Issues

Volume 3, Issue 2

August 2, 2017

Critical Essays

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Threads in the Tapestry of Physics

Sheldon Lee Glashow

[short_description] From its ancient beginnings to the present day, Sheldon Lee Glashow takes us on an anecdotal journey along a few choice but interwoven strands of the magnificent tapestry that is physics.

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Physics

Physics on Edge

George Ellis

[short_description] After examining various theories of the multiverse, George Ellis concludes that lack of experimental proof is a scientific deal-breaker—and should remain so.

Review Essays

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Biology

Spin in Quantum Biology

Ron Naaman & David Waldeck

[short_description] A discussion of chiral induced spin selectivity and the importance of electron spin in biological systems: long-range electron transfer, reactions involving multiple electrons, and bio-recognition.

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Psychology

An Old Infirmity

William von Hippel

[short_description] Can we learn to age well? Evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel looks at some worrying trends shaping current research and offers a note of caution for these approaches and interpretations.

Critical Notes

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Mathematics

Matrix Madness

Daniel Kleitman

[short_description] Infinitesimally-small probabilities and synapse firings. Daniel Kleitman offers some mathematical objections to Nick Bostrom’s well-known paper, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”

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Chemistry

An Open Letter to My Colleagues

James Tour

[short_description] According to James Tour, the overwhelming complexity of biological life—the rich variety of saccharides and the complicated structure of the lipid bilayer—is beyond man’s ability to duplicate.

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Economics

State of the Union

Michael Fumento

[short_description] Is fusion really the energy of the future? Michael Fumento explores its current prospects, including inertial and magnetic confinement, inertial electrostatic confinement, and compact reactors.

Short Notes

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Astronomy

Homage to Quietanus

Jacques Mertzeisen & Jean-Pierre Luminet

[short_description] A puzzling sundial, a transit of Mercury, letters with Kepler and Galileo, and a long-forgotten astronomer. Jacques Mertzeisen and Jean-Pierre Luminet tell the story of Johannes Remus Quietanus.

Book Reviews

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Economics

Equal by Catastrophe

Victor Davis Hanson

[short_description] Is economic equality all it’s cracked up to be? Victor Davis Hanson reviews Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.

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Physics

Odd Man Out

Andrew Jordan

[short_description] A review of Roger Penrose’s Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy by physicist Andrew Jordan. An ironic tension: Penrose attacks contemporary physics as fanciful; his own proposals are just as farfetched.

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Physics

Recollections of Some Notable Texts

Jeremy Bernstein

[short_description] A recent collection of Freeman Dyson’s lectures, Advanced Quantum Mechanics, is reviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, alongside other published lectures by Julian Schwinger and Steven Weinberg.

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Archaeology

Another Great Story

Wendy Doniger

[short_description] Of myths and legends. Wendy Doniger reviews Asko Parpola’s The Roots of Hinduism. Astonishingly erudite, Parpola often allows his imagination and desire to reach beyond the available evidence.

Experiment Reviews

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Anthropology

Skulls That Speak

Antoine Balzeau

[short_description] Antoine Balzeau review a recent paper that argues for a link between the development of human language and the evolving shape of the human skull.

Letters to the Editors

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Vivian Cook

[short_description] The abilities of literacy and bilingualism are not attributes of geniuses alone but part of the normal condition. Idealizing them away from the language in the mind is an unrealistic simplification.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Logic and the Language Faculty

Gennaro Chierchia

[short_description] The capacity to draw nuanced inferences displays the complexity that appears with language. Grammar, with its capacity for recursion, seems necessary to unleash the full power of logic.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Invariant and Variable Properties

David Lightfoot

[short_description] To match our success with invariant properties, it is time to find an alternative to parameter setting as an approach to variable properties. Rather than being parameterized, Universal Grammar is open.

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Hajime Hoji

[short_description] Detection of the effects of LF c-command precisely in accordance with prior predictions means that it is possible to put hypotheses about the language faculty to a rigorous empirical test.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Class, Nationalism, and Labor

Christopher Prendergast

[short_description] Neoliberalism must be reformed. But nothing can be achieved without an understanding of neoliberalism that does not reduce it to a reflection of the internationalized order of globally mobile capital.

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Guenther Roth

[short_description] Weberian analysis requires a battery of types to identify the historical specificity of a case. However, no framework, however inclusive, can ever account for the fluidity of historical dynamics.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### The Role of the Working Class

Ben Tarnoff

[short_description] Most working-class Americans are not Trumpists, since most of them do not vote. The withdrawal of the working class from politics has created the conditions for the rise of the far right.

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Robert Horwitz

[short_description] The starkly uneven consequences of globalized creative destruction have ravaged national working classes. In response, they have revolted politically—but to the right, not to the left.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### The Price of Internationalism

Lawrence Rosenthal

[short_description] Bill Clinton’s liberalism of the 1990s had merely a de facto vision. Nothing to put on a banner and march beneath. Liberalism was slouching toward internationalism.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On National Identity

Owen Goldin

[short_description] The excitement over the Obama and Sanders candidacies, predicated on diversity and openness as traditional unifying American values, suggests that the game is not yet up for American democracy.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Class and Identity Politics

Alana Lentin

[short_description] In political sociology, the poverty of the conclusions reached by venerable academics is the result of a failure to place a critical analysis of race at the heart of mainstream scholarship.

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Djillali Hadjouis

[short_description] Occipital rocking in hominids can help clarify how the bony parts of the base of the skull rotate—a phenomenon that paleoanthropologists have not fully understood.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Gödel’s Ontological Argument

Thomas Metcalf

[short_description] How might a theist defend Gödelian modal ontological-arguments? Thomas Metcalfe details how this might be done, before offering the most dissuasive objections to such arguments.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### A Dozen Years of Misunderstanding

Daniel Everett

[short_description] No one seems to understand anyone anymore. Daniel Everett does not understand Noam Chomsky. And Chomsky and his supporters do not understand Everett. The latter traces the root of this ongoing debate.

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Ángel Gallego

[short_description] Why do structural Cases exist in natural languages if they make no semantic contribution? This question is philosophical: formal languages lack the nuances that natural ones deploy.

ISSN #2576–4403