I’m getting repetitive-motion disorder from all my years of whacking string theorists, or pluckers, as I fondly call them. I’m thus thrilled at the help I’ve gotten lately from Peter Woit and and Lee Smolin, authors of the anti-string screeds Not Even Wrong and The Trouble With Physics, which have been reviewed in Discover, the […]
“Do Magic Mushroom’s Make You Mystical?”, a brief in the October Discover, gives me an excuse to introduce readers of this blog to one of my quirkier beats: psychedelic drugs. As Discover reports, a double-blind, federally funded (!) study at Johns Hopkins found that psilocybin—the primary active ingredient of magic mushrooms–triggered profound spiritual experiences in […]
What a great idea! Throw two of the world’s smartest, crankiest, most influential, iconoclastic thinkers into a room together and see what happens. The linguist Noam Chomsky and evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers are renowned for speaking their minds and not giving a damn whom they offend. Better yet, one has devoted himself to understanding human […]
From Plato onward, critics have argued about whether art must have redeeming social value, help us appreciate how splendid life is, encourage us to be virtuous, blah blah blah. I’ve always been in the amorality camp; artists should be free to do whatever they damn well please, which includes rubbing our faces in the pointlessness […]
Here, quickly, are some other examples of scientific (defined broadly to include medical and technological) regress:
Origin of life: In 1953, Harold Urey of the University of Chicago and his graduate student Stanley Miller simulated the “primordial soup” in which life supposedly began on earth some four billion years ago. They filled a flask with methane, […]
Science can’t go backwards. Every advance of knowledge and applications leads, irreversibly, to still further advances through what Edward Wilson refers to in Consilience as the “ratchet of progress.” Right? Wrong. Sometimes science does go backwards, at least as measured against specific goals. I don’t mean what the philosopher Imre Lakatos referred to as a […]
The Columbia Journalism Review, published bimonthly by my alma mater, dishes out Darts for bad journalistic deeds and Laurels for good ones. On my previous blog, The Scientific Curmudgeon, I occasionally issued my version of Darts & Laurels, called Whacks & Pats. Whacks (as in upside the head) are bad and Pats (as in on […]
John Horgan is a science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He has written not only for Discover but also for Scientific American (where he was a staff writer from 1986 to 1997), The New York Times, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, […]
To the Nobel laureate Phil Anderson, who coined the term in an essay in Physics Today in 1999, "Horganism" connotes corrosive pessimism about science’s future. For the purposes of this blog—and because, hell, it’s my name—I’d like to define Horganism differently, as healthy skepticism toward faith of any kind, scientific, political, philosophical or spiritual. I […]