Ryan Holiday on why wisdom depends on failure, experimentation, and the courage to admit when we’re wrong.

“By not focusing on the outcome and instead designing a tiny experiment, what you can do is letting go of any definition of success, letting go of that binary results that you're looking for, and instead focusing something that makes you feel curious and that you want to explore.”

When theory and experiment disagree, it could mean new physics. This time, they solved the muon g-2 puzzle, and saved the Standard Model.

“It is natural to want to avoid failure. But when we avoid failure, we also avoid discovery and accomplishment."

"Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life, where you're making choices in accord with what you actually want and going where you actually wanna go, versus being on autopilot and having those mindsets subconsciously drive all of your decisions."

"We try to stick to routines and we try to go through very long lists of tasks, often ignoring our mental health in the process. There is a lot more to think about on a daily basis, but our brains haven't evolved."

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Neuroscientist and author Anne-Laure Le Cunff discusses the lasting benefits of uncertainty, curiosity, and the experimental mindset.

How do scientists measure and define life in the natural world? Dr. Lee Cronin gives us a definition, in 4 minutes:

CERN's NA64 experiment used a high-energy muon beam technique to advance the elusive search for dark matter, offering new hope for solving one of astronomy's greatest mysteries.

Over-reliance on experts with quick fixes has taken us too far from reality — it’s time to dispel the fairy tales.

AI is both a tool and a catalyst — and the key to successful integration is to rewrite your rule book and tinker.

There are three kinds of failure. Only one can help you have a better shot of succeeding in the future. A Harvard business professor explains.

Frustrating failures sometimes lead to great breakthroughs.

Philosophy is often seen as little more than armchair speculation. This is a shame, as philosophy often has helped science reach new heights.

So far, two papers have been retracted, and a third is under investigation. Accusations of plagiarism appear convincing.

But they're still lovable.

A concept known as "wave-particle duality" famously applies to light. But it also applies to all matter — including you.

There are at least 15 different types of solid water (ice). Now, scientists believe that there might be a second type of liquid water.

Innovation training encourages the kind of creativity and problem solving that can lead to breakthroughs in business.

Before we discovered gravitational waves, multi-messenger astronomy got its start with light and particles arriving from the same event.

This is a great improvement over the typical brew time of 12 to 18 hours.

The emergence of life in the universe is as certain as the emergence of matter, gravity, and the stars. Life is the universe developing a memory, and our chemical detection system could find it.

Many contemporary composers live in the shadow of Bach and Beethoven, even though they’re just as interesting to listen to.

On Nov. 13, 1946, a scientist dropped crushed dry ice from a plane into supercooled stratus clouds.

1700s economic principles predicted Uber. A Nobel Prize-winning economist explains why.

XLand marks the spot.

The Miller-Urey experiment showed that the building blocks of life could form in the primordial soup. But it overlooked one key variable.

‘Reductio ad absurdum’ won’t help you in an absurd Universe. Throughout history, there have been two main ways humanity has attempted to gain knowledge about the world: top-down, where we […]

Of all the injustices in Nobel Prize history, her 1957 Nobel snub is the most egregious. One of the biggest scientific revolutions of the 20th century was the discovery of […]