In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
How will the Universe end? And when? It's been speculation in religion and philosophy since man realized he was special. Can physics offer anything new?Let's go to the Dark Energy hypotheses and see. 1998 really messed us up, theoretically. Until then, we knew the Universe had to slow down - well, theoretically. But then the Hubble showed us truly distant supernovae and we got the uncomfortable reality that the Universe was actually expanding more slowly in the past than it is now. That meant gravity has not been slowing Universal expansion, it has been accelerating.
No one is asking the Department of Energy to play venture capitalist with taxpayer money again, but basic research in dye-sensitized solar cells may bring the cost of solar down enough to allow for mainstream acceptance - primarily because dye-sensitized solar cells (also known as DSCs) are less fragile than panels that use crystalline silicon, also a benefit of thin-film panels, and don't require a clean room.
Have you noticed a huge increase in the price of pork chops or bacon or hot dogs?Neither have I, despite the fact that sow gestation stalls, or crates or whatever you may call them in your neighborhood, are disappearing. The stalls are basically where pregnant sows are kept. Anti-science hippies who are always looking for ammunition in their war on human food contend big business uses these crates because they are, you know, eeeevil, but that isn't true. Long before Big Pork even existed farmers kept sows apart because they fight. And during pregnancy, if you screw with a female pig, you are asking to roll in the mud. The American Veterinary Medical Association says stalls are safer and therefore better than pens(1).
We just had Snowmageddon and then heat a heat wave in parts of the US. Local, short-term weather events are suddenly proof of long-term climate change once again, according to journalists and biased bloggers who claim to care about science."Generation X", as marketing people call the generation after the Baby Boomers, aren't buying it, despite the fact that awareness campaigns about global warming have gone on for most of their lives.
Is psychology a science? Increasingly, the respect of science (and scientists) by the public has been dropping and a part of that reason is because the line of what science is has become fuzzy. If economics calls itself science, well, the public knows they don't know what they are talking about, so maybe it applies to climate science too. Is sociology science? What about parapsychology?If the definition of science becomes relative, then so does acceptance of science, in a slippery slope world, so we can't expect people will accept FDA findings as science if political science is funded by the National Science Foundation and the public knows that isn't scientific at all.
Over the last year there has been increasing recognition that it isn't "the right" who are anti-science. The left has far more anti-science people; percentage-wise, there are more anti-vaccine people who vote Democrat than there are Republicans who deny evolution or global warming. Ditto for anti-GMO stances, people who believe in psychics and UFOs, etc. The list of kooky positions that turn out to be held by people on the left is huge but you wouldn't know that from science media of the past decade.
Eugenics, the darling of elite, educated progressives 100 years ago in their quest to create Utopia, has been out of favor since those crazy Germans took it too far in the late 1930s, but there is one sound reason it found favor; why wouldn't we eliminate serious diseases beforehand instead of treating them after?
Most people do not want war in their backyard. In geopolitics, people claim to love their neighbor but they still prepare to fight; Switzerland, the home of neutrality, still has hundreds of forts built into their mountains and young men are required to own a gun(1).
Why do clowns freak us out? And why are robots cute until they look too much like people, and then then they creep us out?It's our old friend the Uncanny Valley and it basically postulates that the more realistic something gets to a human likeness, the more repulsive it is. I don't mean like realistic special effects as in "Wrath Of The Titans" - that giant, flaming lava hand of Chronos looks cool - but rather likeness when it comes to humanoids, be they zombies or robots.
Sometimes Science 2.0 has to swim against the stream. The stream, in this case, has been the long-standing irrational belief that America 'needs' more scientists.
It's no secret that an alarming number of left-wing people hate science - and scientists. But why do far-left anarchists really hate science, enough to get violent about it? And why don't the right do anything more than be Freedom of Information Act pests?Sure, more people on the right than on the left deny evolution, but they aren't shooting evolutionary biologists, we just have to be embarrassed that fringe sectarian zealots in backwater counties try to teach children how God planted fossils as some sort of faith-based head fake. There is no physical danger.But science is deadly if you get a left-wing group after you.
Want to get into a bar fight at a physics conference? Argue that quantum mechanics is the best way to predict outcomes. Or argue the opposite.A new paper argues that quantum mechanics is close to optimal in terms of its predictive power but even if all the information is available, the outcomes of certain quantum mechanics experiments generally can't be predicted perfectly beforehand. Optimal but unpredictable? The best but often not good enough? Quantum mechanics is a confusing dichotomy, basically the LeBron James of the physics world.
