Scientific Breakthroughs Require Hard Work, Not Epiphanies

In reality, Mr. Hawking had been inspired not by glowing embers, but by the work of two Russian physicists.

According to their theory, rotating black holes would give off energy, slowing their rotation until they eventually stopped. To investigate this, Mr. Hawking had to perform difficult mathematical calculations that carefully combined the relevant elements of quantum theory and Einstein’s theory of gravity..

.. Mr. Hawking’s calculations showed, to his “surprise and annoyance,” that stationary black holes also leak.

To a physicist that was a shocking result, as it contradicted the idea that black holes devour matter and energy, but never regurgitate it. To Mr. Hawking, it was especially dismaying, for it lent support to a Princeton physicist’s theory about black hole entropy that he had great disdain for.

So Mr. Hawking attacked his own work, trying to poke holes in it. In the end, after months of calculations, he was forced to accept that his conclusion was correct, and it changed the way physicists think about black holes.

.. the negative effects of today’s ubiquitous media “include a need for instant gratification.” The Darwin, Newton and Hawking of the myths received that instant gratification. The real scientists did not, and real people seldom do.

An activist’s controversial crusade against genetically modified crops.

For her part, Shiva insists that the only acceptable path is to return to the principles and practices of an earlier era. “Fertilizer should never have been allowed in agriculture,” she said in a 2011 speech. “I think it’s time to ban it. It’s a weapon of mass destruction. Its use is like war, because it came from war.”

.. “If you look at the graph of the growth of G.M.O.s, the growth of application of glyphosate and autism, it’s literally a one-to-one correspondence. And you could make that graph for kidney failure, you could make that graph for diabetes, you could make that graph even for Alzheimer’s.”

.. Shiva had committed a common, but dangerous, fallacy: confusing a correlation with causation. (It turns out, for example, that the growth in sales of organic produce in the past decade matches the rise of autism, almost exactly. For that matter, so does the rise in sales of high-definition televisions, as well as the number of Americans who commute to work every day by bicycle.)

.. A week earlier, a local agricultural inspector told me, he had seen a cotton farmer on an elephant and waved to him. The man did not respond, however, because he was too busy talking on his cell phone.

..“When you call somebody a fraud, that suggests the person knows she is lying,” Mark Lynas told me on the phone recently. “I don’t think Vandana Shiva necessarily knows that. But she is blinded by her ideology and her political beliefs. That is why she is so effective and so dangerous.”

.. Grant told me that, in 2002, he had commissioned a study to explore the idea of changing the company’s name. “It would have cost twenty-five million dollars,” he said. “At the time, that seemed like a waste of money.” He paused for a moment. “It was my call, and it was a big mistake.”

.. He added that the impact of diseases like the fungus black sigatoka, the parasitic weed striga, and the newly identified syndrome maize lethal necrosis—all of which attack Africa’s most important crops—are “in many instances every bit as deadly as H.I.V. and TB.”

Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links

Google’s search engine currently uses the number of incoming links to a web page as a proxy for quality, determining where it appears in search results. So pages that many other sites link to are ranked higher. This system has brought us the search engine as we know it today, but the downside is that websites full of misinformation can rise up the rankings, if enough people link to them.

A Google research team is adapting that model to measure the trustworthiness of a page, rather than its reputation across the web. Instead of counting incoming links, the system – which is not yet live – counts the number of incorrect facts within a page.