Reader Leo was kind enough to send me a link to a clip from an episode of the TV show Adam Ruins Everything, where host Adam Conover amusingly debunks commonly held beliefs, often using animations. In this clip, he looks at the relationship between Copernicus and the Catholic Church that is often portrayed as a hostile one and uses an article of mine that I published in the December 2007 issue of Physics Today to support his case.
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DNA has become the gold standard for evidence in criminal cases. It has a high reputation for accurately identifying people who had some contact with the scene of a crime and results in many convictions since jurors give great weight to DNA evidence. According to Katie Worth, a “2008 series of studies by researchers at the University of Nevada, Yale and Claremont McKenna College found that jurors rated DNA evidence as 95 percent accurate and 94 percent persuasive of a suspect’s guilt.”
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Via Andrea James I came across this video about how armored vehicles are made to stop bullets. The key point is that the energy of the bullet has to be dissipated laterally as much as possible so that it cannot penetrate the glass or the metal.
Some anti-evolutionists think they are being clever when the point to chimpanzees , monkeys, and apes as evidence that evolution cannot occur, saying things like “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”. That is stupid enough but even worse is that some seem to think that being biologically related to them is somehow shameful and something that we should be embarrassed about.
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An article published in Vox by Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E. Nisbett, three academic psychologists who specialize in studying intelligence, critiqued a podcast hosted by Sam Harris, where he invited Charles Murray to discuss the question of the relationship between race and intelligence. The article (which is well worth reading for its detailed analysis of this issue) criticized Murray for assertions that they felt were unjustified and Harris for not pushing back hard enough and asserting the existence of a mainstream consensus on statements that were in fact highly contentious.
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I thought I would use the recent resurgence of interest in the issue of intelligence and race to highlight some lesser-known and more technical aspects of this contentious debate.
While everyone has some intuitive sense of what intelligence consists of, these vary widely from individual to individual due to the amorphous nature of the concept. Is it verbal fluency? Numerical adeptness? Critical thinking? Logical skills? Depending on one’s preferences, one can come up with many different ways of defining intelligence and testing for it. When it comes to quantifying intelligence and trying to measure it (assuming that it can be reduced to a single measure, itself a highly problematic thesis) one must realize that any measure is always a proxy for the quantity being sought and the issue becomes how good a proxy it is.
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I am not an early adopter of technology, having to be pretty much driven by a strong need to acquire them. Hence I do not have a ‘smart’ home in which all manner of appliances are connected to the internet. Wi-fi and a ‘smart’ TV (i.e., one connected to the internet) are about it. When I see things like the Amazon Echo and Alexa that people have in their homes that they talk into to make purchases and run their devices, I wonder about the advisability of having a device that listens to everything you say and transmits it into the cloud. It is true that our phones can be hacked and turned into listening devices too but that takes some targeted effort on the part of some entity to do so. With smart homes, we are the ones enabling it.
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In science, we often give provisional existence status to entities that serve as explanatory concepts to explain phenomena, even though they have not been directly detected as yet. Of course, that state of provisional existence does not last forever and strenuous efforts are undertaken to obtain direct measurements of existence and sometimes these can take a long time. That seems to be the case with dark matter which is thought to be about five times as abundant as normal matter and to exist in large spheres in which all galaxies are immersed but whose direct detection has proven elusive.
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Clarence King (1842-1901) was the first director of the US Geological Survey and played an instrumental role during the major controversy at the end of the nineteenth century over the age of the Earth. Biologists who were convinced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution knew that for the unguided process of natural selection to work required long times and the absolute minimum age that they needed was 100 million years, though even that was stretching things. But physicists, led by Lord Kelvin, were pushing for a younger age based on their models of the Earth as a once-hot cooling body. (The discovery by Pierre Curie that the decay of radium produced prodigious amounts of heat and thus invalidated all the cooling models did not occur until 1903.) Geologists were in the middle since their models based on geological processes had parameters that were hugely variable and thus could not be the arbiter. But King pushed them over to the physicists’ side.
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