10 Things You Didn't Know About Einstein

Albert Einstein

You know you're permanently established in the pop culture pantheon when people pose in front of your Lego likeness. 

Everyone knows Albert Einstein as a wild-haired, violin-playing genius who revolutionized physics, and many have heard how he arrived at his groundbreaking theories via one ingenious thought experiment, or gedankenexperiment, after another. But did you know that he was also an eccentric who gleefully eschewed socks, dodged German military service and spurned social conventions? Or that he was an enthusiastic but third-rate sailor?

Ever since solar eclipse observations in 1919 made him front-page news, we haven't been able to get enough of this guy. And why not? Einstein's influence extended beyond the scientific fields he revolutionized. His theories of relativity, which departed from the classical Newtonian view of the cosmos, came to symbolize a broader societal shift away from Enlightenment-influenced concepts of art, literature, morality and politics. More than that, thanks to his strong political and social views, often distilled into playful, philosophical and pithy quotes, he's been a mainstay of dorm-room posters and pop culture for decades.

But with the revelations that accompanied the release of his private papers 30 years after his death, do we finally have too much of Einstein? Do they remind us to never meet our heroes, or merely that all geniuses are, finally, human? As we explore the many facets of this extraordinary man, we might find that the answer changes relative to our reference frame.

10. He Took Up Speaking Late as a Child

Einstein at age 3 

Einstein did not speak until comparatively late in childhood, and he remained a reluctant talker until the age of 7 [source: Wolff and Goodman]. This fact, combined with his single-minded devotion to physics, his imposition of routines on his wife, his musical talent and other factors have led some to argue that Einstein had Asperger's syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder that affects language and behavioral development in children.

Other historical talents, including physicists Isaac Newton and Marie Curie and artists like Wassily Kandinsky and J.M.W. Turner, have received similar postmortem armchair diagnoses [source: James]. Departing from this view, Stanford economist and author Thomas Sowell coined the term "Einstein Syndrome" to describe non-autistic gifted people with delayed speech. How his ideas are viewed by child development experts, or how they differ from the more commonly known phenomenon of asynchronous development, in which gifted children develop faster than average in some areas and more slowly in others, remains unclear.

In the end, Einstein, a lifelong visual thinker, might simply have had a rich inner life and no need for speech because, as one famous anecdote claims he said, "up to now everything was in order."

09. He Did Not Actually Do Poorly in School

Grades get kind of confusing when school officials turn F's into A's and vice versa. A switcheroo like that may have been responsible for the rumor that Einstein flunked math. 

We love to swap ironic facts about famous people, especially in our click-bait-driven Internet culture. So it's no surprise that the notions that Einstein struggled with math and that he failed his college entrance exams have such staying power. In truth, he excelled in physics and math from a young age and studied calculus while only 12 years old. He also knew his way around Greek conjugation and Latin declension. So how did the idea that he failed math gain traction? Possibly because, during one year of Einstein's education, school officials reversed the grading system, turning the numerical equivalent of A's into F's (and confusing unwary future biographers).

Einstein did fail his first round of entrance exams -- due to extenuating circumstances. When the young man applied to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he was a 15-year-old dropout who lacked the equivalent of a high school diploma. Moreover, the rigid educational system that he grew up in did not provide him the background in French, chemistry and biology that he needed to pass the institute's exams. He scored so highly on his mathematics and physics tests, however, that the university accepted him anyway, on the condition that he complete his secondary education soon after.

08. He Had an Illegitimate Daughter With a Mysterious Fate

He was 17 and she was almost 21, but despite the difference in age and world experience, Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić fell very much in love. The two are pictured here on Jan. 1, 1905. 

While attending university in Zurich, Einstein fell in love with an older physics student, Mileva Marić, who would eventually become his first wife. By the standards of late 19th-century Europe, theirs was a modern love affair. They soon grew quite close and gave one another nicknames: He called her "Dollie," and she nicknamed him "Johnnie."

Marić was a remarkable woman, having overcome enormous social resistance to earn a place as the fifth woman accepted to the prestigious university [sources: PBS]. But for years after graduation, Einstein remained too poor to marry her. Moreover, his parents rejected Marić as a too-old, bookish Eastern Orthodox Serb, and his father did not approve the marriage until just before his death in 1902 [sources: Golden; Kaku; PBS].

Earlier that year, in January, the couple had a daughter named Lieserl (diminutive for Elisabeth). Marić returned to her parent's home near Novi Sad, a Serb cultural center then located in the Kingdom of Hungary but today part of Serbia's rural Vojvodina region. There she gave birth to the child, after which the couple never spoke of their daughter to others, even friends. Lieserl's fate remains a mystery to this day. The two prevalent theories hold that she died of scarlet fever or was given up for adoption [sources: Golden; Kaku; PBS].

07. He Was a Cad With a Tumultuous Family Life

And here's Einstein with his second wife (and cousin) Elsa on April 1, 1921. The two wed on June 2, 1919. 

Whatever closeness Einstein and Marić shared did not survive long into their marriage, as their correspondence makes clear. Indeed, his own letters paint him as an unkind philanderer who neglected and mistreated her while openly enjoying several flirtations and affairs [sources: Golden]. One mistress, his cousin Elsa, would eventually become his second wife, although he also considered marrying her daughter, his future stepdaughter. This must have made family reunions both uncomfortable and confusing, especially since Elsa was Einstein's first cousin on his mother's side and his second cousin on his father's side [sources: Golden; Kaku]. He cheated on Elsa as well, but she allowed it as long as he kept his affairs quiet.

Meanwhile, because he could not afford to support himself and his first wife in the case of a divorce, Einstein struck a deal with Marić: She would grant him a divorce, and he would give her and their two sons the prize money from his presumably imminent Nobel. Finally, after five years living apart, Marić divorced Albert in 1919. Thereafter, he grew estranged from his sons, one of whom was schizophrenic, leaving Marić to care for them and her own crumbling family [sources: Golden; Kaku; PBS].

06. He Had One Heck of a Year

Yep, 1905 was the year that E = mc2 burst onto the scene, too. 

In 1905, Einstein published four papers that rocked contemporary views of space, time, mass and energy and helped set the stage for modern physics, all while writing a doctoral dissertation and working as a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office.

After graduation, Einstein had applied for numerous academic posts, but school after school had rebuffed him. Their rejections stemmed in part from a letter of recommendation that Einstein had foolishly requested from Heinrich Weber, a professor whose classes he had regularly ditched [sources: Kaku]. As decisions go, it was an object lesson in the difference between intelligence and wisdom. But the clerkship left Einstein enough daydreaming time to conceive his four landmark Annals of Physics journal papers, all published in a single annus mirabilis:

01. "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" explained the photoelectric effect using quantum theory (and would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize, see below).

02. "On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat" experimentally proved the existence of atoms.

03. "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" established the mathematical theory of special relativity.

04. "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?" explained how relativity theory led to a mass-energy equivalence of E = mc2.

05. He Mediated a Hostage Negotiation

August 1914: Bavarian soldiers head out to the war front. Unlike some of his academic peers, Einstein did not support the war and was a lifelong pacifist. 

Einstein was willing to put his pacifism and commitment to peace into action, even at the risk of his own hide. In 1914, he and three colleagues in Germany singled themselves out by daring to sign a statement protesting the then-empire's militarism and involvement in World War I [source: Kaku]. The four issued the declaration in reply to the "Manifesto to the Civilized World," a government-sponsored document that defended Germany's invasion of neutral Belgium and which nearly 100 eminent German intellectuals signed. While many of his colleagues offered the fruits of their genius to the war effort, Einstein refused.

The war left Germany devastated, deeply in debt and facing social upheaval. During the turmoil that followed, radical students at the University of Berlin took the rector and several professors hostage, and no one wanted to take their chances finding out how the police would resolve the standoff [sources: Bolles; Kaku]. Both students and professors respected Einstein, so he and Max Born, a German-born pioneer of quantum mechanics, found themselves in a position to defuse the situation, which they did [source: Kaku]. In later years, Einstein would recall with amused wonder how naïve they had been for never considering that the students might have turned on them [source: Bolles].

04. He Didn't Win the Nobel Prize for Relativity

Einstein and three of his fellow Nobel Prize cronies including (left to right) Sinclair Lewis, Frank Kellogg, Einstein and Irving Langmuir. The four, along with others, had gathered for a formal celebration on the 100th anniversary of Alfred Nobel's birth in 1933. 

As with most scientific revolutions, Einstein's breakthrough insights on special relativity in 1905 did not arise out of a vacuum. His genius lay in how he transformed previous work by scientists like Henri Poincaré and Hendrik Lorentz into a new, unified theory, one that removed the friction between Newtonian physics and James Clerk Maxwell's theory of light.

Published in 1916, Einstein's theory of general relativity completed special relativity by bringing gravity and acceleration into the picture through the concept of warped space-time. Unfortunately, it took years to prove one of its key predictions, the lensing effect of gravity. When astronomers finally confirmed the bending of starlight during observations of a 1919 solar eclipse, it launched Einstein into overnight celebrity, but three more years would pass before the Nobel committee retroactively awarded him the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics in 1922.

Einstein received the prize for "the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." The photoelectric effect refers to the release of electrically charged particles (ions or electrons) from (or within) a material that absorbs electromagnetic radiation (such as light). Einstein's crucial work in this area resolved perplexing questions regarding the particle-wave duality of light. Nevertheless, Einstein's acceptance speech focused on his work in general relativity, a problem that had occupied him for nearly a decade, and whose importance would not be fully appreciated for decades to come.

03. He Co-invented a Refrigerator

Einstein and physicist buddy Leo Szilard came up with an absorption refrigerator that's getting renewed interest decades later. 

Between gas in the pipes and arsenic in the paint and wallpaper, households in the 1920s packed more than their share of deadly substances. Thus it seems appropriate that the transition from the traditional icebox (literally, an insulated wooden box with ice in it) to electrical refrigerators added to the peril by occasionally leaking volatile chemical coolants like methyl chloride, ammonia or sulfur dioxide to poison hapless homeowners.

One such incident in 1926 inspired Einstein to enlist the help of Hungarian physicist Léo Szilàrd in designing a new kind of appliance called an absorption refrigerator that required only ammonia, butane and water, plus a heat source for the pump. Patented in 1930, their device relied on the principle that liquids boil at lower temperatures when exposed to lower atmospheric pressures. As pressure in the pipe above the butane reservoir dropped, the butane would boil off, drawing in heat from its surroundings and lowering temperatures in the fridge. Because it had no moving parts, the appliance would last as long as its casing [sources: Jha].

Einstein and Szilàrd's refrigerator lost out to more efficient competitors and to the introduction of chlorofluorocarbons, which replaced more hazardous coolants and rendered the compressor fridge safer for people, if not the ozone layer. But new technologies and growing environmental concerns have today sparked renewed interest in their approach, particularly as a means of providing refrigeration in remote and rugged areas.

02. He Was Offered the Presidency of Israel

Einstein declares his opposition to the H-bomb and to the arms race between the USA and the USSR on Feb. 14, 1950, during a TV broadcast that created a considerable stir in the U.S. and all over the Western world. 

Although Einstein made his mark primarily as a physicist, his political views have grown nearly as famous as his scientific achievements. But they were also more complex than many realize.

Einstein was a lifelong pacifist, except when it came to taking up defensive arms against the Nazis, who singled him out for persecution. Moreover, when he realized that scientists in Nazi Germany might be working on nuclear chain reactions with bomb potential, he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt urging that the U.S. government coordinate its own research in the area. The letter may have contributed to the formation of the Manhattan Project, to which Einstein -- much to his relief -- was not invited; the government considered him a security risk due to his many associations with peace causes and memberships in social advocacy groups like the NAACP [sources: Kaku]. Nevertheless, his E = mc2 equation was essential to their successful efforts in making the first atomic bombs [sources: Kaku]. Einstein also helped fund the war effort by auctioning his manuscripts, and worked after the war to oppose the development of the hydrogen bomb and to control nuclear proliferation.

In 1952, Israeli premier David Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the presidency of the newly established state of Israel. Einstein politely turned him down, citing advancing age and stating that his lifelong focus on objective matters had left him unsuited to politics [sources: Einstein; Kaku].

01. His Brain and Eyes Were Stolen

The New York World-Telegram blares the news of Einstein's passing. The 20th century's most famous scientist died on April 18, 1955. 

Einstein intended that his body be cremated and his ashes scattered secretly, so as to avoid the possibility of admirers making a shrine of his grave. But when pathologist Dr. Thomas Harvey walked into the Princeton morgue on April 18, 1955, all of that went out the window. Presented with the opportunity to study the brain of one of the great geniuses of the age, and without permission, authority or experience as a neuroscientist, he absconded with 2.7 pounds (1.2 kilograms) of Einstein's gray matter. He also removed the deceased physicist's eyeballs and gave them to Einstein's eye doctor, Henry Adams. They remain in a New York City safe deposit box to this day [sources: Schifrin; Toland].

A tragicomic series of road trips ensued, with Harvey storing slices and chunks of the brain in jars, first in his basement, then in a cider box squirreled away beneath a beer cooler as he relocated after losing his medical license, then in the backseat of a reporter's car. He apparently intended to study the brain and determine what made it so smart, but in 43 years he never got around to it, perhaps because he moved around so much or because lacked the expertise and funding. Ultimately, he returned most of the brain to Princeton, bringing the physicist's postmortem peregrination full circle [sources: Schifrin; Toland].

10 Cool Things You Didn't Know About Stephen Hawking

 Stephen Hawking

From some of his scientific beliefs to works he's written, there are a few things you might not have guessed about world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking.

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Even if you don't keep a close eye on new developments in physics, you've probably heard of the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. He's prided himself on making his complex physical concepts accessible to the public and writing the bestseller, "A Brief History of Time."

And if you are a fan of Conan O'Brien, "The Simpsons" or "Star Trek," you might have seen him brandishing his cool wit during guest appearances on those shows.

Even if you are familiar with his academic work, however, there are many interesting facts you might not know about Hawking, stretching from his time at school and gradual development of disability to his opinions on the future of the human race.

Many find it surprising, for instance, that, despite his influential body of work, Hawking hasn't yet been awarded the Nobel Prize. We'll talk about some of the remarkable distinctions he has received, however.

Another interesting fact: Hawking was born on Jan. 8, 1942, which just happened to be the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death.

But this has just been the warm-up. Next, we'll delve into some fascinating and unexpected facts about Hawking, including some things about his profoundly inspirational story.

10. Received Mediocre Grades in School

Despite his poor grades early on, Hawking was able to get accepted at Oxford University.

These days, we know Hawking as a brilliant mind whose theories are difficult for a nonscientific mind to grasp. This is why it may come as a shock to learn that Hawking was a slacker when it came to his school studies.

In fact, when he was 9 years old, his grades ranked among the worst in his class [source: Larsen]. With a little more effort, he brought those grades up to about average, but not much better.

Nevertheless, from an early age he was interested in how stuff worked. He has talked about how he was known to disassemble clocks and radios. However, he admits he wasn't very good at putting them back together so they could work again.

Despite his poor grades, both his teachers and his peers seemed to understand that they had a future genius among them, evidenced by the fact that his nickname was "Einstein."

The problem with his mediocre grades was that his father wanted to send him to Oxford, but didn't have the money without a scholarship. Luckily, when it came time for the scholarship exams, he aced them, getting an almost perfect score on the physics exam.

09. Had an Aversion to Biology

Hawking chose to study cosmology at university, even though it wasn't yet a popular field at the time.

Stephen Hawking took a liking to mathematics from an early age, and he would have liked to have majored in it. His father, Frank, however, had different ideas. He hoped Stephen would instead study medicine.

But, for all his interest in science, Stephen didn't care for biology. He has said that he found it to be "too inexact, too descriptive" [source: Larsen]. He would have rather devoted his mind to more precise, well-defined concepts.

One problem, however, was that Oxford didn't have mathematics as a major. The compromise was that Stephen would attend Oxford and major in physics.

In fact, even within physics, he focused on the bigger questions. When faced with deciding between the two tracks of particle physics, which studies the behavior of subatomic particles, versus cosmology, which studies the large universe as a whole, he chose the latter. He chose cosmology despite the fact that, at that time, he says, it was "hardly recognised as a legitimate field" [source: Hawking].

In explaining why, he said that particle physics "seemed like botany. There were all these particles, but no theory" [source: Larsen].

08. Was on Oxford Rowing Team

Oxford University's rowing club practices for a race in 2010. Hawking had served as the coxswain for the school's team nearly five decades earlier.

Biographer Kristine Larsen writes about how Hawking faced isolation and unhappiness during his first year or so at Oxford. The thing that seems to have drawn him out of this funk was joining the rowing team.

Even before being diagnosed with a physically disabling illness, Hawking didn't have what one would call a large or athletic build. However, row teams recruited smaller men like Hawking to be coxswains -- a position that does not row, but rather controls steering and stroke rate.

Because rowing was so important and competitive at Oxford, Hawking's role on the team made him very popular. Remembering Hawking from those days, one fellow boatsman called him "the adventurous type" [source: Larsen].

But as much as the rowing team helped his popularity, it hurt his study habits. Occupied with rowing practice for six afternoons per week, Hawking started "to cut serious corners" and used "creative analysis to create lab reports" [source: Larsen].

07. Was Given a Few Years to Live at Age 21

As a graduate student, Hawking gradually started showing symptoms of tripping and general clumsiness. His family became concerned when he was home during his Christmas break from school and they insisted he see a doctor.

Before seeing a specialist, however, he attended a New Year's party where he met his future wife, Jane Wilde. She remembers being attracted to his "his sense of humor and his independent personality."

He turned 21 a week later, and shortly after he entered the hospital for two weeks of tests to discover what was wrong with him. He was then diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, which is a neurological disease that causes patients to lose control of their voluntary muscles. He was told he'd probably only have a few years to live.

Hawking remembers being shocked and wondering why this happened to him. However, seeing a boy dying of leukemia in the hospital made him realize that there were others worse off than him.

Hawking became more optimistic and started dating Jane. They were soon engaged, and he cites their engagement as giving him "something to live for" [source: Larsen].

A Nuclear Cloud

When asked why she was willing to marry him, Jane said that in those times they lived under the "most awful nuclear cloud -- that with a four minute warning the world itself could likely end." She says they wanted "to make the most of whatever gifts were given us" [source: Larsen].

06. Helped Create the Boundless Universe Theory

One of Hawking's major achievements (which he shares with Jim Hartle) was to come up with the theory that the universe has no boundaries in 1983.

In 1983, the effort to understand the nature and shape of the universe, Hawking and Hartle combined the concepts of quantum mechanics (the study of the behavior of microscopic particles) with general relativity (Einstein's theories about gravity and how mass curves space) to show that the universe is a contained entity and yet has no boundaries.

To conceptualize this, he tells people to think of the universe like the surface of the Earth. As a sphere, you can go in any direction on the surface of the Earth and never reach a corner, an edge or any boundary where the Earth can be said to "end." However, one major difference is that the surface of the Earth is two-dimensional (even though the Earth itself is three-dimensional, the surface is only two-dimensional), while the universe is four-dimensional.

Hawking explains that spacetime (see the sidebar on this page) is like the lines of latitude on the globe. Starting at the North Pole (the beginning of the universe) and going south, the circumferences get bigger until beyond the equator, when they would get smaller. This means that the universe is finite in spacetime and will re-collapse eventually -- however, not for at least 20 billion years [source: Hawking]. Does this mean that time itself would go backwards? Hawking grappled with this question, but decided no, because there is no reason to believe that the universe's trend from ordered energy into disordered energy will reverse [source: Hawking].

Inseparable Buddies: Space and Time

Time also fits into the Earth comparison. Because Einstein showed that space and time are relative to each other, physicists measure them together in spacetime. And, because of this relationship and mathematical observations showing the universe is expanding, physicists believe time is affected by the expansion of the universe.

05. Lost a Bet on Black Holes

In 2004, the genius Hawking admitted he had been wrong and conceded a bet he made in 1997 with a fellow scientist about black holes. To understand the bet, let's backpedal a little to understand what black holes are in the first place.

Stars are gigantic -- they have so much mass that their gravity is always incredibly strong. This is fine, as long as the star continues to burn its nuclear fuel, exerting this energy outward, thus counteracting gravity. However, once a massive enough star "dies" or burns out, gravity becomes the stronger force, and causes that big star to collapse on itself. This creates what scientists call a black hole.

The gravity is so powerful in this collapse that not even light can escape. However, Hawking proposed in 1975 that black holes are not really black. Rather, they radiate energy.

But, he said at the time, information is lost in the black hole that eventually evaporates. The problem was that this idea that information is lost conflicted with the rules of quantum mechanics, creating what Hawking called an "information paradox."

American theoretical physicist John Preskill disagreed with this conclusion that information is lost in black hole. In 1997, he made a bet with Hawking saying that information can escape from them, thus not breaking the laws of quantum mechanics.

Hawking is such a good sport that he can admit when he's wrong -- which he did in 2004. While giving a lecture at a scientific conference, he said that because black holes have more than one "topology," and when one measures all the information released from all topologies, information isn't lost [source: Rodgers].

A Singular Event

A singularity is a point of spacetime where Einstein's idea of general relativity breaks down because the gravitational forces are so strong. Theoretical physicists believe this happens when a black hole is formed, and may have happened at the creation of our universe [source: PBS]. Hawking's No-Boundary Proposal, however, suggests the world did not begin in a singularity.

04. Has Numerous Awards and Distinctions

President Obama gives Hawking the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

In his long career in physics, Hawking has racked up an incredibly impressive array of awards and distinctions. We don't hope to be exhaustive in this small space, but we'll go over some of the highlights.

In 1974, he was inducted into the Royal Society (the royal academy of science in the U.K., dating back to 1660), and a year later, Pope Paul VI awarded him and Roger Penrose the Pius XI Gold Medal for Science. He also went on to receive the Albert Einstein Award and Hughes Medal from the Royal Society.

Hawking had so well established himself in the academic world by 1979 that he attained the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England -- a position he would keep for the next 30 years. The chair dates all the way back to 1663, and the second person to hold it was none other than Sir Isaac Newton.

In the 1980s, he was invested as a Commander of the British Empire, which is a rank in the U.K. just under being knighted. He also became a Companion of Honour, which is another distinction given in recognition of national service. There can be no more than 65 members of the order at one time.

In 2009, Hawking was awarded the United States' highest civilian honor of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

All the while, Hawking attained at least 12 honorary degrees. However, the Nobel Prize continues to elude him.

03. Is a Children's Book Author

Hawking co-wrote a children's book with his daughter, Lucy.

One of the most unexpected facets of Stephen Hawking's resume is that of being a children's book author. In 2007, Stephen and his daughter, Lucy Hawking, collaborated to write "George's Secret Key to the Universe."

The book is a fiction story about a young boy, George, who rebels against his parents' aversion to technology. He begins to befriend neighbors, one of whom is a physicist with a computer. This turns out to be most powerful computer in the world, which offers portals to see and enter into outer space.

Of course, much of the book is meant to explain heavy scientific concepts, such as black holes and the origin of life, to children. In this context, it is very fitting that Hawking, who has always sought to make his work more accessible, would want to write such a book.

The book was written to be the first of a trilogy that would continue George's adventures. The next one in the series came out in 2009 and is called "George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt."

02. Believes in Possibility of Aliens

Hawking gives a lecture called "Why We Should Go Into Space" during NASA's 50th anniversary celebration in 2008.

Considering all of Hawking's work in cosmology, people are understandably interested in his opinions on the possibility of alien life. During NASA's 50th anniversary celebration in 2008, Hawking was invited to speak, and he mentioned his thoughts on the subject.

He expressed that, given the vastness of the universe, there very well could be primitive alien life out there, and it is possible, other intelligent life.

"Primitive life is very common," Hawking said, "and intelligent life is very rare." Of course, he threw in his characteristically sharp humor to say, "Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth" [source: Hawking]. He went on the say that humans should be wary of exposure to aliens because alien life will probably not be DNA-based, and we would not have resistance to diseases.

Hawking also did an episode on the possibility of aliens for "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking" on the Discovery Channel (the parent company of HowStuffWorks.com).

In this episode, he explains that aliens might use up their own planet's resources and "become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach." Or, they could set up a mirror system to focus all the energy of the sun in one area, creating a wormhole -- a hole to travel through spacetime.

01. Took Zero-gravity Flight to Save the Human Race

Hawking has said he plans to explore space aboard Virgin Galactic's commercial spacecraft, the first of which was unveiled in December 2009.

In 2007, when Stephen Hawking was 65 years old, he got to take the ride of a lifetime. He was able to experience zero-gravity and float out of his wheelchair thanks to Zero Gravity Corp. The service involves an airplane ride in which sharp ascent and descent allows passengers to experience weightlessness in flight for several rounds, each about 25-seconds long.

Hawking, free from his wheelchair for the first time in four decades, was even able to perform gymnastic flips. Hawking also has booked a seat with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic to ride on a sub-orbital flight.

But perhaps most interesting about this is not what he was able to do, but why he did it. When asked about why he wanted to do this, he of course cited his desire to go into space. But his reasons for going and his overall support for space travel went deeper than that.

Due to the possibility of global warming or nuclear war, Hawking has said that the future of the human race, if it is going to have a long one, will be in outer space [source: Boyle]. He supports private space exploration in hopes that space tourism will become affordable for the public. He hopes that we can travel to other planets to use their resources to survive [source: Daily Mail].

Read on for lots more information about Stephen Hawking, physics and other related subjects.

Trump’s ‘America First’ Policy for the World

What Trump’s ‘America First’ Policy Could Mean for the World

Dr. Howard Stoffer is Associate Professor of National Security at the University of New Haven. Previously, he served in the Foreign Service of the United States and as the Deputy Executive Director of the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate of the U.N. Security Council

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks to the press following a meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 10, 2016.

If the President-elect does everything he promised

If President Obama’s foreign policy was characterized by “don’t do stupid stuff” and a retracted U.S. presence in the world, then Donald J. Trump’s will most certainly be characterized by fear and confusion as the world grapples with what “America First” really means. The real estate mogul turned President-elect has been known to change his view on everything from the Iraq War to Vladimir Putin. But if we are to forecast the consequences of Trump’s foreign policy based on his campaign declarations and promises, then the coming months could look something like this.

First, “The Wall” would be constructed and our immigration policy would change drastically, affecting relations with Mexico, the Arab and Muslim world, and others. We could see the construction of a 1,900-mile East German-style wall along the Mexican border, demanding a new budget funded by Mexico (which politely already refused), the federal government or states.

At the same time, the deportation of 11 million or more undocumented aliens (3% of the U.S. population) could begin as soon as Congress approves a special “deportation force” operating outside the existing immigration courts. Trump said Sunday he plans to keep his promise on deportation.

Exclusions and restrictions on all Muslims seeking entry into the U.S. could follow, including registration of Muslims within the U.S., resulting in contentious court challenges.

The U.S. would scrap several multilateral agreements, including the 2016 Paris Climate Accord, NAFTA and the Nuclear Pact with Iran. Some mutual defense treaties and other trade agreements could soon follow. The U.S. would opt out of any pending free trade agreements like TPP or TTIP.

Following the repudiation of defense treaties, the U.S. would pull back or reduce troops stationed in places including Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Germany, which serve as forward deployments in times of crisis or trip-wires in times of looming war, because Trump could argue that these allies are not paying their fair share. Intense military efforts would be used against ISIS, while the American use of torture, including waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse” against prisoners, enemy combatants and perhaps their families would increase. Finally, demands on NATO allies to meet their military spending obligations would increase along with substantial threats to those allies.

In return, there would be many consequences to our blind bulldozing of our agreements, commitment or respect for international law under an “America First” policy

Backing out of the Paris Climate Accord would let global warming run wild without any comprehensive restraints. The shredding of NAFTA and other trade accords would result in the disruption of global supply chains that generate billions of dollars in trade between the U.S. and many other countries, especially Mexico. Potential foreign investment in the U.S. from around the world could be diverted. The imposition of heavy tariffs on imported goods, especially from China, would violate WTO rules and could spark a global trade war.

The abandonment of allies and friends would provoke the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons in place of the American nuclear umbrella in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere. Critical nuclear agreements such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty or plutonium agreements would be degraded or abrogated, encouraging our foes to also pursue increased nuclear development strategies. Scrapping the Iran nuclear pact would give a green light to Iran to go all-in with a nuclear capability. Israel would be under pressure to act alone to deal with a future Iranian nuclear bomb.

Current allies would increasingly turn to the next superpower for protection, probably Russia or China. Robust American military action against ISIS would result in many civilian casualties and will engineer new support for terrorism and violent extremism. NATO would not be able to offer assurances to the Baltic States and countries in Central Europe, as America’s commitment to them under Article V of the NATO Treaty would become negotiable. In turn, this would give the green light to Putin to keep Crimea and continue threatening parts of eastern Ukraine without any expectation of an American, much less continuation of Western, sanctions.

These are just a few of the immediate effects of Donald Trump’s foreign policy as he has articulated in his campaign. Of course, nobody is completely sure what Trump will actually do. His most recent claim in his acceptance speech was that “we will get along with all other nations willing to get along with us” and that “we’ll have great relationships.” Ultimately, the confusion and brashness of his approach could lead to self-destructive results for American interests and stability. Although some may be quick to label these situations as doomsday scenarios, they are the likely outcomes until Trump offers the world more clarity on his foreign policy approach. Unfortunately, it’s likely that we will no longer be theorizing doomsday scenarios; we will be living them.

History of the Universe

 

 

This timeline shows the entire history of the Universe, and where it's headed 

This is how we'll die.
BEC CREW 26 DEC 2015

And just like that, it's December again - a time to reflect on the good, the bad, and the disproportionately long things that 2015 brought. That last one is easy, because by far, the most disproportionately long thing 2015 has given us is this infographic right here, which just keeps going and going and going. Which makes sense, because we're talking about the entire lifespan of the Universe, from the moment of the Big Bang to the 'heat death' of everything we know and love.

Created by Slovak graphic designer Martin Vargic, the Timeline of the Universe covers the past 13.8 billion years of space, and then plots out what's likely to occur in the next 10 billion or so. He's even separated everything out into things that affect space, Earth, life, and humanity, just so you can really easily see what's going to hit us the hardest in our end of days.

We start out with the beginning of everything - the Big Bang, which gave rise to the Universe 13.8 billion years ago. The event birthed the oldest known star in the Universe, Methuselah, located about 190.1 light-years away from Earth. This strange star has caused quite a bit of trouble for astronomers in the past, because estimates had at one point put its age at around 16 billion years - well before the birth of the Universe, which doesn't make sense at all.

It was only in 2013 that scientists were able to reconcile the age of Methuselah with the age of the Universe, using a new method of combining data on its distance, brightness, composition and structure to come up with a significantly younger age for the oldest known star. "Put all of those ingredients together, and you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a residual uncertainty that makes the star's age compatible with the age of the Universe," lead researcher Howard Bond from Pennsylvania State University said at the time.

As Mike Wall from Space.com explains, while 14.5 billion is still younger than the estimated birth of the Universe, the uncertainty Bond is referring to allows for plus or minus 800 million years, which means their calculations could put the formation of Methuselah at 13.7 billion years old - just after the Big Bang, although only just.

Fast-forward to 10.4 billion years ago, and the Universe achieves habitability for the first time, and life is finally given a chance to emerge. Having said that, we're going to have to wait for the 4.2-billion-years-ago mark to actually see any life on Earth at all, but from there, things start to happen very quickly. (The timeline also includes the more conservative estimate of 3.9 billion years ago for when life on Earth first emerges.)

Want to know when the first natural nuclear reactor formed on Earth, or how far back the brightest star in the night sky appeared? Well, I sure hope you like scrolling, because be prepared to do a lot of it to find out.

And once you get the the bottom of the timeline, enjoy, because you'll be steeped in all the gory details of the predicted death of the Universe, including when Saturn's rings will decay into dust, Earth's orbit goes completely out of whack, and the Sun runs out of hydrogen. Good times.

If you love this timeline, head to Vargic's website to download it as an app for Android and iOS.

America and the world

The piecemaker

For seven decades America has been the guarantor of global order. It may now become a force for instability

WHEN Donald Trump started to assemble his national-security team, he asked his advisers: “Do you know what constant pour is?” At least one of the generals present confessed that he did not. Well, explained Mr Trump, it is the process whereby the concrete foundations of buildings cannot be allowed to set before being filled; cement mixers must be lined up for many blocks at the ready. The lesson was: the generals may know a lot of fancy jargon, but so does he.

It was quintessential Trump: prickly yet boastful. The assertion that the world is complicated is but a con-trick to befuddle honest Americans who wonder why their country seems less feared by enemies and less respected by allies. In his telling, America’s problems are simple, self-inflicted and reversible. It is hard to think of a president-elect less versed in the workings of the world than Mr Trump; or of one more willing to upturn the global order shaped by America in the seven decades since the end of the second world war.

Mr Trump has described his foreign policy in only the vaguest terms, preferring such bumper-sticker slogans as “America First” to detailed plans. To the extent that it can be divined, his programme involves threatening to slap tariffs on imports from China and Mexico; demanding that allies like Japan and the Europeans pay more for their defence; and being nicer to strongmen like Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. A good president, like a real-estate mogul, must be “prepared to walk” away from a bad deal; and it helps if he is unpredictable. Richard Nixon may have resorted to the madman theory of diplomacy to frighten enemies during the cold war. But Mr Trump’s politics of deliberate uncertainty is terrifying America’s friends and partners: no trade treaty, international institution or alliance is sacrosanct.

America’s allies, though mostly horrified, are scrambling to congratulate him in the hope of limiting the damage he might cause. Other demagogues who denounce elites and the liberal, multilateral, rules-based order are elated. Florian Philippot, an adviser to Marine Le Pen, leader of the xenophobic National Front (FN) in France, exulted on Twitter: “Their world is falling apart. Ours is being built.”

The one area of foreign policy about which Mr Trump’s views are clear and consistent is trade. He has grumbled about it since the 1980s, when he would appear on TV and claim that Japan was robbing America blind (by selling Americans reliable cars at reasonable prices). On the campaign trail, he has redoubled his anti-trade tirades. Whether addressing grey-haired ex-factory hands in Ohio or greeting reporters at his brass-plated skyscraper in Manhattan, he has denounced incompetent and corrupt elites for shipping jobs abroad. China is “killing us”, Mr Trump told The Economist last year. “The money that they took out of the United States is the greatest theft in the history of our country.” (In fact, the money in question was willingly paid for Chinese products.)

Depending on the week, Mr Trump’s remedies have included a promise to declare China a currency manipulator, and threats to slap tariffs of 5%, 10% or even 45% on imports to close America’s trade deficit (see chart 1). He has vowed to tweak the tax code and browbeat the bosses of such giant firms as Ford, Apple and Boeing until they make more of their products at home.

Miffed with NAFTA

Speaking before the election, Mr Trump’s senior trade adviser, Dan DiMicco, the former boss of Nucor, a big steelmaker, set out several actions the president will take in his first 100 days. These include starting to renegotiate trade pacts such as the NAFTA accord with Mexico and Canada (and threatening to pull out if they won’t play ball). Every future trade agreement, among them the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between America and 11 other Asia-Pacific countries, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the European Union (EU), will be put on hold. “Whether they go forward depends on whether we can return to balanced trade, and whether they add to GDP growth,” Mr DiMicco said. “The era of trade deficits is over. It will be: let’s talk, but otherwise we put tariffs on.”

Mr DiMicco cited the decision by Ronald Reagan (a favourite of Trump supporters) to impose a 45% tariff on Japanese motorcycles in the 1980s: “That brought people to the negotiating table.” Yet it seems implausible that trading partners will stand idly by should America raise tariffs. A trade war would come as protectionism is already on the rise. The World Trade Organisation predicts that global trade this year will grow less quickly than the world’s GDP for the first time in 15 years.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), a think-tank, has estimated the impact of Mr Trump’s trade policies under three scenarios, ranging from “aborted trade war”, in which Mr Trump is forced to lower tariffs within a year of imposing them, to a “full trade war” with Mexico and China. In the former case, global supply chains are disrupted and 1.3m private-sector American jobs are lost; in the latter, the damage includes the loss of 4.8m American jobs and would spill over into the services sector, too. Adam Posen of the PIIE says Mr Trump’s trade policies would be “horribly destructive”.

Neighbour makes bad fences

They may prove even more devastating abroad, especially in Mexico, where the peso slumped against the dollar. Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican leader, was chastised for inviting Mr Trump for talks in August. Mr Trump’s habit of insulting Mexican immigrants and his rallying cry—that he would build a wall along America’s southern border and make Mexico pay for it—have earned him much hostility in Latin America. But Mr Peña may now feel vindicated, as he has to deal with the president of his giant northern neighbour.

Mr Trump’s victory comes, cruelly, just as left-wing populism in Latin America is in retreat, opening opportunities for closer trade between the two halves of the Americas. Before the election, Latin Americans’ opinion of the United States was warmer than at any point this century. Mr Trump’s victory risks rekindling anti-yanqui sentiments, especially if he repudiates Barack Obama’s policy of normalising relations with Cuba.

Across the northern border, meanwhile, Canada frets about the economic harm that will be caused should NAFTA collapse. The United States buys about three-quarters of Canada’s exports. Some Canadians fondly imagine that a wave of young, well-educated Americans will move north, as they did during the 1970s. However, this is unlikely. A Trump presidency will hardly scare people in the way that the prospect of being drafted to fight in Vietnam did. (As Mr Trump doubtless recalls, though he was lucky enough to receive five deferments during the war.)

Mr Trump has repeatedly said that America’s willingness to defend its traditional allies should depend on whether they pay their fair share for their defence—which in Mr Trump’s view includes paying America in cash to cover the costs of protecting them. America has a justified complaint: it spends far more on defence than its European and Japanese allies put together (see chart 2). But Mr Trump risks upending the basis of post-war global security—particularly in Asia, where China is menacing its neighbours; and in Europe, where Russia has annexed Crimea and stirred a proxy war in eastern Ukraine.

In Asia American strategy has for decades been built on three pillars: open trade and the prosperity that flows from it; strong formal and informal alliances, from Japan to Australia to Singapore; and the promotion of democratic values. It is not clear that Mr Trump cares for any of them.

Mr Obama’s “pivot to Asia”—a promise to pay more attention to the world’s largest and most buoyant region—is under threat. Mr Trump will unnerve Japan, America’s staunchest friend in Asia. China may risk greater assertiveness—particularly in the South China Sea, where it has built up several reefs and atolls into military bases.

Mr Trump has suggested that Japan and South Korea should develop their own nuclear weapons rather than shelter under America’s umbrella—a recipe for regional instability and a nuclear arms race. Neither country is close to considering the possibility, and Mr Trump has played down the remarks. But fear will grow of American disengagement from Asia.

The TPP trade deal, the economic pillar of Mr Obama’s pivot to Asia, was sold as an attempt to set the world’s economic rules before they are dictated by China. But Mr Trump sees it as allowing China to come in through the back door. TPP’s proponents held out a faint hope that it could pass in the lame-duck Congress. That is now impossible. Mr Trump also says he will pull America out of the Paris climate treaty and abrogate Mr Obama’s climate agreement with China—one of the few bright spots in Sino-American relations.

Though China would be hurt by a trade war with America, Chinese hawks spot a geopolitical opening. They see Mr Trump’s election as confirmation that China is a rising power and America a declining one. “We may as well let the guy go up and see what chaos he can create for the US and the West,” wrote Global Times, a Chinese newspaper with links to the armed forces.

The thin Baltic tripwire

Mr Trump’s victory is sending shock waves through NATO, the world’s most successful military alliance. In his book “The America We Deserve” in 2000 he said that eastern Europeans should be left alone to fight out their ancient feuds. The most vulnerable point for NATO will be the Baltic states—lying on a small, flat, thinly populated strip of land with few natural frontiers and nowhere to retreat to. Providing a credible defence for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania has been NATO’s biggest headache in recent years. The alliance has started to rotate tripwire forces through them and has cobbled together rapid-reaction forces. But NATO’s ability to deter Russia rests chiefly on Russia believing that America will act decisively and speedily in a crisis.

Fearing that Mr Trump would not, the Baltic states will now start preparing for the worst—they have boosted their territorial defences and conduct regular drills in guerrilla warfare; and they have developed defence ties with neighbouring countries such as non-NATO Sweden and Finland. They worry that Russia might seek to exploit the lame-duck period in Washington to create new facts on the ground.

Whether or not Russia takes such a gamble, the Kremlin is already crying victory. Two days before Americans voted, Dmitry Kiselev, Russia’s propagandist-in-chief, declared that the campaign had been the dirtiest in America’s history: “It was so horribly noxious that it only engenders disgust towards what is still inexplicably called a ‘democracy’ in America.” Mr Putin hopes that if Western democracy seems less attractive, there is less risk of more “colour revolutions” in Russia’s backyard.

That Mr Trump openly admires Mr Putin is a welcome bonus for the Kremlin. Mr Putin expressed the hope that Russian-American relations would improve. His dream is to see Western sanctions lifted and for Mr Trump to agree to a Yalta-style deal that would recognise a Russian sphere of influence in its “near abroad”.

There are jitters in the Middle East, too. Mr Trump has mocked the folly of toppling dictators in Iraq or Libya (though he once backed both interventions). He has also blamed American leaders for not seizing oilfields in Iraq. “We go in, we spent $3trn. We lose thousands and thousands of lives, and then look, what happens is we get nothing. You know it used to be to the victor belong the spoils,” Mr Trump said in September.

Mr Trump called Mr Obama the “founder” of the Islamic State (IS), because his withdrawal of troops from Iraq created a vacuum in which the terrorist group thrived. Without offering much detail, Mr Trump has said he would “bomb the shit out of” IS. He has also appeared to accept the notion, pushed by Russia, that Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, is a bulwark against Sunni extremism rather than a despot who provokes it. That suggests that Mr Trump will probably let the Pentagon finish the job of driving IS out of the Iraqi city of Mosul if it has not already fallen by the time he is inaugurated on January 20th. But he has shown little appetite for sustained engagement in the Middle East.

Critics, and there are many among veterans of recent Republican administrations, note that many of Mr Trump’s ideas would break American or international law. They shudder when he calls for the return of torture for terrorist suspects, and for the killing of terrorists’ families as a deterrent (which would be a war crime).

Gulf Arab leaders have been appalled by Mr Obama’s policy—his support for revolts against Arab dictators, his reluctance to be drawn into the war in Syria and his decision to sign an agreement with Iran to limit its nuclear programme. But they are even more worried about Mr Trump’s unpredictability and possible isolationism. “Russia, Iran, Iraq’s Shia militias, Syria and Hizbullah all benefit from America’s vacuum in the region and support Mr Trump,” says Oraib Rantawi, a Jordanian analyst. To that list add Egypt’s strongman, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, to whom Mr Trump has promised “loyal friendship”.

Like Mr Obama, Mr Trump refers to the Gulf’s oil-rich Sunni monarchies with disdain. He has also caused outrage by showing contempt for Muslim migrants and demanding that “radical Islam” be named as the true cause of terrorism.

“Trump will cut off America’s aid to the opposition,” says a forlorn Syrian rebel spokesman in Istanbul. “Aleppo will fall to the regime and opposition units either dissolve or shift to the extremists.” Iraq’s marginalised Sunnis are similarly downbeat. Many had hoped that American forces would stay the course after the expected recapture of Mosul to oversee their rehabilitation in Iraqi politics.

When talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr Trump pointedly does not mention the need to establish a Palestinian state. The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, will probably be happy to have an American president who never presses him to trade land for peace or stop Jewish settlement-building in the West Bank. But those who know Mr Netanyahu say he is sceptical. “Bibi is risk-averse and hates surprises,” explains an ally in his Likud party. “Trump is unexpected and volatile and Bibi is like many in the Republican establishment who see him as a wild card and don’t trust him.”

America’s dealings with Iran seem likely to shift in ways that, paradoxically, may please the hardliners there. During the campaign, the state broadcaster devoted much airtime to Mr Trump’s mudslinging. The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, joined in, praising the “straight-talking” Mr Trump. Confidants cheered Mr Trump’s anti-Saudi rhetoric and his good relations with Mr Putin. And so what if he loathes the nuclear agreement, or assents to Congress killing it off? Iranian conservatives have always viewed that deal with grave suspicion, as part of an American plot to gain control of their country.

Following close on Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union, Mr Trump’s election will boost populists everywhere, especially in Europe, by breaking the myth that anti-establishment groups are unelectable. The next test will be Italy’s constitutional referendum in December. A defeat for the prime minister, Matteo Renzi, which seems likely, could lead to the undoing of his government and the rise to power of the populist Five Star Movement, which wants a referendum on the euro.

Trumpeting the Donald

Then there is France. Could Marine Le Pen, leader of the ultranationalist FN, win the presidential election next spring? Before Mr Trump’s victory, the question seemed absurd. Polls suggest that she will win one of two second-round places. This in itself would be a victory of sorts, repeating the achievement of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2002. But no polls have indicated that she could beat any of the centre-right candidates likely to face her. Now, her victory is no longer unthinkable. There was no disguising the delight at the FN headquarters in Paris. A jubilant Ms Le Pen, congratulated the American president-elect and praised the “free” American people. Even Mr Le Pen, who has fallen out with his daughter, tweeted: “Today the United States, tomorrow France!”

The parallels between Ms Le Pen and Mr Trump are striking. Both trade on simplified truths and have built platforms on rejection and nostalgia. Both have cast themselves as outsiders who stand up for people scorned by the elite. Mr Trump and Ms Le Pen are both protectionist, nationalist and fans of Mr Putin. Mr Trump wants to scrap trade deals and is impatient with encumbering alliances. Ms Le Pen wants a referendum on “Frexit”; if it passed it would spell the end of the EU.

One difference is rhetorical excess. Ms Le Pen is in some ways a Trump lite. She may share many of his reflexes, but her language is more cautious. She has never, for instance, called for all Muslims to be banned from entering France, but rather for an end to an “uncontrolled wave” of immigration. She does not promise to build walls, but to control borders. The problem, she says, is not Islam but what she calls the “Islamification” of France. In France, where Ms Le Pen is trying to transform a one-time pariah movement with neo-Nazi links into a credible party of government, such nuances remain an asset.

Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary and prototype European populist, who talks of creating an “illiberal” democracy, was one of the few European leaders to endorse Mr Trump’s campaign. The Polish government, which is in many ways as populist and nationalist as Mr Trump, has been more cautious. It may dislike Muslim migrants, but it fears Russia more, and would love to see more American troops deployed on its territory.

With America in isolationist mood, Britain on the way out and France paralysed, it falls increasingly to Germany to preserve the European order. Many Germans are horrified by Mr Trump’s disdain for due process. “What sets Trump apart from any major US politician—let alone presidential candidate—in living memory is his overt, chilling contempt for the fundamental principles of the constitution. That is familiar to a German in the worst possible way,” says Constanze Stelzenmüller of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. Yet the chancellor, Angela Merkel, weakened by the past year’s refugee crisis, will be largely reduced to “lots of hand-wringing and rhetoric and virtually no action”, says John Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany.

If Mr Trump’s triumph augurs yet more populist victories elsewhere, the EU itself may find it hard to hold together. A remote, complex and technocratic body, the EU is the perfect whipping boy for demagogues. As Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to Washington, put it in a tweet (now deleted): “After Brexit and this election, everything is now possible. A world is collapsing before our eyes.”

Education and class

America’s new aristocracy

As the importance of intellectual capital grows, privilege has become increasingly heritable

WHEN the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination line up on stage for their first debate in August, there may be three contenders whose fathers also ran for president. Whoever wins may face the wife of a former president next year. It is odd that a country founded on the principle of hostility to inherited status should be so tolerant of dynasties. Because America never had kings or lords, it sometimes seems less inclined to worry about signs that its elite is calcifying.

Thomas Jefferson drew a distinction between a natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented, which was a blessing to a nation, and an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, which would slowly strangle it. Jefferson himself was a hybrid of these two types—a brilliant lawyer who inherited 11,000 acres and 135 slaves from his father-in-law—but the distinction proved durable. When the robber barons accumulated fortunes that made European princes envious, the combination of their own philanthropy, their children’s extravagance and federal trust-busting meant that Americans never discovered what it would be like to live in a country where the elite could reliably reproduce themselves.

Now they are beginning to find out, (see article), because today’s rich increasingly pass on to their children an asset that cannot be frittered away in a few nights at a casino. It is far more useful than wealth, and invulnerable to inheritance tax. It is brains.

Matches made in New Haven

Intellectual capital drives the knowledge economy, so those who have lots of it get a fat slice of the pie. And it is increasingly heritable. Far more than in previous generations, clever, successful men marry clever, successful women. Such “assortative mating” increases inequality by 25%, by one estimate, since two-degree households typically enjoy two large incomes. Power couples conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9% of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61% of high-school dropouts. They stimulate them relentlessly: children of professionals hear 32m more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare. They move to pricey neighbourhoods with good schools, spend a packet on flute lessons and pull strings to get junior into a top-notch college.

The universities that mould the American elite seek out talented recruits from all backgrounds, and clever poor children who make it to the Ivy League may have their fees waived entirely. But middle-class students have to rack up huge debts to attend college, especially if they want a post-graduate degree, which many desirable jobs now require. The link between parental income and a child’s academic success has grown stronger, as clever people become richer and splash out on their daughter’s Mandarin tutor, and education matters more than it used to, because the demand for brainpower has soared. A young college graduate earns 63% more than a high-school graduate if both work full-time—and the high-school graduate is much less likely to work at all. For those at the top of the pile, moving straight from the best universities into the best jobs, the potential rewards are greater than they have ever been.

None of this is peculiar to America, but the trend is most visible there. This is partly because the gap between rich and poor is bigger than anywhere else in the rich world—a problem Barack Obama alluded to repeatedly in his state-of-the-union address on January 20th (see article). It is also because its education system favours the well-off more than anywhere else in the rich world. Thanks to hyperlocal funding, America is one of only three advanced countries where the government spends more on schools in rich areas than in poor ones. Its university fees have risen 17 times as fast as median incomes since 1980, partly to pay for pointless bureaucracy and flashy buildings. And many universities offer “legacy” preferences, favouring the children of alumni in admissions.

Nurseries, not tumbrils

The solution is not to discourage rich people from investing in their children, but to do a lot more to help clever kids who failed to pick posh parents. The moment to start is in early childhood, when the brain is most malleable and the right kind of stimulation has the largest effect. There is no substitute for parents who talk and read to their babies, but good nurseries can help, especially for the most struggling families; and America scores poorly by international standards (see article). Improving early child care in the poorest American neighbourhoods yields returns of ten to one or more; few other government investments pay off so handsomely.

Many schools are in the grip of one of the most anti-meritocratic forces in America: the teachers’ unions, which resist any hint that good teaching should be rewarded or bad teachers fired. To fix this, and the scandal of inequitable funding, the system should become both more and less local. Per-pupil funding should be set at the state level and tilted to favour the poor. Dollars should follow pupils, through a big expansion of voucher schemes or charter schools. In this way, good schools that attract more pupils will grow; bad ones will close or be taken over. Unions and their Democratic Party allies will howl, but experiments in cities such as battered New Orleans have shown that school choice works.

Finally, America’s universities need an injection of meritocracy. Only a handful, such as Caltech, admit applicants solely on academic merit. All should. And colleges should make more effort to offer value for money. With cheaper online courses gaining momentum, traditional institutions must cut costs or perish. The state can help by demanding more transparency from universities about the return that graduates earn on their degrees.

Loosening the link between birth and success would make America richer—far too much talent is currently wasted. It might also make the nation more cohesive. If Americans suspect that the game is rigged, they may be tempted to vote for demagogues of the right or left—especially if the grown-up alternative is another Clinton or yet another Bush.

Evolution

Greater than the sum of its parts

It is rare for a new animal species to emerge in front of scientists’ eyes. But this seems to be happening in eastern North America.

LIKE some people who might rather not admit it, wolves faced with a scarcity of potential sexual partners are not beneath lowering their standards. It was desperation of this sort, biologists reckon, that led dwindling wolf populations in southern Ontario to begin, a century or two ago, breeding widely with dogs and coyotes. The clearance of forests for farming, together with the deliberate persecution which wolves often suffer at the hand of man, had made life tough for the species. That same forest clearance, though, both permitted coyotes to spread from their prairie homeland into areas hitherto exclusively lupine, and brought the dogs that accompanied the farmers into the mix.

Interbreeding between animal species usually leads to offspring less vigorous than either parent—if they survive at all. But the combination of wolf, coyote and dog DNA that resulted from this reproductive necessity generated an exception. The consequence has been booming numbers of an extraordinarily fit new animal (see picture) spreading through the eastern part of North America. Some call this creature the eastern coyote. Others, though, have dubbed it the “coywolf”. Whatever name it goes by, Roland Kays of North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, reckons it now numbers in the millions.

The mixing of genes that has created the coywolf has been more rapid, pervasive and transformational than many once thought. Javier Monzón, who worked until recently at Stony Brook University in New York state (he is now at Pepperdine University, in California) studied the genetic make-up of 437 of the animals, in ten north-eastern states plus Ontario. He worked out that, though coyote DNA dominates, a tenth of the average coywolf’s genetic material is dog and a quarter is wolf.

The DNA from both wolves and dogs (the latter mostly large breeds, like Doberman Pinschers and German Shepherds), brings big advantages, says Dr Kays. At 25kg or more, many coywolves have twice the heft of purebred coyotes. With larger jaws, more muscle and faster legs, individual coywolves can take down small deer. A pack of them can even kill a moose.

Coyotes dislike hunting in forests. Wolves prefer it. Interbreeding has produced an animal skilled at catching prey in both open terrain and densely wooded areas, says Dr Kays. And even their cries blend those of their ancestors. The first part of a howl resembles a wolf’s (with a deep pitch), but this then turns into a higher-pitched, coyote-like yipping.

The animal’s range has encompassed America’s entire north-east, urban areas included, for at least a decade, and is continuing to expand in the south-east following coywolves’ arrival there half a century ago. This is astonishing. Purebred coyotes never managed to establish themselves east of the prairies. Wolves were killed off in eastern forests long ago. But by combining their DNA, the two have given rise to an animal that is able to spread into a vast and otherwise uninhabitable territory. Indeed, coywolves are now living even in large cities, like Boston, Washington and New York. According to Chris Nagy of the Gotham Coyote Project, which studies them in New York, the Big Apple already has about 20, and numbers are rising.

Even wilier

Some speculate that this adaptability to city life is because coywolves’ dog DNA has made them more tolerant of people and noise, perhaps counteracting the genetic material from wolves—an animal that dislikes humans. And interbreeding may have helped coywolves urbanise in another way, too, by broadening the animals’ diet. Having versatile tastes is handy for city living. Coywolves eat pumpkins, watermelons and other garden produce, as well as discarded food. They also eat rodents and other smallish mammals. Many lawns and parks are kept clear of thick underbrush, so catching squirrels and pets is easy. Cats are typically eaten skull and all, with clues left only in the droppings.

Thanks to this bounty, an urban coywolf need occupy only half the territory it would require in the countryside. And getting into town is easy. Railways provide corridors that make the trip simple for animals as well as people.

Surviving once there, though, requires a low profile. As well as having small territories, coywolves have adjusted to city life by becoming nocturnal. They have also learned the Highway Code, looking both ways before they cross a road. Dr Kays marvels at this “amazing contemporary evolution story that’s happening right underneath our nose”.

Whether the coywolf actually has evolved into a distinct species is debated. Jonathan Way, who works in Massachusetts for the National Park Service, claims in a forthcoming paper that it has. He thinks its morphological and genetic divergence from its ancestors is sufficient to qualify. But many disagree. One common definition of a species is a population that will not interbreed with outsiders. Since coywolves continue to mate with dogs and wolves, the argument goes, they are therefore not a species. But, given the way coywolves came into existence, that definition would mean wolves and coyotes should not be considered different species either—and that does not even begin to address whether domestic dogs are a species, or just an aberrant form of wolf.

In reality, “species” is a concept invented by human beings. And, as this argument shows, that concept is not clear-cut. What the example of the coywolf does demonstrate, though, is that evolution is not the simple process of one species branching into many that the textbooks might have you believe. Indeed, recent genetic research has discovered that even Homo sapiens is partly a product of hybridisation. Modern Europeans carry Neanderthal genes, and modern East Asians the genes of a newly recognised type of early man called the Denisovans. Exactly how this happened is unclear. But maybe, as with the wolves of southern Ontario, it was the only way that some of the early settlers of those areas could get a date.