Richard Panek
My background isn’t in science—it’s in journalism and fiction—but I try to turn this non-expertise to my advantage. I’m always asking myself if I’ve now explained a subject in such a way that even I would have understood it before I’d started researching it. My most recent book is The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which chronicles both the human and the scientific narratives behind the discovery that led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. My previous books include The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Invisible Universes and Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens.
Richard Panek Elsewhere:
The Father of Dark Matter Still Gets No Respect
Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe
Photo by Deborah Copaken Kogan
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Siesta and the Midnight Sun
Now that humanity has spread right to the Earth's poles and adopted a 24-hour business day, our internal clocks struggle against our urban schedules. And the cost of ignoring these circadian clocks is high. The Exxon Valdez oil spill, Three Mile Island, the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, and the Chernobyl disasters were all attributed to human error and all happened on the night shift. Jessa Gamble travels the planet to answer an essential question: Do we want to construct our own artificial timetables or find a new connection with the body's internal one?
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