Issues

Volume 4, Issue 3

March 1, 2019

Critical Essays

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The Siege of Paris

Robert Berwick & Noam Chomsky

[short_description] In a response to Cedric Boeckx, Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky defend their view of the human language faculty as a species-specific property, with no known group differences and little variation.

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Mathematics

A Crisis of Identification

David Michael Roberts

[short_description] Almost a decade after claiming a proof of the abc conjecture, Shinichi Mochizuki’s work is stil debated. David Michael Roberts examines efforts by Peter Scholze and Jacob Stix to resolve the impasse.

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Biology

Long Live Longevity

John Hewitt

[short_description] Controlling the life cycle of the body and avoiding cellular senescence, John Hewitt argues, will require controlling the nervous system and mitochondria distributed by it.

Critical Notes

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Astronomy

Lost in Space

Michael Fumento

[short_description] Sending to humans into space, Michael Fumento argues, is an enormous waste of time, money, and resources. There is little to be gained and previous claimed benefits have not amounted to much.

Short Notes

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Physics

Charged Interactions

Jeremy Bernstein

[short_description] In a seven-year period, Jeremy Bernstein had three memorable interactions with the physicist Wendell Furry. In one instance, Bernstein was present when Furry testified before Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Book Reviews

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Physics

Long Lost Love

Sheldon Lee Glashow

[short_description] In Lost in Math, Sabine Hossenfelder claims physics has been led astray. Sheldon Lee Glashow replies that if physics has indeed been derailed, beauty, although it may be at issue, is not at fault.

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Linguistics

Kept in Mind

Juan Uriagereka

[short_description] When it comes to the neuroprocessing of language, Juan Uriagereka argues, we know more than we knew, but less than we had hoped. Angela Friedrici’s Language in Our Brain is a case in point.

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Political Science

Greek to a Greek

Wolfgang Streeck

[short_description] Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis did his best to hold off demands for reforms and austerity. His account of those efforts, Adults in the Room, makes for a strange but indispensable book.

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Political Science

Inevitability and Eternity

Paweł Machcewicz

[short_description] In The Road to Unfreedom, Timothy Snyder details efforts by Russia to exert influence on the democratic processes in the West. Paweł Machcewicz shares Snyder’s concerns about the scale of the problem.

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Political Science

Freud in Kigali

Omar Shahabudin McDoom

[short_description] Why do torture, violation, and degradation take place during genocides and mass atrocities? Omar Shahabudin McDoom reviews The Macabresque by Edward Weisband.

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Psychology

Prophesying War

Jason Quinn & Laurel Stone

[short_description] David Winter’s Roots of War attempts to understand the factors that contribute to the escalation of conflicts. Jason Quinn and Laurel Stone scruple at Winter’s methodology and interpretations.

Experiment Reviews

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Chemistry

Water and Its Mysteries

Marc Henry

[short_description] There are few things, Marc Henry observes, that modern science does not understand. One is consciousness; the other is water. The behavior of water at supercooled temperatures is a case in point.

Biographies

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Political Science

Victor Klemperer

The Language of the Third Reich

Jörg Riecke

[short_description] The philologist and diarist Victor Klemperer documented the perversion of the German language under the Nazis in Lingua Tertii Imperii. Jörg Riecke examines Klemperer’s life and lasting significance.

Letters to the Editors

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Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada

[short_description] If, as early as 1943, George Orwell expressed the fear that attacks of political propaganda could cause objective truth to disappear from the world, today the anxiety acquires still broader contours.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Symmetry and Topology

John Cardy

[short_description] In many branches of modern physics, symmetries often imply the existence of localized topological defects which may play a crucial role in explaining the macroscopic behavior of such systems.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Beyond the Standard Model

Gordon Kane

[short_description] Spontaneous symmetry breaking has led physicists to possible solutions that extend the Standard Model theory to include gravity and dark matter candidates.

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Vladimir Zelevinsky

[short_description] From the practical position of a quantum theoretician working in low-energy physics, here is a more modest point of view on the symmetry problem, including its various manifestations and violations.

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Brigitte Granville

[short_description] As dismantling the monetary union may collapse the European project, doubts about the future of the euro are often unwelcome in polite society. Those expressing such views must proceed with great care.

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Jason Josephson-Storm

[short_description] Are we really bereft of enchantment? Jason Josephson-Storm makes the case that modern society has never entirely let go of beliefs in the supernatural, enchantment, and magic.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### The Reemergence of Magical Beliefs

Adam Possamai

[short_description] In a postindustrial world dominated by science, institutional religion is in decline. Yet social actors are more and more interested in practicing their spirituality by themselves for themselves.

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Dafydd Mills Daniel

[short_description] In response to Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” thesis, there have been various attempts to re-enchant the world, not least by arguing that it did not become disenchanted in the first place.

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Ronald Green

[short_description] Reality, a notion that used to be associated with human perception, has been appropriated by physics and made irrelevant within a world where mathematical formulas rule supreme.

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José Manuel Igoa

[short_description] Jerry Fodor made significant contributions to our knowledge of the human mind, of the nature of concepts and meaning, and of human language processing. Here is more on his atomistic theory of concepts.

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Graham Leach-Krouse

[short_description] We can learn a great deal about mathematics—not just its contents, but its nature—by entering into the intellectual worlds of its pioneers, those thinkers who cleared new spaces for inquiry.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Absolutely Unsolvable Problems

Liesbeth De Mol

[short_description] It was not Alan Turing or Kurt Gödel, but Emil Post, who reflected most deeply on issues of absolutely unsolvable problems. He proposed an open-ended research program that was abandoned upon his death.

ISSN #2576–4403