Water is H₂O. Few scientific formulas look more familiar, more compact, or more final. Two atoms of hydrogen, one of oxygen: the phrase seems to say what water really is beneath the shifting appearances of ice, vapour, rain, rivers and the liquid in a glass. Yet that little subscript was not easy to earn. By […]
By 1800, water had already changed once. It was no longer one of nature’s simple terms, but a compound of hydrogen and oxygen (see Is Water H₂O? (1) From Element to Compound). The new chemistry had a powerful account of that change. What it still wanted was a more direct experiment: water itself, giving up […]
Take a walk in London’s Trafalgar Square this summer and wilting under the heat will be all sorts of body sizes, some tall, some short: a real mix of sizes. Picking just two from the crowd to represent the whole human species would be a tall order. But that is exactly what we do when […]
Take a glass of water. Nothing about it seems to ask for a theory. It has no colour worth naming, no dramatic smell, no visible architecture. It runs, freezes, boils, evaporates, dissolves, erodes, circulates and nourishes. It belongs to weather, geology, physiology, cooking and plumbing before it belongs to chemistry. Then science gives us the […]
Artificial Intelligence • Mathematics • Philosophy of science
Author: Melissa Lee, Senior Lecturer, School of Mathematics, Monash University Some weeks ago, artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced ten advances in mathematics and computer science made with their as-yet unreleased model Astra. The discoveries cover a wide range of mathematical fields, including geometry, cryptography and coding theory. These ten are just the latest in a […]
Authors: Kai Riemer, Professor of Information Technology and Organisation, University of Sydney and Sandra Peter, Director of Sydney Executive Plus, Business School, University of Sydney “We are now, like, in the singularity”. These are the words of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaking on the Relentless podcast on July 25. He added: “I’ve been waiting […]
Authors: María-Luisa Chas-Amil, Catedrática de Economía Aplicada, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela and Julia María Touza, Professor of Environmental Economics, University of York As the flames advanced towards the village of Bédar, in the Almería province of Andalusia, the mayor gave a desperate order to ring the church bells to warn residents. It was not […]
Author: Marta Sánchez López, Postdoctoral researcher at Research Centre for Basque Language and Texts (CNRS-IKER) – Université Bordeaux Montaigne. She also collaborates with the The Bilingual Mind Research Group (Gogo Elebiduna), University of the Basque Country. In our daily life, we perceive many different events around us with different participants involved, such as a woman […]
A few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, many scientific institutions felt the need to issue public statements against that war. At the time, I was president of the Commission for the History of Physics within the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and, as such, I took part […]
Author: José Luis Granados Mateo is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (EHU) and a member of the Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (iHPS) research group. His work focuses on history and philosophy of science, science and values, and the epistemology of scientific practices. A […]