I’ve been brooding over weirdness lately. To me, the world and everything in it is weird, and weirdest of all are the clumps of matter that can contemplate themselves and think, “Weird!”
Posts published by “John Horgan”
As a science writer, my job is to raise questions about science and technology, which shape our lives in countless ways, not all of them good.
Can science keep giving us profound insights into the world forever? Or will it inevitably bump up against limits? David Deutsch, an iconoclastic British physicist, made the case for boundlessness in his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity.
Last fall I attended a conference at NYU called “Animal Consciousness.” It should have been called “Animal Consciousness?” to reflect the uncertainty pervading the meeting.
Evolutionary psychology seeks to understand our behavior in light of the fact that we are products of natural selection. In principle, the field can give us deep insights into ourselves.
Science is sexist in two ways. First, women in science (including engineering, math, medicine) face discrimination, harassment and other forms of maltreatment from men.
Years ago I was fishing on an ocean beach and caught a big, beautiful striped bass. My daughter and son, who were 8 and 10, respectively, were nearby.
I recently had an awkward conversation with my doctor. I was getting a routine physical, and he recommended that I get a PSA test for prostate cancer.
Pundits have been fretting lately about robots leaving humans behind, taking our jobs and possibly a lot more, as in The Matrix and Terminator films.
Everybody, and especially everybody at an engineering school like Stevens, should know who Claude Shannon was. Shannon, who lived from 1916 to 2001, was an electrical engineer and mathematician.