Jennifer Marohasy

‘IN open societies where both scientists and the general public are equipped with critical skills and the tools of inquiry, not least enabled by the information revolution provided through the Internet, the ethos of science as open, questioning, critical and anti-dogmatic should and can be defended also by the public at large. Efforts to make [...]

MODERN history suggests that democracy aligns, and progresses, with the expansion of civil liberties, including access by ordinary citizens to government information. But the new media reform bills tabled in [Australian] federal Parliament last week appear unashamedly about the introduction of an additional layer of bureaucracy unaccountable to the public or the judiciary. To address [...]

MICHAEL Crichton wrote the Oscar-winning science fiction adventure Jurassic Park. But screen writing was not his first career, he studied medicine at Harvard, and later in life became very concerned about environmentalism and science, and the difficulty of sorting fact from fiction. In a lecture to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September 2003 [...]

THERE is no doubt that many people are susceptible to the repetition of a single message. No matter how stupid the message, if enough people say it often enough, a large percentage of those who hear it will begin to believe it. That’s the basis of advertising and also propaganda: it’s how you make ideas [...]

Dear Friend, Despite that salutation, I can’t be found on Facebook nor can you follow me on Twitter, BUT you CAN read my book: Australian Universities: A Portrait of Decline which lays bare the corruption of our institutions of higher learning as a result of 20 years of rampant managerialism, baseless education theory and overt [...]

“When questioned, Jesus of Nazareth had this to say on the subject of the end of the world: ‘But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’ (Mark 13:32) We don’t seem to have improved on that forecast since and [...]

Matt Ridley began a recent lecture to the national academy of sciences in Scotland by suggesting it was easy to distinguish science from pseudoscience. He explained that: Astronomy is science; astrology is pseudoscience. Molecular biology is science; homeopathy is pseudoscience. Chemistry is science; alchemy is pseudoscience. But Ridley also reminded us that Sir Isaac Newton, [...]

IF the saying ‘it takes one to know one’ has any truth then the extraordinary attack by Cardinal George Pell on the science of anthropogenic global warming in a recent lecture given in Westminster Cathedral Hall, London, has special significance.   Not because the Cardinal is a scientist, but because he apparently recognizes a competing belief [...]

“THE very idea that science best expresses its authority through consensus statements is at odds with a vibrant scientific enterprise. Consensus is for textbooks; real science depends for its progress on continual challenges to the current state of always-imperfect knowledge. Science would provide better value to politics if it articulated the broadest set of plausible [...]

WE analyse the effect of gravity on the frequency of incident solar quantum/waves upon the surface, and on the quantum/waves emitted by the surface and the atmosphere.    This analysis shows that the IR quantum/waves emitted from the surface towards the atmosphere and the isotropic IR quantum/waves radiated by atmosphere lose energy by the effect of gravity, [...]