Word: physicists
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Most reasonable people agree that the Earth is warming, and that humans are the main cause. But even reasonable people disagree on what we should do about it. At one end are the true believers, like physicist James Hansen, who recently argued that oil executives should be put on trial for crimes against humanity. At the other are the truly doubtful - like Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, who helped block a Live Earth concert from being held on the Capitol's grounds last year - who are convinced that the environmental cost of climate change will prove less disastrous than the expense...
...about messing with the chemistry of the ocean--which is probably pretty much everyone--there is one more way to go, and it's being studied in a warehouse in Tucson, Ariz., by a company named Global Research Technologies (GRT). Developed by GRT president Allen Wright and Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner, the system consists of 32 hanging plastic panels, each 9 ft. high and 4 ft. deep (2.7 by 1.2 m), spaced about half an inch apart. As air wafts through those spaces, CO2 sticks to the proprietary plastic the panels are made of. The device in Tucson...
...arts as well, simplicity and complexity may masquerade as each other. Two years ago, physicist Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon began trying to establish the authenticity of six possible Jackson Pollock paintings. Taylor ultimately determined that the paintings were done by someone else, not because the materials or colors were wrong but because they lacked the microscopic fractals--repetitive patterns within patterns--that defined Pollock's abstractions. Fractals were a well-known concept in mathematics, but nobody expected to find them in a free-form splatter painting. Something in the way Pollock tossed his paint, however, allowed...
...simplicity-complexity fulcrum is producing results elsewhere too--in increasingly complex software that yields increasingly intuitive user interfaces (think the iPhone); in algorithms that show how the movements of schooling fish mirror the behavior of investors, making stock-market predictions more reliable. Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize--winning physicist and a co-founder of SFI, likes to cite the case of physicist Karl Jansky, who founded the science of radio astronomy in 1931 when he was studying the hiss of electromagnetic static that bathes the Earth--part of the same hiss you hear on a car radio. Jansky realized...
...ceremony featured readings from poet and Washington University professor Carl Phillips ’81 and an oration from University of Texas physicist Steven Weinberg...