To understand human life, you need to know where we came from.
Blog on Science: Beyond Earth, We Seek Wisdom, Ultima Thule – the Furthest Visited Object, Other Space News, Gene Therapy – Not Making Superhumans, Monkeys Get Cosy With Wolves, Kilograms Leaving the Material World
Biology
- Evolution Prevented By Competition. Most of the history of life is about changelessness, not evolution. A relentless struggle for existence produces creatures good at winning that particular struggle, not creatures that can open up new possibilities.
- Gaia, daughter of Pangloss. Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis as Rehashed Religion.
- Frankenstein. How none of the films have been true to Mary Shelley’s original vision.
- Big fierce animals are losers. The monsters of the past mostly perished without issue.
- Mammals that ate dinosaurs. (But still went extinct, with smaller mammals being our shared ancestors.)
Physics
- Why Muons were real, even when no one had believed they should exist. Or could explain why they did exist.
- Why atoms are not really ‘a hole in a hole‘.
- The Large Hadron Collider in 2008. One Tetravolt is about the same energy as a flying mosquito. But if you can squeeze that sort of energy into a space about a million million times smaller than a mosquito, interesting things happen.
- Reality – Schrodinger’s Cat.
- Asocialism: Part One; The Muon and the Green Great Dragon. This mixes particle physics, astronomy and human-controlled matters like grammar.
Astronomy
- Should We Fear Alien Civilisations? If they are there, they would have seen us through telescopes much better than we have used to find thousands of exoplanets.
- Humans invented the constellations.
- Cosmic scales – our solar system is tiny in the vastness of the galaxy.
- Calendar months – how we got this odd collection of names in English.
Other
- The Decline of US Science. Bell Labs did good work which led on to useful products. But modern business thinks short-term and neglects such things.
- Computers Burdened by their Early History .
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