Scientific American - 09.2019

(Darren Dugan) #1
September 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 1

26 SPECIAL ISSUE—TRUTH, LIES AND UNCERTAINTY


SEPTEMBER 2019

VOLUME 321, NUMBER 3

PHYSICS
30 Virtually Reality
How close can physics—the
most fundamental of the sci-
ences—bring us to an under-
standing of the foundations
of reality? By  George  Musser
33 How a physician
searches for answers.
By John  P.  A.  Ioannidis
MATHEMATICS
35 Numbers Game
Is math real? By Kelsey
Houston-Edwards

38 How a historical linguist
searches for answers.
By Lyle  Campbell
NEUROSCIENCE
40 Our Inner Universes
In a sense, we really are all
living in different worlds:
“reality” is constructed by the
brain, and no two brains are
exactly alike. By  Anil  K.  Seth
46 How a paleobiologist
searches for answers.
By  Anjali  Goswami

28


DECISION SCIENCE
74 Tough Calls
How we make decisions
when we are faced with
incomplete information.
By  Baruch  Fischhoff
76 How a behavioral scien-
tist searches for answers.
By Phillip Atiba  Goff
DATA SCIENCE
80 Confronting Unknowns
Interpreting uncertainty
in commonly used forms
of data visualization.
By Jessica Hullman

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
84 Radical Change
Why feeling uncertain about
the world breeds populism.
By  Michael  A. Hogg
86 How a neuroscientist
searches for answers.
By Stuart  Firestein
COMMUNICATION
88 A New World Disorder
The evolution of digital disin-
formation. By  Claire  Wardle
91 How a theoretical physi-
cist searches for answers.
By Nima Arkani-Hamed

TRUTH


LIES


UN


CERT


AINT


Y


ANIMAL BEHAVIOR
50 Deception in the Wild
Homo sapiens is not the only
species that deceives.
By  Barbara J.  King
52 How a social technologist
searches for answers.
By Kate Crawford
NETWORK SCIENCE
54 Why We Trust Lies
The epidemic of misinforma-
tion. By Cailin  O’Connor and
James Owen  Weatherall
60 How a statistician
searches for answers.
By Nicole  Lazar

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
62 Contagious Dishonesty
How corruption spreads
through societies.
By  Dan  Ariely and
Ximena Garcia-Rada
CYBERSECURITY
67 How to Defraud
Democracy
A worst-case scenario for the
2020 American presidential
election. By  J.  Alex Halder-
man, as  told to Jen  Schwartz
70 How a data journalist
searches for answers.
By Meredith  Broussard

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