Steven Weinberg¹ writes about the costly future of physics in the New York Review of Books. He claims that some branches of theoretical physics have reached a frightening intellectual impasse that can only be unblocked by expensive transnational experimental projects. For example, in particle physics:

We can hope [...] that the most exciting thing to be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider will be something quite unexpected. Whatever it is, it's hard to see how it could take us all the way to a final theory, including gravitation. So in the next decade, physicists are probably going to ask their governments for support for whatever new and more powerful accelerator we then think will be needed.

And cosmology:

But cosmology is in danger of becoming stuck, in much the same sense as elementary particle physics has been stuck for decades. The discovery in 1998 that the expansion of the universe is now accelerating can be accommodated in various theories, but we don't have observations that would point to the right theory. The observations of microwave radiation left over from the early universe have confirmed the general idea of an early era of inflation, but do not give detailed information about the physical processes involved in the expansion. New satellite observatories will be needed, but will they be funded?

But Weinberg is aware that science is fighting for funds with a number of worthy alternatives, including an underfunded education system; a stretched prison system; a shortage of judges, patent clerks, firemen, and police officers; and a decrepid health service. But he remains optimistic about the potential for increased taxation:

We had better not try to defend science by attacking spending on these other needs. We would lose, and would deserve to lose.

It seems to me that what is really needed is not more special pleading for one or another particular public good, but for all the people who care about these things to unite in restoring higher and more progressive tax rates, especially on investment income. I am not an economist, but I talk to economists, and I gather that dollar for dollar, government spending stimulates the economy more than tax cuts. It is simply a fallacy to say that we cannot afford increased government spending. But given the anti-tax mania that seems to be gripping the public, views like these are political poison. This is the real crisis, and not just for science.

Freeman Dyson writes about the unclear boundary between "fringe science" and orthodoxy in the New York Review of Books. He recounts the stories of two friends who became obsessed with marginal metaphysical-cum-scientific theories:

In my career as a scientist, I twice had the good fortune to be a personal friend of a famous dissident. [...] Both of them were possessed by fantasies that people with ordinary common sense could recognize as nonsense. I made it clear to both that I did not believe their fantasies, but I admired them as human beings and as imaginative artists. I admired them most of all for their stubborn refusal to remain silent. With the whole world against them, they remained true to their beliefs. I could not pretend to agree with them, but I could give them my moral support.

Surprisingly, one of these friends is Sir Arthur Eddington, the accomplished astrophysicist who carried out early experiments confirming General Relativity.¹

Dyson reacts sympathetically to his friends' work:

Why do I value so highly the memory of Eddington and Velikovsky [...]? We honor them because science is only a small part of human capability. We gain knowledge of our place in the universe not only from science but also from history, art, and literature. Science is a creative interaction of observation with imagination. “Physics at the Fringe” is what happens when imagination loses touch with observation. Imagination by itself can still enlarge our vision when observation fails. The mythologies of [...] Velikovsky fail to be science, but they are works of art and high imagining. As William Blake told us long ago, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

Finally, Dyson reflects on the difficulty of distinguishing the very speculative branches of contemporary physics, like string cosmology, from fringe science:

The fringe of physics is not a sharp boundary with truth on one side and fantasy on the other. All of science is uncertain and subject to revision. The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove. The fringe is the unexplored territory where truth and fantasy are not yet disentangled. Hermann Weyl, who was one of the main architects of the relativity and quantum revolutions, said to me once, “I always try to combine the true with the beautiful, but when I have to choose one or the other, I usually choose the beautiful.” Following Weyl’s good example, our string cosmologists are making the same choice.

The New Yorker have a fascinating article on CouchSurfing.org.¹ Its author, Patricia Marx, couchsurfs across the US and Bermuda in order to learn about the hosts and their motivations. Slowly the article becomes a rumination on sociology, technology and the human condition:

How can we explain this pervasive and—some would say—unexpected coöperation? What is to prevent an overabundance of freeloaders from bringing down the system? Essentially, this is the question that George Zisiadis, a researcher at CouchSurfing, who graduated from Harvard last year, with a degree in sociology, asked in his senior thesis. After drawing a lot of diagrams with arrows to show that the dynamic between members is not a typical case of indirect reciprocity (A gives to B, B gives to C, C gives to A), Zisiadis attributed the success of CouchSurfing to its raison d'être—namely, to forge meaningful social connections. Whether you make the sofa bed or sleep in the sofa bed, you will come out a winner.

Has our relation with machines made us feel so deprived of human contact that we befriend anyone and shack up with whoever has a mattress? Moreover, how profound can a social connection be if it is arranged through paperwork and typically lasts only a day or two? "It's sad when they leave," Sommer, one of my San Francisco hosts, said. "But then you get another one." People, it seems, are becoming fungible, and, as in a game of pinball, you score points by bumping up against as many of them as possible.

Stanley Fish has written two columns on justifying methods of inquiry in the New York Times.¹ In both he argues that rationalists are no better placed to justify their first principles than global-warming deniers, Holocaust deniers or creationists:

People like Dawkins and Pinker do not survey the world in a manner free of assumptions about what it is like and then, from that (impossible) disinterested position, pick out the set of reasons that will be adequate to its description. They begin with the assumption (an act of faith) that the world is an object capable of being described by methods unattached to any imputation of deity, and they then develop procedures (tests, experiments, the compilation of databases, etc.) that yield results, and they call those results reasons for concluding this or that. And they are reasons, but only within the assumptions that both generate them and give them point.

What this means is that the rhetoric of disinterested inquiry, as retailed by the likes of Dawkins and Pinker, is in fact a very interested assertion of the superiority of one set of beliefs. And accompanying that assertion is a conviction that those who are not persuaded of those beliefs can be dismissed out of hand.

Later Fish tempers his rhetoric:

Again, don't misunderstand me. I'm not criticizing liberals for standing up for, and with, their own, only for pretending that they are, or could be, doing something else.

But the desire of classical liberals to think of themselves as above the fray, as facilitating inquiry rather than steering it in a favored direction, makes them unable to be content with just saying, You guys are wrong, we're right, and we're not going to listen to you or give you an even break. Instead they labor mightily to ground their judgments in impersonal standards and impartial procedures (there are none) so that they can pronounce their excommunications with clean hands and pure—non-partisan, and non-tribal—hearts. It's quite a performance and it is on display every day in our most enlightened newspapers and on our most progressive political talk shows, including the ones I'm addicted to.

Fish is alluding to a problem called epistemic circularity (or bootstrapping) in epistemology.² Jonathan Weisberg gives a good summary in Bootstrapping in General:

The following procedure seems epistemically defective. Suppose I have no reason to think the gas gauge in my car is reliable, and I attempt to establish its reliability as follows. I read the gauge on many occasions, concluding each time that the tank is as the gauge says; when the gauge reads 'full', I conclude that the tank is full, similarly for 'empty', etc. Eventually I conclude by induction that the gauge is reliable, since it was correct each time.

Even if my beliefs in this chain of reasoning are all true, I have done nothing to establish that the gauge is reliable: I do not know that it is reliable, nor am I justified in believing that it is. Call this sort of defective procedure bootstrapping.

The best introduction to the subject is probably Markus Lammenranta's encyclopedia article on epistemic circularity, but Michael Lynch's article is worth reading for an interesting solution:

The criterion argument is disarming in its simplicity. But it is open to an equally simple response grounded in epistemic externalism. The externalist rejects the key assumption of the argument—namely, that one must first know that a source of belief is reliable before it can be said to produce knowledge. From the externalist's viewpoint, all that matters is whether the source is reliable, not whether we know or even believe that it is. As long as the source is in fact reliable, it can produce knowledge, including knowledge about whether it, or some other source, is reliable. Epistemic circularity may be pervasive, says the externalist, but it doesn't prevent us from having knowledge or justified belief.

Finally, Fish's columns were a reaction to this discussion between Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker:

Addition: Weisberg has a new released a new introduction to the bootstrapping problem.

Michael Gross recounts a spawling history of Internet regulation in Vantity Fair. He casts it as a war between two loose collectives:

One way to think about the War for the Internet is to cast it as a polar conflict: Order versus Disorder, Control versus Chaos. The forces of Order want to superimpose existing, pre-digital power structures and their associated notions of privacy, intellectual property, security, and sovereignty onto the Internet. The forces of Disorder want to abandon those rickety old structures and let the will of the crowd create a new global culture, maybe even new kinds of virtual "countries." At their most extreme, the forces of Disorder want an Internet with no rules at all.

Among other things, the article details the founding of the DNS and ICANN; the rise of Internet piracy; the right to privacy; SOPA and PIPA; the rise of Anonymous and LulzSec; and the upcoming UN Conference of International Telecommunications.

It's packed full of interesting material, but this fact caught my attention in particular:

On the other side, authoritarian governments want to build their own private Internets. The Iranian government has in fact launched a "halal" Internet, cut off from the rest of the world.

In the end Gross sketches the views of the group he believes will win out, the so-called forces of Organized Chaos:

Beyond this core agenda, the forces of Organized Chaos, by and large, think that the Internet should be allowed to evolve on its own, the way human societies always have. The forces of Organized Chaos have a pretty good sense of how it will evolve, at least in the short term. The Internet will stratify, as cities did long ago. There will be the mass Internet we already know—a teeming bazaar of artists and merchants and thinkers as well as pickpockets and hucksters and whores. It is a place anyone can enter, anonymously or not, and for free. Travel at your own risk! But anyone who wishes can decide to leave this bazaar for the security of the bank or the government office—or, if you have enough money, the limousine, the Sky Club, the platinum concierge. You will always have to give something up. If you want utter and absolute privacy, you will have to pay for it—or know the right people, who will give you access to their hidden darknets. For some services, you may decide to trade your privacy and anonymity for security. Depending on circumstance and desire, people will range among these worlds.

James W. Hall, thiller writer and Professor of Literature, defends the American bestseller in a WSJ column:

At this point in my life and career, I simply can't understand or abide literary snobbery. How can anyone who loves books not take heart in seeing so many new readers huddled up with a novel? Whether it’s "Harry Potter," "The Hunger Games" or "Infinite Jest"—does it really matter? These days, when reading fiction seems like an endangered activity, why should we begrudge the success of any book, especially one that stirs such passion with younger readers?

It's admirable that Hall is sticking up for popular fiction, and I love gripping thillers. But let us remember literary authors are often painfully poor, and devote their lives to articulating (often dark) truths about themselves and us. Poets have dismally short lifespans and high rates of depression.

Recently, The Atlantic published a graph showing that reading is actually at an all time high.

Hall is the author of Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers. From the synopsis:

[...] in this entertaining, revelatory book, he reveals how bestsellers work, using twelve twentieth-century blockbusters as case studies—including The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Jaws. [...] Hall identifies the common features of mega-bestsellers. Including fascinating and little-known facts about some of the most beloved books of the last century, Hit Lit is a must-read for fiction lovers and aspiring writers alike, and makes us think anew about why we love the books we love.

The Government Digital Service have just released a list of their 10 design principles. GDS are the guys behind GOV.UK (visit this now), an overhaul of the UK Government's websites.

The principles include:

The design process must start with identifying and thinking about real user needs. We should design around those—not around the way the 'official process' is at the moment. We must understand those needs thoroughly—interrogating data, not just making assumptions—and we should remember that what users ask for is not always what they need.

Accessible design is good design. We should build a product that’s as inclusive, legible and readable as possible.

Wherever possible we should use the same language and the same design patterns—this helps people get familiar with our services.

And case studies like:

This VAT page is a good example of a design that results from thinking about user needs. Most people will arrive at this page after a search for VAT rates. The answer most people are after is 20%, so we've made that the largest, clearest piece of information on the page. You can get the answer you are looking for incredibly quickly.

I absolutely love their work to-date: a structured approach; accessible designs, and crisp typography.

The team were founded in 2010, and asked to revamp the UK Government's digital operations in response to Martha Lane Fox's strategic review of the Government's current portal, Directgov. In the report, Fox recommended moving the Government's many websites under a single domain:

Ultimately it makes sense to the user for all Government digital services to reside under a single brand. The user should not have to navigate the departmental structure of Government before finding the service or content what they need. On the web, this implies the adoption of a single Internet domain for central government. No10 feel it is preferable to go from 750 top level website domains (e.g., www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk) to a single top level website domain for all of central government. I agree with the thrust of this although I do not underestimate the size of the challenge to achieve it.

Although, the GDS works on a number of projects, GOV.UK is the linchpin. The team summarised the project's aim in a blog post in January:

This is our first big platform. It aims to deliver simpler, clearer, faster services for users and savings and innovation for government, all on a single domain.

Many, but not all, of the same needs met, but with a product that is redesigned, rewritten and rethought to offer a simpler, clearer, more consistent design, properly managed search and a user-focused service experience.

Scientific American have posted the first in a series of articles on the Needham Question. Its namesake, Joseph Needham, observed that through the 1st and 17th centuries Chinese science and technology flourished. Its inventions included paper, the printing press, the magnetic compass, and gunpowder. But, then, quite inexplicably, progress stopped.

In The Grand Titration, Needham asks:

Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West at the time of Galileo? This is the most obvious question which many have asked but few have answered.

In the column, Gorelik extends the problem:

Most important is not why Europe was the first to launch the modern physics—somebody has to be the first—but why for so long nobody joined the modern physics beyond Europe. European culture borrowed important innovations from China, India, and Islamic world like paper, Hindu-Arabic numerals, and algebra. However the greatest Western innovation of the modern physics did not transfer South-East for centuries.

The traditional answer is twofold. Firstly, Chinese cultural and religious values tripped-up development. Wisegeek summarises this nicely:

[...] the answer had to do most with the way Confucianism and Taoism promoted a way of life incompatible with huge scientific advances. Emphasis on wholeness in community thinking and respect to elders meant that children and even college students could not question teachers. A desire to maintain strong cultural identity discouraged new developments in favor of keeping a traditional way of doing things. To Needham, China’s culture and its philosophy and religion just was not interested in the high paced dramatic ahege of discovery in the West.

Secondly, early capitalism in the West encouraged competition and individualism, which were conducive to experimentation and inventiveness. And, a robust capitalist infrastructure meant that the West could coordinate large-scale scientific and industrial projects. Timur Kuran writes:

The regions that failed to keep up with Europe could not match the West's economic infrastructure. Most important, they failed to develop institutions for pooling labor and capital on a large scale and to develop sustainable organizations capable of reallocating resources efficiently. In the Middle East, religion, and culture more broadly, mattered, but not for the cosmological reasons that Needham might have thought. Rather than Islam's supposed conservatism, lack of curiosity about the natural world, or unwillingness to learn from foreigners, it was Islam's inheritance and marriage rules that created the stumbling block. These rules fragmented capital, blocking the establishment of large and durable private enterprises. Meanwhile, in South Asia, Hinduism hindered large-scale, impersonal cooperation by encouraging families to hold capital within family enterprises.

Otherwise, Simon Winchester has a video lecture online. There's a snippet below:

And, BBC Radio 4 hosted a discussion on the question that is available for listening.

Addition: A number of alternative explanations have been offered. Nathan Sivin asserts that China only ever demonstrated technological success, and not scientific success. Mark Elvin claims that explosive Chinese population growth in the 17th Century stretched the country to breaking point, meaning it did not have the resources to sponsor an industrial revolution. And, finally, Roger Hart picks out two further explanations:

Alfred Bloom asserted that the Chinese language had inhibited the ability of the Chinese to think theoretically. Robert Hartwell argued that the major impediment was the absence of the formal logical system embodied in Euclidean geometry.