Science

It is always amazing to browse through YouTube, specially if you are looking for science material. Here is an example of superconductivity: take a superconductor and a magnet at room temperature. Nothing happens. Now cool down the superconductor using liquid nitrogen. The superconductor starts “superconducting” and boom! here comes in the Meissner effect. As always, a picture (movie) is better than a page of equations to show how wonderful physics is. ...

Two New York newspapers (The New York Times and the New Yorker) are running stories about whether string theory is a theory of anything or not. Specifically, both articles are reviews of a couple of very critic books on string theory:  * NOT EVEN WRONG : The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. By Peter Woit. * THE TROUBLE WITH PHYSICS The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. ...

Apparently, a company in Ireland named Steorn has found the killer marketing campaign for their products: 1. Get a law of physics: the first law of thermodynamics, for example, and claim you have a technology that can break it. Cool! 2. Get a good flashy marketing campaign by publishing in The Economist a "show us wrong" announcement to the scientific community. 3. Hide the details of your technology and delay its public announcement by creating a "challenge" to the scientific community. ...

Kiyoshi Itô (90), professor emeritus at kyoto University, has become the first winner of the Gauss Prize. This prize is to honor scientist whose mathematical research has had an impact outside mathematics. Ito’s work, mainly in establishing a well defined calculus (named Ito’s calculus) to treat high irregular noise functions has got widespread application in describing several stochastic processes across fields like economics, biology, chemistry, physics, etc. Ito’s calculus is behind the pricing of options introduced by Black, Scholes and Merton (which got them a Nobel price). ...

We all are aware of recent cases of fraud in science. The case of cloning in South Korea is the most recent one, but not the first or the last to happen. Identifying those cases is hard, since most of the times the verification of the claims is a long time-consuming process. Very recently, Robert L. Park has identified some warning signs about a scientific discoverythat can make us doubt about the scientific soundness of it, since they indicate that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse:  * The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media * The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work * The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection * Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal * The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries * The discoverer has worked in isolation * The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation Several examples with all or several of these red lights come to my mind. ...

The Edge has a summary-article on a Kevin Kelly’s talk on The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method. Kevin Kelly helped launch Wiredmagazine in 1993 and has published several books and articles in publications such as The Economist, The New York Times, Time, etc. He rises some interesting points about what’s next in science for this century. Specifically: * There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years. ...