Critical views of science in the news
Here are basic facts about the massacre that took place in Aurora, Colorado, early yesterday morning. A 24-year-old man, James Holmes, opened fire in a movie theater with an AR-15 assault rifle and other weapons that he had purchased legally...
In last week's post on the Turing Test , I mentioned a fact I stumbled on in the Alan Turing exhibit at the Science Museum in London. The pioneering computer theorist was a believer in telepathy, or mind-reading...
Chillin' with my children in London recently, I kept a lookout for blog topics, and I found one: "Codebreaker: Alan Turing's Life and Legacy," an exhibit at the city's Science Museum.
So it's finally, probably, maybe, happened. Although they are still hedging a bit, physicists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced this morning that they had found the long-sought Higgs boson...
I'm immensely relieved by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to uphold key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, as reported here. The ruling represents a crucial step toward fixing my country's dysfunctional health care system...
Opinions are my stock-in-trade. Early in my career, I pretended to be objective, but as time went on I thought it would be more fun telling readers exactly what I think about psychiatric drugs, "progress" in psychology, multiverse "theories", war-is-in-our-genes malarkey, free will and so on...
When freshmen in my humanities colloquium at Stevens Institute of Technology ask why they have to read stuff by ancient Greeks, I reply that we have much to learn from old guys like Thucydides...
Rational Scientific American readers surely scoff at claims—based on ancient Mayan calendars and other esoterica—that life as we know it will end this December, especially now that NASA experts have "crushed" the prophecy...
Behaviorism is back! That's what David Freedman proclaims in the June Atlantic cover story, "The End of Temptation: How the creepy science of behavior modification is reshaping our desires." The article is, on one level, a hyperbolic report on apps that are "transforming us into thinner, richer, all around-better versions of ourselves" by helping people (including Freedman's brother) overcome overeating, smoking and other bad habits...
In 1991, when I was a staff writer for Scientific American , I wrote a letter to Thomas Kuhn, then at MIT. I said I wanted to profile him for Scientific American and "tell readers how you developed your views of the process of science." When he didn't respond, I called...
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