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This Labor Day, consider this; some of the most prominent scientists and artists worked only a few hours a day.
From the archives:
"Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours."
Forty years ago this coming Tuesday, a car-sized piece of equipment launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Thirty five years later, it became the first and only man-made object to enter interstellar space.
Fran Bagenal was a student when the Voyager probes launched, and wrote her doctoral thesis on data the probes collected around Jupiter and went on to become professor of astrophysical and planetary science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has also worked on the Galileo, Deep Space 1, New Horizons and Juno missions.
Nautilus caught up with Bagenal to discuss the legacy of Voyager and the future of manned and unmanned exploration of space.
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"We won’t know if there is a limit to knowledge unless we try to get past it. At the moment, we have no sign of one. We may be facing roadblocks, but those give every indication of being temporary. Some people say to me: “We will never know how the universe began.” “We can never know what happened before the Big Bang.” These statements demonstrate a remarkable conceit, by suggesting we can know in advance the locus of all those things that we cannot know. This is not only unsubstantiated, but the history of science so far has demonstrated no such limits. And in my own field, cosmology, our knowledge has increased in ways that no one foresaw even 50 years ago."
"Early in my academic career I had started to find the climate of academic philosophy unwelcoming to women. No one in my department taught works by women philosophers; a mentor had openly doubted women’s ability to do philosophy. As one of the few women in the program, I was lonely. I believed women could make significant contributions to philosophy, but even so, I questioned whether philosophy was a place where they could thrive.
This began to change the year I arrived in Io...wa. One afternoon I was reading an obscure monograph when a footnote led me to A Serious Proposal to the Ladies by Mary Astell, who lived from 1666 to 1731. I’d never read works by women philosophers who lived before the 20th century, assuming that since they didn’t show up in textbooks or in class discussions that they didn’t have anything unique or profound to say. Yet I was captivated by the title of Astell’s work. Here was a book personally addressed to women.
I began to realize that part of the reason that philosophy lost Astell, and other brilliant women, has to do with how the history of philosophy is crafted and taught. The history of philosophy is not a comprehensive catalog of different theories, or a series of accidental events in human history. It’s an account of the development of the science of human reason as understood by a few 19th century historians, who focused on theories of knowledge. These histories of philosophy, written by men, relegated women’s concerns to the sidelines. I came to see the plight of women in philosophy in Astell’s story. And in my own."
Potential employers aren't the only ones turning to social media for more information. Liliya Gershengoren, a psychiatrist and professor at Cornell University, recently reported results form a survey of 48 staff doctors and 34 residents to gauge how common it is to Google a patient.
Her survey indicates that 93 percent of staff and 94 percent of residents have admitted to Googling a patient at least once.
By including information gathered online, medical records are now changing and questions about culpability and privacy are brought to the fore.
What can a feminist philosopher teach a young graduate student struggling with a sexist academic department? That story, plus the limits of physics, Voyager's 40th anniversary, and getting googled by your doctor, this week on Nautilus: http://nautil.us
The 2011 tsunami and earthquake left deep grooves in Japan’s collective psyche. The disaster caused an increase in suicides, PTSD, and stress-related physical ailments like cardiovascular disease. In Fukushima, the number of stress-related deaths—1,656—has topped deaths directly caused by the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown combined.
As bad as they were, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami were just the latest chapter in a long, tragic narrative. The Japanese archipelago sits at the nexus of four tectonic plates, subjecting the region to more than 1,500 seismic events each year. As a result, Tokyo has been destroyed and rebuilt on average, from 1608 to 1945, once every five years.
There’s good reason to think this long history has had a biological effect on the Japanese.
From our friends The New Yorker: What Big Tech’s monopoly powers mean for our culture.
This month, before LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, and its European counterpart Virgo, close down for a year to undergo upgrades, they jointly surveyed the skies. It was a small observational window—the 1st to the 25th—but that may have been enough: A rumor that LIGO has detected another gravitational wave—the fourth in two years—is making the rounds. But this time, there’s a twist: The signal might have been caused by the merger of two neutron stars instead of black holes.
If the rumor holds true, it would be an astonishingly lucky detection.
Earth currently supports 7.5 billion people, and, according to the United Nations, that number will rise to 9.7 billion in 2050 and to 11.2 billion by the end of the century. If the planet has a maximum occupancy, it remains elusive.
The thing is, most Malthusian population predictions—that we will eventually run out of resources and, thus, diminish in population size as a result of the negative consequences—fail to take into account a very important aspect of human nature:
Humans don’t just extract from a fixed set of resources. They can create new resources through invention.
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From our friends The New Yorker: Freud was a lousy scientist. He fudged data; he made unsubstantiated claims; he took credit for other people’s ideas. Sometimes he lied. Why do we still revere him?
Many scientists love to sing the praises of their own specialties, but few proclaim them with the confidence of the ecologist Andrew Dobson. To Dobson, biology’s importance outstrips everything from the search for elementary particles to the exploration of the universe. More specifically, he says, the study of biology’s network systems, from food webs to neural networks, represents “our only hope.”
"There’s no benefit to humans at all from Higgs boson or the discovery of all these boring bits of planets," says Dobson. In a recent interview with Nautilus, he shared his incisive opinions and his fears for the future of our planet.
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