Archive for September, 2008
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Angry Johnny and the Bear DNA
With the economy pulling a Hindenburg and McCain getting aroused at the thought of cutting budgets, I wonder what a McCain presidency will mean for publicly funded science. Here’s his hissy fit about bear DNA from Friday’s debate:
“You know, we spent $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. I don’t know if [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Monday, September 29th, 2008
On Turkeys and Black Swans
Imagine you’re a turkey, born on an organic farm, where for a couple of years you roam happily in a field and get plenty of wholesome grain to eat. Life is good. You’re an unusually introspective and intelligent turkey, and so one fine fall day, taking measure of your life, you conclude through simple inductive [...]
4 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
Is China Going To Become The Bastion of Research and Free-Inquiry?
I just read this story from the BBC about how the current patent system is stifling progress and innovation in important areas like cancer and AIDS research, among other medical and biotech fields. The patent system, intended to promote innovation by providing security for companies that do breakthrough research, has proved incapable of dealing with [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Saturday, September 20th, 2008
Surfing Einstein’s Really Revolutionary Idea
Not to drop names, but this week I attended a party that Peter “String-Theory-Is-Not-Even-Wrong” Woit threw for Garrett “Einstein-On-A-Surfboard” Lisi. An unemployed 40-year-old physicist dedicated to surfing, snowboarding and seeking a unified theory of physics, Lisi became an international celebrity a year ago after publishing “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything.” The paper proposed that [...]
6 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
One Step Closer to a Philip K. Dick Nightmare?
It’s at times like this I find myself repeating that old proverbial truth: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.
A recent ruling in a murder case in Pune, India found a 24-year-old woman guilty of murdering her fiancé based on the results of a brain scan she agreed to take after she [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by Suhas Sreedhar
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
The God Particle and the Rabid Skunk
My former CSW colleague Jim Weatherall, now pursuing doctorates in physics at Stevens and philosophy at U Cal Irvine, has a terrific piece in Slate on the Large Hadron Collider, which as I mentioned in my last post is finally up and running. The chief quarry of this $8 billion machine is the elusive Higgs [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Friday, September 12th, 2008
Is Particle Physics Worth the Price?
In a recent post I raised the question of when scientists and/or taxpayers should pull the plug on a major endeavor. I suggested that some goals are so important that we must never cease striving to attain them, no matter how often we fail. The end of cancer, for example, or the end of war. [...]
2 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Monday, September 8th, 2008
E. coli and the Future of Biology
In The End of Science I argued that biology will never again yield revelations as profound as the theory of evolution and DNA-based genetics. Biologists will extend, refine, modify and apply their current knowledge but will not achieve advances comparable to those of Darwin in the mid-19th century and Watson and Crick in the mid-20th.
Now [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Sunday, September 7th, 2008
War Expert Ferguson on Bloggingheads
In my latest appearance on Bloggingheads.tv, I chat with Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers and authority on the origins of warfare. Brian offers insights into the Hobbesian versus Rousseauian views of pre-civilized humans, the violent Amazonian tribe the Yanomamo, the effect of western contact on violence among “primitive” people, the link between male violence [...]
3 Comments » - Posted in The Scientific Curmudgeon by John Horgan
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008
Linus Pauling, Cancer and War
In my last post I argued that we can never stop trying to solve problems like cancer and war, no matter how often we fail. The chemist Linus Pauling, one of history’s greatest scientists, devoted himself to ending both war and cancer. He also explained the chemical bond in quantum terms, for which he won [...]