Physical Sciences

Dave over at The World's Fair is asking a few questions about interdisciplinary envy. Do biologists wish they were physicists? Or do physicists dream of biology? And what about archaeologists?1. What's your current scientific specialty? I'm an archaeologist specialising in Scandinavian Prehistory, mainly the 1st Millennium AD. 2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? Nope, I've concentrated on this subject since day one at the University of Stockholm back in 1990 when I was 18. I chose between archaeology and astronomy, but went for the field where I could dive straight…
The blogroll toward the bottom of the sidebar on the left displays 15 random links from the list below. 10,000 Birds 3 Quarks Daily Abu Aardvark Acephalous Ad Hominin Advances in the History of Psychology All in the Mind Anna's Bones The Annotated Budak Bad Astronomy Bad Science Bering in Mind The Beautiful Brain BibliOdyssey The Big Picture Bioethics.net Biology in Science Fiction Bjorn Brembs BLDGBLOG A Blog Around the Clock Blue Ridge Blog Body in mind Bogbumper Botany Photo of the Day BPS Research Digest Brain Ethics Brain Hammer Brains Brain Windows Bug…
Social Studies of Science is a premier peer-reviewed journal in the field of STS. Here is the table of contents + abstracts for its latest issue, Volume 37, Issue 3, 2007. Perhaps something will catch your eye: 1. Wendy Faulkner: "`Nuts and Bolts and People': Gender-Troubled Engineering Identities," 331-356 Engineers have two types of stories about what constitutes `real' engineering. In sociological terms, one is technicist, the other heterogeneous. How and where boundaries are drawn between `the technical' and `the social' in engineering identities and practices is a central concern for…
tags: science, religion You all know that scientists are less religious than the general population, but contrary to most people's assumptions, the reason for this has little to do with either the study of science or with peer pressures to conform. "Our study data do not strongly support the idea that scientists simply drop their religious identities upon professional training, due to an inherent conflict between science and faith, or to institutional pressure to conform," said Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo and co-author of the study. Basically, the…
Would the oil and gas industry underwrite research that makes the plight of the polar bear seem, well, less dire? Does a polar bear swim in the Arctic? From NewScientist: Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues question whether polar bear populations really are declining and if sea ice, on which the animals hunt, will actually disappear as quickly as climate models predict (Ecological Complexity, DOI: 10.1016/j.ecocom.2007.03.002). Soon, who receives funding for this and other work from Exxon-Mobil, has been attacking climate change science for…
Books: "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. It's 2025 - What happened to science, politics and journalism? Well, you know I'd be intrigued. After all, a person whose taste in science fiction I trust (my brother) told me to read this and particularly to read it just before my interview with PLoS. So, of course I did (I know, it's been two months, I am slow, but I get there in the end). 'Rainbows End' is a novel-length expansion of the short story "Fast Times at Fairmont High" which he finished in August 2001 and first published in "The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge". The novel was written…
This interview with the novelist from The Believer is a few months old, but it's well worth a read: Something truly interesting is happening in many basic sciences, a real revolution in human knowing. For a long time--centuries--empiricism has tried to understand the whole in terms of its isolated parts, and then to write out precise and simple rules about the controlled behavior of those parts in isolation. In recent decades, with the explosion of the life sciences and with a new appreciation in physics and chemistry of emergent and complex systems, a new kind of holism has emerged.…
A new ID book, a new selection of yummy delicious quote mines. Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution (EoE) offers quite the smorgasbord I'm not surprised that Jerry Coyne would have such a visceral negative reaction to anything Michael Behe writes. He was the victim of one of the more egregious ID quote-mines of recent memory. In Darwin's Black Box (DBB), Behe quotes Coyne as follows: Jerry Coyne, of the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, arrives at an unexpected verdict: We conclude -- unexpectedly -- that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian…
I'm late to this round of the discussion about scientists and journalists (for which, as usually, Bora compiles a comprehensive list of links). The question that seems to have kicked off this round is why scientists are sometimes reluctant to agree to interviews, especially given how often they express their concern that the larger public seems uninterested in and uninformed about matters scientific. As I have some interest in this topic, I'm going to add a few thoughts to the pile: Does reporting on science have a tendency to misrepresent science? This is a long-standing concern -- that, in…
posted by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum Last week the National Academies reported that stereotypes affect women's academic performance. Their report, Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering came out earlier this year concluding:Women are underrepresented at higher levels of science and engineering academics because of the influence of gender bias and the disadvantages that such bias generates. Another report, To Recruit and Advance: Women Students and Faculty in Science and Engineering, goes on to say female high school students are less likely…
One of my colleagues raves about David Lindley's Where Does the Weirdness Go? as a basic introduction to odd quantum effects, but somehow, I've never managed to get around to reading any of his books until now. I recently had a need to know a bit more about the historical development of quantum theory, though, and ran across Lindley's Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science in the library, which promised to contain the information I was after, so I checked it out. As you can guess from the title, the book deals with the early development of quantum…
Science Student Gender Gap: A Continuing Challenge: Interactive classes don't necessarily solve the performance imbalance between the genders in physics classes, according to a new study that stands in stark contrast to previous physics education research. In fact, while students as a rule benefit from interactive classrooms, the teaching technique may even increase the imbalance in some cases. Chad has more on this study. Paying Taxes, According To The Brain, Can Bring Satisfaction: Want to light up the pleasure center in your brain? Just pay your taxes, and then give a little extra…
An e-droog recently waxed poetic about a single malt Scotch that she gave to a friend on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday. If I recall correctly, this was an especially rugged Islay beast, and stronger than the infamous Laphroaig. The subject of single malts triggered an avalanche of nostalgic reverie, not uncommon for us geriatrics, so I will inflict you with my aged yammering...and photos... here. A British friend, then a post-doc in the lab next door and now a chemoinformatics guru, introduced single malts to me back in my grad school days. My previous experiences with Scotch had…
Right now, we're all painfully aware of attacks on science that come from the political Right. However, let us not forget that such attacks can and have in the past come from the political Left, and that indeed anybody with a political ax to grind, and with a strong identification with some political ideology, will turn on science when it seems that the process of science is not supporting that ideology. Martin at Aardvarchaeology writes about historians struggling with the "truth be damned" legacy of post-modernism. It reminded me of when I was a naive young scientist, comfortable in the…
Thomas Woodward, author of the new book Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelliigent Design turned up at the Washington D.C. offices of the Discovery Intstitute last night. Since it's alays nice to have an excuse to hang out in the big city, I decided to check it out. There's rather a lot to report, so I'll break it up into two pieces. According to the bio read at the start of his talk, Woodward holds a PhD from the University of South Florida in the rhetoric of science. He is a professor at Trinity College in Florida, where he teaches history of science, communication, and…
Welcome to Week 4 of our course on "Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science". This post will be a presentation of the summaries for each of this week's assigned readings. If you were not able to do the readings or couldn't get access to the books, I hope this post will give you a good flavor of what the week's readings were all about. You can reference the course syllabus for more details about the readings in the whole course and the course structure. Here's the initial post about the course. And here are some guidelines about how I'll post on readings and what we should strive for in…
As we go on the road with our Speaking Science 2.0 tour, it's a chance for many to hear a more detailed presentation of the Nisbet & Mooney thesis. It's also a chance to engage in an important conversation about new directions in science communication. (For example, based on our talk last month at the Stowers Institute, Josh Rosenau has this comprehensive summary over at Thoughts from Kansas.) Monday night at the New York Academy of Sciences, close to 150 people turned out to hear our latest presentation, with a lively question & answer period that followed. Among those in the…
In this post, I want to propose my own view, or rather the views I have come to accept, about the nature of science. [Part 1; Part 2] There are three major phases in the philosophical view of science. The first was around in the nineteenth century - science is the use of inductive logic based on data to draw conclusions about the laws of nature. Thick books described this in detail, and they are still worth reading, in particular a book by W. Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science, published in the 1870s. But induction, as anyone who has studied Hume knows, is problematic. You simply…
Philosophy of science deals largely with two general topics: Metaphysics and Epistemology. These are general topics of philosophy, and in the philosophy of science they deal only with the metaphysics and epistemology of science. So there are no overarching debates about how you can tell if you're dreaming, or whether we are all brains in a matrix-style vat. But there are local issues, as it were, that reflect these general concerns of philosophers. [Part 1, Part 3] Metaphysics covers many things Metaphysics is a hard field to define. It is named after the book of Aristotle, which…
Why are basic scientific facts controversial in the public realm? What can scientists and their friends do to engage the public and move them past those misunderstandings? Those are the questions motivating fellow ScienceBloggers Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet as they tour the country giving a talk called "Speaking Science." They kicked the tour off here in Kansas City, and they'll be in New York tonight and on to places unknown after that. The talk is rooted in their controversial paper in Science and a subsequent op-ed in the Washington Post, both on the topic of framing science –…