Dmitri Levitin

‘Oriental history​,’ the German philologist Johann Jakob Reiske wrote in 1747, ‘is very worthy of the study of an honest mind, and does not deserve any less than European history to be taught publicly in universities.’ The book in which these words appear – Dissertatio de Principibus Muhammedanis qui aut eruditione aut ab amore literarum et literatorum...

On 11 February​, David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had detected evidence of gravitational waves emanating from a pair of black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth. It was empirical confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The...