Science

Does Hot Water Freeze Faster?
Search on the Web sometime about whether hot water freezes faster than cold water. It's amazing that there can be so much controversy about such a simple fact that can be easily checked by anyone. How can we resolve complex issues when we can't agree on the simple ones?

Science and Philosophy
In "Investigations of a Dog" Kafka makes fun of our science, implying that we're doing no better than dogs trying to figure out where their food comes from. He's wrong about this. In the 1920s, when he wrote this, great progress was being made in understanding our physical world and that understanding has since exploded. Some of the questions that philosophers debated over the centuries have been answered more or less definitely by science. Indue course I expect others to be answered, especially about the nature of consciousness, though I don't think that computers will run fast enough in my lifetime to allow this to be understood before I die.