Skeptophilia

Today's post is about a pair of new scientific papers that have the potential to shake up the world of cosmology in a big way, but first...

In my Critical Thinking classes, I did a unit on statistics and data, and how you tell if a measurement is worth paying attention to.  One o...

I've always loved Robert Frost's razor-sharp poem, written in 1920, called "Fire and Ice": Some say the world will end in ...

While our knowledge of the origin of the universe has grown tremendously in the past hundred years, there are still plenty of cosmological m...

When I was an undergraduate, I sang in the University of Louisiana Choir in a production of Franz Josef Haydn's spectacular choral work ...

One of the weirder claims of modern physics, which I first ran into when I was reading about string theory a few years ago, is that the univ...

The idea of Intelligent Design is pretty flimsy, at least when it comes to biology.  The argument boils down to something the ID proponents ...

In Douglas Adams's brilliant book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , a pair of alien races, the Vl'Hurg and the G'gugvu...

One of the hallmarks of science is its falsifiability.  Models should generate predictions that are testable, allowing you to see if they co...