Related papers: Global Warming: the Sacrificial Temptation
Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such…
According to the World Economic Forum, the diffusion of unsubstantiated rumors on online social media is one of the main threats for our society. The disintermediated paradigm of content production and consumption on online social media…
Unconstrained CO2 emission from fossil fuel burning has been the dominant cause of observed anthropogenic global warming. The amounts of "proven" and potential fossil fuel reserves are uncertain and debated. Regardless of the true values,…
Suspicions that the world might be some sort of a machine or algorithm existing ``in the mind'' of some symbolic number cruncher have lingered from antiquity. Although popular at times, the most radical forms of this idea never reached…
Both religion and science start with basic assumptions that cannot be proved but are taken on faith. Here I note that one basic assumption that is rather common in both enterprises is the assumption that in comparing different hypotheses…
Our Universe is a vast, tantalizing enigma - a mystery that has aroused humankind's innate curiosity for eons. Begging questions on alien lifeforms have been thus far unfruitful, even with the bounding advancements we have embarked upon in…
The mean surface temperature on Earth and other planets with atmospheres is determined by the radiative balance between the non-reflected incoming solar radiation and the outgoing long-wave black-body radiation from the atmosphere. The…
An interpretive phenomenological approach is adopted to investigate scientists' attitudes and practices related to hype in science communication. Twenty-four active quantum physicists participated in 5 focus groups. Through a…
Opinion dynamics have fascinated researchers for centuries. The ability of societies to learn as well as the emergence of irrational {\it herding} are equally evident. The simplest example is that of agents that have to determine a binary…
Contrary to claims about the irrelevance of philosophy for science, I argue that philosophy has had, and still has, far more influence on physics than is commonly assumed. I maintain that the current anti-philosophical ideology has had…
Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…
Why are we good? Why are we bad? Questions regarding the evolution of morality have spurred an astoundingly large interdisciplinary literature. Some significant subset of this body of work addresses questions regarding our moral psychology:…
In this report, a simple experimental system is shown, by which the temperature rise of global warming due to greenhouse gases can be demonstrated quantitatively. The system configuration is similar to that of the earth-atmosphere-space…
Inflation is considered as the best theory of the early universe by a very large fraction of cosmologists. However, the validity of a scientific model is not decided by counting the number of its supporters and, therefore, this dominance…
How does the climatic experience of previous generations affect today's attention to environmental questions? Using self-reported beliefs and environmental themes in folklore, we show empirically that the realized intensity of deviations…
Cognitive and psychological studies on morality have proposed underlying linguistic and semantic factors. However, laboratory experiments in the philosophical literature often lack the nuances and complexity of real life. This paper…
Causality is a seminal concept in science: Any research discipline, from sociology and medicine to physics and chemistry, aims at understanding the causes that could explain the correlations observed among some measured variables. While…
During the last three decades, there has been a growing realization among physicists and cosmologists that the relation between particle physics and cosmology may constitute yet another successful example of the unity of science. However,…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Global climate change is attracting widespread scientific, political, and public attention owing to the involvement of international initiatives such as the Paris Agreement and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We present a…