September 2018

Photographer and philosopher Laszlo Bencze has been rereading Thomas Nagel’s Mind & Cosmos (2012), and he writes to say, I’m finding Mind and Cosmos to be a very thought provoking book. In it Nagel sets himself the task of explaining the existence of mind (or consciousness) without resorting to either materialistic evolution or to theism. I suspect that most of us on will feel that he’s missing the obvious answer, theism, but Nagel refuses to accept that. Therefore he goes through some rather elaborate mental contortions in trying to find a path which is “the territory between them.” He kindly sends us his notes from Nagel: The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions about Read More ›

That’s tech philosopher George Gilder’s view: Last month, World News Daily did a three-part interview with George Gilder on the publication of Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, which unpacks some of the book’s main ideas: Part One: “Reagan guru, predictor of iPhone foresees new web revolution” In 1981, his bestselling “Wealth and Poverty” provided a blueprint for the economic revolution led by Ronald Reagan, who cited him more than any other living author. In the 1994 version of his book “Life After Television,” he predicted the digital world in which we now live and the invention of the smartphone that now dominates daily life. And long before the iPhone was introduced Read More ›

Prime numbers are the “building blocks for larger numbers”: The Riemann hypothesis is a statement about a mathematical curiosity known as the Riemann zeta function. That function is closely entwined with prime numbers — whole numbers that are evenly divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers are mysterious: They are scattered in an inscrutable pattern across the number line, making it difficult to predict where each prime number will fall (SN Online: 4/2/08). But if the Riemann zeta function meets a certain condition, Riemann realized, it would reveal secrets of the prime numbers, such as how many primes exist below a given number. That required condition is the Riemann hypothesis. It conjectures that certain zeros of the function — Read More ›

One question is whether people are looking for logically certain answers any more: Whereas mathematics seeks precise and certain answers, obtaining them in real life is often intractable or outright impossible. In such circumstances, what we really want are algorithms that return reasonable approximations to the right answers in an efficient and reliable manner. Real-world models also tend to rely on assumptions that are inherently uncertain and imprecise, and our software needs to handle such uncertainty and imprecision in robust ways. Many of philosophy’s central objects of study – language, cognition, knowledge and inference – are soft in this sense. The structure of language is inherently amorphous. Concepts have fuzzy boundaries. Evidence for a scientific theory is rarely definitive but, Read More ›

But the reason for the manipulation is unclear: A fresh investigation into publications from a French plant-biology laboratory has revealed “severe” and “intentional” manipulation of research figures. No one has yet been named as responsible for the misconduct, but the institute that led the investigation is expected to announce disciplinary measures by the end of September. The inquiry — led by France’s national research council, the CNRS, with the participation of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) — investigated five molecular-biology articles from researchers at the CNRS Institute of Plant Molecular Biology in Strasbourg, France. The now-defunct lab was renowned for its work on how a gene-silencing technique called RNA interference helps plants, invertebrates and mammals to combat Read More ›

Behaviorist Brian Wansink whose “bottomless bowl” theory of why people eat too much – and other creative but problematic ideas hatched at Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab has fallen from grace: His lab informed food companies implementing the 100-calorie snack packs you see in stores, for example, under the idea that these smaller portions would get people to eat less. He led the national committee on dietary guidelines and worked to improve the food ecosystems in public schools, the U.S. Army, and Google, among others. On Thursday, Cornell’s provost, Michael Kotlikoff, issued a statement (touted by a university press release) that said a faculty committee had investigated Wansink and found that he had “committed academic misconduct in his research and Read More ›

We outlined the story of how a mortarboard mob hounded out of the journals a paper by a respected mathematician that had passed peer review for fear of “repercussions” (= the hell they themselves would go out and raise). The paper was about “greater variability in various traits among males than females of many species, including humans.” That is, more men than women win the Field’s Medal and more men than women sit on Death Row. That is something everyone everywhere has noticed but the social justice gestapo makes it difficult to discuss intelligently, as in this instance. Anyway, from The Scientist, we learn, For the scientific community, the double retraction has highlighted issues with the editorial process, and how Read More ›

In St. Louis earlier this month: What do you do if you’re a climate activist and a geoscientist speaks at a meeting near you offering scientific evidence against your point of view? Well, of course—you do what any rational person would do. You attend and listen carefully and weigh the arguments and consider whether you should change your views. Maybe you ask some questions during the Q&A at the end of the talk, challenging some of his evidence or reasoning. Maybe, if you’re really confident of your views, you contact the event organizers in advance and offer to debate the speaker, making the event all the more valuable to people of all persuasions. Or maybe not. Maybe, instead, you just Read More ›

Might that be the final resolution of the otherwise intractable scandal of social “science,” which is increasingly just political screeds? In 2014, Stephen Guy of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues described how people move to avoid hitting each other when interacting in large groups. “Human crowds,” they wrote, “bear a striking resemblance to interacting particle systems.” Pedestrians move, the researchers observed, like negatively-charged electrons, which repel each other more strongly as they approach, with one key difference. Unlike electrons, pedestrians anticipate when a collision is imminent and change their motion beforehand by swinging wide to avoid a crash. Using this knowledge, the researchers derived a mathematical rule for an electron-like “repulsive force” between any two pedestrians, but based Read More ›

At Horizons EU we are told, “New efforts to figure out just how fast the universe has expanded since the Big Bang, a speed known as the Hubble constant, could upend current theories of physics , according to some scientists. If current theories were upended, who would know. Consider these stories from this month alone: Discover: Even the best dark matter theories “are crumbling” Is there a crisis in the physics of our time? The cat is back: Is quantum theory dead, alive, AND contradicting itself? “Perhaps physics has slipped into a post-empirical era…” That’s a lot of fundamental uncertainty, as opposed to the endless quibbles of any scholarly discipline. Ultimately, more accurate measurements would establish the correct value of Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: How do the large-scale patterns we observe in evolution arise? A new paper in the journal Evolution by researchers at Uppsala University and University of Leeds argues that many of them are a type of statistical artefact caused by our unavoidably recent viewpoint looking back into the past. As a result, it might not be possible to draw any conclusions about what caused the enormous changes in diversity we see through time. The diversity of life through time shows some striking patterns. For example, the animals appear in the fossil record about 550 million years ago, in an enormous burst of diversification called the “Cambrian Explosion.” Many groups of organisms appear to originate like this, but later on Read More ›

Rather, he thinks, it is an unknown type of life form, which belonged to “an alien clade,” not certainly related to later life forms. Readers will recall that fats (sterols) were recently recovered from a 558 million-year-old fossil entity, Dickinsonia, which was previously uncertainly classified but is now classified as an animal as a result. Bechly writes, Although we know many well-preserved specimens of Dickinsonia, its affinities in the supposed tree of life have remained extremely controversial for more than 70 years since its description (Shu et al. 2014, Budd & Jensen 2015). This resulted in its wandering across nearly every kingdom and many phyla of life. In 1992 seven authorities among paleontologists were asked by evolutionary biologist Rudolf Raff Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Many wild and cultivated plants arise through the combination of two different species. The genome of these so-called polyploid species often consists of a quadruple set of chromosomes — a double set for each parental species — and thus has about twice as many genes as the original species. About 50 years ago, evolutionary biologists postulated that this process drives evolution, leading to new species. Due to the size and complexity of such genomes, however, proving this theory on a genetic level has been difficult. Arabidopsis kamchatica arose through the natural hybridization of the two parental species A. halleri and A. lyrata between 65,000 and 145,000 years ago. With 450 million base pairs, its genome is somewhat small Read More ›

Sabine Hossenfelder, author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, explains, Three weeks ago, Steinhauer’s group reported results from a new experiment in which they have now measured the temperature of the fluid black hole: Observation of thermal Hawking radiation at the Hawking temperature in an analogue black hole Juan Ramón Muñoz de Nova, Katrine Golubkov, Victor I. Kolobov, Jeff Steinhauer arXiv:1809.00913 [gr-qc] While the measurement is not very exact owing to the noise in the system, the result agrees with Hawking’s prediction, at least to the precision that the experiment allows to identify a temperature to begin with. The authors also point out in the paper that they see no evidence of a black hole firewall. A black hole Read More ›

Because the best theories have not identified dark matter after decades: Having been fooled once, scientists have to ask: Is dark matter the new ether? For decades, a few rogue scientists have stood hopefully at the edge of respectability, offering their theory called Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND. Essentially, it says that physics doesn’t work as we know it at the largest scales. It says we’ve been drawing the wrong conclusions, and dark matter isn’t required to explain the universe. No one has managed to develop a theory of MOND that adequately explains the universe around us, but it occasionally gains converts simply because the competing theory of dark matter has a glaring flaw: we can’t find it. Perhaps we’re Read More ›