Cargo Cult Science
Richard Feynman named the failure mode in 1974. The replication crisis proved him right. The problem isn’t bad scientists — it’s incentive systems that make rigorous science economically irrational.
The Philosopher Who Ate at Diners: How Eric Hoffer’s Longshoreman Logic Maps Perfectly onto the Counter Stool Economy
Eric Hoffer wrote The True Believer on the San Francisco docks. He would have understood the diner immediately — the counter as the great leveler.
The Neutron Star’s Testimony: How a Collision 130 Million Light-Years Away Revealed Where Gold Comes From
Every gold ring, every coin, every crown — forged in a kilonova so violent it bent spacetime. We learned this in 2017. What does ownership mean after that knowledge?
To Orbit a Dead God: The Psychological Weight of Sending Cassini Deliberately Into Saturn’s Atmosphere
On September 15, 2017, NASA engineers watched a spacecraft they had built and loved die on purpose. They had ordered its death. What does it mean to destroy something you made to protect life it could never intend to harm?
Occam’s Razor in the Age of String Theory: When Simplicity Fails in Theoretical Physics
Abstract Occam’s Razor — the principle that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity —…
The Confession of Light: What Gravitational Waves Force Us to Admit About the Fabric of Reality
On September 14, 2015, LIGO detected a chirp lasting a fifth of a second. A century of theorizing became unbearable certainty. What did it cost the people who heard it?
