Minus times minus equals plus; The reason for this we won’t discuss.
— Abby Adams
Since its inception, the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics has been used to justify mysterianism, subjectivism, postmodernism, relativism, the preferred status of consciousness and human beings in the universe, a realm of intuition outside of logic and science, and other intellectual errors too many to number. It seems that people who reject reason and science [...]
Bee over at Backreaction had a post last week on Max Tegmark: Discover Interview with Tegmark, and I would like to respond to some things said there and in a previous post by Bee on the topic. (The Tegmark paper on “The Mathematical Universe” can be found on arxiv.org.) Does the theory warrant further scrutiny? [...]
There’s a blog entry at FXQI by William Orem nicely summing up a few points which are important to me: FQXi Community: Articles, Forums, Blogs, News First of all, much of confusion in Western Philosophy and thinking can be dissolved by looking beyond our culture – in that way we can see what are only [...]
A nice debunking article also delving a little bit into philosophy of science issues; but primarily a nice heuristic for evaluating “extraordinary” claims: Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory | Cosmic Variance Technorati Tags: philosophy of science, physics
Wow: if you are at all interested in physics, check out this resource – seminars recorded for public viewing by the Perimeter Institute, referenced in arxiv style. You will find tons of interesting stuff there: PIRSA – Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive Technorati Tags: physics, pointer
One of the weirder things in Star Trek which I didn’t quite buy were life forms that developed in outer space. But it looks as the others of ST may not have been so far off after all – physicists have found structures in plasma (!) which have properties similar to DNA – so maybe [...]
I nearly forgot to blog this, I was at the Symposion for Modern Physics a couple of weeks ago and wrote a summary for the university online news. Vienna Symposium on the Foundations of Modern Physics Technorati Tags: philosophy of science, physics
This result is widely reported on the net lately, and while we can’t yet be sure it actually occurs in plants at normal temperatures (so there is room for speculation – it shows one thing for sure – something I have been advocating for a long time: that the boundaries between the scientific disciplines are [...]
I have travelled through the science blogosphere today and discovered this very nice compilation of essential topics every scientist – and indeed also the lay public – should know: Evolving Thoughts http://scienceblogs.com/mt/pings/31058 Technorati Tags: philosophy of science, physics
A very good article from one of my favourite blogs, which sums up quite nicely some metaphysical positions on consciousness. Sentient Developments: Protopanpsychism and the consciousness conundrum, or why we shouldn’t assume uploads Protopanpsychism and the consciousness conundrum, or why we shouldn’t assume uploads Technorati Tags: cognitive science, physics
