Articles to 2018-02-16

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First the link to this week's complete list as HTML and as PDF.

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Deming reminded me of the beautiful science fiction story by Hecht in nature 453 (2008), 562 .

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A lot of basic, ground-breaking science used to be made by slow deliberate thinkers who kept at it regardless of short term goals. There definitely was and is a place and need for people like that. Unfortunately our current system of temporary contracts and fast results drives these people out of academia. Quiet and steady patent office jobs offering the opportunity of pursuing new and independent thoughts also are a thing of the past in our time of rushing after the highest possible efficiency. We need people like Nobeli and have to retain places for them in academia or we shall all be suffering the loss.

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I know it's a total crack pot theory and supported by nothing but a gut feeling – and a voluminous gut with more flab than muscle at that. But I have always been convinced that neither dark matter nor dark energy exist. The expansion of the universe proceeds at a uniform speed driven by the time dimension. It neither decelerates, as demanded by gravity, nor accelerates due to a mysterious energy introduced to explain the lack of deceleration. It is no coincidence that measurement precision has never sufficed to decide between a closed, elliptic and an open, hyperbolic cosmology but always straddled the parabolic border between them. The formalism of Special Relativity is pure trigonometry and allows representation by a very simple and easy geometric modeling. If nothing else, at least Ockham's Razor tends to agree with me and now Boylan-Kolchin and Müller have come up with one more pointer in the same direction.

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Enrico Fermi may well have dabbled in a little physics now and then, but his most important contribution deserving first rank in any biography were his contributions to the feminist world view, at least according to Formato, that is. If you want the biography by Schwartz to be done justice, then refer to Catherine Westfall's review in nature 552 (2017), 28–29 .

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