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 A few years ago, while writing about the Golem series by the sociologists Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, I bought their first coauthored book, Frames of Meaning: The social construction of extraordinary science. I did not read it. Unlike the Golem books, which examined ordinary scientific controversies, Frames of Meaning was at…
by David Kordahl Like most Americans, I spent the summer of 2020 indoors. I had just graduated from Arizona State and moved my wife and our two daughters to Shreveport, Louisiana, but my new job as an assistant professor would not start for a few months. We settled into an Airbnb and only left to…
by David Kordahl When I was a physics graduate student at Arizona State, one of my fellow grad students had a roommate who, after obtaining an undergraduate business degree, got a job as an office assistant for an economics professor. The roommate (remember, not a grad student) was earning like a young professional, not a…
by David Kordahl After the first Cub Scouts meeting of the new year, I stood outside the Scout hut chatting with two other dads, both of them doctors. I am also called “doctor” at work, mostly by premed students who are enrolled in their required physics course, but it’s not the same—for many reasons, but…
by David Kordahl No one sells out anymore. The first pages of Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, W. David Marx’s overview of the past quarter-century of popular culture, give a striking example of this cultural shift. In 1992, the Seattle-based grunge band Pearl Jam elected to stop making music videos because…
by David Kordahl Government secrecy makes UFO claims impossible to verify—or disprove. When I lived in Arizona, my next-door neighbor once told me that he had seen a time machine. These types of anecdotes are not uncommon in Arizona, out on the edge of the world. At the time, I was in graduate school for…
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.…