From Aeon, trying to resolve the stubborn paradoxes of their field, physicists craft ever more mind-boggling visions of reality. The dirty secret of evolution is that it's a lot more like the game of Mousetrap than you might think: An excerpt from Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science by Dorion Sagan. From 3:AM, Jonathan Bain is an ice cool philosopher of physics; and Tim Maudlin is the Tekken Revolution of the philosophy of physics. Jim Stein interviews Brian Clegg, author of Dice World: Science and Life in a Random Universe. Mark O’Connell reviews The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers by Curtis White. Daniel Clery goes inside the most expensive science experiment ever. Serena Golden interviews Scott L. Montgomery, author of Does Science Need a Global Language? English and the Future of Research. Leonard Susskind on string theory and using maths to explain the universe. Dominique Lambert on why science needs Catholicism. Richard Marshall. Is teaching “junk science” protected by academic freedom? Physicist Carlo Rovelli looks at free will, determinism, quantum theory and statistical fluctuations. The past is key to the future: Historical observations strengthen modern science. Science's hunt for a unifying account of how the world works requires us to entertain everything from hidden dimensions to multiple universes — but are these ideas based on fact or fiction? It's a no-brainer: The government should be spending money on science that nobody else wants to fund.
