Why do they look like us?

The near future of humanity looks precarious, not to say bleak, due to what Schmachtenberger calls the Meta Crisis. The biggest wild card in our future is one that Schmachtenberger and most financial analysts, eschatologists, and even transhumanists never consider: UFOs and the ET presence. Will we be rescued from human folly by non-human beings from … Read more

Keeling over on the Soccer Field

I’ve been writing for ScienceBlog almost since its inception, and I feel grateful for the platform it has given me, and identified with the values and culture of ScienceBlog. Today, there appeared on this site the article, Study Helps Explain Post-COVID Exercise Intolerance. This article is typical of the perversion of science by corporate and government interests, exposure … Read more

What Gödel Wrought

The Enlightenment was a three-century European movement to tame the world under the reign of Reason. It began with René Descartes and Isaac Newton in the 17th century, expanding the domain of science; in the 18th century, Emmanuel Kant sought to rationalize faith itself, with his monograph, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. In … Read more

All together now…

If a star is big enough to explode at the end of its natural life, but not big enough to form a black hole, it will explode on the outside, while collapsing on the inside from gravity. Collapse is halted when all the electrons and protons merge to form neutrons, and all the neutrons come … Read more

An adjustment to Newton’s gravity?

For 85 years, astronomers have noted that there is more gravity than they can account for in the galaxies that they see, in clusters of galaxies, and in the dynamics of the whole universe. What is the invisible source of that extra attraction? Last week there was striking new evidence for a dark horse theory — … Read more

CO2 is the Least of our Worries

Listen to the author reading this essay. Last week, Nobel physicist John Clauser came out of the Clausit to speak his own inconvenient truth about global warming and CO2 . No good deed goes unpunished. Another physicist who was a personal hero of mine has expressed similar views. This is a big subject, and I don’t feel engaged enough with … Read more

Placebo controls—gold standard for EFFICACY trials—have no place in SAFETY trials

In a recent study of heart medications (REDUCE-IT), mineral oil was used as a “placebo”. Mineral oil is not a biological substance, and the body rejects it with nausea and diarrhea. Some of the adverse effects of mineral oil are listed here. There is no reason to use mineral oil as a “placebo” instead of (for example) olive … Read more

A Brief History of Science

For those of us in the thick of it, there is great irony in the fact that the Scientific World View led to the deepest, most abstract theory in the history of science which actually falsified the Scientific World View. Most scientists today are acting as though this had never happened. ——————— From the time … Read more

It’s about time!

“Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future!” — attributed variously to Yogi Berra and to Niels Bohr By the time you get to the end of this essay, you may be wondering whether Berra got the phrase from Bohr, or Bohr picked it up from a premonition of a Yogi-ism to come. … Read more