What, Why & How do we Know ?
Just received three books in time for some holiday reading, all ordered locally via The Guisborough Bookshop. Mentioned all three in passing already. Trivium 21c by Martin Robinson is focussed on the Trivium of three complementary ways of knowing, called here Grammar, Dialectic & Rhetoric. The point being that a complete worldview needs all three. … Continue reading “A Little Holiday Reading – Robinson, Rovelli and Carroll”
Interesting to see today’s news on standardisation of units of measure, that time, distance and mass are now to be unified through the Caesium clock with application of the speed of light (c) and Planck’s constant (h). (Hat tip to Jim Al-Khalili on Twitter). Fascinating article in itself, however yet more evidence that the accepted standard … Continue reading “Carlo Rovelli – A Fresh Spin on Fundamental Physics”
Interesting review of Carlo Rovelli’s latest “Reality Is Not What It Seems” by Michael Brooks in the New Statesman. In my own review of Rovelli’s introductory work “Seven Brief Lessons“, I felt compelled to add a footnote to ensure readers understood he was peddling a minority view in Quantum Loop Gravity. Interesting in Brooks’ review of Rovelli’s latest, he highlights the well … Continue reading “Carlo Rovelli is right, in the sense that …”
I’ve been largely offline for a week visiting Florence, and in fact did very little reading whilst I was away. Florence was too fascinating. So, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Black Swan” and “Antifragile“ and Simon Blackburn’s “Truth” and “Hume“ remain incomplete and un-reviewed despite enjoying the gist I’d already gleaned from all four. Their styles could … Continue reading “Physics Moves in Mysterious Ways – Carlo Rovelli’s “Seven Brief Lessons””
This is just a holding post. Already in my previous post on Carlo Rovelli, I was overdue a fuller review. Since then I’ve been reading Sean Carroll, and finding myself reading backwards, from the index of key topics and chapter headings. The reality is that every current philosophical physicist I read, I find enormous implicit … Continue reading “The Matrix Cometh”
I’m reading my way through Carlo Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” (Finished Part 1 of 3) and finding it full of items that resonate. Not least because I already loved his “Reality is Not What it Seems” but also because I have been joining up the dots with the work of David Deutsch and Erik … Continue reading “Well we never! PoPoMo Physics Again.”
Fundamentally – What do I know? Black holes ain’t so black, and science ain’t so different from the humanities. Singularities have horizons crammed with information. Nothing objective is more fundamental than the information available. This is a summary of recent work ostensibly on quantum gravity and the role of humans more generally in the science … Continue reading “Fundamentally – What do I know?”
Harris Podcast with Sean Carroll [Aside – Identity Politics topic – previously talking past each other with Ezra. Apart from better management of conversations with specific Q’s requiring A’s, main Harris lesson is to avoid agendas of extremists left or right. Convincing an extremist that they may be wrong is a counterproductive waste of effort. … Continue reading “Sam Harris & Sean Carroll – Raw Notes”