"We live in a semi-barbaric age where science is probing the finest details of matter, space and time—but many of the discoveries, paid for by taxes levied on the hard-working poor, are snatched, hidden, and sold by profiteers."
I agree with his sentiment, but his wording is rather offensive to barbarians. Profiteering is enabled by the fine civilisational invention called "intellectual property".
the deadpan "gunther eigen" joke got me :) i thought it was going to be a great new addition to the list of "things that sound like descriptive names but were actually named after people" (e.g. google's "page rank") but it was just the author pulling our legs.
I used to be a huge fan of John Baez when I was an aspiring theoretical physicist and into category theory. His weekly finds in mathematical physics column was my HN before HN.
The high level idea of reducing the cost per molecule of breaking those hydrogen bonds by having whole groups of molecules evaporate makes sense to me.
Not completely related, but I think about the fundamental physics of water a lot, primarily when referencing the chaotic nature of reality.
Do we have a mathematical model to predict the properties of water (or other chemical compounds)? How can we predict a chemical mixture is wet? Can it ever be known or is the computation complexity such that it is impossible to calculate inside a computer?
Questions that I transpose onto understanding consciousness ...
"We live in a semi-barbaric age where science is probing the finest details of matter, space and time—but many of the discoveries, paid for by taxes levied on the hard-working poor, are snatched, hidden, and sold by profiteers."