Science
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Science and Parliament II
The official aims of the MP-Scientist pairing scheme are To help scientists recognise the potential methods and structures through which they can feed their scientific knowledge to parliamentarians. To help practising research scientists understand the pressures under which MPs operate. To give MPs the opportunity to forge direct links with a network of practising research…
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Science and Parliament (UK)
Sorry I’ve been so quiet this week: I’ve just finished participating in the Royal Society’s MP-Scientist Pairing Scheme. They’ve linked 25 youngish scientists from throughout the UK with a member of Parliament, and let us “shadow” them for much of this week (as well as giving us presentations on the way science and scientists interact…
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Atomic quote
The nightmare of all art, as well as of all politics, is generalities. You cannot generalize. You’ve got to keep things as specific to the minute, as down to the wire, as possible. –Peter Sellars in Alex Ross’s “Countdown” (from The New Yorker), on Dr. Atomic, the new opera about physicist Robert Oppenheimer and the…
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Postmodernists and Scientists, partying together
In the nineties, after the infamous Sokal “Social Text” Hoax, it became fashionable to lambaste post-scructuralist/postmodernist academia for its misunderstanding and misappropriation of science and scientific terms — from “relativity” to “uncertainty principle” to “paradigm shift”. The latter itself is of course a term from the history and philosophy of science: Thomas Kuhn‘s description of…
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The BBC, the Big Bang and WMAP
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For some reason, the BBC’s Today Program had a feature on the Big Bang and its purported problems confronting modern data. Apart from the woefully misguided Eric Lerner, the discussion was relatively nuanced and at least attempted to distinguish between a wrong theory and an incomplete one — the questions that the Big Bang, as…
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“They’re just birds”
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Unlike their sister paper, The Guardian, who seem willing to pander to the crackpot anti-evolution right, The Observer not only reports on the Religious Right’s weird valorization of the film March of the Penguins, but is also willing to point out the truth in an editorial (aka leader): If ever the world needed reminding about…
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The Guardian’s Unintelligent Design
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I was enjoying the new, redesigned Guardian newspaper today, until I came to the end of the new G2 features section, and an offensive interview with chief Intelligent Design crackpot Michael Behe, under the inappropriate banner, “Ideas”. Offensive because interviewer John Sutherland doesn’t call Behe on any of his flagrant misstatements (I hesitate to call…
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Life Principle or just dirty water?
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In the Guardian, Paul Davies writes about investigating the origins of life on earth and, possibly, throughout the Universe. Davies, a media-savvy astrophysicist with a notable spiritual, if not mystical, streak, comes dangerously close to advocating something like Intelligent Design, albeit a more primordial level than its usual crackpot promoters. He talks about the existence…
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Quote of the day (experts only)
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The ΛCDM Model requires two pieces of unknown physics. One is ‘Λ’ and the other is ‘CDM’ -Tom Shanks, at “Open Questions in Cosmology“, a meeting being held at the Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik in Garching, Germany. I’ll explain later.