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. Read More…
Month: September 2018
Google is doomed because it doesn’t get information theory
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” Read More…
Why proving the Riemann hypothesis matters
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 Read More…
At Aeon: Do philosophy and math still need each other?
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 Read More…
“Severe” manipulation of figures from lab that studied gene silencing technique
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. Read More…
Another pop science great, the 100-calorie snack guy, fizzles
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 Read More…
The Scientist tries to come to grips with the Mortarboard Mob problem
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, Read More…
Heckler’s veto: Protesters disrupt climate science conference
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 Read More…
Will social science morph into physics and economics, using Big Data?
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 Read More…
Could new galactic measurements “upend current theories” of physics?
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: Read More…
Acknowledged: Claims of well-established patterns in evolution may be “remarkable bias”
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 Read More…
Gunter Bechly: Dickinsonia is NOT likely an animal
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. Read More…
Researchers: Genome doubling is plant’s secret weapon for spreading widely
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, Read More…
Black holes do not behave as string theorists say they should
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 Read More…
Discover: Even the best dark matter theories “are crumbling”
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 Read More…