“How do I upgrade my brain?” In an ever more inhuman world, ever more humans seek answers to that question. But the right answer depends on what you mean by the question. If by “upgrading” you mean upgrading the nervous system according to its own needs and functions (my expertise), your...
After a year of enduring barriers imposed by the pandemic, scientists have good reason to welcome the Biden administration's first budget request, which includes significant increases in funding for technology and innovation. Scientific progress requires this investment — indeed, it requires...
Theoretical physics inhabits an area of human knowledge and discourse whose frontier is so hermetic no one other than the physicists themselves may claim to make sense of the discourse they manage to produce. Even the physicists are not always sure of what they understand in their own discourse,...
In a fascinating interview with The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony, media-friendly physicist Michio Kaku reveals more than he may have intended about both science and politics when he explains how political funding of the science of fundamental research takes place today. The champion of string...
During his inauguration, President Joe Biden appealed to us, American citizens, repeatedly and emphatically, to defend unity and truth against corrosion from power and profit. Fortunately, the bedrock tensions between unity, truth, power and profit have newly-discovered mathematical definitions,...
China has for the first time taken the top position in the Nature Index as the biggest producer of high-quality research in chemistry. What will the future of China science look like? Quantum physics may be science on an impossibly small scale, but it is one field where China is staking a...
Every year, on Indian Science Day in February, India commemorates the discovery of the Raman Effect by Sir C.V. Raman. In 1930, Raman won the Nobel Prize in Physics and has been revered by Indians ever since. Fast forward to 2019, and the US National Science Foundation placed India third when...
In a previous article on Fair Observer, I describe an unusual new way of communicating the most important parts of “scientific truth” through potentially noisy, biased news media. The key innovation is to consider them together, all at once, as a kind of jigsaw-puzzle about scientific truth,...
What is science doing next to news, anyway? Is “science” whatever a scientist says? Is it just another buzzword politicians use to mask their motives? “News” comes from “new,” just like “information” comes from “inform,” both terms over 500 years old. In print, news usually...
All that is old need not be dated. Take for instance, our ecological heritage. It has been rightly proposed by scholars that countless enlightened ideas may be drawn from old precepts of previous civilizations, especially from ancient India. More than that, knowledge may also, in today’s...
