Archive for April, 2008
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
My Review of Break Through
Break Through is a book filled with big ideas and expansive themes, sweeping broadly across all aspects of global warming, from the political to the philosophical and the scientific to the sociological. All of this is done to convince us of the validity of Nordhaus and Shellenberger’s claim that the classic approach of environmentalists, namely imposing limits on pollution and development, is ineffective in tackling the massive and multifaceted problem of global warming. Frightening people with apocalyptic climate change scenarios, the authors argue, does not yield positive results and only hurts prospects for solving global warming. Instead, they advocate proactive investment in green technologies and the development of clean energy sources.
5 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
Break Through Author on Bloggingheads.tv
Bloggingheads.tv just posted a chat between me and Michael Shellenberger, who with Ted Nordhaus is the co-author of Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Shellenberger talks about the dissatisfaction with mainstream environmentalism that led him and Nordhaus to write “The Death of Environmentalism,” the 2004 essay upon which Break [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
A Dash of Popper in Politics
I’d like to see pollsters and pundits ask voters, especially those who’ve made a commitment to one candidate or another, a question like this – What would it take to convince you that you are supporting the wrong candidate? I think the answers would speak volumes about the electorate and the nature of each candidate’s core constituency.
If the overwhelming response turns out to be “nothing,” then we learn something very disturbing about the nature of politics in this country: it’s based on zealotry. Zealous people thrusting rulers into power is NOT the democracy the founding fathers envisioned, but rather the tyranny of the majority which John Stuart Mill warned us about.
5 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
E. Coli and the Death of Genetic Determinism
Ours is an age of genetic determinism, in which virtually everything we do and are can be explained in terms of nature rather than nurture. For years I’ve railed against this trend, for what I admit are philosophical and political as well as scientific reasons. (See for example this rant.) I was thus thrilled to [...]
8 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, April 21st, 2008
Teaching the Controversy over “Expelled”
I flogged Science Shapers Speak at length during my last appearance on Bloggingheads.tv, hoping to pique the public’s interest, but all anyone wants to talk about is my brief riff on Ben Stein’s anti-Darwin mockumentary Expelled. My remarks triggered critical comments on Bloggingheads.tv and, to a much greater extent, Pharyngula, the blog of PZ Myers, [...]
12 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
“Science Shapers Speak” on Bloggingheads.tv
George Johnson and I talked about the late great physicist John Wheeler on our most recent Bloggingheads.tv. That gave me an excuse to shamelessly promote the digital archive that Suhas Sreedhar and I are creating, “Science Shapers Speak: Online Interviews with Icons of Science.” So far, we’ve posted snippets from my interviews with Wheeler and [...]
No Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
Anton Chekov and the End of Science
My friend Gabriel Finkelstein, a historian at the University of Colorado-Denver, is a font of knowledge of past proclamations on the end of science. See for example his essay on Emil du Bois-Reymond on this website. Gabriel just sent me the following fragment from Anton Chekhov’s tale “A Boring Story,” originally published in 1889 and [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Norhaus & Shellenberger win 2008 Green Book Award
The second Green Book Award was given to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger for their book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Nordhaus and Shellenberger received the award during a public ceremony at Stevens on April 30, 2008.
An expansion of their widely discussed 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism,” [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Green Book Award by Rand HOPPE
Monday, April 14th, 2008
John A. Wheeler, Seeker of “The Answer,” Dies
John A. Wheeler, one of my favorite scientists, in whom immense scientific skill was fused with free-wheeling, poetic imagination, died yesterday. I interviewed Wheeler at Princeton University in April 1991, when he was 79. This is one of the first audio interviews we plan to post on this website, along with those of Chandrasekhar (whose work on collapsing stars helped to lay the foundation for Wheeler’s subsequent exploration of black holes), Kuhn, Popper, Bethe and Pauling. I can’t write an obituary of Wheeler nearly as good as that of Dennis Overbye in the New York Times. Instead, I’ll just reprint my section on Wheeler in The End of Science, which I hope will give a sense of the man’s personality and powers of mind. Far from being “difficult,” like the physicists mentioned in my last post, Wheeler could not have been more charming.
7 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Friday, April 11th, 2008
Chandra, Feynman and Other Difficult Physicists
While googling for background material on Chandrasekhar, a brief recording of whom we just posted, I came across a funny 2001 essay by the eminent physics historian Robert Crease. Crease opens “Revenge of the Science Writer” by recalling an incident in which a famous physicist he was interviewing in a crowded cafeteria abruptly jumped up, [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, April 9th, 2008
Chandrasekhar Speaks
Want to hear Thomas Kuhn speak from the grave about why he liked his critics more than his admirers? Karl Popper on Bohr’s deficiencies as a philosopher? Hans Bethe on how he reacted to Edward Teller’s fear that the Trinity test would ignite the earth’s atmosphere? Fred Hoyle on why he hates the big bang [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, April 7th, 2008
Unification’s Underside
On our latest Science Saturday chat on Bloggingheads.tv, George Johnson and I talk about his wonderful (truly) new book The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments. One experiment is Faraday’s demonstration that an electromagnetic field can switch the polarization of a light beam. Later Faraday, who revealed the connectedness of electricity and magnetism, dreamed of unifying electromagnetism [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
Al Gore’s Ad Campaign
Talk about convenience. A day after my post about framing, there’s a New York Times story talking about Al Gore’s global warming group starting a $300 million advertising campaign designed to rally people to fix climate change.
The first ad, up on the Gore Group’s site, wecansolveit.org, masterfully casts climate change as the next momentous [...]