Issues

Volume 7, Issue 1

April 7, 2022

Critical Essays

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The Quest for Fusion Energy

Daniel Jassby

[short_description] Despite repeated claims that the prospects for commercialization have never looked brighter, the stark reality is that practical fusion-based electric power remains a very distant prospect.

Review Essays

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Archaeology

A Mirror of Nature

Mike Edmunds

[short_description] The Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical calculator found in a first-century BCE shipwreck, has proven to be mechanically more sophisticated than anything known from the subsequent millennium.

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Archaeology

The Riddle of the Mountain

Edmund Richardson

[short_description] For almost 2,000 years, the Behistun Inscription lay unread. Written in cuneiform, the inscription had “baffled for centuries the most learned men” until Henry Rawlinson set his mind to solving it.

Short Notes

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Physics

The Kilogram

Jeremy Bernstein

[short_description] Prior to 2018, the standard for the kilogram was a platinum alloy cylinder created in 1889 and stored in Paris. In this note, Jeremy Bernstein explains how the kilogram is now defined using fundamental constants.

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Physics

Before Before

Stanley Deser

[short_description] More than most laymen, physicists are floored by the idea of the Big Bang. They are confounded also by the structures that govern the resulting universe. They know too much not to feel mystified.

Book Reviews

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Physics

Agents in the Ether

David Kordahl

[short_description] In Imperial Science, Bruce Hunt details how the desire for quick communications across the British Empire, drove progress in the physical sciences towards a theory of the electromagnetic field.

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Biology

Parallel Histories

Raghavendra Gadagkar

[short_description] Twentieth century research into bacteriophages and sarcoma agents radically reshaped what virologists thought they knew, and laid the foundations for our current understanding of viruses.

Experiment Reviews

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Biology

Long Thoughts

Rufin VanRullen

[short_description] Were consciousness to be updated only twice per second, as some claim, decisions would take place during an unconscious processing stage, meaning our free will might just be an illusion.

Biographies

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Biology

Memories of
E. O. Wilson

Walter Tschinkel

[short_description] Wilson’s life was an astounding journey from a child collecting snakes and ants, to a top-ranking academic biologist, to one of the best-known public champions of nature. He died late in 2021.

Letters to the Editors

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Anthony Futerman

[short_description] Origin of life research is in trouble. Laboratory conditions cannot replicate prebiotic scenarios, meaning studies that purport to explain the emergence of life in fact explain nothing at all.

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Neeraja Sankaran

[short_description] Peyton Rous’s reactions to his various colleagues offer a glimpse of the personality behind the scientist—and serve as a perfect example of the vital role archives play in the craft of history.

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David Romps

[short_description] Lawrence Krauss’s The Physics of Climate Change is an accurate portrayal of modern climate science, says David Romps. There are, however, a few quibbles to be had with Robert Socolow’s review.

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Martin Greiter

[short_description] A fascinating possibility exists for exotic quantum statistics to interpolate between the familiar cases of bosons and fermions: the anyon, observed in two dimensions. But how does it behave in one?

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Robert Blobaum

[short_description] After World War One, national populist agendas plunged Eastern and Central Europe into civil war. Robert Blobaum can see similarities to this period of history in the current conflict in Ukraine.

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Selmer Bringsjord & Alexander Bringsjord & Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu

[short_description] Machine learning is incapable of generating the kind of subterfuge that a human mind can. It is the human mind that can harness this new technology to nefarious ends that should be feared.

ISSN #2576–4403