Issues

Volume 6, Issue 1

May 12, 2021

Critical Essays

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Monetary Faith

Philip Pilkington

[short_description] Central banks argue that economists should have faith in the natural interest rate and try their best to accommodate the banking system to it. But shouldn’t it rather be judged by its works?

Review Essays

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Mathematics

At Lunch with Freeman Dyson

William Press

[short_description] The prisoner’s dilemma, played once, involves limited strategy. But consider the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Using information from the previous plays, each player can try to outwit their accomplice.

Book Reviews

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Genetics

The Secret Lives of DNA

Neeraja Sankaran

[short_description] The discovery of the double helical structure of DNA is well known. But what of the discoveries of DNA itself and of its function as the material carrier of life’s instructions?

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Physics

Secrets

Jeremy Bernstein

[short_description] Alex Wellerstein’s fascinating new book, Restricted Data, confirms what Jeremy Bernstein has long believed to be true: the information needed to make a nuclear weapon has been in circulation for a long time.

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Philosophy

Songlines

Sheldon Lee Glashow

[short_description] Jeremy Bernstein’s book A Song for Molly is a fantasy in the form of fictional autobiography. He weaves around many seminal intellectual achievements in a delightful example of episodic storytelling.

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Political Science

A Passage from India

David Berlinski

[short_description] In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra reveals that in his thoughts on British imperialism, he is very much a member of the moral majority. Imperialism was, Mishra believes, evil in its consequences.

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Economics

Self-Made

Jean-Paul Fitoussi

[short_description] Richard Robb defines a category of actions that “are neither rational nor irrational, but rather one-time acts of will that no one, not even the individual who undertakes them, can predict.”

Experiment Reviews

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Physics

Complexity Far from Equilibrium

Michael Engel

[short_description] Life is a sophisticated example of dynamic self-assembly, which occurs far from equilibrium. Can researchers harness this phenomenon to purposefully create and control more diversely complex behavior?

Biographies

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Geology

James Hutton

A Theory of the Earth

Mike Leeder

[short_description] In 1788, James Hutton described his geological observations and resulting theory for the age of the earth. His conclusion was startling: “We find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”

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Mathematics

John Horton Conway

The Game of Life

Daniel Kleitman

[short_description] The late John Horton Conway had a gift for making complicated mathematics appear simple. His contributions included a solution for the major problem of group theory and the concept of surreal numbers.

Letters to the Editors

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### More Secrets

Kenneth Ford

[short_description] One of the developers of the H-bomb recounts his experiences with security and keeping national secrets. His perspective? Secrets are like helium. They escape from almost any container.

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Glen Van Brummelen

[short_description] We do not study the history of science to determine winners and losers in the game of truth. Rather, we wish to understand what it meant for humans to explore their world and what science was to them.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### The Evolution of Big Brains

Theiss Bendixen & Jennifer Mather & Michael Muthukrishna

[short_description] The cultural brain hypothesis predicts two main paths to intelligence and large brains in animals: a social learning path taken by humans at one end, and an asocial learning path taken by cephalopods at the other.

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Mark Aronoff & Jonathan Rawski & Wendy Sandler

[short_description] Spoken and signed languages differ because of the affordances of the human body and the limits of each medium. But can commonalities between the two be compared to find abstract language universals?

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Roger Markwick

[short_description] Viewing the rise of fascism in the 1930s, to many European intellectuals the Soviet Union seemed the only barrier to Armageddon. But an environment of total war and backwardness scarred the Soviet experiment.

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Oliver Knill

[short_description] A fellow European mathematician reacts to Inference’s interview with Sergiu Klainerman. Oliver Knill reflects on the importance of persistence, deep understanding, and creativity in mathematics education.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Contact Tracing Is Far from Futile

Emily Gurley et al.

[short_description] In limiting the spread of COVID-19, contact tracing is an imperfect tool. Is it then useless? Emily Gurley et al. make the case that thinking so is not just wrongheaded; it is potentially deadly.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Contact Tracing and Consequences

Martin Kulldorff

[short_description] COVID-19 contact tracing programs are eroding trust between the public and public health agencies—with potential dire consequences for future disease outbreaks in which contact tracing could be critical.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Algorithmic Amplification

Hany Farid

[short_description] The culprits in the plunge into delusion are not deepfakes. The real culprit is more mundane and pernicious: the algorithms that curate the information recommended by search engines and social media.

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Alexander Lanoszka

[short_description] Adam Garfinkle has made a compelling argument that deepfakes pose dangers to politics and news information. But there are, thankfully, some reasons for not sharing his pessimism—at least, not fully.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Modified Gravity

Viktor Toth

[short_description] Viktor Toth adds theoretical insights to the modified theories of gravity that aimed to solve the dark matter problem without necessitating the existence of hypothetic particles of nonbaryonic matter.

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Fine-Tuning and Design

Stephen Meyer

[short_description] Does fine-tuning convey an illusion of design or design itself? If Lawrence Krauss remains underwhelmed by arguments in favor of design, Stephen Meyer remains underwhelmed by arguments in favor of Krauss.

ISSN #2576–4403