Ignorance: The Elevator Speech

Ever since I reviewed Ignorance: How it Drives Science, a charming new book by the Columbia neuroscientist Stuart Firestein, I’ve been thinking about ignorance. And I tell you, it’s been a bit of a headache. Firestein teaches a popular science class at Columbia, also called Ignorance, in which he invites scientists from different disciplines to talk [...]

Abstruse Goose: The Sum of All Knowledge

Pay attention to the quote below the drawing.  John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist whose specialities were nuclear physics, gravitation — he created the term, “black hole” — and getting people riled up.   He died in 2008 at age 96. I mean, when Victor Hugo writes that science says the last word on nothing, [...]