ESP Biography
MARTIN MUELLER, No-nonsense Stanford grad student in Physics
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Major: Physics College: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Year of Graduation: G |
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Brief Biographical Sketch:
I am at Stanford doing research toward a PhD in Astrophysics, studying black holes at the center of galaxies. I've been a Teaching Assistant for Physics courses a number of times, and I really enjoy teaching. Outside of my professional research, I've always had an interest in questions at the forefront of knowledge where the answers are not clear-cut and where people have different ideas about what's going on. Past Classes(Look at the class archive for more.)Delusion, Deception, and Baloney: How to Detect Pseudoscience in Splash! Spring 2010
Somebody comes up to you and says he has a new elixir that increases your brain power, makes studying easier, and gets you 20% better grades on your tests. How would you respond? Try the product and see what happens? Find out more about it? Dismiss his claims out of hand? In this course, we will look at what distinguishes science from pseudoscience. We'll explore what it means to have good evidence for a claim and how scientists use evidence to build our understanding of the world. And of course we'll explore the flip side as well -- claims based on false evidence, bad reasoning, deception, and delusion. In the process, we build for ourselves a mental toolbox that will help us detect pseudo-scientific arguments wherever we find them.
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