Continuations

I recently read “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson and just last night finished “The Dark Forest” which is the second book in the “Three Body Problem” trilogy by Cixin Liu. What these books have in common is that they look at a threat to humanity’s existence and probe our responses to it. This literature is timely because we face such a threat in the form of climate change. The message from the books is clear: only scientific knowledge and staying rational can get humanity past a global threat. T...

Quantum mechanics and general relativity, the last two foundational breakthroughs in science, are a century old each. Since then we have made tons of progress in more applied science, such as learning to decode and manipulate DNA and RNA, but we have been in a rut when it comes to developing a deeper understanding of such fundamental phenomena as information and heat. I believe that this lack of a new fundamental breakthrough is contributor to an overall slowing down of scientific progress th...

… to come to the aid of their country. Here is a supremely depressing chart from Businessweek showing the professional backgrounds of the members of Congress The largest groups in both the House and the Senate are lawyers (yellow) followed by business people (green). On the other extreme there is 1 lone engineer in the Senate and even worse only 2 engineers in the House. There are no scientists in the Senate and 2 in the House. This is a huge problem at a time when many of the issues we confr...

The New York Times has a great article today on Edward O. Wilson. Since my undergraduate days I have been fascinated by his work on evolution. I loved his book Consilience which is incredibly thought provoking. But the real reason to read the article is to get a sense of how slowly the wheels of science can turn. For instance, it refers to Wilson’s 1975 book Sociobiology which had ideas in it that more than three decades later are still contested. There are many reasons for this rate of progr...

Having recently started to read “Willpower” by Roy Baumeister, I am fascinated with the controversy over the reproducibility of his experiments on ego depletion. This is just the latest example in a longstanding historic problem with reproducibility that impacts the progress of science in many fields including medicine. This is an area where blockchain technology may be able to help. How so? We need to switch the academic standard for publishing to include raw data from experiments. Often thi...

Our elected representatives are busy at work coming up with misguided laws. Leading the charge once again is Lamar Smith, this time proposing to replace peer review of NSF grants with congressional criteria (Congress of course is not exactly known for its scientists). Now that is not to say that we shouldn’t look into how NSF funding works and propose changes to it. For instance, with crowdfunding platforms for science like Mircoryza emerging, it would be interesting to see if these can be us...

One accusation that has been leveled at social media and those who invest in it is that it won’t help us solve the tough problems because those require science (Steve Blank provides one example of this view and at least somewhat ironically so does Founders Fund). I wholeheartedly agree that we need more science but I believe we will get there in a peer produced and funded model that will be quite different from what we have today. Research networks such as Research Gate, Academia.edu and Mend...

Last week in Homeschool Wednesdays I wrote about the New York State requirement for an Individualized Home Instruction Plan (IHIP). One of the sections that I have been thinking a fair bit about is science. So I have started to put together a Hackpad with what I think everyone should know in science. I literally mean everyone here. I have a strong believe that the world would be a better place if more people knew more about science. If you want to contribute head over to the Hackpad. It is cu...

For the end of her 5th grade, my daughter had to complete something called the “capstone project” – meant to be a first original research project. She came up with what I thought was a rather original project: she wanted to look into “how does ESP work?" Her teacher didn’t seem to think so and suggested she find another topic. Katie batted around a few other ideas but it was clear that she wasn’t excited about any of them. I felt pretty strongly that her being excited about the topic was more...

Yesterday, Felix Baumgartner jumped from 24 miles up, briefly traveled at supersonic speed and landed safely with a parachute. While it’s highly debatable whether this stunt did anything to advance science, it makes for utterly awesome science teaching. In fact this is so rich that it made me wish we were still home schooling our kids because science class in school is beholden to the curriculum. So I was reduced to a walk to school with my youngest but here are some of the things we talked a...