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I just won a bet I made in 2002 with physicist Michio Kaku. I bet him $1,000 that “by 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, which recognized solid work in cosmology (yay Jim Peebles!) and astronomy, was Kaku’s last chance to win before 2020. Kaku and I made the bet under the auspices of Long Bets, a “public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake.” Long...

The mathematical physicist and cosmologist Roger Penrose, now professor emeritus at Oxford University, is best known to mathematicians for his discovery of Penrose tiles. These are two four-sided polygons that tile the plane only in a nonperiodic way, that is, without a fundamental region that repeats periodically like the hexagonal tiling of a bathroom floor, or the amazing tesselations of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher. To everyone’s surprise, including Penrose’s, his whimsical tiling turned out to underlie a previously unknown type of crystal. You can read all about this in my book Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers. Penrose’s two...

This patently false claim is part of the ongoing Big Lie campaign to try to downplay and minimize the jihad threat. It first surfaced in June, and in wake of he Oregon murders, the media elites are dragging it back out again. But it is no more coherent or reasonable than it was in the summer.The study is based on the number of those killed by each group since 9/11. It skews the results by leaving out 9/11: what possible justification can there be for leaving 9/11 out of what is supposed to be a calculation of the magnitude of...

Orlando Massacre Exposes Need for More Gun Control, Not More Counterterrorism The easy availability of guns poses a much greater threat to Americans than terrorism does

The trumpets were left at home and the parades were canceled. The press releases and campaign signs were quietly forgotten. The news was big, but it did not contain what some had hoped for. On April 14, 2003, the International Human Genome Consortium announced the successful completion of the Human Genome Project—two years ahead of schedule. The press report read: "The human genome is complete and the Human Genome Project is over" (see "Human Genome Report...," 2003, emp. added). Most of the major science journals reported on the progress in the field of genetics, but also speculated on how the...

Exactly 20 years ago, I wrote an article for Scientific American that, in draft form, had the headline above. My editor nixed it, so we went with something less dramatic: "In the Beginning…: Scientists are having a hard time agreeing on when, where and—most important—how life first emerged on the earth." That editor is gone now, so I get to use my old headline, which is even more apt today. Dennis Overbye just wrote a status report for The New York Times on research into life's origin, based on a conference on the topic at Arizona State University. Geologists, chemists,...

Last week the Garrison Institute, a retreat center just a few miles down the Hudson River from my home, hosted an impressive symposium on “Climate, Mind and Behavior.” An organizer made the mistake of inviting me to the meeting’s wrap-up session Friday.As a brochure put it, the symposium brought together 75 “thought leaders and practitioners from the fields of neuro, behavioral and evolutionary economics, psychology, policy, investing and social media to explore how to integrate emerging knowledge on the key drivers of behavior into solutions for solving the world’s most pressing problem: climate change.”Basically, this was a brainstorming session on...

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once....

Trofimko Lysenko is not a household name; but it should be, because he was the model for all the Politically Correct "science" in the last hundred years. Lysenko was Stalin's favorite agricultural "scientist," peddling the myth that crops could be just trained into growing bigger and better. You didn't have to breed better plants over generations, as farmers have been doing for ages. It was a fantasy of the all-powerful Soviet State. Lysenko sold Stalin on that fraud in plant genetics, and Stalin told Soviet scientists to fall into line --- in spite of the fact that nobody really believed it....

Is It Wrong to Link Hurricane Irene to Global Warming?By John Horgan | August 27, 2011 Six years ago, experts waited until after Katrina to start arguing over whether the hurricane was a consequence, at least in part, of global warming. This week, pundits didn’t even wait for Irene to smash into the U.S. to start squabbling over the same question. The green journalist-activist Bill McKibben, who last week was arrested in front of the White House while protesting an Obama administration proposal to build a new oil pipeline, got things started on Thursday. “Irene’s got a middle name, and...

Early 20th century photo depicts Samoan girls preparing for the 'ava ceremony.' Wikimedia Commons If Alfred Kinsey of the Kinsey Reports was the “Father of the Sexual Revolution,” perhaps no one woman can be more accurately called the “Mother of the Sexual Revolution” than Margaret Mead. Margaret Mead was a young anthropologist who set out to help anthropology professor Frank Boas of Columbia University prove a very specific thesis: that a person’s upbringing and environment shaped a person’s actions to a greater extent than genetic factors did. Together with another young scholar named Ruth Benedict, Mead set off to...

Rejoice! In case you were jaded by the whole evolution vs. intelligent design exercise in masochism, there's a new front in the war on science: the mind. Apparently, creationists are no longer satisfied by throwing tantrums in front of Darwin's grave; they'd rather be throwing flowers on Descartes'. This past week there was a story in New Scientist that talked about a new movement in creationism called "non-material neuroscience." Basically, these guys claim that the traditional, biological approach to solving the mysteries of the mind has failed, therefore we need to look to non-material (non-physical) explanations for human intelligence and...

No hints of “new physics” beyond the predictions of the Standard Model have turned up in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile circular tunnel at CERN Laboratory in Switzerland that slams protons together at high energies. (Photo: CERN) As a young theorist in Moscow in 1982, Mikhail Shifman became enthralled with an elegant new theory called supersymmetry that attempted to incorporate the known elementary particles into a more complete inventory of the universe.“My papers from that time really radiate enthusiasm,” said Shifman, now a 63-year-old professor at the University of Minnesota. Over the decades, he and thousands of...

A school district in the Amish-region town of Dover, Pa., became the first in the nation to officially inform biology students of the theory of intelligent design as an alternative to Darwin's theory of Evolution. A one-minute statement read at the beginning of the school term says Darwin's theory is not a fact and continues to be tested, and "intelligent design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view." As WorldNetDaily reported, the American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the new policy in a federal lawsuit, but decided not to go forward with a request...

C.S. Lewis, the former atheist and famous Oxford scholar, once said "Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...." There are a myriad of eminent scholars (like Lewis) who understand the folly of atheism. I will list a few others in this second part of my treatise to expose atheists' agenda to ban Christianity from the courts of culture. In my last article I discussed "step 1" of their plan. In this discourse I will address steps 2 & 3. Step two: target...

With its latest research, Big Blue says it's reached device performance close to the minimum requirements for implementing a "practical quantum computer." But many hurdles remain.Seen here is a silicon chip housing three superconducting quantum bits, or qubits. IBM believes qubits are the key to its quantum computing efforts. (Credit: IBM Research) Scientists at IBM say they have made a quantum computing breakthrough that demonstrates that a full-scale quantum computer is not only possible but is within reasonable reach. In an announcement being made today at the American Physical Society in Boston, Matthias Steffen, manager of IBM's experimental quantum computing...

There's been some complaining on the original thread about hijacking, so I'm offering a chance for you guys to continue the debate without all the distracting comments. I'd suggest not pinging anyone until the debate is finished. Here's a rcap of the debate so far. The first argument is in brown; the reply to part one of the first argument is in green.

Think the IRA has stepped off the world stage? Their role is closer to that of ringleader. One of America’s most influential terrorist enemies traces its lineage back some thirty years — and it isn’t a Muslim organization.In splinter groups like the Continuity IRA and more recently the Real IRA, Irish terrorists have positioned themselves at the center of a network connecting revolutionary FARC rebels in Colombia, Hezbollah in the Middle East, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Taliban forces in Afghanistan currently fighting and killing American troops. The IRA and PFLP have trained together and coordinated attacks, weapons smuggling, and other...

I'm 54, with all that entails. Gray hair, trick knee, trickier memory. I still play a mean game of hockey, and my love life requires no pharmaceutical enhancement. But entropy looms ever larger. Suffice it to say, I would love to believe that we are rapidly approaching “the singularity.” Like paradise, technological singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting. At first, we'll become cyborgs, as stupendously powerful brain chips soup up our perception, memory, and intelligence and maybe even eliminate the need for annoying TV remotes. Eventually, we will abandon our flesh-and-blood selves entirely and upload...

December 31, 2002 More Than Good Intentions: Holding Fast to Faith in Free Will By JOHN HORGAN When I woke this morning, I stared at the ceiling above my bed and wondered: to what extent will my rising really be an exercise of my free will? Let's say I got up right . . . now. Would my subjective decision be the cause? Or would computations unfolding in a subconscious neural netherworld actually set off the muscular twitches that slide me out of the bed, quietly, so as not to wake my wife, and propel me toward the door? One...