James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

Perhaps the most persistent nonsense in physics: the perpetual motion machine. Bad ideas come and go in physics. But there’s one bit of nonsense that is perhaps more persistent than all others: the ...

Conservation of energy isn’t just a good idea: It is the law. In particular, it is the first law of thermodynamics. But, apparently, a lot of people don’t really get that because history is replete ...

Inventors have long tried to cheat the laws of physics. From quirky toys to impossible contraptions, these are the strangest perpetual motion machines ever imagined Donald Trump admin suffers legal ...

Why AI is taking on impossible challenges. How a perpetual motion machine can power an AI. Why we have to put an explicit explanation about an April 1st article so that the search engines don’t ding ...

Editors note: This story has been updated to properly credit the concept of the gigan to the poet Ruth Ellen Kocher. Eliot White sees poetry in the impossible, beauty in failure and the infinite in ...

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of ...