The agreement between you and us.

These terms cover your use of The Unintuitive Universe (unintuitiveuniverse.com). By reading the site, signing in, or submitting a comment, you agree to them. They are written plainly so you can actually read them.

What this site is

The Unintuitive Universe is an independent science publication about physics, biology, perception, and math. Content on this site is AI-generated (synthetic) content, produced by an automated editorial system with human direction and review. Every claim is traced to published sources; no warranty of accuracy is made. The method page describes the process and its limits.

AI-produced essays can get things wrong. If you spot an error, write to corrections@unintuitiveuniverse.com or use the comment form (see below); we fix mistakes visibly and the change shows up in the essay’s revision history.

Your account

You can read the site without an account. To submit a comment, you sign in with Google. We require sign-in so contributions have an attributable author and so spam is harder to scale.

By signing in, you confirm that:

• The Google account is yours.
• You are at least 13 years old.
• You will not impersonate another person or organisation in the name or content of your contributions.

We may suspend or delete an account at any time, with or without notice, for any of the prohibited conduct listed below or for any violation of these terms.

Reader contributions

When you submit a comment, you grant The Unintuitive Universe a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual licence to display, edit, quote, paraphrase, and republish your contribution on the site and in derived materials (for example: a future newsletter, an annual review post, a video). We may attribute your contribution to you using your Google account name (or part of it — see the privacy policy); we may also anonymise it.

The licence is non-exclusive: you keep ownership of what you wrote, and you can republish it elsewhere yourself. The licence is perpetual: once your contribution influences an essay (for example by adding a fact or correcting a number), we retain the right to keep that change in the essay and its revision history even if you later ask for your account to be deleted — the source attribution will change to “Reader” at that point.

Submitted contributions are evaluated automatically. Some are folded into the essay; some are shown publicly as “reader notes” (contested or unsupported views, preserved for transparency); some are hidden (spam, abuse, off-topic, policy violations). The method page explains the evaluation rules.

Prohibited conduct

Don’t do these here:

• Submit spam, malware, automated content, or advertising.
• Harass or threaten any person, or use slurs targeting any group.
• Submit fabricated citations or quotations attributed to real researchers or publications.
• Submit pseudoscience, conspiracy framing about the scientific community, or sweeping unsourced claims dressed up as fact.
• Infringe copyright. If you quote a copyrighted source, cite it; the contribution should be your own paraphrase or argument, not a paste.
• Attempt to break the site, bypass authentication, scrape faster than a polite reader would, or otherwise abuse the infrastructure.

We remove contributions that violate this list and may suspend the account that submitted them.

Site content and intellectual property

Original essays on The Unintuitive Universe are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence unless a specific essay notes otherwise. You can quote, remix, and republish with credit (“The Unintuitive Universe,” a link back, and the essay title).

Third-party content we display under fair-use citation (paper titles, short quotations, figure thumbnails) remains owned by its original authors. Hero images are licensed via their stated terms (typically Pexels License or equivalent; attribution shown under the image).

Disclaimers

Content on this site is AI-generated (synthetic) content, produced by an automated editorial system with human direction and review. Every claim is traced to published sources; no warranty of accuracy is made. Essays are not peer-reviewed and are not a substitute for the primary research or for expert advice. Where a topic is contested in the field, we try to name the disagreement rather than pick a winner; that does not mean every position has equal evidentiary support, only that researchers actively disagree.

The site is provided “as is.” We make no warranty that it will be available, accurate, or fit for any particular purpose. If accuracy matters for your work, go to the underlying published research.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, The Unintuitive Universe and the person who runs it are not liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages arising from your use of the site, including reliance on any published claim. Direct liability, where it cannot be excluded, is limited to the amount you paid to use the site — which is nothing; the site is free.

Termination

You can stop using the site at any time. We can suspend or remove an account at any time, with or without notice. The contribution-licence and intellectual-property provisions survive termination.

Changes to these terms

We may revise these terms. When we do, the “Last updated” date at the top changes. Material changes (especially to the contribution licence) will be noted at the top of this page for at least thirty days after the change.

Contact

For questions about these terms or anything else, email corrections@unintuitiveuniverse.com. See also our privacy policy and method & corrections policy.