Musings on chemistry and the history and philosophy of science
Psychiatric drugs have always been a black box. The complexity of the brain has meant that most successful drugs for treating disorders like depression, psychosis and bipolar disorder were discovered by accident and trial and error rather than rational design...
I was immersed in the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in Dallas this week, which meant that I could not catch more than wisps of the thrilling announcement from cosmology on Monday that could potentially confirm the prediction of inflation...
I am writing from the Dallas airport from where I am heading out back home after a fantastic national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
Surprises rank high on the list of things that make science a source of everlasting delight. When it comes to being surprised scientists are no different from the general public.
Elizabeth Kolbert combines the sharp observational powers of a field biologist with the literary skill of a seasoned and thoughtful writer.
In the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson has a nice review of Mario Livio’s readable book on scientific blunders committed by great scientists.
The body of men and women who built the atomic bomb was vast, diverse, talented and multitudinous. Every conceivable kind of professional – from theoretical physics to plumber – worked on the Manhattan Project for three years over an enterprise that spread across the country and equalled the US automobile industry in its marshaling of [...]..
Pedro Ferreira’s book “The Perfect Theory: A Century of Geniuses and the Battle over General Relativity” essentially tells us what other people did with Einstein’s general theory of relativity after he developed it...
This is part 4 of a series of posts delving into the fundamental scientific challenges in drug discovery. Here are the other parts:1, 2, 3.
A few people seem unhappy with my previous post in which I made the contention that falsification as a philosophy is much less relevant to chemistry than to physics, especially when chemists make molecules...
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