What’s the point of the humanities? I mean, in addition to supplying jobs for humanities teachers? I am a faculty member within the College of Arts & Letters, a.k.a. CAL, of Stevens Institute of Technology, a university dedicated primarily to engineering and the hard sciences. And so naturally I and my CAL colleagues—who include professors [...]

I just started teaching my spring classes, and on the first day a student asked me if my work as a science journalist had taken me to any cool places. I said that in 1985 I rode a trolley into a tunnel at the Nevada Test Site in which a nuclear bomb would be detonated [...]

Driving through my hometown recently, I passed half a dozen neighbors holding antiwar signs. One declared, “BRING ALL OUR TROOPS HOME,” with “ALL” underlined. I honked and gave them a thumbs-up. Like many doves, I’m glad that the U.S.—after eight bloody years and the deaths of 4,500 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis—has finally [...]

In 1995, I critiqued evolutionary psychology in “The New Social Darwinists,” an article in the December issue of Scientific American. Afterwards I got a scathing letter from Robert Trivers, whose work on altruism, parent-offspring conflict and other tendencies helped lay the foundations for evolutionary psychology, which like its precursor sociobiology attempts to explain human thought [...]

Environmentalism, like politics in general, is depressingly polarized these days. On one side, alarmists like the activist Bill McKibben, climatologist James Hansen and blogger Joe Romm warn that if we don’t cut way back on fossil fuels—now!—civilization may collapse. On the other side, deniers, including most of the current GOP candidates for president, won’t even [...]

I just realized today is Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. To celebrate it, I’m posting the following column, adapted from something I wrote for The New York Times nine years ago: Three years ago, my wife, who is a pagan, decided that our family should celebrate Winter Solstice. To be honest, I [...]

What does it say about particle physics that the Higgs boson has generated so much hullaballoo lately? Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have reportedly glimpsed “tantalizing hints” of the Higgs, which might confer mass to quarks, electrons and other building blocks of our world. Not actual “evidence,” mind you, but “hints” of [...]

All science writers, especially those of us who cover particle physics and other fields that purport to reveal ultimate reality, hear from cranks. Pre-email, I got envelopes stuffed with manuscripts, sometimes hundreds of pages long, from people unaffiliated with any research institution known to me. Some letters were so baroque—the text hand-written in shifting scripts [...]

I’ve been brooding over Buddhism lately, for several reasons. First, I read that Steve Jobs was a long-time dabbler in Buddhism and was even married in a Buddhist ceremony. Second, a new documentary, Crazy Wisdom, celebrates the life of Chogyam Trungpa, who helped popularize Tibetan Buddhism here in the U.S. in the 1970s. Third, Slate [...]

The biologist Lynn Margulis died on November 22 at the age of 73. I adapted the following essay about her from my 1996 book The End of Science. Lynn Margulis was among the most creative challengers of mainstream Darwinian thinking of the late 20th century. She challenged what she called “ultra-Darwinian orthodoxy” with several ideas. [...]