CategoryScience
Invisibility Isn’t Science Fiction; It’s Interesting Engineering
Things are visible only when light strikes them but light can sometimes be manipulated so as not to strike them, with remarkable results.Invisibility is one of those interesting concepts that started out as imagination: What if I were invisible? Or— in the hands of a storyteller — what if my character were invisible? Tolkien famously made it a power granted by the Ring in The Lord of the Rings. The concept is used in science fiction too, for example, in the form of the cloaking device: However, as science fiction writer Douglas Adams (1952–2001) noted satirically in Life, the Universe, and Everything, in everyday life, “The Somebody Else’s Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what’s more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people’s natural disposition not Read More ›
Fine-Tuning of Universe Makes a Top Neuroscientist “Very Hopeful”
Allen Institute’s Christof Koch talks about the assumptions underlying his consciousness theory — which led many other neuroscientists to try to Cancel himIs Our World, Post-1950, Really a Geological Epoch?
Some earth scientists lobby for calling the past 75 years the Anthropocene epoch, giving it equal importance with the 16-million-year Upper JurassicGrappling Honestly With Science’s Blind Spot
An astrophysicist, a theoretical physicist, and a philosopher all walk into a bar and say, “At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible” Um… yes!If AI Speeds Up Science, Does It Risk Squashing Some Parts?
A Yale anthropologist and a Princeton psychologist warn of the dangers of overreliance on AI in scienceIs There a Solution to Low Quality Research in Science?
Molecular biologist Henry Miller and statistician Stanley Young explain why statistical techniques like meta-analysis won’t solve the basic problemRetracted Paper Is a Compelling Case for Reform
The credibility of science is being undermined by misuse of the tools created by scientists. Here's an example from an economics paper I was asked to comment onHow Data Can Appear in Science Papers — Out of Thin Air!
At Retraction Watch, Gary Smith explains how one author team apparently copy pasted missing data about green innovation in various countriesRecently, Retraction Watch, a site that helps keeps science honest, noted some statistical peculiarities about a paper last September in the Journal of Clean Energy, “Green innovations and patents in OECD countries.” The site was tipped off by a PhD student in economics that “For several countries, observations for some of the variables the study tracked were completely absent.” But that wasn’t the big surprise. The big surprise was when the student wrote to one of the authors: In email correspondence seen by Retraction Watch and a follow-up Zoom call, [Almas] Heshmati told the student he had used Excel’s autofill function to mend the data. He had marked anywhere from two to four observations before or after the missing values Read More ›
Bigfoot and Trust in Science: A Cautionary Tale
Of three men searching for Bigfoot in 1969 — a hunting guide, an enthusiast, and a physical anthropologist, which seemed surest that the monster was real?Why Is Theology the Most Important Empirical Science?
Arguing pro or con about the existence of God has resulted in many successful and/or widely accepted theories in scienceScientists Attempt an Honest Look at Why We Trust Science Less
Contemplating the depressing results of a recent Pew survey, a molecular biologist and a statistician take aim at growing corruption in scienceMolecular biologist Henry Miller and statistician S. Stanley Young have written an article at the Genetic Literacy Project on why trust in science is at an all time low. The Project’s motto is “Science Not Ideology” — a tall aspiration in theses times. To be honest, going in, I braced myself for the usual stuff: Politicians don’t fund science enough; the public is full of ignorant hillbillies who believe evangelists, not scientists; most reporters flunked science so they can’t explain why people should trust the science! or else the planet is doomed… and so forth. Well, I am glad to be wrong. Miller and Young’s article is a serious look at the current scandals in science around data manipulation that Read More ›
Five Trends That Help Us Make Sense of Space Science Today
The five trends noted below aren’t the only trends of importance but they are worth noting — they result in the kinds of stories that keep appearing in one form or another because the concept has enduring appeal. 1.The multiverse persists as a belief without evidence. At Cosmic Log, science writer Alan Boyle discusses why scientists take the multiverse — the idea that there might be an infinite number of universes — seriously? He points to the book The Allure of the Multiverse (Basic Books 2024) by Saint Joseph’s University physicist Paul Halpern: Scientists have searched for traces of the multiverse at work in the temperature variations of cosmic microwave background radiation — the so-called afterglow of the Big Bang. Read More ›
Citizen Scientist Forrest Mims Tells His Remarkable Life Story
In his new book “Maverick Scientist,” he details the ups and downs of an extraordinarily productive life in science, with few credentials to hide behindForrest M. Mims III (1944–) has so many accomplishments in science and electronics — with little formal training — that they would make your head spin. Getting Started in Electronics, originally written for RadioShack (now the Source), is one of dozens of electronics books Mims has produced over the years, sold more than 1.3 million copies. Introducing his autobiography, Maverick Scientist: My Adventures as an Amateur Scientist (Make Community, LLC, April 2024), the publisher notes, At thirteen he invented a new method of rocket control. At seventeen he designed and built an analog computer that could translate Russian into English and that the Smithsonian collected as an example of an early hobby computer. While majoring in government at Texas A&M Read More ›
Will Scientists Be Forced to Consider the Occult as Science?
When the World Economic Forum invited a witch to Davos to offer incantations, it was more than just window dressingIn the aftermath of the recent plagiarism scandal at Harvard University, in which president Claudine Gay had to resign, one commentator at the Wall Street Journal reminded readers of something she had said earlier. Her earlier, disastrous testimony before Congress on anti-Semitism paved the way for the scandal. Her response to the subsequent widespread criticism was that she had failed to convey “my truth.” Hold on to that phrase. It represents a shift in the intellectual currents of our time. “My truth” or (for grammatical convenience) “private truth” is making serious headway against public truth. That headway is beginning to impact science, as we shall see in later posts. But first it impacts culture. A witch at Davos In line Read More ›
Fighting Pseudoscience With Empathy? Try a Little Humility First…
The accusation of “pseudoscience,” under the current science regime, has often become little more than an elite-driven smear against inconvenient dataStony Brook astrophysicist Paul Sutter has decided to take on the big topic of pseudoscience, which, he says, he encounters “everywhere I go.” He admits that there is no clear definition of pseudoscience. For example, is controversial string theory, which he supports, pseudoscience? Some say it is “practically pseudoscience.” He says no. But happily, he has a personal definition: “pseudoscience has the skin of science but misses its soul.” The soul of science? It involves skills like rigor, where we take our own statements seriously and follow them to their full logical conclusions. Or humility, where we learn to accept that any statement can be proven wrong at any time. There’s also fundamental skepticism, in that we allow the evidence Read More ›
A Biochemist Begins To Sense the Limits of Materialism
William Reville seems both confident and uncertain at the same time that science can crack the problem of consciousnessIrish biochemist William Reville, has been the first Officer for the Public Awareness and Understanding of Science at University College, Cork — the sort of post Richard Dawkins has at Oxford. Reville, author of Understanding the Natural World: Science Today (Irish Times Books 1999), informed us last week that “There is every reason to believe that consciousness will eventually yield to scientific analysis just as the general nature of life yielded”. I was somewhat taken aback. What does he mean by the “general nature of life” yielded to scientific analysis? True, we now know vastly more than we used to about life in all its forms. But, as James Tour’s ongoing debates with fellow scientists attest, no one has any Read More ›
Being a Good Scientist Doesn’t Mean Being an Effective Leader
Francis Collins admits that they botched the COVID-19 response.Dr. Francis Collins may be a brilliant geneticist — he headed the very successful Human Genome Project among other laudable achievements — but he has been a disappointing public-health leader and public intellectual. Collins headed the NIH between 2009 and 2021, and was on the front lines of the COVID policy response. Alas, his work in that effort left very much to be desired. Indeed, the other day, he issued something of a mea culpa for being unduly focused on preventing COVID deaths and not enough on the devastating societal impacts his advocated policies caused. In an interview, he said: The public health people — we talked about this earlier and this really important point — if you’re a public health Read More ›
Science vs Religion Debate: Uselessness Cubed
Science no longer means anything like what Dr. Pierre hopes that it doesOne of the more useless debates we encounter is “science vs. religion.” Many people approach their religion as a form of science and many other people approach their science as a form of religion. Earlier this year, San Francisco psychiatrist Joseph M. Pierre offered some thoughts recently in Psychology Today, on whether religious faith is compatible with scientific thinking: Here are some of his thoughts and some responses: Faith—that is, choosing to believe something in the absence of evidence—is a normal process for dealing with uncertainty around those kinds of questions. Joe Pierre, “Is Religious Faith Compatible With Scientific Thinking?”Psychology Today, November 14, 2023 Actually, wait. In the vast majority of cases, faith is not belief in the absence of Read More ›
Medical Journal Crosses a Whole New Line
Is blaming commercialism for global warming genuine science? Or just ideology?The Lancet is at it again. Having previously strived mightily to transform global warming into a planetary health emergency, it has now published a screed attacking “commercialism” for killing the planet. Besides repeating the usual bromides about the need to drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels and transform food production into “regenerative agriculture” — which probably means no more meat — the piece uses the usual politically progressive anti-clarity lexicon that turns the prose of leftist advocacy into impenetrable gobbledygook. From “Climate Change Mitigation: Tackling the Commercial Determinants of Planetary Health Inequity,” by Australian National University’s professor of “health equity” Sharon Friel: Taking this bold mitigation action requires disrupting the consumptogenic system — the system of institutions, actors, multisectoral policies, commercial activities, and norms Read More ›