Throughout tradition, stories have offered people two main benefits: entertainment and wisdom. Stories in the world of science fiction (SF) are no different. SF allows us to explore the most ambitious of our “what if?” questions and ponder on a universe much larger than ourselves. In terms of wisdom, however…

Seldom in nature do isolated agents effect change. At the same time, individual perturbations in nature, through the chaotic twists and turns of their causal chains, may butterfly into enormous changes in fate. Herein lies a dichotomy: individual agents in isolation can achieve nothing, but individual actions in a group…

Perhaps more than any other science, astronomy relies on the wonder of human imagination. For the average individual, astronomical discoveries do not shape their lives in the way medicines and technologies do, and so it comes as no surprise that the pursuit of such knowledge is riddled with controversy. One…

During my time in LB492, I found the epistemological themes of how we arrive at certain knowledge to be very fascinating for me. As we begin working on the mid-semester essay, there are three branches of this theme that I think would be interesting for me to focus on: What…

In the pursuit of objectivity, many times the subject of a scientific investigation is designed to be interchangeable. If we are running a clinical trial, we do not want our exact choice of patient cohort to significantly influence our results. In the race for COVID treatments, the heroes of the…

Science prides itself on the virtues of objectivity, attempting to detach scientist from conclusion in the pursuit of “truth.” Juxtaposed to this is the cultural and historical virtue of heroism, which attempts to unite the scientist with their discovery in a feat of public enchantment. In her piece on the…

The US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) announced on July 6th of this year that nonimmigrant students would not be permitted to stay in the United States if they take a fully online course load. On the surface, there seems to be some logic in this idea. Under the premise…

Every community has a certain “culture” associated with it, a term Traweek formally defines as “a group’s shared set of meanings, its implicit and explicit messages, encoded in social action, about how to interpret experience.” (Traweek, 7–8). In her book, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists, Traweek…

High impact articles are appearing left and right that share one common goal: Space exploration. Take this article published in the Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer which looks at the effect of radiative heating (as opposed to convective heating) on entry vehicles to Mars. The article describes how the…