What's the point of humanities? More specifically, what's the point of STEM students taking humanities?
Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”
In response to my last column, “Is Science Hitting a Wall?,” a reader sent me “Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency,” published in Nature Reviews in 2012.
I just read a paper that has me brooding, once again, over science’s limits. In “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
It’s hard maintaining an optimistic outlook these days, especially about the environment. U.S. officials are rolling back regulations designed to curb global warming even as reports flood in about its scale and potential consequences.
My friend Robert Wright recently gave a terrific talk here at Stevens about his bestseller Why Buddhism Is True. He argues that Buddhism has correctly diagnosed humanity’s problem.
I’ve been writing for decades about the mind-body problem, the deepest of all mysteries. And yet, only recently have I realized that few people outside philosophy and mind-related scientific fields are familiar with the phrase “mind-body problem.”
In 1990, on assignment for Scientific American, I had a close encounter with Stephen Hawking, who just died at the age of 76.
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!”
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.