ToK Essays Nov 2024

The human mind is designed to experience the world a certain way, and so it leads us to biases, prejudices, and heuristics. Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method, identified four of the most common of these, 400 years before our modern idea of "cognitive biases."

Crystal healing continues to undergo a resurgence in popularity, but when put to the test, believers can’t tell the difference between a real crystal or a fake

An eminent astrophysicist argues that signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life have appeared in our skies. What’s the evidence for his extraordinary claim?

The Gaia hypothesis states that our biosphere is evolving. Once sceptical, some prominent biologists are beginning to agree

We’ll never have a final answer on whether Pluto is a planet.

The theories we have to describe the nature of the Universe are completely incompatible. Enter an eccentric Polish physicist with a possible solution to the biggest of conundrums

In the old days, determining an art forgery was mostly a matter of narrative deduction, a la Sherlock Holmes. Open Culture, openculture.com

Experts within a discipline constantly challenge and question each others’ knowledge. It’s part of the very process of reaching consensus in disciplines like Climate Science, for example. We can sometimes identify a ‘line’ – if not always a ‘clear’ one – between those who dispute and those who accept th

How fast is our universe is expanding? Scientists zeroed in on a new estimate of the local expansion rate and found that it doesn't square up with previously-predicted rates of expansion in the early universe, right after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.This is significant because the expansio