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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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First, a cultural fact: The NFL Draft can be seen for three solid days by every cable subscriber in America.   This is hours and hours of nothing but 30 seconds of reading out a name punctuated by 14.5 minutes of nothing - actually, brief bursts of activity separated by committee meetings sounds a lot like most football games, but it consumed an entire network a short while ago even though the sport may not even be played this fall.

How is that relevant on a science site?
So Stephen Hawking doesn't believe in Heaven.  This is apparently a big deal.   It's not that he is wrong, he is most likely right, though the nature of faith is belief in defiance of any evidence so that doesn't matter, the important question is why anyone cares.
 
If your advocacy group says Republicans are anti-science but then Democrats are also anti-science, it may instead be that your groups positions aren't really scientifically valid.  Yet conservation groups routinely say "let science be the guide" as long as 'the science' is advocacy papers they fund and write.    If you don't agree, you are accused of being against science.
You'd think if you were adjusted to the horrors of war you'd be immune to concerns about seeing a therapist but some with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can't bring themselves to deal with it face-to-face.
It's common practice among learned people that, the more educated the company, the more obscure the lists of people they will invent any time there is a question about history.   Science may be universally quantifiable but history of science is quite subjective.   So on a site where we all extol Al-Khwarizmi,  Pietro Monti, Zu Chongzhi,  Ibn al-Haytham and too many others to count in our quest to be thorough, I am going to make a bold claim sure to infuriate historians and nationalists from many countries, including America; some of the greatest scientists of any age were all in one place, at one time, and that place was Britain.
It may surprise you to learn this but Nature (the magazine, not the bitch) is not a fan of yours.  Or ours.  Or anyone not part of their multi-billion dollar publishing conglomerate.