News Currents for January 20

This week, I have come across a number of interesting stories that touch on the boundaries of science’s ability to answer significant questions.

The New York Times Magazine has a tremendous story on a double-amputee runner from South Africa, Oscar Pistorius, who has run the 400 meters in times that are respectable for Olympic-level sprinters. The science questions in this piece are about the quality of his prostheses and if they provide him with an unfair advantage in competition. Scientists disagree and some think he should be prohibited from competition.

The next topic would seem pretty easy. The question is: “What is nothing?” And it’s discussed by Robert Wright, the editor in chief of bloggingheads.tv (among other things), and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State (and formerly of my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University). They spend so much time trying to agree on how they are using words to describe space and nothingness that they have trouble getting to talk about the beginning of the universe.

Another story on big cosmic questions discusses the contribution of a field (sub-field?) I had previously not come across, the philosophy of physics. Check out this interview from The Atlantic .

These stories highlight something that I love about science. The answers to all of the questions brought up in these links are open to interpretation. What happened before the Big Bang? What can a philosopher bring to questions that are ostensibly physics or cosmology? Can an amputee have an unfair advantage in a footrace? What are the most important factors in a runner’s success?

Scientists can answer a multitude of questions, but often, in order to provide a good answer, they must first answer many, many smaller questions to actually accumulate the knowledge required to address the question that first piqued someone’s curiosity.