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We should be very careful in thinking about whether we’re working on the right problems. If we don’t, that ties into the problem that we don’t have experimental evidence that could move us forward. We're trying to develop theories that we use to find out which are good experiments to make, and these are the experiments that we build.   We build particle detectors and try to find dark matter; we build larger colliders in the hope of producing new particles; we shoot satellites into orbit and try to look back into the early universe, and we do that because we hope there’s something new to find there. We think there is because we have some idea from the theories that we’ve been working on that this would be something good to probe. If we are working with the wrong theories, we are making the wrong extrapolations, we have the wrong expectations, we make the wrong experiments, and then we don’t get any new data. We have no guidance to develop these theories. So, it’s a chicken and egg problem. We have to break the cycle. I don’t have a miracle cure to these problems. These are hard problems. It’s not clear what a good theory is to develop. I’m not any wiser than all the other 20,000 people in the field.

I’m still asking myself the same question that I asked myself ten years ago: "What is going on in my community?" I work in the foundations of physics, and I see a lot of strange things happening there. When I look at the papers that are being published, many of them seem to be produced simply because papers have to be produced. They don’t move us forward in any significant way. I get the impression that people are working on them not so much because it’s what they’re interested in but because they have to produce outcomes in a short amount of time. They sit on short-term positions and have short-term contracts, and papers must be produced.

The field that I mostly work in is the foundations of physics, which is, roughly speaking, composed of cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, high-energy particle physics, and quantum gravity. It’s a peculiar field because there hasn’t been new data for almost four decades, since we established the Standard Model of particle physics. There has been, of course, the Higgs particle that was discovered at the LHC in 2012, and there have been some additions to the Standard Model, but there has not been a great new paradigm change, as Kuhn would have put it. We’re still using the same techniques, and we’re still working with the same theories as we did in the 1970s.

An alternative technique is to use two forks and put a quarter (or other medium-sized coin) between the middle slot of the two forks when they are held together and balance this in the same way

Yet another alternative: Create the fork and spoon "boomerang" with one matchstick as before. Stick another matchstick upright in the top of a heavy salt shaker. Balance one matchstick on the point of the other. If you're lucky, the center of gravity will work so as to allow you to balance the point of one matchstick on the point of the other at close to a 90-degree angle. This one takes a bit of experimentation.

Actually, it’s because of ‘center of gravity’. Women carry ‘weight’ literally in their hips. That’s where we balance from, that’s why the bones in our legs point outward from the knee up. Men and women aren’t that different in muscle strength, etc. BUT: The different center of gravity in a woman’s hips versus a man’s upper body will make it so its a cinch for women and men can’t rebalance their upper body while holding onto the chair.

Across the world, "population change is reversing secularism and shifting the center of gravity of entire societies in a conservative religious direction." The same will be true here in the United States, where religious families have more children than non-religious ones.

It's easy to underestimate the role that population change can have in social change, Kaufmann says, but it can have a huge role, especially when differences in values drive differences in fertility