Science and Technology

Physics pervades our lives, not just in the experiences of gravity, momentum, heat and cold that our ancestors would have felt but with the engines, electricity, communications and computing that are now taken for granted. The laws of physics have been elucidated by a group of people unknown for much of human history - scientists - and this group has been largely, but not entirely, male, the balance changing slowly throughout the last century. Women are still under-represented in physics, research, teaching, and industry, relative to their proportion in the general population - that is beyond...

On 8 October, a scientists’ panel convened by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after surveying more than 6,000 scientific studies, reported that the world is on course for catastrophic warming by the end of the century, due to carbon emissions. And this same week the first UK site for “horizontal fracking” looks set to start in Lancashire. “Fracking” pumps pressurised liquid deep underground to fracture rock, releasing natural gas. “Horizontal fracking” also drills sideways, accessing larger underground areas. Globally, fracking puts more fossil fuels into circulation; is...

On 19 April 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann ingested a small dose of a chemical he had synthesised and experienced the world’s first LSD trip. His experience ushered in two decades of experimentation and clinical research into psychedelic drugs until it was cut short by prohibition in 1970. 75 years on, the USA seems poised to start licensing psychedelics for the treatment of mental illness. This may not only lead to a huge breakthrough in psychiatry but may also mean that we are approaching a time when human beings are once again free to take whatever mind-altering substances they fancy...

In the discussions prompted by centenary of the first workers’ government, little has been said about the Bolsheviks and their science policies. This series of articles about Marxism, the Bolsheviks, Stalin, and science draws, amongst other sources, on Simon Ings’ recent book Stalin and the Scientists,1 Douglas R Weiner’s book Models of Nature,2 and Loren R Graham’s Lysenko’s Ghost.3 “No previous government in history was so openly and energetically in favor of science. …[it] saw the natural sciences as the answer to both the spiritual and physical problems of Russia” (Graham quoted).1 “An...

A recent article by Gavin Evans in the Guardian has drawn attention to a resurgence in the idea that race and intelligence are linked.1 These terms, though commonly used, are quite difficult to define…and for good reason. (see separate boxes) In the 19th century, despite the religious tradition that “God… hath made of one blood all nations of men,” it was axiomatic that there were different races with different abilities. Since European powers were dominant, “Caucasoid” (white) peoples were held superior. Other races were divided into Mongoloid (yellow), Malay (brown), American (red), and...

The scandal surrounding how Facebook shared with a Cambridge psychologist, and his firm (Global Science Research) the personal information of 50 million users, without their explicit consent, has revealed a gruesome network of right-wing academic, political and business connections. GSR’s data, mined in 2014, was sold on to the data analytics company Cambridge Analytica (CA). The company is partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports right wing causes, including Brexit. Its director and CEO is Alexander James Ashburner Nix. CA is affiliated to the...

We’re here because we’re here Les Hearn wrote this review of a Brief History of Time in 1989 for Socialist Organiser. We reprint it as a tribute to Stephen Hawking who died on 14 March. In 1963, when he was a student, Stephen Hawking was told he had motor neurone disease and had possibly two years to live. Now, confined to a wheelchair, unable to move, breathing through a hole in his windpipe, communicating by computer and voice synthesiser, he is one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists. It cannot have been easy for Hawking to build his career, even with the devoted help of his...

False news spreads on Twitter much faster than truth. Researchers at MIT have published the results of research into 126,000 fact-checkable stories tweeted or retweeted between 2006 and 2017 (bit.ly/false-t). True stories rarely reached more than 1000 people through retweeting; the top 1% of false-news tweet-cascades got to 10,000 or more. True reports took six times as long as falsehoods to reach 15,000 people. Falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than truths. This was not because false-news tweeters were generally more active than truth-tweeters. On the contrary, they were less...

Some political tides are flowing our way a bit, but not as much as we might hope. Google's latest figures from their web search engine, released in December 2017, show that the number of people taking to the web to find out more about "socialism" is increasing in Britain, though modestly. The worldwide picture is less encouraging. It shows spikes after the economic crash in 2008-9, and in early 2016, with publicity for Sanders and Corbyn, but no increasing trend. Searches for the term "capitalism" - inquiries by people who have probably realised, to one degree or another, that they live in a...

Good news! The ozone hole is shrinking at last, a rare success for collective action in response to scientific evidence.1 Unfortunately, it will take until 2050 to return to its 1980 levels. This is because the chemicals largely responsible for its depletion are very stable and those already released will persist in the atmosphere until then, even if no more emissions take place. It’s 30 years since the signing of the Montreal Protocol which aimed to tackle the problem of the accelerating destruction of the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Ozone in the stratosphere absorbs most of...