Living Inside

Living Descendants Of Mark Anthony

Theodore Kopaliani | Antigone | 19th October 2022

Extreme genealogy. The claim made here is that Bagrationi family, which ruled Georgia for a thousand years until the Bolshevik revolution, is directly descended from Mark Anthony, who died in 30BC. The author is himself a Bagration; perhaps he paints the lily here and there; even so, the family tree is quite a sight, with its massed ranks of kings and queens plus the odd saint and priestess (1,690 words)

Inside The Proton

Charlie Wood & Merrill Sherman | Quanta | 19th October 2022

Popular science done right. Status update on the proton. The proton was first imagined a century ago as a featureless lump in the middle of a stylised atom. Then it was re-imagined as a bundle of quarks. Now, thanks to quantum mechanics, it must be re-imagined yet again as a mere abstraction, a "haze of probabilities", which collapses, when observed, into a sort of tiny seething soup  (1,900 words)