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 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…
by David Kordahl From the moment we’re born into bright hospital lights until that last day when we’re topped off with embalming fluid, it’s hard to escape the human world. By the “human world,” here, I mean the world that we have built for ourselves, a world where, whether or not you know the specific…
by David Kordahl Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes) Georges Franju is perhaps best remembered for Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage, 1960), an oddly poetic entry in the body horror canon, but Franju’s most memorable film may be his first, Blood of the Beasts (Le sang des bêtes, 1949). The…
by David Kordahl The evidence that mass media can cause physiological responses in humans is so evident in our everyday experience that it’s easy to ignore. Subliminal muzak makes our fingers tap lightly on our grocery carts. Billboards with sexy models flush our cheeks during our daily commutes. But not all such stimuli are subtle.…
by David Kordahl James Clerk Maxwell, whose theory of electromagnetism occupies the same physics pedestal as Newton’s theory of gravity, was by all accounts a good-humored and generous man, and a fairly confusing lecturer. Here is a story about Maxwell (admitted to be apocryphal in the math notes that recount it) that suggests something of…
by David Kordahl If you follow science news, there’s a good chance that you’ve recently heard about Muon g-2 (pronounced “mew-awhn gee minus two”), an experiment whose preliminary results were announced to media fanfare and general excitement. The experiment’s most recent iteration is going on at Fermilab, the physics facility outside Batavia, Illinois, but it…
by David Kordahl This is a post about conspiracy theories—yes, another one, after a year’s worth—but let’s start by remembering a benign old theory from a little over one year ago, back when ex-vice-president Joe Biden had won just one primary, down in South Carolina, where he had been aided by the endorsement of representative…
by David Kordahl In the part of my life when I was most actively trying to invent myself as a writer, I was working as a high school teacher and was desperately unhappy. (Notice the way that I put this: “I was working as a high school teacher,” not “I was a high school teacher”;…
by David Kordahl There are two main types of people who seek out arguments that contradict their beliefs: those who are not afraid to change their mind, and those cannot imagine themselves doing so. I’m not sure which type I was a few years ago when I watched Out of the Blue, a documentary that…
by David Kordahl Last month I worked on a modern sort of archaeological dig, going through the equipment in a college physics lab to see what sorts of devices were on hand. It reminded me of being a little kid, when I would tiptoe around my dad’s religious paraphernalia (he was a Lutheran pastor), not…
by David Kordahl When I was seventeen years old, I took my first college science course, a summer class in astronomy for non-majors. The professor narrated his wild claims in an amused deadpan, calmly showing us how to reconstruct the life cycle of stars, and how to estimate the age of the universe. This course…
by David Kordahl Many of the best historical movies featuring “hard” scientists have used social problems, rather than than scientific controversies, to propel their action.1 Two recently released films that address the legacy of Nikola Tesla reverse this trend. The Current War, a plummy costume drama whose planned 2017 distribution was delayed by the Harvey…