Starship Asterisk*

“The Kepler mission is designed to discover Earth-sized planets but it has not yet discovered any; at this time we have found only planet candidates,” he wrote. In other words: keep on moving, nothing to see here. I’ve heard that a lot lately. Call it the two-sigma blues.

One culprit here is the Web, which was invented to foster better communication among physicists in the first place, but has proved equally adept at spreading disinformation. But another, it seems to me, is the desire for some fundamental discovery about the nature of the universe ...