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...they actually accomplishing? My argument is that science in its grandest sense--the attempt to comprehend the universe and our place in it--has entered an era of diminishing returns. Scientists will continue making incremental advances, but they will never achieve their most ambitious goals, such as understanding the origin of the universe, of life and of human consciousness. Most people find this prediction hard to believe, because scientists and journalists breathlessly hype each new breakthrough, whether genuine or spurious, and ignore all the areas in which science makes little or no progress. The human mind, in particular, remains...
...power. Relativity theory prohibits faster-than-light travel or communication. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory constrain our predictive abilities. Science's limits are glaringly obvious in particle physics, which, as Steven Weinberg describes [in the Visions issue], seeks a "theory of everything" that will explain the origin of matter, energy and even space and time. The leading theory postulates that reality arises from infinitesimal "strings" wriggling in a hyperspace of 10 (or more) dimensions. Unfortunately, these hypothetical strings are so small that it would take a particle accelerator the size of the Milky Way to detect them...
...branching tree of earthly life with a common trunk) indicate that every living thing on Earth, from the tiniest bacterium on the ocean floor to the highest albatross that ever flew in the sky, arose as the magnificently diversified evolutionary outcome of one single experiment performed by nature, one origin of life in the early history of one particular planet...
...fact that fossilized life of the simplest bacterial grade appears in some of the most ancient rocks on Earth suggests that an origin of life in these conditions may be nearly inevitable, since incredibly improbable events should not occur so quickly. But my skeptical side retorts that good luck in one try proves nothing. I may win the lottery the first time I buy a ticket, and I might flip 10 heads in a row on my first sequence of tosses...
...height of the Cold War - and that's exactly the spin President Vladimir Putin's government wants to put on its relations with the West. The U.S. Navy announced Friday that its forces maintaining a blockade of Iraq were holding a Russian tanker pending tests to establish the origin of the oil on board, prompting a furious reaction from Moscow. The incident came the same day as Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov castigated a decision by European Union member states to suspend Russia from the Council of Europe for its refusal to accept independent investigation of human rights violations in Chechnya...