“How real is reality?” asks theoretical physicist Adam Frank at NPR: … throughout the past 100 years, physicists have proposed a lot of different ways to interpret their mathematics and, in the process, explain what quantum theory tells us about the fundamental nature of “The Real.” These interpretations tend to fall into one of two camps. For the first camp, the mathematics directly describes a reality that is independent and objective. In this view, quantum mechanics is an ontological theory (ontology is the branch of philosophy dealing with what truly exists). For the second camp, however, the mathematics of quantum mechanics describes only our knowledge of the world. For these folks, quantum physics is an epistemological theory (epistemology is the Read More ›

The parable of Plato’s Cave in The Republic — vid: [youtube d2afuTvUzBQ] . . . is a classic point of departure for discussions of true vs false enlightenment, education, worldviews, liberty and manipulative sociocultural agendas or power games that open up marches of folly. ( I think Acts 27 still has the best classical case study on how democratic polities and/or decision makers can all too easily be led into such ill advised marches.) March of folly? Yes: Of course, with a US Election cycle in full swing as the number one media story for the year, such is obviously highly relevant to anyone interested in public policy or geostrategic issues. But, these issues are also highly relevant to the Read More ›

Learn how. Or so they say. From Mashable: It’s an age old question: Can cutting pizza ever be truly equal? … But mathematicians Joel Haddley and Stephen Worsley at University of Liverpool in England believe they have cracked the code for perfect equality at the dinner table by cutting somewhat complex, curved slices — also known as monohedral disc tiling. More. From Phys.org: “I’ve no idea whether there are any applications at all to our work outside of pizza-cutting,” said Haddley in New Scientist. He has tried slicing a pizza in this way for real. But the results are “interesting mathematically, and you can produce some nice pictures.” In short, the math is beautiful, but the pizza was probably a Read More ›

Science historian Michael Flannery kindly contributed this review: When I started reading Perry Marshall’s book, Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design, I must confess to some consternation almost from the beginning. While Marshall was quick to point out the shortcomings of the neo-Darwinian approach of common descent by means of natural selection through the undirected processes of chance and necessity, he oddly went on to claim that ID, while recognizing many truths about biology that old-school Darwinism denies, ultimately abdicates its responsibility by jumping directly to ‘God did it’. At least in its most simple forms, ID halts scientific inquiry by dismissing too easily the possibility that God may have used a process to develop life on Read More ›

The high-resolution image transmitted to Earth on Dec. 24 from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) shows the dwarf planet’s icy surface. However, look a little closer and you may see a strange and dark snail-like object. Hey, They just gotta be out there!

Epigenetics at work, sure, but … From ScienceDaily: Flexible gene expression may regulate social status in male fish For a small African fish species, a colorful dominant male does better in life, winning access to food and females. New research by Stanford biologists suggests that this lucky outcome is regulated at a genetic level, by turning genes on and off. … Fernald studies Astatotilapia burtoni, one of the hundreds of cichlid fish species inhabiting Lake Tanganyika in eastern Africa, because of the unique ways they have evolved over time. For male A. burtoni, dominance is everything. They battle frequently for territory, with the victor winning access to the two most important resources — food and females. Sporting bright rainbow-colored scales, Read More ›

In a 2010 book. So, is the problem with the Theory of Everything that it doesn’t include information? From The Guardian (2010): Physicist Vlatko Vedral explains to Aleks Krotoski why he believes the fundamental stuff of the universe is information and how he hopes that one day everything will be explained in this way Book. Blurb: In Decoding Reality, Vlatko Vedral offers a mind-stretching look at the deepest questions about the universe–where everything comes from, why things are as they are, what everything is. The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, he writes, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena. This view Read More ›

Time doesn’t go backward, and that is a problem in current physics. From Quanta: Why should the fundamental laws have that bizarre and problem-posing property, T invariance? The answer we can offer today is incomparably deeper and more sophisticated than that we could offer 50 years ago. Today’s understanding emerged from a brilliant interplay of experimental discovery and theoretical analysis, which yielded several Nobel prizes. Yet our answer still contains a serious loophole. As I’ll explain, closing that loophole may well lead us, as an unexpected bonus, to identify the cosmological “dark matter.” … We are told, there are “grounds for optimism.” A theortical paarticle called the “axion”: The theory of axions predicts, in a general way, that axions should Read More ›

From Jonathan Haidt at Heterodox Academy: New Study Indicates Existence of Eight Conservative Social Psychologists A new data set has come in. Bill von Hippel and David Buss surveyed the membership of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology. That’s a professional society composed of the most active researchers in the field who are at least five years post-PhD. It’s very selective – you must be nominated by a current member and approved by a committee before you can join. Von Hippel and Buss sent a web survey to the 900 members of SESP and got a response rate of 37% (335 responses). So this is a good sample of the mid-level and senior people (average age 51) who produce most Read More ›

Are people allowed to say this in pop science venues now, like something that is just true? From physicist Tom Hartsfield at RealClearScience: String theory has been the darling of the theoretical physics community for decades. It has reigned as the dominant theory in prestigious US research institutions since the 1980s. Elegant books, TV shows, and grandiose TED talks have hyped it to the public. Brilliant theoretical physicists tell us that this theory is the best answer to the hardest problem that their field has ever attacked. All that is fine, but here’s the unequivocal truth: string theory has failed as a scientific theory. … Discussing the conference last month, he pleads for empiricism, taking evidence seriously: The fire igniting Read More ›

From a (paywalled) review in Science of Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science (Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, Eds. Harvard 2015): Before Columbus discovered America, people believed that the world was flat. When the apple struck Newton’s head, he discovered gravity and replaced God with objective truth. Gregor Mendel was a lone genius who discovered genetics. You will probably have heard at least some of these stories—you may even have believed them—but this delightful collection of short, thought-provoking essays shows that they are all myths. So pointing out that the pop sci lore on these subjects is largely myth is now going mainstream? Used to be, earnest Christian profs wrote this stuff. They were correct, and often engaging, Read More ›

From a brief review in Scientific American of A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life (Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves II, Norton, 2015): No scientific quandary is as confounding, controversial or important as the question of how life began, argue journalist Mesler and geochemist Cleaves. “It touches upon not only how we came to be, but why we came to be,” they write. “It is, in a sense, the ultimate question.”More. Maybe. How much of the problem is rather this: The search is not so much for what happened as for what happened that is consistent with a naturalist perspective? Thus we hear about chance, law, self-organization (which is actually not completely Read More ›

Not only are mouse data often meaningless for humans, but according to a recent piece by Monya Baker in Nature News: Reports of hundreds of biomedical experiments lack essential information. Whereas reports of clinical trials in major medical journals routinely state how many patients die or drop out of analysis during the course of a study, animal studies generally fail to report this figure — or drop animals without saying why, according to a team led by Ulrich Dirnagl at the Charité Medical University in Berlin. That lapse could significantly bias results, the team reports in the journal PLoS Biology. … Dirnagl’s team reviewed 100 reports published between 2000 and 2013 describing 522 experiments that used rodents to test cancer Read More ›

From Nature: “We think bumblebees are using this ability to perceive electrical fields to determine if flowers were recently visited by other bumblebees and are therefore worth visiting,” says Robert. “We had no idea that this sense even existed,” says Thomas Seeley, a behavioural biologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Assuming we can replicate the findings, this is going to open up a whole new window on insect sensory systems for us to study.” More. See also: Does intelligence depend on a specific type of brain? The way insect intelligence develops may be different as well. Bees, like many insects, exhibit “an incredibly wide variety of intelligent behaviors.” But, according to some researchers, insect intelligence tends to increase Read More ›

Everywhere I go … Rats! This should have happened approx December 8, 2015, not January 8, 2016: A friend writes to say that an open access paper at eLIFE includes the words, Tissue organization, spindle orientation, and the GKPID complex itself are all examples of complexity, defined as the integrated functioning of a system made up of differentiated, interacting parts. More. Friend asks: Contrast this with what Michael Behe said years ago defining irreducible complexity: “A single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function of the system ” Note: The Brainyquote version adds, “wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.” Hmmmm. Readers? See also: Is it Read More ›