I met Stephen Hawking in the summer of 1990, when I spent five days in northern Sweden at a conference attended by 30 or so leading cosmologists.
Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”
Late last spring, as I’ve mentioned in previous columns, I participated in a conference called How the Light Gets In, where I hung out with all kinds of professional reality-ponderers.
For more than 20 years, I have hammered behavioral genetics, which attempts to pinpoint the genetic underpinnings of an enormous variety of human traits and disorders, from homosexuality and religiosity to alcoholism and depression.
One of the best parts of being at Stevens is hanging out with cool (compared to me), young (compared to me), up-and-coming scholars, from whom I can learn a lot about science and technology.
Almost every day, the media reports some alleged breakthrough stemming from research on cancer, leading many people to believe that science is winning the war against this dread disease.
Last June, I attended the annual “Dialogue” of the Breakthrough Institute, an Oakland, California, thinktank that challenges mainstream environmental positions, and then I wrote positively about it.
In this column and in my book The End of War, I knock what I call the deep roots theory of war.
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.
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.