Hal Harris

Jaron Lanier is an expert on digital networks and media, and is known as a pioneer in virtual reality, a term that he created.  He has been involved in numerous Silicon Valley start-ups that have been bought out and are now parts of Adobe, Oracle, and Google.

One could argue that the technological triumphs embodied in our robotic explorations of Mars far exceed those that put men on the moon.  Missing, however, is the drama of putting human life at risk, and the ease with which our imagination can put us in the shoes of the explorer. That is not to say that there is not a human element.

Universities should be and are expected to be sources of truthful and unbiased information about controversial subjects, especially in the sciences.  Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

Peter Hoffman is a physicist and materials scientist, and he brings those perspectives and sensibilities to the description of how life converts chemical energy into order and motion.  The "Ratchet" in the title is Feynman's Ratchet, a gedanken experiment described in Feynman's "Lectures on Physics" and reminiscent of Maxwell's Demon.

When I think of a 'half-life' I have in mind a particular physical model, the one that we use when discussing first-order chemical reactions as exemplified, for example, in unimolecular thermal decompositions at moderate pressure or any nuclear fission.