The Year in Review

As the end of the year approaches, the editors are delighted to present our second annual review, highlighting the essays that best represent our aims, ambitions, attitudes, and even our animadversions. Collected below are some notable essays we published this year, some illuminating exchanges from our letters section, and a selection of our favorite links from The Rambler.

To our fond familiar readers: Thank you. To readers in prospect wishing to know what Inference is all about: Start here.

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• 

  Physics

  The Quest for Fusion Energy

  Daniel Jassby

  In recent years, a steady flow of press releases from nuclear fusion research projects have hailed breakthrough advances and new record yields. Despite repeated claims that the prospects for commercialization have never looked brighter, the stark reality is that practical fusion-based electric power remains a distant prospect. It is likely unachievable anytime in the next half century.

  → Update: In mid-December, Daniel Jassby published a brief note assessing the implications of the latest milestone achieved at the NIF.

• 

  Medicine

  Thunder Out of China

  Yuri Deigin

  For the moment, the best explanation for the origins of COVID-19 seems to be that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were engaged in creating novel SARS-like chimeras and potentially supercharging their transmissibility and pathogenicity.

• 

  Computer Science

  The Origins of Python

  Lambert Meertens

  Python is the most popular programming language worldwide. Since its debut in 1991, Python’s accessibility and rich functionality has helped it gather a huge userbase. Its design was influenced by creator Guido van Rossum’s involvement with an earlier language, ABC. Lambert Meertens, one of ABC’s developers, recounts Python’s origins and how ABC’s design philosophy shaped its successor.

• 

  Astronomy

  A First Year of Discovery

  Casey Papovich

  The first images from the largest and most advanced orbiting optical observatory to date—NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope—were released in mid-July. And they were truly stunning. As one of the scientists who will be using the Webb, Casey Papovich examines how it may help answer deep questions about the nature of exoplanets and the formation of the first galaxies following the Big Bang.

• 

  Archaeology

  A Mirror of Nature

  Mike Edmonds

  The Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in a first-century BCE shipwreck, has proven to be mechanically more sophisticated than anything known from the subsequent millennium. Yet rather than being an anachronism, the mechanism testifies to the reality of such complex machines in the ancient world.

• 

  Physics

  Agents in the Ether

  David Kordahl

  In the late nineteenth century, research in electromagnetism became intertwined with the Victorian British Empire’s ambitions to install a global network of submarine telegraph cables. In Imperial Science, Bruce Hunt details how the desire for quick communications from London to Egypt, and then on to India, drove progress in the physical sciences towards a theory of the electromagnetic field.

• 

  Archaeology

  Anarchaeology

  Lawrence Rosen

  In The Dawn of Everything, speculative archaeology meets a personal advocacy of anarchy. The result is “a new history of humanity”—anarchaeology. The exercise merely proves that humans will always seek, in our rage for meaning, to reassemble the scattered remnants of our past into a story. In the process, we will project an image of ourselves that speaks to our current needs.

• 

  Physics

  A Lonely Universe

  Charles Lineweaver

  When considering whether intelligent life in the universe is rare, researchers often turn to the existence of Homo sapiens to demonstrate their point. But this example of biological evolution is contingent and self-referential. It is a moot point when discussing the chances of its occurrence anywhere outside earth.

• Letters to the Editors

• On the Feasibility of Fusion Energy

  Ian Hutchinson, reply by Daniel Jassby

  The conditions needed for fusion to occur are known. But terrestrial controlled fusion energy production remains, nevertheless, extremely difficult and potentially impracticable.

• A Storm in a Primordial Teacup

  Anthony Futerman, reply by James Tour

  Origin of life research is in trouble. Laboratory conditions cannot replicate prebiotic scenarios, meaning studies that purport to explain the emergence of life in fact explain nothing at all.

• Needham and the Yijing

  Richard Smith, reply by Shellen Wu

  Modern science and technology arose in the West after Galileo, but did not similarly arise in China. Was it the Yijing that stood in the way of Chinese scientific development?

• More Aspects of Aspects

  Howard Lasnik, reply by Anna-Maria Di Sciullo

  Howard Lasnik elaborates on some of Anna Maria Di Sciullo’s points regarding Aspects of the Theory of Syntax—Noam Chomsky’s landmark text in the investigation of human language and cognitive capacity.

• The Rambler

  Some of our favorite links posted this year.

• Out of Africa, into the ocean: Prehuman seafarers might have conquered the Aegean, some 450 thousand years ago …

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• Fire for fish? In olden day British Columbia, man and bear lived side by side, sharing resources and space …

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• At death’s door, the human brain undergoes a spike in activity, indicating some sort of unique inner conscious experience …

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• New from the JWST: Nine billion light years away lies the “Sparkler Galaxy,” home to what might be the first stars in the universe … …

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• Caught up in the buzz: Magnetic fields from submarine electric cables produce wayward haddock larvae …

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• Recalling ribbits: Frog-eating bats prove that animals can have remarkably long-term memory for sounds associated with rewards … …

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• “To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world,” writes Gary Marcus. “LaMDA simply isn’t. It’s just an illusion” …

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• Monkey metropolis jive: Orangutans that live in high-density populations are vocally more original and unpredictable compared to their rural cousins …

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• A dance in deep space: Two supermassive black holes are orbiting one another and will eventually merge, releasing a massive amount of energy …

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• With written sources being patchy at best, historical pollen counts are coughing up more data about the Black Death’s mortality rate …

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