The Named Thing

The talk's the thing

Scientists present talks all the time. The talk is one of the main tools of our trade. Some people give so many you wonder how they fit in experiments at all. Lab heads give seminars and conference speeches to sell their work to the world, and to attract the best people to work for them. Aspiring lab heads give job talks to sell themselves to potential employers. Nearly everyone gives talks so ...

The Impossible Thing

W hat is it?,” Sierra Rodriguez asked her older brother. “You’ll have to guess,” Billy answered. Sierra looked up at the object that was hanging —almost as if levitating —from two crisscrossed cables in the barn. “Does it y?” she asked. “Nope. It lights up.” “So you mean it’s just a light,” she said, glaring at her brother. “What’s so special about—” “It’s not just a light.” Billy began moving ...

The real thing.

Fifteen minutes into Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, the audience realizes it is seeing a play within a play, the reality of which will be expressed in a dimension yet to unfold. Dramatic license? Of course; and yet it is not far from what we experience in science. Whether because of or despite the fact that the molecular age is upon us, at times we succumb to the temptation to read universal re...

Doing the Right Thing

Do the right thing.

We study a model of opinion formation where the opinions in conflict are not equivalent. This is the case when the subject of the decision is to respect a norm or a law. In such scenarios, one of the possible behaviors is to abide by the norm and the other to ignore it. The evolution of the dynamics is implemented through an imitation mechanism, in which agents can change their opinions based o...