Having a Thoughtful Life

Svend Brinkmann’s Think is a book in praise of the thoughtful life and an easygoing exploration of the role of thinking in our lives today.

The book is essentially in two parts. The first is descriptive. It explores questions like “what do we mean by thinking?”, “why has it become difficult to think in today’s world?” and “where does thinking come from?”

The second part is prescriptive. Brinkmann provides some quick and relatively simple strategies for bringing more thoughtfulness into our everyday lives.

Think: In Defence of a Thoughtful Life – Svend Brinkmann (Polity)      READ MORE... 

Time Travel Speculation

Have you ever dreamed of traveling through time, like characters do in science fiction movies? For centuries, the concept of time travel has captivated people’s imaginations. Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time, just like you move between different places. In movies, you might have seen characters using special machines, magical devices or even hopping into a futuristic car to travel backward or forward in time.

But is this just a fun idea for movies, or could it really happen?

The question of whether time is reversible remains one of the biggest unresolved questions in science. If the universe follows the laws of thermodynamics, it may not be possible. The second law of thermodynamics states that things in the universe can either remain the same or become more disordered over time.   READ MORE...

Reading Art of War Correctly

In the mid-1990s, I picked up the military classic “Art of War” hoping to find insight into my new career as an officer in the United States Marine Corps.

I was not the only one looking for insights from the sage Sunzi, also known as Sun Tzu, who died over 2,500 years ago. “Art of War” has long been mined for an understanding of China’s strategic tradition and universal military truths. The book’s maxims, such as “know the enemy and know yourself,” are routinely quoted in military texts, as well as business and management books.

Initially, I was disappointed. It seemed Sunzi’s advice was either common sense or in agreement with Western military classics. However, a few years later the Marine Corps trained me as a China scholar, and I spent much of my career working on U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific region. This deepened my desire to understand how leaders in the People’s Republic of China see the world and choose strategies. Looking for insight, I turned to classical Chinese philosophy and finally encountered concepts that helped illuminate the unique perspective of Sunzi’s “Art of War.”

Today, I am an academic researching how Chinese philosophy and foreign policy intersect. To comprehend “Art of War,” it helps readers to approach the text from the worldview of its author. That means reading Sunzi’s advice through the prism of classical Chinese metaphysics, which is deeply shaped by the philosophy of Daoism.  READ MORE...

Multiverse Theory

Interest in the multiverse theory, suggesting that our universe is just one of many, spiked following the release of the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. The film follows Evelyn Wang on her journey to connect with versions of herself in parallel universes to ultimately stop the destruction of the multiverse.

The multiverse idea has long been an inspiration for science fiction writers. But does it have any basis in science? And if so, is it a concept we could ever test experimentally?

That’s the topic of the third episode of our podcast Great Mysteries of Physics – hosted by me, Miriam Frankel, science editor at The Conversation, and supported by FQxI, the Foundational Questions Institute.

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“One way to think of a multiverse is just to say: ‘Well, the universe might be really, really big – much bigger than our observable universe – and so there could be other regions of the universe that are far beyond our horizon that have different things happening in them’,” explains Katie Mack, Hawking chair in cosmology and science communication at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. “And I think that idea is totally well accepted in cosmology.”  READ MORE...

Super Earths Are Common

Astronomers now routinely discover planets orbiting stars outside of the solar system – they’re called exoplanets. But in summer 2022, teams working on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite found a few particularly interesting planets orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars.

One planet is 30% larger than Earth and orbits its star in less than three days. The other is 70% larger than the Earth and might host a deep ocean. These two exoplanets are super-Earths – more massive than the Earth but smaller than ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.

I’m a professor of astronomy who studies galactic cores, distant galaxies, astrobiology and exoplanets. I closely follow the search for planets that might host life.

Earth is still the only place in the universe scientists know to be home to life. It would seem logical to focus the search for life on Earth clones – planets with properties close to Earth’s. But research has shown that the best chance astronomers have of finding life on another planet is likely to be on a super-Earth similar to the ones found recently.  READ MORE...

Stents Do Not Prevent Heart Failure

Every year, 60,000 people in the UK are diagnosed with heart failure, and many are treated with stents. In a large new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, my colleagues and I discovered that these procedures are unnecessary.

Heart failure is where the heart muscle becomes weakened, leading to symptoms of severe breathlessness that may cause premature death. The commonest cause is blocked blood vessels that reduce blood supply to the heart muscle. This is known as coronary artery disease.

A person with heart failure is treated with medication and sometimes with specialised pacemakers. Despite this treatment, many patients die prematurely or are admitted to hospital with wor sening symptoms.

People with heart failure also sometimes have a procedure to insert a stent – a small metal tube that is used to unblock a coronary artery. Stents are placed into the heart arteries by a cardiologist through tubes inserted either into the wrist or the groin and guided by X-rays.

Trials have shown that stents are a very effective treatment for people with heart attacks and angina, but their effects in patients with heart failure have remained uncertain.  READ MORE...

No Longer Grading Students

I’ve been teaching college English for more than 30 years. Four years ago, I stopped putting grades on written work, and it has transformed my teaching and my students’ learning. My only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner.

Starting in elementary school, teachers rate student work – sometimes with stars and checkmarks, sometimes with actual grades. Usually by middle school, when most students are about 11, a system of grading is firmly in place. In the U.S., the most common system is an “A” for superior work, through “F” for failure, with “E” almost always skipped.

This system was widely adopted only in the 1940s, and even now, some schools, colleges and universities use other means of assessing students. But the practice of grading, and ranking, students is so widespread as to seem necessary, even though many researchers say it is highly inequitable. 

For example, students who come into a course with little prior knowledge earn lower grades at the start, which means they get a lower final average, even if they ultimately master the material. Grades have other problems: They are demotivating, they don’t actually measure learning and they increase students’ stress.

During the pandemic, many instructors and even whole institutions offered pass/fail options or mandated pass/fail grading. They did so both to reduce the stress of remote education and because they saw that the emergency, disruptive to everyone, was disproportionately challenging for students of color. Many, however, later resumed grading, not acknowledging the ways that traditional assessments can both perpetuate inequity and impede learning.  READ MORE...

A Soft Science

The big idea
One factor that influences the use of the labels “soft science” or “hard science” is gender bias, according to recent research my colleagues and I conducted.

Women’s participation varies across STEM disciplines. While women have nearly reached gender parity in biomedical sciences, they still make up only about 18% of students receiving undergraduate degrees in computer science, for instance.

In a series of experiments, we varied the information study participants read about women’s representation in fields like chemistry, sociology and biomedical sciences. We then asked them to categorize these fields as either a “soft science” or a “hard science.”

Across studies, participants were consistently more likely to describe a discipline as a “soft science” when they’d been led to believe that proportionally more women worked in the field. Moreover, the “soft science” label led people to devalue these fields – describing them as less rigorous, less trustworthy and less deserving of federal research funding.

Why it matters
Over the past decade, a growing movement has encouraged girls and women to pursue education and careers in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. This effort is sometimes described as a way to reduce the wage gap.

By encouraging women to enter high-paying fields like science, technology and engineering, advocates hope that women on average will increase their earning power relative to men. Others have hoped that, as women demonstrate they can be successful in STEM, sexist stereotypes about women’s ability and interest in STEM will erode.

Our research suggests this may not be the case. Stereotypes about women and STEM persist, even in the face of evidence that women can and do productively participate in STEM fields. These stereotypes can lead people to simply devalue the fields in which women participate. In this way, even science and math can end up in the “pink collar” category of heavily female fields that are often devalued and underpaid.                 READ MORE...

Panic Buying & Isolation Dodging

‘Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law’. EPA/ Salvatore Di Nolfi

The coronavirus crisis has forced us to look at our behaviour in a way that we’re not used to. We are being asked to act in the collective good rather than our individual preservation and interest. Even for those of us with the best of intentions, this is not so easy.

This is a problem for governments. Practically, they need us to obey their recommendations and to only buy what we need. They can enforce these behaviours upon us through policing, but some, such as the UK government, have preferred to appeal to our sense of duty and morality to act in the interest of society as a whole. They say “we have to ask you” rather than “you must”. They are invoking a communal spirit to do what’s right. The key point being that we should follow guidelines out of a sense of duty rather than needing to be commanded. Judging from the fact that I am having to ration my coffee supply, this is having mixed success.

Friederich Nietzsche argues that appeals to morality are no less a system of power and discipline than the police. In his book The Genealogy of Morals, he argues that moral thinking arises first, not from a desire to be a good and happy human being, but from the upper classes as a way of distinguishing themselves from the lower classes – justifying why they had benefits those less fortunate did not.

He points out that, in most languages, the words for good and evil arise from the words for “clean” and “unclean”. The evidence of the moral nobility of the upper classes was their cleanliness and the decadence of the lower classes was proven by their dirtiness. This still seems to be true today, as we are told it is a moral duty to be clean and that those who do not obey the bodily discipline of handwashing, facial awareness and social distancing are not simply dangerous but selfish.  READ MORE..

Plankton Creates Mountains

A world without the great mountain ranges – the Himalayas, the Alps, the Rockies, the Andes – is unimaginable, but they were not always a part of the Earth’s geography. Mountains didn’t start forming widely until 2 billion years ago, half way through the planet’s history. Now our research has revealed how primitive life played a key role in their introduction to the planet.

While the formation of mountains is usually associated with the collision of tectonic plates causing huge slabs of rock to be thrust skywards, our study has shown that this was triggered by an abundance of nutrients in the oceans 2 billion years ago which caused an explosion of planktonic life.

Timeline for the formation of mountains on Earth. J Johnston/University of Aberdeen, Author provided

Making mountains
Mountains are not just a beautiful backdrop for recreation, they are essential to the way the world works, through their influence on weather, climate, the distribution of fresh water and the erosion of rock to make cultivable soil.

Before there were mountains, the plate movements that reshape the distribution of oceans and continents only occurred on a limited scale. But the movement of these plates are essential to making mountains. The pressure of one plate pushing against another – typically an ocean plate hitting a continental plate – causes slabs of ocean rock to break off and stack up on top of each other as they are pushed from behind.  READ MORE...

Solitude is Beneficial

Over the past seven months, many of us have got closer to experiencing the kind of solitude long sought by monks, nuns, philosophers and misanthropes.

For some, this has brought loneliness. Nevertheless, like religions such as Buddhism, the West has a rich literature — both religious and secular — exploring the possible benefits of being alone.

“Take time and see the Lord is good,” Psalm 34 enjoins, in a biblical passage long read as a call to periodically withdraw from worldly occupations. The best form of life will be contemplative, the philosopher Aristotle concurs.

Solitude, according to the Renaissance poet-philosopher Petrarch, rehabilitates the soul, corrects morals, renews affections, erases blemishes, purges faults, (and) reconciles God and man.

Here are four key benefits of solitude these very different, contemplative authors point to.

1. Freedom to do what you want — any old time
The first boon identified by those who praise solitude is the leisure and liberty it provides.

There is freedom in space. You can (proverbially) get around in your PJs, and who’s to know? There is the release from the needs and demands of others (a liberty many parents may have found themselves longing for recently). And there may be a freedom in time, also. In solitude, we may do, think, imagine and pay easy attention to whatever pleases us.

“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep,” the 16th century French philosopher Montaigne, a connoisseur of the quiet life, mused.


Yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time, for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.

2. Reconnecting with yourself
Solitude (unless of course we are working from home) withdraws the external objects, demands and tasks crowding our days. All the energies we have distributed so widely, in different relationships, projects and pursuits can regather themselves, “like a wave rolling from sand and shore back to its ocean source,” as psychologist Oliver Morgan has written.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Placebos

If you’ve had both of your COVID vaccinations, you may have suffered some side-effects – perhaps headaches, fatigue, fever or a sore arm. These effects are mainly caused by your immune system’s reaction to the vaccine. But most scientists agree that there is another cause: the human mind.

The ability of the mind to generate the symptoms of illness is known as the “nocebo” effect. The nocebo effect is the unpopular twin brother of the placebo effect. Whereas the placebo effect alleviates pain and the symptoms of illness, the nocebo effect does the opposite: it generates pain and symptoms.

A 2018 study found that almost half of participants in placebo trials experience side-effects, even though they are taking inert substances. 

There was a similar finding in the first major trial of the Pfizer COVID vaccine in 2020. In the placebo group – who were not given the vaccine – between a quarter and a third of people reported fatigue, a similar number reported headaches, and around 10% reported muscle pain.

Indeed, Martin Michaelis and Mark Wass, bioscientists at the University of Kent, recently suggested that “for some vaccinated people the knowledge that they have been vaccinated may be sufficient to drive side-effects”.  READ MORE