In Steven Pinker’s latest book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, the best-selling cognitive scientist comes out, perhaps unsurprisingly, in favor of rationality. Since the 1990s, Pinker has been a leading spokesman for a sort of ultra-sophisticated common sense. Rationality is his guide to how to think, a fun textbook version of Pinker’s popular Harvard class General Education 1066: Rationality. Thus, Rationality is more Pinker in his educator mode than in his polemicist mode (in contrast to his argumentative last book, Enlightenment Now). So, much of Rationality won’t be wholly novel to people who, say, had read the classic blogs of the early 2000s. But, as … Continue reading →
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Neil Ashcroft 1938-2021
By Daniel Garisto
Neil Ashcroft, a theorist who paved the way for high-temperature hydrogen superconductors and was renowned for his commitment to educating the next generation of physicists, died on March 15 in Ithaca. He was 82.
For his work, Ashcroft collected honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Bridgman Award for high pressure physics. In addition to his leadership positions, Ashcroft was an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He was a fellow of APS.
“He could well have shared a future Nobel Prize on high-temperature superconductivity,” said N. David Mermin, his longtime colleague at Cornell University. “That was really uniquely Neil s way of thinking about things I don t think anybody else had thought about what hydrogen would be like if the hydrogen nuclei were extremely dense.”
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