Science & Technology

In archaeology, new evidence and the resulting explanations have come to resemble the conclusions that Marxists reached long ago in explaining how dialectical materialism corresponds to the natural world.

This weekend has seen a massive cyberattack against large corporations and public institutions. Negligence on the part of governments and companies allowed hackers to encrypt data on hundreds of thousands of computers based on tools developed by US security NSA.

Since the 1930s a dominant trend has existed within the scientific community and popular science that explains quantum mechanics with all kinds of idealistic and mystical interpretations. Dominant within this school of idealism has been the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, which originated with academics such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg who were based in the Danish capital.

On June 23, 1905, Orville Wright became the first person to successfully fly a powered aircraft. Just 56 years later, in April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, when Vostok 1 made a successful orbit of the Earth. Flight, and later space travel, were viewed as an indication of humanity’s progress and ability to overcome even the most enormous of obstacles, in this case, the Earth’s gravitational pull. But the recent explosion of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares rocket on October 28, and the explosion of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo just a few days later seem to highlight the primary obstacle in the way of humanity’s development today: the private ownership of the means of production.

The various unsolved mysteries in physics described above are no secret. The scientific community is fully aware of the challenges they face. The search for the solution to these problems has yielded many candidates, none of which can yet claim victory. What is remarkable, however, is just how little the field of cosmology has advanced in the last few decades.

The other three main pillars of cosmology– quantum mechanics, the SMPP, and general relativity – are not without glaring problems. In most cases, these are of a more theoretical, dare it be said, philosophical nature.

Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have questioned the workings of the natural world around them and their own place in the Universe. Through a long process of investigation over millennia, mankind has built up an understanding of Nature and the wider cosmos. Each successive generation has expanded the horizon of our knowledge and in the process extended the boundary of the known Universe. From Ptolemy and Copernicus and through to the modern day, at every stage scientific discoveries have refined and redefined our picture of the Cosmos and our place within it.

A spoof Daily Mail front page is currently circulating on the internet, screaming that giant Islamic spiders are spreading Ebola in Britain and, what's more, at taxpayers’ expense. It won’t be long before we see life imitating art.

Americans’ dysfunctional relationship with food is regularly lamented or mocked in the media and in academia. What is never explained is the root cause of this dysfunction. Marxism explains that conditions determine consciousness. Your physical and social environment heavily influences the choices you make by limiting the very choices that are available to you.

Centuries of scientific research and investigation have helped to propel society forwards and improve the lives of millions. This strength of the scientific method and its ability to discover and innovate has been so great that it has created a mystical sense of infallibility surrounding science. But, as with all other areas of society, the senility and decay of capitalism is now being reflected in the question of science also, and many are starting to worry about the reliability of research.

Karl Marx has been decried by mainstream economists and news outlets as dead, irrelevant and/or outdated. A new study published by the world’s most reputed scholarly journal, Nature, once again shows that despite the hue and cry of naysayers and those who would revise history, his specter cannot be exorcised.

Quantum physics occupies a fascinating place at the cutting edge of modern scientific research. First developed in the early 20^th Century, quantum theory is allowing today’s scientists to plumb new depths when it comes to matter and motion. A new book, Quantum Social Science, by Andrei Khrennikov and Emmanuel Haven argues that applying the logic of quantum theory to social systems can take our understanding of human society to a whole new level.