Archive for November, 2007
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
The Stevens Seventy Greatest Science Books
As you might have noticed, we just redesigned our site (although not for now this blog). As part of this re-launch, we’ve published “The Stevens Seventy Greatest Science Books.” Written primarily by scientists but also by philosophers, historians, journalists and other worthies, these books stand out for their subject matter, rhetorical style and impact on science and the rest of culture. Although our original goal when we conceived this
25 Comments » - Posted in Stevens 70 Greatest Science Books, The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
Davies Get Whacked, Cont.
Edge.org has published responses to the Paul Davies essay “Taking Science on Faith” from Jerry Coyne, PZ Myers, Lawrence Krauss, Lee Smolin, me and others. I especially like the comments from the sharp-tongued megablogger PZ, who says Davies reiterates “the tired and familiar claim that science has to be taken on faith, so it’s just like religion. I recall hearing variants on this back in the schoolyard, usually punctuated with ‘nyaa nyaas’ and assertions about each others’ mothers.”
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
Paul Davies Gets Whacked!
A previous incarnation of this blog featured Whacks & Pats, in which I whacked and patted science writing I disliked and liked. We’re reviving this gimmick, so I can whack the physicist Paul Davies for his New York Times oped, “Taking Science on Faith.”
Davies is a nice guy and graceful writer, but this essay reads like a parody of The Mind of God and other
7 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Saturday, November 24th, 2007
Green Books
In my last post I mentioned the book “Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.” A little over a week ago, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times wrote an article highlighting this book, along with two others (”Cool It” by Bjorn Lomborg and “A Contract with the Earth” by Newt Gingrich).
The important thing about these books (other than the
8 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Tuesday, November 20th, 2007
Hiroshima, Chaoplexity on Bloggingheads.tv
In this week’s “Science Saturday” with George Johnson on Bloggingheads.tv, I describe Jennet Conant’s provocative talk at Stevens last Wednesday about World War II research. Conant mentioned that her grandfather, Harvard president James Bryant Conant, not only helped to create the Manhattan Project; he also picked Hiroshima as the primary target for the atomic bomb. Conant vigorously defended her grandfather’s decision, which she believes saved many American lives,
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, November 12th, 2007
Coruscant, Naboo and the Vision for Progress
Lately, I’ve been reading the book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger and one of the many things it’s made me think about is the definition of human progress. What exactly is human progress and what characteristics do we ascribe to it? From what I’ve read so far, Nordhaus and Shellenberger seem
5 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
War a Scientific Problem? Dyson Demurs
A final note on “Is Science Near Its Limits?”, the conference I just spoke at in Lisbon. My fellow speaker Peter Woit describes my talk as an “uncompromising defense of the thesis of his 1996 book The End of Science (although he did allow that possible advances in neuroscience such as the decoding of a neural code, could be as revolutionary as previous advances).” I also suggested, even
6 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Thursday, November 1st, 2007
Gerald Edelman and The End of Science
One of my co-speakers at “Is Science Near Its Limits?” in Lisbon was Gerald Edelman, who won a Nobel Prize in immunology in 1972 and eventually turned his attention to the brain. I interviewed him in 1992, when he was still at Rockefeller University in New York. He subsequently moved to San Diego to head the Neurosciences Institute. I included a section on Edelman’s “neural Darwinism” theory in The