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Issues

Volume 5, Issue 4

December 1, 2020

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December 1, 2020

Critical Essays

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Good Eats
Vaclav Smil
[short_description] Affluent countries currently produce far more food than they need, or could ever hope to consume. Vaclav Smil examines the enormity of this waste and its effects on health.
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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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The Standard Model
Sheldon Lee Glashow
[short_description] The third and final installment in Sheldon Lee Glashow’s history of physics. In this essay Glashow examines a development in which he played a key role, the formulation of the Standard Model.
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A View from the Bridge
Natalie Paquette
[short_description] Einstein expressed general relativity using tools created by Riemann. Mathematicians discovered group theory long before physicists. Natalie Paquette explores correlations between physics and math.
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The Galilean Challenge
Noam Chomsky
[short_description] One of the most striking features of the human capacity for language is the use of finite means to express an unlimited array of thoughts. Accounting for this feature is the Galilean challenge.
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Trump and the Trumpists
Wolfgang Streeck
[short_description] Trumpism, according to Wolfgang Streeck, was a result of a global shift from classes to status groups, exacerbating social rifts between neoliberal urban elites and the traditional working class.
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Animadversions of a Synthetic Chemist
James Tour
[short_description] Chemists study molecules. Synthetic chemists make them. What Nature does is anyone’s guess. James Tour constructs nanovehicles and considers the difficulties. What can we say of abiogenesis?
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Doing Mathematics Differently
Gregory Chaitin
[short_description] Spattering drops of ink, Leibniz intuited that a theory as complex as the data it is supposed to explain is useless. Gregory Chaitin finds the same thing using algorithmic information theory.

Review Essays

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The Arabic Grammatical Tradition
Kees Versteegh
[short_description] In large parts of the Islamic world, children are taught Classical Arabic, which can differ greatly from their local dialect. Kees Versteegh recounts the history of teaching Classical Arabic grammar.
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Reflections on Project Orion
Jeremy Bernstein
[short_description] How might nuclear bombs propel a spaceship? Very carefully. Jeremy Bernstein recalls studying this problem with Freeman Dyson. Dyson’s previously unpublished remarks on the project are included.
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Gödel: The Third Degree
Graham Oppy
[short_description] Formulations of Gödel’s ontological argument in third-order modal logic, Grapham Oppy argues, allow us to decide between theistic and naturalistic positions.
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Across the Universe
Steven Wheeler
[short_description] The detection of gravitational waves by LIGO made global news. Steven Wheeler looks at the technological achievement and its contentious history, and considers the future of gravitational astronomy.
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Tōhoku
Rick Jardine
[short_description] Alexander Grothendieck’s 1957 paper, “Some Aspects of Homological Algebra,” also known as the Tōhoku paper, was a turning point in homological algebra, algebraic topology and algebraic geometry.
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Haldane’s Dilemma
Chase Nelson
[short_description] J. B. S. Haldane showed there is a limit to the rate of evolutionary change, but what about the complex adaptive differences between humans and chimpanzees? Chase Nelson examines the issues.

Critical Notes

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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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An Outbreak of Epidemiological Hysteria
Michael Fumento
[short_description] Malaria kills more per day than have died in total since the Ebola outbreak began. The WHO has predicted the epidemic’s wild growth—but ignored basic epidemiology. Ebola infections may have peaked.

Short Notes

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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.
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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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A Gentle Giant
Robert MacLean Losee
[short_description] Claude Shannon was an unmatched problem-solver, whether in electrical engineering, mathematics, or cryptography, but he is chiefly implicated in the creation of information theory.
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Only Connect
Daniel Kleitman
[short_description] Fibonacci numbers, cellular automata, and an extension of the Erdős–Ko–Rado theorem: Daniel Kleitman reviews highlights from a volume honoring the mathematician Ron Graham on his eightieth birthday.
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A Life Far Less Ordinary
John Mathew
[short_description] Popularizing Science: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane is a new biography by Haldane’s mentee, Krishna Dronamraju. John Mathew casts an approving eye over its account of Haldane’s life and work.
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Dialectics of Darkness
Egil Asprem
[short_description] On the persistence of magic in modernity: Egil Asprem reviews The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Jason Josephson-Storm.
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Black as Death
Monica Green
[short_description] A new account argues for the importance of climate and disease as forces shaping medieval Europe. Monica Green offers a detailed critique and reviews new research into the origins of the Black Death.
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Godzooks
David Berlinski
[short_description] David Berlinski reviews Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. To the question of whether human beings are shortly to become like gods, Berlinski answers not any time soon.
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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.
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How Things Hang Together
George Scialabba
[short_description] George Scialabba reviews Convergence: The Idea at the Heart of Science by Peter Watson, and his description of the progressive unification of the sciences.

Film Reviews

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Became, Become, Becoming
David Adger
[short_description] Concepts such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis form the basis for both the film Arrival and the short story by Ted Chiang on which it is based. David Adger reviews the film and its ideas.
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Touched by the Goddess
Krishnaswami Alladi
[short_description] A recent film starring Dev Patel depicts Srinivasa Ramanujan’s mathematical achievements and tragically early death at 32. Number theorist Krishnaswami Alladi reviews The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Experiment Reviews

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The Origin of Novel Genes
Richard Buggs
[short_description] A series of studies finds that novel genes do not accumulate with Darwinian gradualism in the phylogeny, but can be gained through radical overhauls. How this might be accomplished is a mystery.
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Higgs on the Moon
Adam Falkowski
[short_description] A hundred precision experiments or a one hundred-km collider? Adam Falkowski reviews recent results from the Large Hadron Collider and what they mean for the future of experimental particle physics.

Laboratory Reviews

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The New View of Proteins
Tyler Hampton
[short_description] Dan Tawfik’s biochemistry lab investigates the deepest questions in molecular evolutionary biology. But the answers may be beyond our grasp. Inference reviews Tawfik’s laboratory and literature.

Biographies

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Edsger Dijkstra
The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
Krzysztof Apt
[short_description] Little known outside his field, Edsger Dijkstra was a highly influential and often controversial figure in computer science. He was a pioneer and a genius whose work shaped the field like few others.
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Macfarlane Burnet
The Concept of Self
Neeraja Sankaran
[short_description] In 1960, Macfarlane Burnet became Australia’s second winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Neeraja Sankaran examines his wide body of work and enduring significance, both at home and abroad.
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Alexander Grothendieck
A Country Known Only by Name
Pierre Cartier
[short_description] Mathematicians liken him to Einstein. Yet he is a figure of gossip and pity. Mathematician Pierre Cartier, Grothendieck’s colleague, offers a rational and honest appraisal the work and the man.

Letters to the Editors

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Reflections on a Revolution
John Iliopoulos
[short_description] Gauge theories brought about a profound revolution in the way physicists think about the fundamental forces. It is this revolution that is the subject of Sheldon Lee Glashow’s essay.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### An Unfinished Revolution
Quentin Wheeler
[short_description] The revolution in systematics begun by Willi Hennig is unfinished and, unless biologists abandon goals that have been central to the discipline for centuries, its completion ought to be a top priority.
######### 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.
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Xi Yin
[short_description] The deepest and most far-reaching ideas of physics are not the most elegant or beautiful, but the ideas that are confusing, not rigorous, or, in fact, utterly incomprehensible to mathematicians.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Closed Timelike Curves and Singularities
Jean-Pierre Luminet
[short_description] Discovered in 1949 by Kurt Gödel, the homogeneous rotating universe model contains closed timelike curves and therefore allows for travel into the past, accompanied by all its paradoxes.
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Martin Rees
[short_description] The question “Do other universes exist?” is a genuinely scientific one. Martin Rees outlines why it may be answered within a few decades, and why he already suspects that the answer may be yes.
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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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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.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On the Madelung Rule
Eric Scerri
[short_description] Can chemistry be reduced to physics? Eric Scerri argues that philosophers of science have done chemistry a disservice in neglecting the field that pulls the sciences together.
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Sheldon Lee Glashow
[short_description] Cosmology has evolved over the past few decades from a hand-waving qualitative discipline to what is more and more becoming an exact science. Max Tegmark’s work has been integral in this progression.
Endmark

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