Identifying a gene, working out what it did and then modifying it to do something else, or do something better, was a miraculous enough ability, acquired a bit over a decade ago, and it kept researchers and ethicists awake wondering what the consequences of this work would be for humanity and the planet. If that doesn’t mean much, perhaps the acronym will: CRISPR allows us to cut and paste genetic information. She was the scientist who directed and led the effort to harness the genome-editing systems that occur naturally in bacteria. With three years’ hindsight, we can safely say that “monster” doesn’t even begin to describe the scale and enormity of Doudna’s scientific achievement. “I began to feel a bit like Doctor Frankenstein,” writes Jennifer Doudna, in a book that our reviewer Adam Rutherford likened to James Watson’s classic DNA discovery story The Double Helix. The Bodley Head A Crack in Creation: The new power to control evolution Champions say he’s got quantum itself on the run. It satisfies no one – but who will cast the first stone? Critics say Smolin is tilting at windmills. Roger Penrose and Gerard ‘t Hooft can’t stand it. So did Erwin Schrödinger, whose collapsing wave functions gifted us that notorious undead cat metaphor. So did Louis de Broglie, who first predicted the wave-like aspects of matter. In falling in love with our mathematics, we have come adrift from the real.Įinstein hated quantum theory. Theory should offer a reasonable explanation of how the world works, not replace it with a solipsistic mathematical theory, however ornate. Smolin declared war on string theorists, in particular, in 2006 with The Trouble With Physics, and there’s rigor, as well as sincerity, to his ongoing critique. And they don’t even explain observable reality. Like the small boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, delights in pointing out that the emperors of contemporary quantum physics wear surprisingly few intellectual clothes.
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