Footnote Physicist

 by Steven Gussman           Universities have transitioned to (and in fact, created) woke ideology over the past ten years. Many have noted that Jews are considered a form of, "white oppressor," in the Marxist “intersectionality” table which leftists use to figure out who, "gets to win," a given argument. This is because many western Jews are fair skinned (whereas western Muslims are typically darker skinned), Jews are relatively successful in the West, and because leftists graph their Marxist view of Good-Palestine versus evil-Israel onto their views of Jews, generally. Nevertheless, in the wake of Hamas' October 7 th terror attack on Israel, many of us were shocked by the outpouring of support for Palestine, and even Hamas (and hatred towards U.S. ally, Israel), in Western cities, campuses, and among friends and acquaintances in our lives. All of this is likely the result of a mix of immigration policy and the ascension of the aforementioned...

          “Pseudoscience is easier to contrive than science, because distracting confrontations with reality           —where we cannot control the outcome of the comparison—are more readily avoided.  The           standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed.”           – Carl Sagan I PSEUDO-SCIENCE           Pseudo-science has the appearance of science, especially to the layperson, but none of the substance.  Precisely because the sciences have had so much success at explaining the cosmos, its philosophical competitors, and mere hucksters and salesman, have attempted to insert a patina of scientific language into their claims in the hopes that a patina of its convincing power will rub off.   Pseudo-science comes in three distinct flavors: the continued belief in a hypothesis, pos...

          “The universe revealed by the relentless error-correcting mechanism of science was to him           infinitely preferable to the untested assumptions of traditional belief.  For Carl, the 'spiritual' had to           be rooted in natural reality.  He cherished those ideas about the cosmos that remained after the           most rigorous experiment and observation.  Scientific insight made him feel something, a soaring           sensation, a recognition that he could only compare to falling in love.”           – Ann Druyan I           “Real peer review is what happens after you've passed the bull-shit thing called, 'peer review.'”           – Eric Weinstein II           “Science i...

          “But is groupthink the best way to create really new science?  Risking heresy, I hereby dissent.  I           believe the creative process usually unfolds in a very different way.  It arises and for a while           germinates in a solitary brain.  It commences as an idea and, equally important, the ambition of a           single person who is prepared and strongly motivated to make discoveries in one domain of           science or another.  The successful innovator is favored by a fortunate combination of talent and           circumstance, and is socially conditioned by family, friends, teachers, and mentors and by stories           of great scientists and their discoveries.  He (or she) is sometimes driven, I will dare to suggest,...