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Recalling Freeman Dyson + Unsolved decay + Naive realism + Flow chemistry + Solvents

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Chemists use supercomputers to understand solvents
https://phys.org/news/2021-03-chemists-s...vents.html

To understand the fundamental properties of an industrial solvent, chemists with the University of Cincinnati turned to a supercomputer.


Flow chemistry surges forward
https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/...58.article

The long-discussed technique could help make pharma manufacturing more distributed, finds Andy Extance, and create opportunities for chemists with the right skills.


I'm agonizing over my naive realism (John Horgan)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...e-realism/

The philosophical position that the world has an objective, physical existence may be dubious, but we need it to address our very real problems.


Remembering Freeman Dyson, legendary scientist and rebel with a cause
https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/21074

EXCERPT: . . . Though he claimed to be “much more of a conformist,” it is hard to ignore the streak of rebellion in Freeman Dyson. His distinct puzzle-solving approach to research directly counters the conventional paradigm of how scientists work and advance in their fields.

More explicitly, Dyson has, in many of his popular science books, posited rebellion as central to the ability of science to better both society and science itself. In his collection of essays, The Scientist as Rebel, Dyson advises parents “to introduce our children to science today as a rebellion against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.” Not only is rebellion a valuable driving force behind the role of science within society, Dyson asserts that rebellion is vital within science as a catalyst for new knowledge production. Whether ironic or fitting, it was his role as a scientific contrarian that ultimately landed Dyson in much publicised controversy in the final years of his life.

In 2005, Dyson began publicly stating his misgivings about whether climate change was a pressing issue, announcing that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” While agreeing that there were rising atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels caused by human activity, Dyson believed warming to be local, not global, and doubted the severity of climate change’s impact on humans and the biosphere. His convictions about climate change were grounded in his own climate models and observations of a deficiency in convincing data.

Going against consensus did not bother him in the slightest. Dyson believed that the deeper discord was between those who allege that “any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil” and those who hold that conserving the biosphere is less important than fighting other evils such as war and poverty. In other words, Dyson simply did not see enough evidence to convince him that climate change was a significant enough problem to divert resources from more pressing issues.

Dyson has said that he did not want his legacy to be defined by his views on climate change. For both his sake and the sake of future generations of scientists, I hope for this as well. While Dyson’s dissension from climate change orthodoxy is significant and perhaps even dangerous given his stature, it is just as dangerous to allow the public disavowal of such an eminent scientist for the singular reason that he, rightly or wrongly, spoke against a certain consensus. It is important to recognise that Dyson’s reservations about climate change came from a lifetime of experience.

Despite the unorthodoxy of his position on climate change, Dyson was a good scientist and, like any good scientist, asked hard questions. As a good scientist, Dyson acknowledged that he was just as likely to be a lonely prophet as he was dead wrong, and, as a good scientist, he did not care. Science needs its contrarians and rebels to generate the diversity of ideas required for scientific progress. Ultimately, as long as science is anchored by social responsibility, it is the direction in which science progresses and the fruits it bears along the way that matter... (MORE - details)

RELATED: Heretical thoughts about science and society (Dyson, Aug 2007)


Could an unexplained decay at the LHC demolish the Standard Model?
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/as...c8ded9f68d

INTRO: One of the greatest puzzles in all of physics is that the laws of nature — as we know them, at least — do a remarkably good job of explaining what matter is and how all the different particles interact with one another.

And yet, if these only obey the rules that we know, there’s no way to explain why the Universe is so predominantly made up of matter, rather than antimatter. The only interaction we know of that shows any difference at all between particles and their antiparticle counterparts are the weak interactions, and that difference isn’t nearly enough to explain the Universe we observe.

But recently, a new set of experiments have started to show a significant difference between the weak decays of rare particles created at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and what our leading theories would have expected. Could this be an enormous clue towards going beyond the Standard Model? That’s what Rob Krol wants to know, writing in to ask:

“I want know more about the last announcement from the LHCb [collaboration] about CP Violating asymmetry in a charged B meson decay. What [does] this mean and/or this is a hint for new physics beyond the Standard Model??”

This is right at the cutting edge of the frontiers of experimental particle physics, so let’s bring you up to speed on what this new discovery is all about, and then let’s talk about what it might mean... (MORE)
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