David Kordahl lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, with his wife and two daughters. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from Arizona State University and is now an assistant professor of physics at Centenary College of Louisiana. Previously, he taught high school and gigged as a violinist. His writing has appeared in The New Atlantis, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nautilus, and various technical journals. Email: david.kordahl [at] gmail.com
Website: https://davidkordahl.net/
by David Kordahl There’s an old story, popularized by the mathematician Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) in A Budget of Paradoxes, about a visit of Denis Diderot to the court of Catherine the Great. In the story, the Empress’s circle had heard enough of Diderot’s atheism, and came up with a plan to shut him up.…
by David Kordahl On Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, I taught introductory physics students how to set up circuits. They struggled. They tried to connect capacitors one to the next but, upon hooking up the battery, would find that none had charged. Or, if some capacitors had charged, others would have voltages unaccountably higher…
by David Kordahl Accusatory reevaluations of the COVID-19 era are underway. Anthony Fauci’s new memoir addresses the accusations—or does it? Oversight and Accountability Some six weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared before the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, an investigative panel of the U.S. House of Representatives. I watched the first hour (the full session…
by David Kordahl In popular media, physics often comes up for one of two competing reasons. The first is to introduce a touch of mysticism without labeling it as such. Whether it’s Carl Sagan talking about our bones as stardust, or Lisa Randall suggesting some extra dimensions of space, these pronouncements are often presented to…
by David Kordahl A few months ago, the Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky released Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. It’s a book whose thesis is as easy to state as it is hard to accept. Sapolsky argues that since our actions result from nothing more than one event following another, no one really…
by David Kordahl The photograph beside this text shows two men standing side by side, both scientific celebrities, both Nobel prizewinners, both of them well-known and well-loved by the American public in 1932, when the picture was taken. But public memory is fickle, and today only the man on the right is still recognizable to…
by David Kordahl While grading papers last week, I turned on Max (the streamer formerly known as HBO) and watched The Insurrectionist Next Door. This documentary was made by Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Rep. Nancy Pelosi. I’d read a little about the film beforehand, and I was curious how the younger Pelosi would find…
by David Kordahl This column is ultimately a review of A Guess at the Riddle: Essays on the Physical Underpinnings of Quantum Mechanics, the short new book by David Z Albert, a philosopher at Columbia University and (as I found out last week) the graduate advisor of the founding editor of 3QuarksDaily, S. Abbas Raza.…
by David Kordahl The science lab and the theory suite If you spend any time doing science, you might notice that some things change when you close the door to the lab and walk into the theory suite. In the laboratory, surprising things happen, no doubt about it. Depending on the type of lab you’re…
by David Kordahl I’m writing this column in the cool semi-darkness of a municipal auditorium. I will be here for several hours, and my main duty is to stay put. This is the dress rehearsal for a dance recital where my daughters (ages four and six) will perform. When the time comes, I will take…
by David Kordahl I began reading Anthony Zee’s most famous book, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, at Muncher’s Bakery in Lawrence, Kansas, where, as a would-be quantum field theorist in 2010, Zee’s book taught me to evaluate Gaussian integrals. Zee made it all seem almost trivial, but his fast style belied the true expectation…
by David Kordahl Thomas Kuhn’s epiphany In the years after The Structure of Scientific Revolutions became a bestseller, the philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) was often asked how he had arrived at his views. After all, his book’s model of science had become influential enough to spawn persistent memes. With over a million copies of…
by David Kordahl I’ve been thinking again about the relationship of scientists to the history of science. Lorraine Daston, the historian and philosopher of science, was recently interviewed for Marginalia, where her interviewer asked a strongly worded question. “Scientists are—I don’t want to put it too provocatively—but frankly they’re afraid of the history of their…
by David Kordahl Every October, I try to carve out a little time to enjoy Nobel Season. This past week marked the climax of the last year’s iteration, with the winners of the various Nobel Prizes announced on successive days of the week. I had fun following the picks, and learning a bit about new…
by David Kordahl Note: This piece is an accidental addendum to my column of March 2021, “The Limits of Conspiracy Debunking,” though it can be read separately. Sometimes, we’re surprised. Though everyday surprises can be comedic, the surprises that we register collectively are more often tragic. My parents both remember the assassination of John F.…
by David Kordahl Here’s a brief story about two friends of mine. Let’s call them A. Sociologist and A. Mathematician, pseudonyms that reflect both their professions and their roles in the story. A few years ago, A.S. and A.M. worked together on a research project. Naturally, A.S. developed the sociological theories for their project, and…
by David Kordahl I’ll start this column with an over-generalization. Speaking roughly, scientific models can be classed into two categories: mechanical models, and actuarial models. Engineers and physical scientists tend to favor mechanical models, where the root causes of various effects are specified by their formalism. Predictable inputs, in such models, lead to predictable outputs.…
by David Kordahl Most people who know about William Shockley are likely to describe him as a eugenicist, though it’s a question of taste whether they present this aspect of his character before or after they call him the father of the transistor. The first full-length Shockley biography, Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of…
by David Kordahl Imagine, if you will, that I own a reliably programmable qubit, a device that, when prepared in some standard and uncontroversial way, has a 50/50 probability of having one of two outcomes, A or B. Now imagine also that I have become convinced of my own telekinetic powers. Suppose that the qubit…
by David Kordahl The physicist Philip W. Anderson, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1977, has lingered in the broader scientific imagination for two main reasons—reasons, depending on your vantage, that cast him either as a hero, or as a villain. The heroic Anderson is the author of “More Is Different,” the 1972 essay that…