If you are a regular reader of this column, you might know that I have something to do with the Center for Science Writings, or CSW, but you probably don’t know what the CSW is.
Posts published by “John Horgan”
By John Horgan
One of the high points of my summer vacation took place last May, when I attended How the Light Gets In, a philosophy in Hay-on-Wye, Britain.
A new semester has just started, and I’m more excited than usual—that is, less depressed that summer vacation is over. The College of Arts & Letters just hired two scholars to beef up our programs in Science and Technology Studies and Science Communication.
Is there a more urgent problem in the world today than war? And when I say “war,” I mean also militarism, the culture of war, the armies, arms, industries, policies, plans, propaganda, prejudices, rationalizations that make lethal group conflict not only possible but also likely.
I lack the tribalism gene. I don’t identify strongly, emotionally, with clusterings of people, whether nation, hometown, religion, ethnic group, profession or sports team (although long ago I endured the horror of being a Mets fan).
Corvid cleverness is making news lately. Researchers in New Zealand recently reported that crows can mimic the fictional hero of Aesop’s ancient fable “The Crow and the Pitcher.”
In my last column, I commented on an anomalous riff by Sherlock Holmes–who usually shuns metaphysics—on whether a beautiful flower is evidence of God.
I’ve become, belatedly, a Sherlock Holmes groupie. I dig the BBC series Sherlock, starring the suddenly ubiquitous Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as its American counterpart Elementary (I prefer the latter, in part because of Lucy Liu, the best Watson ever).
I hope I was wrong about inflation. For decades, I’ve been bashing this theory of cosmic creation, lumping it together with strings, multiverses, and other highly speculative propositions sprung from the fecund minds of physicists.
In my previous column, I criticized Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the new science series Cosmos (which I’m loving), for downplaying historical links between science and war.