polarization discovered Sep. 20: New York Times - you can login with username=tegmark, password=tegmark)
The Boomerang experiment revolutionized things in April 2000: Science, New York Times, Economist, Scientific American, Philadelphia Inquirer & Astronomy Magazine.
``State of the CMB'' Feb. 2001: New York Times
Our QMAP data made Scientific American (mentioning how I messed up and my wife fixed it) as well as Science News in 1998.
Our Saskatoon map made the Saskatoon Star Phoenix exclaim ``Step Aside Toronto, Saskatoon is taking over...''.

Cosmology: Dark matter, dark energy, neutrinos

I've worked a lot on measuring what the Universe is made of.

Most of it appears to be a strange type of dark energy: Science News 2000, Science News 1998, Mirror 2000,
Dark matter warps space everywhere, causing weak gravitational lensing discovered in 2000: Nature, USA Today, Science News, space.com,

Crazy ideas: parallel universes, multiverse

There's a big story on this (Oct 29 2002) in the New York Times - you can login with username=tegmark, password=tegmark). You'll find a non-passworded abridged version in the Herald Tribune as well as here and even(!) in the Malaysia Star
John Archibald Wheeler and I wrote an article in Scientific American in honor of the 100th birthday of quantum mechanics including decoherence and the many-worlds interpretation.
I published this article in 2000 arguing against Penrose's quantum brain hypothesis: Science, Cern Courier + critique, Physics Web, Dagens Nyheter (Swedish)
Perhaps my most crazy paper so far is about the search for a ``theory of everything'', and was the cover story of New Scientist.
Continuining the bananas theme, here's some stuff about quantum suicide: New Scientist, the Guardian.

Crazy ideas: anthropic Principle

Is the Universe fine-tuned for life? Although still highly controversial, the ``A-word'' is not quite the taboo that it used to be in physics circles.

Martin Rees held a fun anthropic conference in his house summarized in Physics World
Life may only be possible with 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension: New Scientist, Associated Press, Facts (Switzerland), Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) & Information (Denmark).
Why is the CMB fluctuation level around 0.00001? New Scientist, Sky & Telescope
Why are the laws of physics what they are? New Scientist

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This page was last modified November 19 2002.

max@physics.upenn.edu