Forget war, forget climate change, recessions, pandemics. Today we'll talk about a real crisis. The decrease of testosterone levels. Just look at all those headlines.

Quantum mechanics is weird - I am sure you've read that somewhere. And why is it weird? Oh, it's because it's got that "spooky action at a distance", doesn't it? Einstein said that. Yes, that guy again. But what is spooky at a distance?

Space, the way we experience it, has three dimensions. Left-right, forward backward, and up-down. But why three? Why not 7? Or 26? The answer is: No one knows. But if no one knows why space has three dimensions, could it be that it actually has more? Just that we haven’t noticed for some reason? That’s what we will talk about today.

Last week I came across a particularly bombastically nonsensical claim that I want to debunk for you. The claim is that the black hole information loss problem is “nearing its end”. So today I am here to explain why the black hole information loss problem is not only unsolved but will remain unsolved because it’s for all practical purposes unsolvable.

Among the more peculiar side-effects of publishing a book are the many people who suddenly recall we once met. There are weird fellows who write to say they mulled ten years over a single sentence I once spoke with them.

A week or so ago, a list of perverse incentives in academia made rounds. It offers examples like “rewarding an increased number of citations” that -- instead of encouraging work of high quality and impact -- results in inflated citation lists, an academic tit-for-tat which has become standard practice. 

When Senator Rand Paul last year proposed that non-experts participate in review panels which award competitive research grants, my first reaction was to laugh. I have reviewed my share of research proposals, and I can tell you that without experience in the respective discipline you can’t even judge whether the proposal is feasible, not to mention promising.

I wish people would stop insisting they have free will. It's terribly annoying. Insisting that free will exists is bad science, like insisting that horoscopes tell you something about the future -- it's not compatible with our knowledge about nature.