Posts published by “John Horgan”

I admire Sabine Hossenfelder, the iconoclastic physicist. In her writings and videos, she is blunt, clear, courageous, funny. So her advocacy for superdeterminism distresses me.

These are dark times, and I take solace where I can get it. Lately I’ve gotten it from The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by anthropologist David Graeber, who died shortly after finishing the book, and archaeologist David Wengrow. 

What’s at the bottom of things? If we keep asking “Why?”, where do we end up? Some physicists postulate that everything stems from a single primordial force or particle, perhaps a super-symmetrical string, from which flow the myriad forces and particles of our fallen world.

My girlfriend, “Emily,” often tells me her dreams, and I, less often, tell her mine, which are usually too murky and disjointed to share.

My girlfriend, “Emily,” who likes to hack her health, recently purchased an Oura Ring. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary silver ring, but it’s lined with sensors that monitor heart rate, respiration, temperature, body motion and other variables.

Passing through a park in Manhattan recently, I spotted a plaque with a poem on it, “Nature Poem,” by Tommy Pico. It

Last winter, I banged my right elbow playing hockey, and it became swollen and red. Doctors diagnosed bursitis, inflammation of my elbow’s bursa sac, and prescribed antibiotics.

My attempt to learn quantum mechanics, which has consumed me for more than a year now, has dredged up a creepy, long-buried memory.

I’ve been hard on American medicine. Americans are over-tested, over-diagnosed and over-treated, I’ve argued, because physicians and hospitals in our capitalist culture care more about profits than patients.