Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”

Facing The End of Science

My gloomy 23-year-old book The End of Sciencehas been popping up lately, mainly in discussions of physics. Below I respond to recent articles that cite my book:

*David Kordahl, a graduate student in physics, writes in Los Angeles Review of Booksthat it is “hard to imagine today’s popular writing about physics without the existence of two books.”

New Zealand Acts to Stop Mass Shootings. Why Not U.S.?

Last month an avowed white supremacist shot to death 50 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The shooter carried out the slaughter with weapons, including an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle with a high-capacity magazine, that he had purchased legally, according to the BBC

Doubting my anti-caffeine faith

In columns last fall, I described how I stopped drinking coffee after decades of swilling 5 to 7 cups per day.

The case for soaking the rich

Can you be too rich? I think so, and so does newly-elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I’m not saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are immoral,” she said recently, “but a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.”

Painful reality or pleasant delusion?

In my classes, I like making students ponder the pros and cons of knowledge. We talk about Plato’s parable, in which people imprisoned in a cave mistake shadows projected on a wall for reality.

The Deep Roots of Fake News

A new history of the U.S. traces mass media’s destabilizing effects back to the nation’s birth.