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 This article is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation with David Baron about his new book, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America. A video of this conversation is embedded below. Intro and Percival Lowell Background (0:00) Origins of the Canal Craze (6:39) Gathering Evidence…
Secrecy has long been understood as a danger to democracy—and as antithetical to science. But how much of scientific knowledge is already hidden? by David Kordahl “Our society is sequestering knowledge more extensively, rapidly, and thoroughly than any before it in history,” writes physics Nobelist Robert Laughlin in his opinionated 2008 tract The Crime of…
by David Kordahl Peter Morgan has worked for decades to appreciate the underlying structures of physics. But can he convince others he is right? When I receive unsolicited scientific communication, I bin writers into two crude categories: Possible Collaborators, and Probable Crackpots. Of course, these categories may overlap. Ted Kaczynski, after all, taught at Berkeley…
by David Kordahl Adam Becker alleges that tech intellectuals overstate their cases while flirting with fascism, but offers no replacement for techno-utopianism. People, as we all know firsthand, are not perfectly rational. Our beliefs are contradictory and uncertain. One might charitably conclude that we “contain multitudes”—or, less charitably, that we are often just confused. That…
by David Kordahl Twenty years after Steven Pinker argued that statistical generalizations fail at the individual level, our digital lives have become so thoroughly tracked that his defense of individuality faces a new crisis. When I first picked up The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Steven Pinker, 2002), I was in my…
by David Kordahl In the fallow days of late December, I watched many holiday movies with my kids. The choices weren’t adventurous: Rudolph, Elf, The Polar Express. Between viewings of Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Home Alone 3, The Grinch played no fewer than eight times. My daughters capitalized on…
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…