Last week, a few dozen scholars assembled at Stevens for “The Maintainers, ”a three-day conference on our modern obsession with innovation.
Posts published in “Scientific Curmudgeon”
Times are tough for young psychologists. That’s what I kept thinking during recent meetings with candidates for a psychology position at Stevens.
Michael V. Hayden, a central figure in the U.S. war on terror, spoke at Stevens recently. Hayden directed the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009.
Don’t always believe what scientists and other authorities tell you! Be skeptical! Think critically! That’s what I tell students, and some learn the lesson all too well.
These are tough times for scientists. As funding has flattened or declined, the competition for grants and glory has grown increasingly fierce.
I recently gave a talk at Stevens about how I came to write The End of Science, which was published two decades ago and just reissued with a new preface.
“Gravitational Waves Detected, Confirming Einstein’s Theory.” That’s how The New York Times reported that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) had detected gravitational waves, first predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity a century ago.
A report in Nature on 10,000-year-old skeletons unearthed in West Turkana, Kenya is being touted as evidence for the assertion that war has deep evolutionary roots.
Physics, more than any other field, lured me into science journalism more than three decades ago. Physics represented a kind of scientific theology, an empirical, rational way of probing, if not solving, the mysteries of existence.
At the end of every year for almost two decades, science book agent John Brockman poses a provocative question to a bunch of smarty-pants, including scientists, philosophers, and journalists.