"An hour before the lecture, the overflow room in the basement of Waterloo Collegiate Institute was already filling up. I double-checked with the volunteer at the door, to make sure I understood what I was seeing. Every month during the school year, eager science fans snap up free tickets to the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics’ public lecture as soon as they appear online, she told me. The fifty or so people in the cafeteria had missed out in the virtual stampede, but they were here anyway, hoping some o..."

"Using a few ultracold ions, intense lasers and some electrodes, researchers have built the first programmable quantum computer. The new system, described in a paper to be published in Nature Physics, flexed its versatility by performing 160 randomly chosen processing routines. Earlier versions of quantum computers have been largely restricted to a narrow window of specific tasks. To be more generally useful, a quantum computer should be programmable, in the same way that a classical computer must be able to ru..."

"The year I was born, in 1981, the US Government decided magick was real. Well, the “US Government” is of course an abstraction—specifically, Congressional Research Service was commissioned to do a report on psychic phenomena and offered the following conclusion: “Recent experiments in remote viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there exists an ‘interconnectiveness’ of the human mind with other minds and with matter. This interconnectiveness would appear to be functional in nature and amplifi..."

"Was George Lucas on to something when he wrote, "May the force be with you?" Did he know something about the universe's mysterious machinations that physicists today don't understand? Sci-fi worlds are often a blend of mythology, fantasy and science, and a good writer can blur the lines between them to momentarily suspend disbelief. While it's true that a good deal of what comprises the universe is unknown to science - dark energy and dark matter, for example - these unknowns do not suspend the absolute truth of un..."

"One night I saw a TV program, Einstein's Universe. I turned it on because it was narrated by Peter Ustinov, whom I admire, even though I'm tired of Einstein's universe. The program was well done. A great effort was made to make a clear and convincing dramatization of the universe according to Einstein; just enough mystique to sugar the dull sterility of science. What bothered me most was the subservient role of Peter Ustinov playing an average man who didn't know science, feeling privileged to be let in on the secr..."

"It might be the science of the very small, but quantum computing is on the verge of solving some giant problems. For more than 30 years, physicists have dreamed of harnessing the power of atoms to produce computers that would far outstrip the capabilities of the silicon microchips used in today's PCs. These machines would have the ability to perform calculations that would take normal computers millions of years, while carrying out a vast number of tasks simultaneously. They promise to make as big an impact on i..."

"Never did I imagine that spirituality would be so important in my life. Throughout my childhood and student years I always thought I would end up as a scientist. I loved science. I loved discovering how the world works... The more I discovered, the more fascinated I became. At sixteen I was devouring Einstein and marveling at the paradoxical world of quantum physics. I delved into different theories of how the universe began, and pondered the mysteries of space and time. I had a passion for knowing, an insatiable..."