Category Archives: Science

Essays, Physics, Science

Science Essays: ‘The Stagnation Of Physics’

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AEON MAGAZINE (April 1, 2025) by Adrien De Sutter:

Browse a shelf of popular science books in physics and you’ll often find a similar theme. Whether offering insights into The Hidden Reality (2011), Something Deeply Hidden (2019) or Our Mathematical Universe (2014), these books hint at an underlying, secret world waiting to be unravelled by physicists – a domain beyond our sensory perception that remains their special purview.

‘It’s akin to knowing everything about sand dunes … but not knowing what a grain of sand is made of’

Over its history, physics has delivered elegant and accurate descriptions of the physical Universe. Today, however, the reality physicists work to uncover appears increasingly removed from the one they inhabit. Despite its experimental successes, physics has repeatedly failed to live up to the expectation of delivering a deeper, ‘final’ physics – a reality to unify all others. As such, physicists appear forced to entertain increasingly speculative propositions.

Yet, with no obvious avenues to verify such speculations, physicists are left with little option but to repeat similar approaches and experiments – only bigger and at greater cost – in the hope that something new may be found. Seemingly beset with a sense of anxiety that nothing new will be found or that future experiments will reveal only further ignorance, the field of fundamental physics is incentivized to pursue ever more fanciful ideas.

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It may even require that we abandon doing physics altogether, in the attainment of an expanded reality that not only accepts but encourages the possibility of difference and more. Or, as the speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin once put it, what we require are ‘the realists of a larger reality’.

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Adrien De Sutter completed his PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Germany. An interdisciplinary researcher specialising in science and technology studies and the history and philosophy of science, he focuses on the philosophical, sociological and political implications of fundamental physics research.

Physiology, Reviews, Science

Science: The Mysterious Flow Of Fluid In The Brain

QUANTA MAGAZINE (March 26, 2025) by Veronique Greenwood:

Incased in the skull, perched atop the spine, the brain has a carefully managed existence. It receives only certain nutrients, filtered through the blood-brain barrier; an elaborate system of protective membranes surrounds it. That privileged space contains a mystery. For more than a century, scientists have wondered: If it’s so hard for anything to get into the brain, how does waste get out?

What’s more, during NREM sleep norepinephrine levels change rhythmically. This neurotransmitter could help tie together their hypotheses — the physical movement of CSF through brain tissues and the “brainwashing” occurring during sleep.

The brain has one of the highest metabolisms of any organ in the body, and that process must yield by-products that need to be removed. In the rest of the body, blood vessels are shadowed by a system of lymphatic vessels. Molecules that have served their purpose in the blood move into these fluid-filled tubes and are swept away to the lymph nodes for processing. But blood vessels in the brain have no such outlet. Several hundred kilometers of them, all told, seem to thread their way through this dense, busily working tissue without a matching waste system.

However, the brain’s blood vessels are surrounded by open, fluid-filled spaces. In recent decades, the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, in those spaces has drawn a great deal of interest. “Maybe the CSF can be a highway, in a way, for the flow or exchange of different things within the brain,” said Steven Proulx, who studies the CSF system at the University of Bern.

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Veronique Greenwood is a science writer and essayist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Discover, Aeon and other publications.

Essays, Humanities, Mathematics, Science

Mathematics Essay: ‘Beyond Causality’

AEON (February 14, 2025): In 1959, the English writer and physicist C P Snow delivered the esteemed Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge. Regaled with champagne and Marmite sandwiches, the audience had no idea that they were about to be read the riot act. Snow diagnosed a rift of mutual ignorance in the intellectual world of the West. On the one hand were the ‘literary intellectuals’ (of the humanities) and on the other the (natural) ‘scientists’: the much-discussed ‘two cultures’.

Mind and world are no separate spheres that must first be connected. Rather, both depend on each other

Snow substantiated his diagnosis with anecdotes of respected literary intellectuals who complained about the illiteracy of the scientists but who themselves had never heard of such a fundamental statement as the second law of thermodynamics. And he told of brilliant scientific minds who might know a lot about the second law but were barely up to the task of reading Charles Dickens, let alone an ‘esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer … like Rainer Maria Rilke.’

Mathematics mediates a conciliatory view that avoids the mistake of the naive realist and the naive idealist…

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: ‘I want to show the colourfulness of mathematics.’ In that spirit, I placed mathematics at the centre of my project because, in my view, mathematics searches along more of these many paths than any other intellectual discipline. It is connected on a deep level both with the natural sciences and the humanities. It bridges the gulf between them, and it does so by putting certain metaphysical and epistemological dogmas into question, as will become clear in the following.

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Gordon Gillespie is an actuary, quantitative risk manager and data scientist. He has a doctorate in philosophy and is the author of the German-language book The Oracle of Numbers: A Short Philosophy of Mathematics (2023). He lives in Rüdesheim, Germany.

Book Reviews, Reviews, Science

‘Can Understanding The Brain Make Us Better People?’ (Book Review)

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 14, 2025)

CEREBRAL ENTANGLEMENTS: How the Brain Shapes Our Public and Private Lives, by Allan J. Hamilton

A profound and profoundly important book that, using the most up-to-date revolutionary discoveries in neuroscience, shows us how to understand the brain; how it allows us to think, feel, experience and perceive, written by an acclaimed Harvard-trained neurosurgeon.

The human brain! It’s amazing! A master conductor of our emotional symphonies, a supercomputer of intelligence, a treasure inside the “temple” of the skull, where it gloriously shimmers “vivid, vital, jewel-like.” I mean, is it any wonder we’re such a special species?

Sorry: I had to get that out of my system. Books built on hyperbole seem to bring out the worst in me. And “Cerebral Entanglements,” a new book by the surgeon and medical consultant Allan J. Hamilton, is so breathlessly excited about our brains and how they work, about the dazzle of new insights and technologies, that occasionally this reader felt compelled to take a break and fan herself.

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Deborah Blum is the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T. and the author of “The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Quest for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.”