Links for 2012-04-11

Last May, the Republican-controlled state legislature voted to amend the Minnesota Constitution, adding a thirteenth section to the “Miscellaneous Items” of the Constitution’s Article XIII to declare, “Only a union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Minnesota.” The Democratic governor’s veto was purely symbolic; in Minnesota, the fate of constitutional amendments proposed by the legislature is determined by statewide ballot. So seven months later, I started calling total strangers and asking them to vote against the amendment.

Clearly we need help. This isn’t a matter of a deficit in “critical thinking.” It is a problem of recovering a lost art. Television and radio producers acknowledge this by filtering questions in advance or asking would-be questioners to submit their interrogatories in writing. We lose something important in this filtering. The questions that get asked are the ones moderators pick out to make their own points. We would be better served if people could ask their own coherent and pertinent questions. Here’s how.

Yesterday’s edition of the Physics World online lecture series saw the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss hold forth on one of his favourite subjects: the life and science of his intellectual hero, Richard Feynman. Krauss has won awards for his work in science communication, and his biography of Feynman, Quantum Man, garnered Physics World’s own Book of the Year gong for 2011, so it was no surprise to “see” almost 300 of you tuning in yesterday to learn more.[…] With Feynman as the subject, there were sure to be plenty of questions from audience members at the end of the lecture, and inevitably there wasn’t time for all of them. However, Krauss has now sent us written answers to a few of the most interesting ones, and I’ve pasted his replies below. Enjoy!

So it is important to balance the OPERA mini-fiasco with another hot-off-the-presses neutrino story that illustrates why, even though mistakes in individual scientific experiments are common, collective mistakes in science are rare. A discipline such as physics has intrinsic checks and balances that significantly reduce the probability of errors going unrecognized for long. In the story I’m about to relate, one can recognize how and why scientists start to come to consensus. Though quite suspicious of any individual experiment, scientists generally take a different view of a group of experiments that buttress one another. The context of this story, though much less revolutionary than a violation of Einstein’s speed limit, still represents a milestone in our understanding of neutrinos, which has been advancing very rapidly over the past fifteen years or so. W

Now that Mitt Romney is the Republicanc candidate for president in all but name, the nation turns to consider his nominee for Vice-President. Who should fill the role? There are, of course, many possibilities.

The précis of Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Review is such a tissue of non- and half-truth, of historical misconception and ideological prejudice, that it requires an interlinear gloss to set the story straight. Here goes.