Issues

Volume 6, Issue 4

January 4, 2022

Critical Essays

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Heart of Darkness

Subir Sarkar

[short_description] Is the standard model of cosmology wrong? Subir Sarkar argues that the discovery of dark energy, the basis of widely accepted models, was simply an accident waiting to happen.

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Anthropology

The Nature of Art

Armand Marie Leroi

[short_description] Can pieces of art be related in the way that biological species can? In living things, phylogenic links are forged by the inheritance of genetic material; in culture, by influential ideas.

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Medicine

Thunder Out of China

Yuri Deigin

[short_description] Questions about the origins of COVID-19 are of more than academic interest. For the moment, the best explanation seems to be that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Short Notes

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Physics

Old Age and Creativity

Stanley Deser

[short_description] Physics seems to have no very old top-tier contributors. The field’s greatest giants have either died young, stopped meaningful work well before they died, or changed fields mid-career.

Book Reviews

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Archaeology

Anarchaeology

Lawrence Rosen

[short_description] In The Dawn of Everything, speculative archaeology meets a personal advocacy of anarchy, and the result is “a new history of humanity.” Welcome anarchaeology.

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Physics

Underselling Hawking

Bernard Carr

[short_description] Four years after the death of Stephen Hawking, Charles Seife published a biography, Hawking Hawking. It painted him as a second-rate physicist who manipulated the media for his own fame.

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Anthropology

Americans at Armageddon

Guy Middleton

[short_description] Eric Cline’s book Digging Up Armageddon tells the story of an archeological team from the University of Chicago that began digging at Megiddo during the mid-1920s.

Experiment Reviews

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Physics

A Lonely Universe

Charles Lineweaver

[short_description] Is anybody out there? Likely not. The occurrence of intelligent life on Earth is moot when modeling for its likelihood on other planets.

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Chemistry

Much Ado About Nothing

James Tour

[short_description] Recent research by Jiménez, Gibard, and Krishnamurthy is further evidence, if any were needed, that eminent synthetic chemists—and scientists in general—remain clueless about life’s origins.

Biographies

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Physics

In Memoriam: Myriam Sarachik

Tony Liss & Parameswaran Nair

[short_description] Myriam Sarachik passed away on October 7, 2021. Her work on the Kondo effect, the metal-insulator transition, and quantum tunneling in molecular magnets are highlights in her research career.

Letters to the Editors

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Mind the Gap

Nadir Jeevanjee

[short_description] The gulf between physics and climate science is a strange one. Those who have transitioned from one to the other call for physicists to engage more deeply with the science of climate change.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Remembering Stephen Hawking

Sheldon Lee Glashow

[short_description] Bernard Carr has mounted a sensitive and effective defense against the slings and arrows launched at Stephen Hawking by Charles Seife in his offensively named and outrageously written book.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Needham and the Yijing

Richard Smith

[short_description] 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?

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Dividing Paradoxes and Theorems

Jonas Becker Arenhart

[short_description] In logic, difficulties arise when results use self-reference in their derivation. The challenge is to determine which of such results are respectable theorems and which are merely dangerous paradoxes.

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Victor Baker

[short_description] James Hutton is widely recognized as the founder of modern geology. Should he be? His role in the development of geology might be as controversial as his ideas were when he published them.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Mapping Uncharted Territory

Serim Ilday

[short_description] Far from equilibrium is far from understood. The authors discuss scale-invariant autocatalytic sigmoidal growth and Tracy–Widom statistics with respect to universal dissipative self-assembly.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### The High-Pressure Search for Metallic Hydrogen

Graeme Ackland

[short_description] In this energetic exchange, the original authors and Graeme Ackland express markedly differing views about progress and recent achievements in the study of metallic hydrogen.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Linguistics as Science, Language as Mystery

Evelina Leivada

[short_description] Notions of competence and performance, language as a mystery, and the promotion of linguistics into a science—Evelina Leivada discusses controversial points in Anna Maria Di Sciullo’s essay.

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Howard Lasnik

[short_description] 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.

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Martin Haspelmath

[short_description] Noam Chomsky’s Aspects inspired many scholars to think in new ways about grammatical structures of languages. But was it really a landmark achievement? Two linguists debate its contributions.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### To the Beginning—And Back to the Future

Kleanthes Grohmann

[short_description] Biolinguistics essentially stems from Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and is very much a child of its times, especially through the influence of Eric Lenneberg on Chomsky’s thinking.

ISSN #2576–4403