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 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…
by David Kordahl Paul Halpern’s new book, Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect, takes its time to get there, but its best parts discuss the intersection of two puzzles for 20th century rationalists: psychoanalysis, and quantum mechanics. This intersection is dramatized by the correspondence of Carl Jung, Freud’s…
by David Kordahl Physicists, as a tribe, are overwhelmingly likely to believe that smart extraterrestrials exist, and are also overwhelmingly likely to believe that they haven’t visited Earth. I’m considered a bit of a kook by my physicist friends because I harbor genuine confusion on this point. I want to believe, but I also want…
by David Kordahl Physics writing, let’s face it, is usually pretty boring. In a recent essay for Tablet, Adam Kirsh diagnosed one reason for this. When physicists write non-technical literature, they often begin with the assumption that the world as revealed by physics is the real one, and that the job of physicists, when they…