Archeologists sometimes find ancient artifacts that show considerable sophistication. These might cause us to infer that the people of that time had a better understanding of the underlying science than we had previously given them credit for. This is because advances in technology often go hand in hand with advances in science. Technological advances upon up new frontiers for scientific investigation while new scientific theories lead to new technologies. But that link may not always exist.
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I do not suffer from jet lag that much but I have friends who suffer terribly. I ascribe my greater tolerance to my belief that a prime cause is tiredness during the long flight and so make it a point to sleep as much as possible on the plane, which I am fortunately able to do. Some people find it very hard to sleep and watch a lot of inflight films which may make the even more tired. I have also experienced that traveling west is easier than traveling east and I put that down to the fact that going west results in the day-night cycle becoming stretched out and so one has longer nights and can more sleep.
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There has long been a common method used in science and social sciences when deciding whether results are worth publishing. One starts out with what is called the ‘null hypothesis’, a kind of baseline that might represent (say) the current conventional wisdom, and then one sees if the results of the experiment are consistent with it. If it is not consistent, then the results are considered to be more interesting than if they were. This requires the use of statistics and then one has the problem of deciding whether the result is a real effect or a statistical anomaly. For a long time, something called the ‘p-value’ was used to make this decision and a p-value of 0.05 was used as the benchmark for statistical significance.
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The evolution of whales is one of the most fascinating stories in evolution because it goes in the opposite direction to the conventional story, of a land animal becoming a water-based one. The outlines of this have been pretty well established but now comes a report of the discovery of a new fossil of a large whale with four large legs that showed it to be capable of life on land and sea.

Photograph: A. Gennari/CellPress

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We often see artistic representations of animals that have long been extinct. Some of these are in color, even though we only have the fossils. Fossil expert Maria McNamara explains how scientists try to infer their coloration. She says that they carefully study fossil metallic insects with hard shells that have preserved their color as fossils to see what makes them take on various colors. She says that if an animal’s skin layer is fossilized, that helps too. When it comes to dinosaur colors, she says:
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Diophantine equations are a certain class of equations for which solutions that consist only of integers are sought. So, for example, we know that Pythagoras’s theorem x²+y²=z² has many sets of solutions such as the numbers x=3, y=4, z=5 or the set x=6, y=8, z=10. A lot of these problems involve existence claims such as whether any solution exists at all and if none can be found, whether it can be proved that no solution exists.
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The Cambrian explosion is the name given to the discovery of a vast range of fossils of organisms that existed about 500 million years ago. The first discovery of them was made in the Burgess Shale region of Canada in 1909 and other troves were later found in China and Australia. But now comes a report of an extremely rich new trove that has been discovered, again in China.
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(My review of the above book just appeared in the March 2019 issue of the American Journal of Physics (vol. 87, issue 4, p.319). You can access it here but I give the review below.)

A major problem with quantum mechanics is that the dominant Copenhagen interpretation is not conducive to providing visual images of what is going on. With special and general relativity, the initially unsettling ideas that time and distance are not invariants but depend upon the state of motion of the observer and that space can be warped by the presence of mass and energy have gone mainstream. Not so with quantum mechanics. Although of the same vintage as relativity, quantum mechanics has continued to greatly perplex people because it undermines the realist position that other theories, including relativity, take for granted, of a world existing independent of the observer, whose features we can discover by making observations. The denial of this made even Einstein uneasy.
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