Only religious apocalyptics and left environmentalists will dislike this
Only religious apocalyptics and left environmentalists will dislike this Read More »
Science
Science journalism for non-experts on the climate change issue
I understand: (1) Climate is not weather, except when it is. (2) Global warming means milder winters but also harsher winters. Far from expert on the issue, but can USA Today please up its science-journalism game? The video accompanying this article promises to explain why “Climate change is making winters colder despite rising temperatures and
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Kuhn on the Greeks’ unique creation of scientific culture
Sparked by some recent conversation, here again is a striking quotation from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: “Every civilization of which we have records has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and so on. In many cases those facets of civilization have been as developed as our own.
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Thomas Hager’s *The Alchemy of Air*
Hager’s The Alchemy of Air (Broadway, 2009) is a gripping read. You might think a story about chemistry and chemical engineering — fixed nitrogen, hydrogen, and ammonia — would be a snooze, but you might be wrong. Subtitle: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery that Fed the World and Fueled the
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Sex with Robots? The Ethics [Good Life series]
A new generation of sex robots is upon us, and the joking has begun. I don’t need one, says a wife, since my husband is already robotic in bed. Ha ha. Sure, a husband replies, but you should see my wife in inaction. (No thanks, I think to myself.) The next generation of sex robots promises
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Is Newton’s *Principia* a rape manual?
From the “Did he/she really say that?” file. Here is adversarial-feminist philosopher Sandra Harding on Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica: “why is it not as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton’s laws as ‘Newton’s rape manual’ as it is to call them ‘Newton’s mechanics’?”[1] How did she get there? Well, Francis Bacon did say that
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Isaac Newton as *philosopher* of science
On recognizing what one does and does not know: “But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult
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Why there can be only seven planets
A contemporary of Galileo’s in reply to his 1610 discovery of Jupiter’s moons: “There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head. From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc., which were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven.
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