Cornell University

3 posts

Freeman Dyson's PhD

3 min read
Op-eds Science Cornell University doctorate Freeman Dyson Institute for Advanced Study Julian Schwinger Nobel Prize PhD privilege quantum electrodynamics Richard Feynman scientific publishing scientific research Vannevar Bush Shin'ichiro Tomonaga

The physicist, thinker and writer Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28, 2020, at the age of 96. I wrote his obituary for The Wire Science; excerpt: The 1965 Nobel Prize for the development of [qu…

The not-so-obvious obvious

4 min read
Scicomm Science Brian Wansink Cornell University data torturing Higgs boson Ig Nobel Prizes incremental research Large Hadron Collider Marc Abrahams modelling ozone p-hacking Ronald H Coase scientific research statistical significance University of Exeter

If your job requires you to pore through a dozen or two scientific papers every month – as mine does – you'll start to notice a few every now and then couching a somewhat well-known fact in study-…